Here is investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, talking with Amy Goodman about his reporting and insights on Syria/Sarin.
Hersh discuss his new article casting doubt on the veracity of the
Obama administration’s claims that only the Assad regime could have
carried out the chemical attacks in the Damascus
suburb of Ghouta earlier this year. Writing in the London Review of
Books (Article below), Hersh argues that the Obama administration
“cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.” The
administration failed to disclose it knew Syrian rebels in the al-Nusra
Front had the ability to produce chemical weapons. Evidence obtained in the days after the attack was also allegedly distorted to make it appear it was gathered in real time.
____________
Whose sarin?
By Seymour M. Hersh
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons
attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted
important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts.
Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US
intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in
the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN
study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in
the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American
intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports,
culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that
precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a
jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of
creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the
attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the
administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against
Assad.
In his nationally televised speech about
Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on
the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government,
and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings
that any use of chemical weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s
government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know
the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful
deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests
of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical
weapons through a targeted military strike.’ Obama was going to war to
back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure
who did what in the early morning of 21 August.
He cited a list of what appeared to be
hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to
August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared
for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed
gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets
from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime
has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty
was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told
the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the
intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin
attacks.
But in recent interviews with
intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I
found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly
seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level
intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the
administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The
attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. A former
senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had
altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence –
to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved
days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in
real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said,
reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency
intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The
same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and
intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air
and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his
cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”‘
The complaints focus on what Washington
did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack.
The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly
classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning
Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser and
the director of national intelligence.
The Morning Report includes no
political or economic information, but provides a summary of important
military events around the world, with all available intelligence about
them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the
attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two
days – 20 and 21 August – there was no mention of Syria. On 22 August
the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item
discussed an internal change in the command structure of one of the
rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about the use of nerve gas in
Damascus that day. It was not until 23 August that the use of sarin
became a dominant issue, although hundreds of photographs and videos of
the massacre
had gone viral within hours on YouTube, Facebook and other social media
sites. At this point, the administration knew no more than the public.
Obama left Washington early on 21 August
for a hectic two-day speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania;
according to the White House press office, he was briefed later that day
on the attack, and the growing public and media furore. The lack of any
immediate inside intelligence was made clear on 22 August, when Jen
Psaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, told reporters: ‘We are
unable to conclusively determine [chemical weapons] use. But we are
focused every minute of every day since these events happened … on doing
everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.’ The
administration’s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney,
Obama’s press secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific
information – that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not
responsible ‘are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself
didn’t occur’.
The absence of immediate alarm inside the
American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no
intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And
there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance:
both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence
documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
On 29 August, the Washington Post
published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence
programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with
the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim
portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than
top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with
problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting
Assad’s office. The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic
eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted
communications among senior military officials at the outset of the
civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar
al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA
no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership
in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad,
such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since
21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific
information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)
The Post report also provided the first
indication of a secret sensor system inside Syria, designed to provide
early warning of any change in status of the regime’s chemical weapons
arsenal. The sensors are monitored by the National Reconnaissance
Office, the agency that controls all US intelligence satellites in
orbit. According to the Post summary, the NRO is also assigned ‘to
extract data from sensors placed on the ground’ inside Syria. The former
senior intelligence official, who had direct knowledge of the
programme, told me that NRO sensors have been implanted near all known
chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are designed to provide constant
monitoring of the movement of chemical warheads stored by the military.
But far more important, in terms of early warning, is the sensors’
ability to alert US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel
has always been on the alert for changes in the Syrian chemical
arsenal, and works closely with American intelligence on early
warnings.) A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin, has a shelf life
of a few days or less – the nerve agent begins eroding the rocket almost
immediately: it’s a use-it-or-lose-it mass killer. ‘The Syrian army
doesn’t have three days to prepare for a chemical attack,’ the former
senior intelligence official told me. ‘We created the sensor system for
immediate reaction, like an air raid warning or a fire alarm. You can’t
have a warning over three days because everyone involved would be dead.
It is either right now or you’re history. You do not spend three days
getting ready to fire nerve gas.’ The sensors detected no movement in
the months and days before 21 August, the former official said. It is of
course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by
other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to
monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.
