He’s made the Middle East worse: Let’s be honest, Obama bears as much responsibility for this mess as predecessors who shaped them
Decades of poorly concocted policies with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and others haunt us — and worsen every day
It is all there now for us to see. Decades of cynical, poorly devised policy in the Middle East, vacant of any principle our indispensable nation purports to advance, return as we speak to bite our president and his foreign policy cliques on their backsides. The shambles that now ensues serves them right, absolutely.
With the sudden ignition of smoldering hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia last weekend—the Iranians managing this more correctly than the Saudis—at last the veil drops to expose the gross duplicity, not to say stupidity, of Washington’s alliances in the region. At last we can talk about the unclothed emperor. And it is our responsibility to do so.
One would never argue that the chaos into which the Middle East now descends is all President Obama’s doing. It is not, by a long way. The music simply stopped on his watch, and it is he who is left to grope for a chair. No solicitude and no empathy, however. The bitter reality is that our hope-and-change president, as a drone-addicted assassin signing death warrants on a routine basis, bears as much responsibility for the messes he now confronts as any of those predecessors who shaped them.
If there is a single moment that crystallized all that has been wrong in America’s conduct across the Middle East for many decades, it came at the weekend, when the administration’s spokesmen could not bring themselves even to comment directly on, to say nothing of condemn, Riyadh’s purposely provocative beheading of a prominent Shiite cleric, a principled critic of the regime, last Saturday.
Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, took as few words as he could get away with to say nothing whatsoever. When John Kirby, the dim bulb who fronts for the State Department, noted only “the need for leaders throughout the region to redouble efforts aimed at de-escalating regional tensions,” one knew the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of American policy in the Middle East were both perfectly intact.
Numerous readers have written over the months to assert that I assign the U.S. too much responsibility for the Middle East’s violence and turmoil. This is my form of exceptionalism, they suggest. There is a long history of abuse and inhumanity in the region that has nothing to do with America, I am reminded.
It has never been my intent to argue otherwise. The new regime in Riyadh, to take an example readily to hand, beheaded 47 people last weekend against the Obama administration’s vigorously rendered advice. And I agreed with Kirby, weirdly, when he told journalists after the executions, “Real, long-term solutions aren’t going to be mandated by Washington, D.C.”
My problem—ours, indeed—is that Kirby is a liar to suggest State, the White House or anyone in the defense and intelligence bureaucracies believes this to be so. The hands-off pose, the shrug of the powerless, is default position when the going gets too patently sordid. And that is all it is. No, I will not step back from my contention that the U.S. is the primary author of the disorder and deadly hostility that now engulf the entire region.
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One could go back to prewar decades to trace the roots of Washington’s errors and lawlessness in the Middle East. We leave this to the historians for now. For my money, the ridiculous soufflé the Obama administration has made of Middle East policy began to collapse last August, when a Marine general—not a diplomat—negotiated and signed an accord certifying the Erdoğan government in Turkey as an ally in the fight against the Islamic State.
Wrong times a hundred. By last year the U.S. had been using Turkey to convey weapons to the imaginary “moderate opposition” fighting the Assad government in Syria for three years. But it had been plain for nearly as long that the proto-fascist Erdoğan intended to turn this policy to his own purposes, which no one of any decency could countenance.
Seymour Hersh’s pieces in the London Review of Books have been revelatory in this context. In April 2014 he gave persuasive evidence that, in an attempt to frame Assad, Erdoğan provided extremist Sunni militias with the crudely concocted poison gas that exploded in a Damascus suburb the previous August. In his latest piece, Hersh documents the Pentagon’s many failed efforts to pull the administration off its obsession with developing a coup in Damascus and recognize Islamic terrorists as the threat that matters in Syria.
“The assessment was bleak,” Hersh writes of a classified document the Joint Chiefs brass sent the White House in 2013. “There was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the U.S. was arming extremists…. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria.”
One cannot agree more heartily. At this point, the alliance with Turkey represents a festival of cynicism our media flatly refuse to describe in any detail or with any substantive accuracy. It is the height of naiveté to think Washington does not understand the perverse uses Erdoğan makes of it.
The ink was not dry before the Turkish president took his new pact with the superpower as license to make war against the Kurdish populations of Turkey, Syria and Iraq and pursue a Sunni nationalist agenda while assisting the Islamic State all but overtly in its campaign to destabilize Damascus. Unequivocally, this guy—who favorably cited Hitler as a political model just a few days ago—takes his place in the long line of repellent dictators the cliques in Washington almost always prefer to democrats.
