Mick Hartley

Lee Smith – Obama’s Syria Policy Isn’t a ‘Mistake.’ It’s Deliberate:

Perhaps it’s because Obama’s term is winding down, but in the wake of the recent siege of Aleppo, which brought injury, exile, and death to thousands of Syrian civilians, a late-breaking consensus seems to have emerged that the White House’s Syria policy is a tragic failure. Even opinion makers who generally admire Obama vie to outdo each other in soulfully condemning his Syria policy, while administration officials past and present echo the president’s line that there is little the United States could have done to stop the bloodshed. You could call it virtue-signaling or Kabuki theater—except the president’s critics really do seem authentically baffled by how a man they authentically admire could be guilty of such a terrible blunder….

Obama’s inaction in Syria is not simply part of the hangover from the failed American war in Iraq, or of the president’s personal psychology. There is something entirely practical at stake here, too—namely, the Iran deal. The explanation is, in fact, a simple one: U.S. intervention in Syria against Assad would have made the Iran deal impossible. In fact, U.S. support for Iran’s continuing presence in Syria was a precondition of the deal, according to no less an authority than the president himself. In a December press conference, Obama spoke of “respecting” Iranian “equities” in Syria—which, translated into plain English, means leaving Assad alone in order to keep the Iranians happy.

The connection between Syria and the Iran deal was not particularly hard to spot for anyone in the administration. “Iranian officials told me that even had the diplomats doing the negotiations wanted to stay in talks, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would have pulled the plug,” says Jay Solomon, author of the just published Iran Wars, an account of U.S.-Iran relations. “Obama sent a letter to Khamenei saying he wouldn’t target Assad,” Solomon continues. “And Pentagon officials told us they were concerned that operations in Syria risked undermining the nuclear negotiations.”

Former State Department official Frederic C. Hof agrees. “The administration’s policy toward Assad Syria,” writes Hof, “rests on its desire to accommodate Iran—a full partner in Assad’s collective punishment survival strategy—so that the July 14, 2015, nuclear agreement can survive the Obama presidency.”…

The reason that so many journalists and opinion-makers of good conscience cannot make the connection between the Iran deal and the Syrian war is because the truth is too awful. The president’s policy is not simply a matter of a lack of vision or political will. The money Iran received through the JCPOA, as well as the $1.7 billion paid in ransom for American hostages, has helped fund Iran’s war in Syria—which the president proclaimed to be Iran’s business and not ours.