Timber Sycamore: The Largest U.S. Covert War Since Afghanistan in the 1980s

This is how it works. For the life of the covert program the government will not officially recognize its existence. The mainstream media proves compliant by not reporting on it in any thorough, coherent way. Then, once the program is rolled up, lo and behold! It turns out to have been gigantic, the main driver of everything in the region. What does this say then about the prestige press reporting about Syria since 2013?

What we know from "Under Trump, a Hollowed-Out Force in Syria Quickly Lost C.I.A. Backing," by Mark Mazzetti, Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt, other than a obfuscating headline, is that the main points found in alternative media about the war in Syria have been validated: The CIA armed and funded Nusra Front, the arm of Al Qaeda in Syria, through the Free Syrian Army, an umbrella of Western/GCC mercenary ad hoc militias. Nusra fought alongside these CIA militias. The only distinction was a nominal one.

We are left with the fundamental contradiction of U.S. involvement in Syria. The legislative fig leaf that justifies a U.S. presence in Syria is the 2001 AUMF, which grants the U.S. the right to wage war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Yet what the U.S. did in Syria -- and no doubt continues to do on a smaller scale -- is wage war alongside Al Qaeda.

How long can such fundamental dishonesty be maintained?

WASHINGTON — The end came quickly for one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A. 

During a White House briefing early last month, the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, recommended to President Trump that he shut down a four-year-old effort to arm and train Syrian rebels. The president swiftly ended the program.

The rebel army was by then a shell, hollowed out by more than a year of bombing by Russian planes and confined to ever-shrinking patches of Syria that government troops had not reconquered. Critics in Congress had complained for years about the costs — more than $1 billion over the life of the program — and reports that some of the C.I.A.-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of a rebel group tied to Al Qaeda further sapped political support for the program.

While critics of Mr. Trump have argued that he ended the program to curry favor with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, there were in fact dim views of the effort in both the Trump and Obama White Houses — a rare confluence of opinion on national security policy.

The shuttering of the C.I.A. program, one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, has forced a reckoning over its successes and failures. Opponents say it was foolhardy, expensive and ineffective. Supporters say that it was unnecessarily cautious, and that its achievements were remarkable given that the Obama administration had so many restrictions on it from the start, which they say ultimately ensured its failure. 

[snip]

President Barack Obama had reluctantly agreed to the program in 2013 as the administration was struggling to blunt the momentum of Syrian government forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. It soon fell victim to the constantly shifting alliances in Syria’s six-year-old civil war and the limited visibility that American military and intelligence officials had over what was occurring on the ground.

Once C.I.A.-trained fighters crossed into Syria, C.I.A. officers had difficulty controlling them. The fact that some of their C.I.A. weapons ended up with Nusra Front fighters — and that some of the rebels joined the group — confirmed the fears of many in the Obama administration when the program began. Although the Nusra Front was widely seen as an effective fighting force against Mr. Assad’s troops, its Qaeda affiliation made it impossible for the Obama administration to provide direct support for the group.

American intelligence officials estimate that the Nusra Front now has as many 20,000 fighters in Syria, making it Al Qaeda’s largest affiliate. Unlike other Qaeda affiliates such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Nusra Front has long focused on battling the Syrian government rather than plotting terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe.

The American officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a program that is classified.

In the summer of 2012, David H. Petraeus, who was then C.I.A. director, first proposed a covert program of arming and training rebels as Syrian government forces bore down on them.

The proposal forced a debate inside the Obama administration, with some of Mr. Obama’s top aides arguing that Syria’s chaotic battlefield would make it nearly impossible to ensure that weapons provided by the C.I.A. could be kept out of the hands of militant groups like the Nusra Front. Mr. Obama rejected the plan.

But he changed his mind the following year, signing a presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to covertly arm and train small groups of rebels at bases in Jordan. The president’s reversal came in part because of intense lobbying by foreign leaders, including King Abdullah II of Jordan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who argued that the United States should take a more active role in trying to end the conflict.

Given the code name Timber Sycamore, the covert program began slowly, but by 2015 the C.I.A.-backed rebel groups had made significant progress against Syrian forces, pushing into areas of the country long considered to be government strongholds. The offensive gained momentum after the C.I.A. and Saudi Arabia began supplying the powerful tank-destroying weapons to the rebel groups.

But the rebel push in Idlib, Hama and Latakia Provinces in northern Syria also created problems for Washington. The Nusra Front, often battling alongside the C.I.A.-supported rebel groups, made its own territorial gains.

It was Nusra’s battlefield successes that Mr. Putin used as one justification for the Russian military offensive in Syria, which began in 2015. The Russian campaign, a relentless bombing of the C.I.A.-backed fighters and Nusra militants, battered the rebels and sent them into retreat.

Enemies of Syria Launch Plan B (or is It Plan C?)

It can't be just a coincidence that the recent Al Qaeda offensive in the suburbs of Damascus is taking place at the same time as Israel has stepped up its air war against Syria.

Every indication is that the Gulf monarchies that prop up the Salafist jihadis waging war on Syria are making a concerted effort, along with their Israeli allies, to change the contours of the conflict and continue to dictate the terms of any future agreement as the siege of Raqqa is to commence in April.