The sensors had worked in the past, as
the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system
picked up signs of what seemed to be sarin production at a chemical
weapons depot. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian army was
simulating sarin production as part of an exercise (all militaries
constantly carry out such exercises) or actually preparing an attack. At
the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that using sarin was ‘totally
unacceptable’; a similar message was also passed by diplomatic means.
The event was later determined to be part of a series of exercises,
according to the former senior intelligence official: ‘If what the
sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to
call and say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the same
warning three days before the gas attack in August?’
The NSA would of course monitor Assad’s
office around the clock if it could, the former official said. Other
communications – from various army units in combat throughout Syria –
would be far less important, and not analysed in real time. ‘There are
literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in
Syria for mundane routine communications,’ he said, ‘and it would take a
huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in – and the
useful return would be zilch.’ But the ‘chatter’ is routinely stored on
computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA
mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack,
sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or
two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant
conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies
started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter
that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a
high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that
Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports
that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to
justify the Iraq war.
*
The White House needed nine days to
assemble its case against the Syrian government. On 30 August it invited
a select group of Washington journalists (at least one often critical
reporter, Jonathan Landay, the national security correspondent for
McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited), and handed them a document
carefully labelled as a ‘government assessment’, rather than as an
assessment by the intelligence community. The document laid out what was
essentially a political argument to bolster the administration’s case
against the Assad government. It was, however, more specific than Obama
would be later, in his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it
stated, knew that Syria had begun ‘preparing chemical munitions’ three
days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry
provided more details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel
were on the ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We
know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the
attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with
chemical weapons.’ The government assessment and Kerry’s comments made
it seem as if the administration had been tracking the sarin attack as
it happened. It is this version of events, untrue but unchallenged, that
was widely reported at the time.
An unforeseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the Free Syrian Army’s
leadership and others about the lack of warning. ‘It’s unbelievable
they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the
crime,’ Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of the
towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail was more
blunt: ‘Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas
attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people – including
more than 400 children.’ (The number of deaths attributable to the
attack varied widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by the
Obama administration, to many fewer. A Syrian human rights
group reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans Frontières put it at 355; and a
French report listed 281 known fatalities. The strikingly precise US
total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been based
not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA
analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern
Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In
other words, it was little more than a guess.)
Five days later, a spokesman for the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the
complaints. A statement to the Associated Press said that the
intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known
at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: ‘Let’s be
clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible
attack took place. The intelligence community was able to gather and
analyse information after the fact and determine that elements of the
Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to using chemical
weapons.’ But since the American press corps had their story, the
retraction received scant attention. On 31 August the Washington Post,
relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front
page that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the
Syrian army attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the
launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian
officials’. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House
maintained control of the narrative.
So when Obama said on 10 September that
his administration knew Assad’s chemical weapons personnel had prepared
the attack in advance, he was basing the statement not on an intercept
caught as it happened, but on communications analysed days after 21
August. The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt
for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous
December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army
mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its
troops. The White House’s government assessment and Obama’s speech were
not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August
attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have
followed for any chemical attack. ‘They put together a back story,’ the
former official said, ‘and there are lots of different pieces and parts.
The template they used was the template that goes back to December.’ It
is possible, of course, that Obama was unaware that this account was
obtained from an analysis of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas
attack, rather than from direct evidence. Either way he had come to a
hasty judgment.
The press would follow suit. The UN
report on 16 September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note
that its investigators’ access to the attack sites, which came five days
after the gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces. ‘As with other
sites,’ the report warned, ‘the locations have been well travelled by
other individuals prior to the arrival of the mission … During the time
spent at these locations, individuals arrived carrying other suspected
munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and
possibly manipulated.’ Still, the New York Times seized on the report,
as did American and British officials, and claimed that it provided
crucial evidence backing up the administration’s assertions. An annex to
the UN report reproduced YouTube photographs of some recovered
munitions, including a rocket that ‘indicatively matches’ the specifics
of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket. The New York Times wrote that the
existence of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government
was responsible for the attack ‘because the weapons in question had not
been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the
insurgency’.