For said cliques it is the Cold War redux with the Turks, as the generals at the Pentagon suggested. Once again Washington recruits Turkey as a spear-carrier in its great-power game—previously against the Soviets, now against the Russian Federation. The bitterest truths are now evident: 1) no post-Cold War administration has yet proven capable of new, 21st century thinking of even the most basic kind, and 2) in consequence of 1) Obama has been purposely ineffectual against the Islamic State these past 18 months because he has refused to abandon plans to topple Assad so as to push Russia decisively out of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean.
Humanitarian angst? Wasted lives, the worst suffering on the planet in our time, the shock-horror of Assad’s alleged cruelties? These have nothing to do with what Washington is up to in Syria, and the alliance with Ankara stands as evidence of this.
We must consider the downing of a Russian jet in late November by Turkish pilots flying American-made F-16s in this context. After Obama delivered an almost humorously hypocritical defense of this wildly irresponsible act—“Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its air space”—Washington and its clerks in the corporate media made this incident disappear but quick. We have since been treated to a media blackout as brazen as any since the coup in Ukraine two years ago next month. And when you consider the facts available in non-American media, it is no wonder.
There has been fulsome coverage of the Turkish incident in the Russian press, needless to say. Before offering even a brief summary of it, this: One may accept it at face value or question it, but there are no grounds for dismissing it or ignoring it altogether, as our media have, simply because the assertions made are Russia’s. They deserve scrutiny and further investigation at the very least, and they have had neither.
Most interesting is the “why” of the incident. What lay behind President Putin’s blunt charge that the downing of a Russian plane while it was flying an anti-terror mission in Syria was “a stab in the back by accomplices of terrorists”? I find the answer in one simple fact: Russian jets, it is not to be missed, had begun targeting convoys of trucks carrying oil into Turkey just before the Turks took one of them out of the sky.
Moscow has practically gushed with evidence and accusations since shortly after its Su-24 went down. Putin, at a press conference with French President François Hollande, showed reconnaissance footage of truck convoys and strikes against oil-storage facilities in Raqaa, the Islamic State’s declared capital. Hollande, roused by the attacks in Paris at the moment I describe, assented as Putin spoke:
“Vehicles, carrying oil, [are] lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” Putin asserted . “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there—empty. We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas and not any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going.”
Other reports alleged that this activity is not the doing merely of middlemen operating on the Turkish-Syrian border. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev alleged “direct financial interest of some Turkish officials relating to the supply of oil products refined by plants controlled by ISIS.” It soon emerged that the chain of beneficiaries may well run up to the presidential palace by way of Erdoğan’s son and son-in-law: Between them, they run Turkey’s largest energy-trading company and the energy ministry.
There is no need to take the Russians’ word for this, although I find the evidence presented in Moscow persuasive, and the activities of Erdoğan’s family members are a matter of record. David Cohen, Treasury’s undersecretary for financial intelligence, had already made the Russian case in October—a month before the matter got as hot. Cohen put the Islamic State’s income from oil sold directly or indirectly into Turkey at $1 million a day.
A few days after the incident, I had a lengthy note from a very well-placed source with extensive interests in, and therefore knowledge of, European investment and commodity markets. What he or she wrote fits like a glove with what had then begun to emerge. Here is some of it, in the form it arrived. The oil prices stated obtained at the time:
For more than 2 yrs I have heard from contacts in Turk,—contacts among people who would know about such things—that the oil was delivered to the Turks and that it was then run through the system, with some of it entering the pipeline which carries crude to the Medit coast for then delivery to W. Europe… I am told that there is a handsome profit of around 15$/bar on this—that is, for example, they buy it from Daesh [the Islamic State] through middlemen at a discount of 30$ and then, “cleaned,” it hits world markets at 45$…. The trade runs on the basis of this 15$ spread. If it is, say 25K bar/day, that = 136M$ for yr (15x25Kx365). So it is not just small change. I understand that the money goes through Turk and Qatari banks. Once the oil is “cleaned,” they don’t even need to launder it through Qatari banks, or any other banks. I further hear that much of the proceeds are then recycled into real estate in W. Europe. So if you are draining off 136M$/yr and, say, you leverage that 2:1, as is typical for commercial real estate, that would mean that after 3 yrs, you are running a 1.2B$ real estate portfolio….