“30 seconds over Syria.”
The revenge of the Obamanauts.
10 MARCH— Welp. That didn’t take long. Late in February, little more than a month into the Biden presidency—or, perhaps more accurately, the Obama restoration—the Pentagon carried out airstrikes on what it alleged were Iranian proxies active in Syria. Where are the Four Tops now that we really need them? The Biden regime’s mood music is the same, same old song that has defined America’s imperialist foreign policy for the past 75 years.
Some of us anticipated last week’s events long before the votes were even counted in November: A Biden presidency, we foresaw, would usher in a renewed era of American belligerence in the Greater Middle East, and toward Syria in particular. As noted in these pages, Biden and those who will run his foreign policy in years to come—chiefly Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan—had defined their confrontational posture toward China by the middle of last month. Now it is the same in the Middle East.
We cannot but note an emergent pattern in what is coming out of Washington on the foreign policy side since Biden took office. “Lead with diplomacy,” “military restraint,” and other such phrases are now common currency among the policy cliques. This is to be applauded. At last a very significant point appears to be getting across. But only on paper. What policy turns out to be, as it is to be executed has to date had nothing whatsoever to do with the grand rhetoric of Biden’s foreign policy people. This is not to be applauded: It is to be condemned.
Russian linguists of the early Soviet era used to say words are actions. So they are. In this case they are acts of mendacity, of deception. Let us remain alert to this as the Biden presidency proceeds. In our read, fine words and objectionable policies will be the leitmotif.
The latest example of this official chicanery arrived last week, when Antony Blinken delivered what he advertised as “my first major speech as secretary.” All the new themes are sounded here. There was the necessity of American leadership—“We’re hearing this now from our friends.” There was cooperation with others—“We will revitalize our ties with our allies and partners.” There was democracy promotion—“We will incentivize democratic behavior,” and so on. The transcript of Blinken’s remarks is here.
There are outright lies in Blinken’s speech. The necessity of American leadership is not what Blinken and his colleagues are hearing from others, as we noted in these pages late last month. Democracy promotion remains what it has long been, a euphemism for coup operations. Wake us when we have a democracy-promoting operation in Saudi Arabia or some other such repressive nation that happens to be our ally or “partner.”
Among our favorites in this line is, “At our best the United States is a country with integrity and a heart.” There are many, many millions of Americans of whom this can be said. None of them has anything to do with setting the objectives and methods of American foreign policy. The same day Blinken made this remark he Tweeted:
Last Thursday, this:
Here is Blinken on the Syria bombings:
Of course, we will never hesitate to use force when American lives and vital interests are at stake. That’s why president Biden authorized an airstrike last week against Iranian-backed militia groups targeting U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, but in that case and in future cases when we must take military action, we will do so only when the objectives and mission are clear and achievable, consistent with our values and laws and with the informed consent of the American people and we’ll do it together with diplomacy.
We do not know precisely what occurred just inside Syria along its border with Iraq on 25 February. The Pentagon reported American planes dropped seven 500–pound bombs on seven targets at a border crossing used by various militias, including Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, which are also active in Iraq against the remnants of the Islamic State and as such maintain working relations with Iraqi security forces.
Al Jazeera quoted “a medical source at a hospital in the area and several local sources” as saying 17 people had been killed. That toll could not be independently confirmed. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the figure at 22. A Kata’ib Hezbollah spokesperson told The Associated Press the casualty count came to one.
John Kirby, the Pentagon’s press spokesman, said the bombings were in response to mid–February rocket attacks on the airport in Erbil, in northern Iraq, in which a Filipino contractor was killed and six others connected to what is called the U.S.–led coalition were wounded.
Now things get very wobbly.
The New York Times report on the attack, based on Kirby’s remarks while traveling with Lloyd Austin, Biden’s just-confirmed defense secretary, was all over the place, a masterpiece of the sort of obfuscation The Times has perfected over many decades. The U.S. bombing run was retaliatory, the Times report stated in its lead. Then, far enough down so that readers might miss the preposterous contradiction:
The attack on the Erbil airport was claimed by a little-known group called Awliya al Dam, or Guardian of the Blood, brigades. The group also claimed responsibility for two bombings against U.S. contractor convoys in August.
Little is known about the group, including whether it is backed by Iran or related to the organizations that used the facilities the American airstrikes targeted on Thursday.
Say what? Those responsible for the Erbil attacks were Iranian-backed, we just read, and so were those operating at the border site the U.S. bombed. But those operating at the border site may not have been responsible for the bombing, and those claiming responsibility for the bombing may not enjoy Iranian backing.
Why did the U.S. execute the 25 February bombing? This is our first question.
Kirby also obfuscated on this point, although he is not nearly as good at it as those polished mis– and disinformers at The Times. This is Kirby’s second go-around as the Pentagon’s flak, attentive readers will recall. During his first tour at the podium, he famously tried to explain to Matt Lee, The Associated Press’s splendidly dogged diplomatic correspondent, that Russia was simply too close to NATO’s easternmost extensions.
The retired admiral has not lost his touch. The 25 February strike was “defensive,” he told those traveling with Austin—a defensive move 5,900 miles from Washington. Then: “We have acted in a deliberate manner that aims to de-escalate the overall situation in both eastern Syria and Iraq.” On this point The Scrum leaves readers to their own conclusions.