Theodore Postol, a professor of
technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a
group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was
an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He
told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable
machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the
specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian
arsenal. The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report,
also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were
believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent
‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more
than nine kilometres from the landing zone. Postol, who has served as
the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon,
said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on
actual observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in
particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a
thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was
‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres. Postol and a colleague,
Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in
which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far
greater payload of sarin than previously estimated. The Times reported
on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading
weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths
and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to
the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.
*
The White House’s misrepresentation of
what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to
ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative. That
information concerned al-Nusra, the Islamist rebel group designated by
the US and the UN as a terrorist organisation. Al-Nusra is known to have
carried out scores of suicide bombings against Christians and other non-Sunni
Muslim sects inside Syria, and to have attacked its nominal ally in the
civil war, the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA). Its stated goal is to
overthrow the Assad regime and establish sharia law.
(On 25 September al-Nusra joined several other Islamist rebel groups in
repudiating the FSA and another secular faction, the Syrian National
Coalition.)
The flurry of American interest in
al-Nusra and sarin stemmed from a series of small-scale chemical weapons
attacks in March and April; at the time, the Syrian government and the
rebels each insisted the other was responsible. The UN eventually
concluded that four chemical attacks had been carried out, but did not
assign responsibility. A White House official told the press in late
April that the intelligence community had assessed ‘with varying degrees
of confidence’ that the Syrian government was responsible for the
attacks. Assad had crossed Obama’s ‘red line’. The April assessment made
headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation. The
unnamed official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence
community assessments ‘are not alone sufficient’. ‘We want,’ he said,
‘to investigate above and beyond those intelligence assessments to
gather facts so that we can establish a credible and corroborated set of
information that can then inform our decision-making.’ In other words,
the White House had no direct evidence of Syrian army or government
involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted in the press
coverage. Obama’s tough talk played well with the public and Congress,
who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.
Two months later, a White House statement
announced a change in the assessment of Syrian culpability and declared
that the intelligence community now had ‘high confidence’ that the
Assad government was responsible for as many as 150 deaths from attacks
with sarin. More headlines were generated and the press was told that
Obama, in response to the new intelligence, had ordered an increase in
non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But once again there were
significant caveats. The new intelligence included a report that Syrian
officials had planned and executed the attacks. No specifics were
provided, nor were those who provided the reports identified. The White
House statement said that laboratory analysis had confirmed the use of
sarin, but also that a positive finding of the nerve agent ‘does not
tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible
for the dissemination’. The White House further declared: ‘We have no
reliable corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria
has acquired or used chemical weapons.’ The statement contradicted
evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies.
Already by late May, the senior
intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama
administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent
alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in
Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing
sarin. At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus,
including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer
dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert
formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria
and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta. The consultant told me that Tariq
had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making
mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using
sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American
military.
On 20 June a four-page top secret cable
summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas
capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive
and comprehensive,’ the consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we
believes”.’ He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether
the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and
April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability
to acquire and use sarin. A sample of the sarin that had been used was
also recovered – with the help of an Israeli agent – but, according to
the consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable
traffic.
Independently of these assessments, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuming that US troops might be ordered into
Syria to seize the government’s stockpile of chemical agents, called for
an all-source analysis of the potential threat. ‘The Op Order provides
the basis of execution of a military mission, if so ordered,’ the former
senior intelligence official explained. ‘This includes the possible
need to send American soldiers to a Syrian chemical site to defend it
against rebel seizure. If the jihadist
rebels were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that Assad
would not fight us because we were protecting the chemical from the
rebels. All Op Orders contain an intelligence threat component. We had
technical analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency,
the Defense Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I & W
[indications and warnings] people working on the problem … They
concluded that the rebel forces were capable of attacking an American
force with sarin because they were able to produce the lethal gas. The
examination relied on signals and human intelligence, as well as the
expressed intention and technical capability of the rebels.’
