Source: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/01/07/pushing-for-a-lucrative-new-cold-war/
The
New Cold War promises untold riches for the Military-Industrial Complex,
causing hawks inside the Obama administration to push for more hostilities with
Russia, as in a Syrian case study dissected by Gareth Porter for Truthdig.
By
Gareth Porter
Airstrikes by
the United States and its allies against two Syrian army positions Sept. 17
killed at least 62 Syrian troops and wounded dozens more. The attack was
quickly treated as a non-story by the U.S. news media; U.S. Central Command
(CENTCOM) claimed the strikes were carried out in the mistaken belief that
Islamic State forces were being targeted, and the story disappeared.
The circumstances surrounding the attack, however, suggested it
may have been deliberate, its purpose being to sabotage President Obama’s
policy of coordinating with Russia against Islamic State and Nusra Front forces
in Syria as part of a U.S.-Russian cease-fire agreement.
Normally the U.S. military can cover up illegal operations and
mistakes with a pro forma military investigation that publicly clears those
responsible. But the air attack on Syrian troops also involved three foreign
allies in the anti-Islamic State named Operation Inherent Resolve: the United
Kingdom, Denmark and Australia. So, the Pentagon had to agree to bring a
general from one of those allies into the investigation as a co-author of the
report. Consequently, the summary of
the investigation released by CENTCOM on Nov. 29 reveals
far more than the Pentagon and CENTCOM brass would have desired.
Thanks to that heavily redacted report, we now have detailed
evidence that the commander of CENTCOM’s Air Force component attacked the
Syrian army deliberately.
Motives Behind a Pentagon Scheme
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and the military
establishment had a compelling motive in the attack of Sept. 17 — namely,
interest in maintaining the narrative of a “new Cold War” with Russia, which is
crucial to supporting and expanding the budgets of their institutions.
When negotiations on a comprehensive cease-fire agreement with
Russia, including provisions for U.S.-Russian cooperation on air operations
against Islamic State and Nusra Front, appeared to gain traction last spring,
the Pentagon began making leaks to the news media about its opposition to the
Obama policy. Those receiving the leaks included neoconservative hawk Josh Rogin,
who had just become a columnist at The Washington Post.
After Secretary of State John Kerry struck an agreement Sept. 9
that contained a provision to set up a “Joint Integration Center” (JIC) for
U.S.-Russian cooperation in targeting, the Pentagon sought to reverse it. Carter grilled
Kerry for hours in an effort to force him to retreat from
that provision, according to The New York Times.
Lobbying against the JIC continued the following week after
Obama approved the full agreement. When the commander of the Central Command’s
Air Force component, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigan, was asked about the JIC at a
press briefing Sept. 13, he seemed to suggest that opponents of the provision
were still hoping to avoid cooperating with the Russians on targeting. He told
reporters that his readiness to join such a joint operation was “going to
depend on what the plan ends up being.”
But the Pentagon also had another motive for hitting Syrian
troops in Deir Ezzor. On June 16, Russian planes attacked a remote outpost of a
CIA-supported armed group, called the New Syrian Army, in Deir Ezzor province
near the confluence of Iraq, Syria and Jordan. The Pentagon demanded an
explanation for the attack but never got it.
For senior leaders of the Pentagon and others in the military, a
strike against Syrian army positions in Deir Ezzor would not only offer the
prospect of avoiding the threat of cooperating with Russia militarily, it would
also be payback for what many believed was a Russian poke in the U.S. eye.
Evidence in the Investigation Report
On Sept. 16, Gen. Harrigan, who also headed the Combined Air
Operations Center (CAOC) at al-Udeid airbase in Qatar, set in motion the
planning for the attack on the two Syrian army bases. The process began, according to the
investigation report, on Sept. 16, when Harrigan’s command
identified two fighting positions near the Deir Ezzor airport as belonging to
Islamic State, based on drone images showing that the personnel there were not
wearing uniform military garb and, supposedly, displayed no flags.
