WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — In his nearly 7,000-word article, Hersh wrote that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, decided to deliberately subvert Obama’s foreign policy and form a secret alliance with Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment… by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff… forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos," the article published on Monday in the London Review of Books stated.
The US generals, Hersh wrote, criticized what they see as Obama’s fixation on Putin, and believed the president had not adjusted his stance on Syria even though Russia and the United States shared anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria.
In the summer of 2013, the Joint Chiefs discovered that Turkey had co-opted the CIA's program to arm so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels. Ankara decided to redirect US aid to Islamic extremists, including the Islamic State, also known as Daesh, and the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front, Hersh explained.
The Joint Chiefs also discovered that viable moderate Syrian rebels did not exist and that the opposition consisted nearly uniformly of extremists, Hirsh added.