There is evidence that during the summer
some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by the prospect
of a ground invasion of Syria as well as by Obama’s professed desire to
give rebel factions non-lethal support. In July, General Martin Dempsey,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provided a gloomy assessment, telling the
Senate Armed Services Committee in public testimony that ‘thousands of
special operations forces and other ground forces’ would be needed to
seize Syria’s widely dispersed chemical warfare arsenal, along with
‘hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers’. Pentagon
estimates put the number of troops at seventy thousand, in part because
US forces would also have to guard the Syrian rocket fleet: accessing
large volumes of the chemicals that create sarin without the means to
deliver it would be of little value to a rebel force. In a letter to
Senator Carl Levin,
Dempsey cautioned that a decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could have
unintended consequences: ‘We have learned from the past ten years,
however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military
power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to
preserve a functioning state … Should the regime’s institutions collapse
in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower
extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.’
The CIA declined to comment for this
article. Spokesmen for the DIA and Office of the Director of National
Intelligence said they were not aware of the report to Shedd and, when
provided with specific cable markings for the document, said they were
unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI,
said that no American intelligence agency, including the DIA, ‘assesses
that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to
manufacture sarin’.
The administration’s public affairs
officials are not as concerned about al-Nusra’s military potential as
Shedd has been in his public statements. In late July, he gave an
alarming account of al-Nusra’s strength at the annual Aspen Security
Forum in Colorado. ‘I count no less than 1200 disparate groups in the
opposition,’ Shedd said, according to a recording of his presentation.
‘And within the opposition, the al-Nusra Front is … most effective and
is gaining in strength.’ This, he said, ‘is of serious concern to us. If
left unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements’ –
he also cited al-Qaida in Iraq – ‘will take over.’ The civil war, he
went on, ‘will only grow worse over time … Unfathomable violence is yet
to come.’ Shedd made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he
was not allowed to: the reports his office received were highly
classified.
*
A series of secret dispatches from Syria
over the summer reported that members of the FSA were complaining to
American intelligence operatives about repeated attacks on their forces
by al-Nusra and al-Qaida fighters. The reports, according to the senior
intelligence consultant who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is
‘more worried about the crazies than it is about Assad’. The FSA is
largely composed of defectors from the Syrian army. The Obama
administration, committed to the end of the Assad regime and continued
support for the rebels, has sought in its public statements since the
attack to downplay the influence of Salafist and Wahhabist factions. In
early September, John Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing with a
sudden claim that al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority
players in the Syrian opposition. He later withdrew the claim.
In both its public and private briefings
after 21 August, the administration disregarded the available
intelligence about al-Nusra’s potential access to sarin and continued to
claim that the Assad government was in sole possession of chemical
weapons. This was the message conveyed in the various secret briefings
that members of Congress received in the days after the attack, when
Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive against
Syrian military installations. One legislator with more than two decades
of experience in military affairs told me that he came away from one
such briefing persuaded that ‘only the Assad government had sarin and
the rebels did not.’ Similarly, following the release of the UN report
on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha
Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: ‘It’s very
important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we
have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.’
It is not known whether the highly
classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power’s office,
but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the
administration. ‘The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,’
the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘The new director of
the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White
House and says: “Look at what I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just
waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot of political pressure to bring
Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking
that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama’s hand:
“This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama
can react.” Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the
administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were
alerted that he was going to attack weren’t so sure it was a good
thing.’
The proposed American missile attack on
Syria never won public support and Obama turned quickly to the UN and
the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare
complex. Any possibility of military action was definitively averted on
26 September when the administration joined Russia in approving a draft
UN resolution calling on the Assad government to get rid of its chemical
arsenal. Obama’s retreat brought relief to many senior military
officers. (One high-level special operations adviser told me that the
ill-conceived American missile attack on Syrian military airfields and
missile emplacements, as initially envisaged by the White House, would
have been ‘like providing close air support for al-Nusra’.)
The administration’s distortion of the
facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we
have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red
line’ threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but
suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept
Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible
that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory
information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack
plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.
The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September by the Security Council,
dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces such as al-Nusra
would also be obliged to disarm: ‘no party in Syria should use, develop,
produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer [chemical] weapons.’
The resolution also calls for the immediate notification of the Security Council
in the event that any ‘non-state actors’ acquire chemical weapons. No
group was cited by name. While the Syrian regime continues the process
of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s
stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist
allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the
ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be
unlike any other in the war zone. There may be more to negotiate.
(Sabbah.biz/myartikel/ABNS)