But, as a former intelligence analyst told me, that was not a
legitimate basis for a positive identification of the sites as Islamic
State-controlled because Syrian army troops in the field frequently wear a wide
range of uniforms and civilian clothing,
The report contains the incriminating revelation that the
authorities at CAOC had plenty of intelligence warning that its identification
was flat wrong. Before the strike, the regional station of the Air Force’s Distributed
Common Ground System, which is the Air Force’s primary intelligence organ for
interpreting data from aerial surveillance, contested the original
identification of the units, sending its own assessment that they could not
possibly be Islamic State.
Another prestrike intelligence report, moreover, pointed to what
appeared to be a flag at one of the two sites. And a map of the area that was
available to intelligence analysts at CAOC clearly showed that the sites in
question were occupied by the Syrian army. Harrigan and his command apparently
claimed, implausibly, that they were unaware of any of this information.
Further evidence that Harrigan meant to strike Syrian army
targets was the haste with which the strike was carried out, the day after the
initial intelligence assessment was made. The investigation summary
acknowledges that the decision to go ahead with a strike so soon after the
target had been initially assessed was a violation of Air Force regulations.
It had started out as a “deliberate target development” process
— one that did not require an immediate decision and could therefore allow for
a more careful analysis of intelligence. That was because the targets were
clearly fixed ground positions, so there was no need for an immediate strike.
Nevertheless, the decision was made to change it to a “dynamic targeting
process,” normally reserved for situations in which the target is moving, to
justify an immediate strike on Sept. 17.
No one in Harrigan’s command, including the commander himself,
would acknowledge having made that decision. That would have been a tacit
admission that the attack was far more than an innocent mistake.
The Deir Ezzor strike appears to have been timed to provoke a
breakdown of the cease-fire before the JIC could be formed, which was
originally to be after seven days of effective truce — meaning Sept. 19. Obama
added a requirement for the completion of humanitarian shipments from the
Turkish border, but the opponents of the JIC could not count on the Syrian
government continuing to hold up the truck convoys. That meant that Harrigan
would need to move urgently to carry out the strike.
Perhaps the single most damaging piece of evidence that the
strike was knowingly targeting Syrian army bases is the fact that Harrigan’s command
sent the Russians very specific misleading information on the targets of the
operation. It informed its Russian contact under the deconfliction agreement
that the two targets were nine kilometers south of Deir Ezzor airfield, but in
fact they were only three and six kilometers away, respectively, according to
the summary. Accurate information about the locations would have set off alarm
bells among the Russians, because they would have known immediately that Syrian
army bases were being targeted, as the U.S. co-author of the investigation
report, Gen. Richard Coe, acknowledged to reporters.
“Who is in Charge?”
Gen. Harrigan’s strike worked like a charm in terms of the
interests of those behind it. The hope of provoking a Syrian-Russian decision
to end the cease-fire and thus the plan for the JIC was apparently based on the
assumption that it would be perceived by both Russians and Syrians as evidence
that Obama was not in control of U.S. policy and therefore could not be trusted
as a partner in managing the conflict. That assumption proved correct.
When Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin,
spoke to reporters at a press briefing outside a U.N. Security Council
emergency meeting on the U.S. attack on Syrian troops, he asked rhetorically,
“Who is in charge in Washington? The White House or the Pentagon?”
Seemingly no longer convinced that Obama was in control of his
own military in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled the plug on his
U.S. strategy. Two days after the attacks, Syria announced, with obvious
Russian support, that the cease-fire was no longer in effect.
The political-diplomatic consequences for Syrians and for the
United States, however, were severe. The Russian and Syrian air forces began a
campaign of heavy airstrikes in Aleppo that became the single focus of media
attention on Syria. In mid-December, Secretary of State Kerry recalled in an
interview with The Boston Globe that he had had an
agreement with the Russians that would have given the United States “a veto
over their flights. …” He lamented that “you’d have a different situation there
now if we’d been able to do that.”
But it didn’t happen, Kerry noted, because “we had people in our
government who were bitterly opposed to doing that.” What he didn’t say was
that those people had the power and the audacity to frustrate the will of the
President of the United States.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and
winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly
published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
