The U.S. “war on terror” has
always been a bait-and-switch scam on the American people, with Washington
putting the desires of its Mideast allies ahead of defeating Al Qaeda and ISIS.
By Gareth Porter
New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman outraged many readers when he wrote an
opinion piece on April 12 calling on President Trump to ”back
off fighting territorial ISIS in Syria.” The reason he gave for that
recommendation was not that U.S. wars in the Middle East are inevitably
self-defeating and endless, but that it would reduce the “pressure on Assad, Iran, Russia and Hezbollah.”
That suggestion that the U.S.
sell out its interest in counter-terrorism in the Middle East to gain some
advantage in power competition with its adversaries was rightly attacked as
cynical. But, in fact, the
national security bureaucracies of the U.S. – which many have come to call the
“Deep State” – have been selling out their interests in counter-terrorism in
order to pursue various adventures in the region ever since George W Bush
declared a “Global War on Terrorism” in late 2001.
The whole war on terrorism has
been, in effect, a bait-and-switch
operation from the beginning. The
idea that U.S. military operations were somehow going to make America safer
after the 9/11 attacks was the bait. What has actually happened ever
since then, however, is that senior officials at the Pentagon and the CIA have
been sacrificing the interest of American people in weakening Al Qaeda in order
to pursue their own institutional interests.
It all began, of course, with the invasion of Iraq. Counter-terrorism
specialists in the U.S. government knew perfectly well that U.S. “regime
change” in Iraq through military force would give a powerful boost to Osama bin
Laden’s organization and to anti-American terrorism generally.
Rand Beers, then senior director
for counter-terrorism on the National Security Council staff, told his
predecessor Richard Clarke in late 2002, “Do you know how much
it will strengthen al-Qaeda and groups like that if we occupy Iraq?”
After it quickly became clear
that the U.S. war in Iraq was already motivating young men across the Middle
East to wage jihad against the U.S. in Iraq, (Watchman comment: Muslims gravitate to the latest,
greatest jihad e.g. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Chechnya, Libya, Syria, Yemen
etc.; they have proven to be a very fluid, mobile bunch. Put out the fire in Afghanistan
and Bosnia and they pop up in Iraq; put out the fire in Iraq and they go to
Libya etc. They are like cock roaches one cannot get rid of) the chief
architect of the occupation of Iraq, neocon Paul Wolfowitz, came up with the
patently false rationalization that Iraq would be
a “flytrap” for jihadists.
Breeding Terrorists
But in January 2005, after a year
of research, the CIA issued a major
intelligence assessment warning that the war was breeding more
Al Qaeda extremist militants from all over the Middle East and even giving them
combat experience that they would eventually be able to use back home.
In a 2006 National
Intelligence Estimate, the intelligence community warned that the
number of people identifying themselves as jihadists was growing and was
becoming more widespread geographically and even the predicted growing
terrorist threats from “self-radicalized cells” both in the U.S. and abroad.
The war managers continued to
claim that their wars were making Americans safer. CIA Director Michael Hayden not only sought
to sell the flypaper argument on Iraq, but also bragged to
the Washington Post in 2008 that the CIA was making great
progress against Al Qaeda, based mainly on its burgeoning drone war in
Pakistan.
But Hayden and the CIA had a huge
bureaucratic interest in that war. He had lobbied Bush in 2007 to loosen restraints
on drone strikes in Pakistan and let the CIA launch lethal attacks on the mere
suspicion that a group of males were Al Qaeda.
It soon became clear that it
wasn’t really weakening the Al Qaeda in the northwest Pakistan at all. Even
drone operators themselves began privately
criticizing the drone attacks for making many more young
Pakistanis hate the United States and support Al Qaeda. The only thing Leon Panetta, Hayden’s successor
as CIA director, could say in defense of the program was that it was “the only
game in town”.
Barack Obama wanted out of a big
war in Iraq. But CENTCOM
Commander Gen. David Petraeus and Joint Staff director Gen. Stanley A.
McChyrstal, talked Obama into approving a whole new series of covert
wars using CIA drone strikes and special operations commando raids against Al
Qaeda and other jihadist organizations in a dozen countries in the Middle East,
North Africa and Central Asia. At the top of their list of covert wars was
Yemen, where Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had just been formed.
Cruise Missiles and Drones
Since 2009, the Joint Special
Operations Command and the CIA have launched 16 cruise missile strikes and
183 drone strikes in Yemen. Unfortunately, they lacked the intelligence
necessary for such a campaign. As many as one-third of
the strikes killed innocent civilians and local notables –
including the cruise
missile strike in December 2009 which killed 41 civilians
and attack on a
wedding party in December 2013. Virtually every
independent observer agrees that those killings have fed Yemeni hatred of the
U.S. and contributed to AQAP’s luster as the leading anti-U.S. organization in
the country.
The CIA again claimed they were
doing a splendid job of hitting AQAP, but in fact the Yemeni offshoot of Al
Qaeda continued to be the primary terrorism threat while the covert war
continued. Three times
between late 2009 and 2012, it mounted efforts to bring down airliners and
nearly succeeded in two of the three.
In late 2011 and early 2012, the
contradiction between the U.S. pretension to counter-terrorism in its Middle
East policy and the interests sharpened even further. That’s when the Obama
administration adopted a new anti-Iran hard line in the region to reassure the Saudis that we
were still committed to the security alliance. That hardline policy had
nothing to do with a nuclear deal with Iran, which came more than a year later.
At first, it took form of covert logistical assistance to the Sunni
allies to arm Sunni anti-Assad forces in Syria. But in 2014, the Obama
administration began providing anti-tank missiles to selected anti-Assad armed
groups. And when the Nusra Front wanted the groups the CIA had supported in
Idlib to coordinate
with the jihadist offensive to seize control of Idlib province,
the Obama administration did not object.
The Obama national security team
was willing to take advantage of the considerable military power of the Nusra
Front-led jihadist alliance. But it was all done with a wink and a nod to
maintain the fiction that it was still committed to defeating Al Qaeda
everywhere.
When the Saudis came to Washington in March 2015 with a plan to wage a
major war in Yemen against the Houthis and their new ally, former President Ali
Abdullah Saleh, the deep state was ready to give Saudi a
green light. A predictable consequence of that decision has been to
fuel the rise of AQAP, which had already emerged as the primary threat of
terrorist attack on the U.S., to an unprecedented position of power.
The Biggest Winner
As documented by the
International Crisis Group, AQAP has been the biggest winner in
the war, taking advantage of state collapse, an open alliance with the
Saudi-supported government and a major infusion of arms – much of its provided
indirectly by the Saudis.
Endowed with a political strategy
of playing up AQAP’s role as champion of Sunni sectarian interests against
those Yemenis whom they wrongly call Shia, AQAP controlled a large swath of
territory across southern Yemen with the port of Mukalla as their headquarters.
And even though the Saudi coalition recaptured the territory, they maintain a
strong political presence there.
AQAP will certainly emerge from the disastrous war in Yemen as the
strongest political force in the south, with a de-facto safe haven in which to
plot terrorist attacks against the U.S. And they can thank the war
bureaucracies in the U.S. who helped them achieve that powerful position.
But the reason for the betrayal
of U.S. counter-terrorism interests is not that the senior officials in charge
of these war bureaucracies want to promote Al Qaeda. It is because they had to
sacrifice the priority of countering Al Qaeda to maintain the alliances, the
facilities and the operations on which their continued power and resources
depend.
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