Speaking on CNN the following weekend, Kirby scoffed at the idea that these most recent strikes were a continuation of the “forever wars.” They were necessary, he said, “to send a very clear signal that the U.S. is going to protect its people, it’s going to protect its interests and it’s going to protect its partners in the region.” Left out of the discussion, of course, was the U.S. drone attack a year ago January near the Baghdad airport, which killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s senior military commander—an event that drastically increased tensions between Washington and Tehran.
Things were supposed to be different with the “professionals” now back in back in D.C.
And so we come to our second question, an inconvenient one for which America’s mandarins never seem to have a proper answer: Why are our “people” still in the region?
The principle reason we still have troops in Syria and Iraq is that the DoD, with the connivance of national security adviser John Bolton and Trump’s own special envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, did everything they could to ignore or slow-walk the president’s orders to bring U.S. troops home from the region. Bolton, in his ludicrous memoir, The Room Where it Happened, says as much; Jeffrey has admitted to misleading the president on troop levels. According to Bolton, Trump had repeatedly told his chief of staff, John Kelly, that he wanted to get the U.S. out of the Middle East entirely. In December 2018 Trump even instructed his team to begin planning for a withdrawal from Syria. But at each point, the neocons were able to outmaneuver the doltish Trump, and American troops remained—illegally in Syria, inexplicably in Iraq.
It cannot come as a surprise that it would take the Biden team just a month to reignite hostilities with Syria, a country with which we are not at war, which has never attacked us, and which was, during the Bush II years, a reliable, secular ally in our fight against radical Islamic extremists. Biden and high administration appointees such as Blinken have long indicated that they wanted another bite at the apple in Syria. Now they are simply carrying out the foreign policy of John Bolton—which is to say there is no longer any daylight between the foreign policy preferences of the Democratic establishment and the neocons.
And so this is where we are today: We have a newly elected Democratic administration staffed by people who are not content with illegally occupying Syrian territory and undermining that country’s fight against the very extremists who attacked us on September 11th. No: The Obama retreads now calling the shots seem intent on waging an illegal war—directly and by proxy.
Our judgment: The Biden administration will pursue a kind of “neocon-lite” foreign policy wherein it talks a good game about human rights, the value of multilateralism, and the sanctity of our longstanding alliances, while in practice it will continue the policies put in place (with the help of Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., of Delaware) 20 years ago this October—policies of endless, illegal, and counterproductive war in behalf of American fantasies of unipolarity and global hegemony.
No one can say they were not warned. The migration of alumni from the Bush–Cheney administration to the Biden camp during last year’s presidential election was probably the best early-warning indicator suggesting the return of “the Blob” to Washington under a Biden Administration.
In fairness to Biden, it is unclear whether the Blob ever left. For all of Trump’s rhetorical questioning of many of the tenets that have governed U.S. foreign policy over the past seven decades, his own actions often reflected a capitulation to the same militarism when push came to shove. Whether via the killing of Suleimani, or the 2017 missile barrages in Syria, ostensibly in response to a chemical weapons attack by the Assad government, (a propaganda trope now disproven), it is hard to distinguish between the actions of the Pompeo–Bolton axis and the more recent measures adopted by Biden.
Ironically, Jen Psaki, now Biden’s White House press spokesperson, questioned the lawfulness of Trump attacking Syria in 2017 but appears to have swallowed such misgivings whole when it is her boss who is doing the bombing. This despite the fact, (as former Ambassador Chas Freeman has observed), “a report by Middle East Eye suggests that Iran has strongly urged the militias it supports in Iraq to refrain from such attacks, or any warlike actions that could derail its sensitive diplomacy to bring the U.S. and Iran back into compliance with the 2015 international nuclear agreement or JCPOA.”
Even though Washington is ostensibly back in the guiding hands of “experts,” who will provide a steadying hand after four years of apparent mismanagement and capriciousness, the lack of coherence underlying the recent strikes in Syria against Iran suggests a level of amateurism worthy of the Three Stooges. A long-stated goal of the Biden Administration is to re-engage with Tehran. For weeks in advance of the Syrian attack, the president was busy ostentatiously mapping out how the United States might rejoin the international nuclear deal with Iran and work more closely with our European allies. That goal has clearly been placed on the back burner for now—although Biden’s abjectly corrupt relations with Israel cast doubt on Biden’s intentions from the first.
At the same time, Biden has directed Defense Secretary Austin to review the entire U.S. force structure worldwide. But as Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Vlahos observes, “aside from announcing that he is stopping a Trump plan to withdraw some 12,000 forces from Germany (only half were actually supposed to come home), [the president] said nothing about our country’s longest war in history.”
The thought that Americans can finally begin to relax after the four-year Trump sh*t show, counting on Joe Biden to “build back better” and restore a semblance of normality to the U.S. seems almost laughable in the wake of recent events. Rather than adhering to his grandly proclaimed intent last year to save “the soul of America,” Biden instead seems set to take the country back to its foreign policy purgatory of endless wars and militarism.
Excellent and clear article.Thank You.