WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Top US military generals have deliberately opposed and even subverted President Barack Obama’s policy to topple Assad for at least two and a half years, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in the January edition of the London Review of Books.
“If Seymour Hersh in the latest edition of London Review of Books is to be believed, then Washington has long been aware that its policy of regime-change-at-all-costs in Syria would issue in a victory for jihadists and extremists,” University of Copenhagen Professor Matthew Dal Santo said.
Hersh has broken major and often embarrassing stories about the US military for half a century, and his access to senior US intelligence figures seems second to none, Dal Santo noted.
“So alarmed do the upper ranks of the Pentagon appear to be about Obama's anti-Assad strategy (including covert CIA-led weapons supplies for the so-called 'moderates' and unconditional support for Turkey) that they seem to have sought to blunt if not obstruct it when they could,” the professor observed.
These efforts included direct military-to-military cooperation behind the back of the White House with both Russia and Israel, Dal Santo pointed out.
Obama’s policies toward Syria and across the Middle East could be explained as the world view of a liberal revolutionary who thought revolution and chaos were harmless and necessary stages to achieve perfect freedom at the end of history, he argued.
“For Obama, the community activist, legitimate government — whether in Syria today or in Ukraine in 2013 — is itself part of the problem: the argument that order is a precondition for meaningful freedom has no traction with him,” Dal Santo said.
Obama has continued his predecessor George W. Bush’s policies of destroying state structures across the Middle East even though this is what made the emergence and rise of the Islamic State possible in the first place, Executive Intelligence Review Senior Editor Jeff Steinberg said.
“The United States, under the Bush and Obama presidencies has demonstrated an uncanny ability to ignore the ‘collateral damage’ consequences of their actions.”
Obama’s hostile policies toward the Assad government and Russia had led to him encouraging the rise of extreme Islamist movements filled with hate in regard to the United States, Steinberg noted.
“Sometimes people put too much emphasis on witting, clever decision making when it is often stupidity, fantasy and denial that shape policies that are disastrous. The actions are driven by narrow minded concerns, and…[are] a path to disaster.”
Obama’s decisions on Syria also appeared to reflect a great deal of anti-Russia and anti-Iran sentiment among his inner circle of advisers, Steinberg concluded.