Since the beginning of the year ISIS and Nusra have used suicide bombers to target Shiite pilgrims at shrines outside Damascus.

Anne Barnard reports in "Resurgent Syrian Rebels Surprise Damascus With New Assaults" that

After the government seized the eastern half of Aleppo from rebels last year, it worked hard to create the impression that the war was essentially over. The recent activity, including a series of suicide bombings in Damascus and a rebel attack Thursday on the northern city of Hama, seemed to indicate that the war might be entering a new phase instead.

While the government still seems to be consolidating control over major population centers along Syria’s western spine, it appears at a minimum likely to face a lingering rural insurgency and bombing campaigns in the cities by hard-line jihadist groups.

At the least, the rebel assaults carried a political message: that the insurgents could still disrupt life in the capital and challenge the forces of President Bashar al-Assad at several points around the country, while simultaneously attacking Islamic State fighters.

By mounting a series of simultaneous assaults around the country, the rebels seemed intent on exploiting one of the government forces’ main weaknesses. While they have Russian air support and help on the ground from Iranian-trained militias, they are spread thin after six years of war and the drain of so many men fleeing the country rather than serving in the army.

It was not immediately clear if the rebels could maintain the offensive. Their forces around Damascus have been badly depleted in recent years and their territory rolled back as the government besieged districts and forced their surrender.

And the new assaults raised political concerns, in that they continue the alliance between a spectrum of rebel groups and hard-line Islamists considered terrorists by Russia and the United States.

The rebels are also walking a fine line with Syrian and international public opinion. To build leverage for imminent peace talks, they need to show they can still cause trouble for the government on the ground, undermining its claim that it can control territory and maintain security.

Yet, they stand to pay a huge political price if they ally themselves with groups that have been intensifying Baghdad-style insurgent attacks like the suicide bombing that killed more than 30 people last week in a historic courthouse in Damascus.

Barnard goes on to describe the central coordination at work in the recent offensive:

There were reports late Tuesday of several new insurgent assaults on government territory taking place at once: one in Hama Province and another on the western outskirts of Aleppo. In recent weeks, rebels have also launched attacks in Daraa Province to the south. Until recently, fighters there had lain low at the behest of foreign sponsors including the United States, but it now appears they have either decided to defy their patrons or persuaded them to heat up the front again.

Rebel and jihadi groups were also advancing against the Islamic State in the Qalamoun region, north of Damascus.

The immediate goal appears to be to protect the caliphate, to draw government forces away from the battle to retake Raqqa; to that end, Israel is acting as the jihadis air force.

Baghdad has lived with suicide bombings for more than a decade. I don't think Nusra moving to a conventional terror campaign is going to change anything. What is a game-changer is if Israel substantially expands its Syrian target list. I can't imagine that they would risk directly jousting with Russia. Liberman's threat to destroy Syria's Russian-supplied air defenses seems outlandish. The problem is it can't be completely dismissed.

Any mojo Trump has left is in foreign policy, and it is bleeding out fast. (There was some good news yesterday when it was reported that Rex Tillerson will skip the NATO summit next month.) If W. can have a statue in Albania, why can't Trump have one in Rojava?

Rare NYT Story on Mosul Siege Highlights Weakness of U.S. Propaganda

Aleppo and the alleged Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election are the stories that have dominated the front page the last week. Now coverage will shift to the tractor trailer massacre at the Berlin Christmas market -- which Merkel, after a bit of delay, has proclaimed an act of terrorism -- and the assassination in Ankara of the Russian ambassador.

There are still plenty of hyperventilating stories inside the paper about the devastation of Aleppo. What's remarkable is how little reporting of any kind is devoted to the massive U.S.-led operation to the east in Mosul. A reader of The New York Times could be forgiven if she thought a ceasefire was in effect there because nothing is said about the huge military operation.

Yesterday was an exception though. A substantial story appeared, penned by Tim Arango, Eric Schmitt and Rukmini Callimachi, "Hungry, Thirsty and Bloodied in Battle to Retake Mosul From ISIS," part of the purpose of which was to explain why the U.S.-led siege of Mosul is different from the Russian-led siege of Aleppo.

Something to keep in mind: Whenever Eric Schmitt appears in the byline, know that your are getting official USG propaganda. Tim Arango is one of the better reporters on the Gray Lady's staff, and Rukmini Callimachi has written stories basically calling out the Gulf monarchies for funding and maintaining the Islamic State. But with Schmitt on the byline Arango and Callimachi are being minded by a government handler.

Another aside: Each morning I usually take a peek at Foreign Policy's Situation Report by Paul McCleary and Adam Rawnsley. It is a daily roundup of foreign policy news that sticks closely to the Deep State's point of view, i.e., it is thoroughly Russophobic.

Neither yesterday nor today is there a peep about "Hungry, Thirsty and Bloodied in Battle to Retake Mosul From ISIS," which is unusual because most significant NYT reports get a nod from McLeary and Rawnsley.

I mention this because clearly the Pentagon, Langley and Foggy Bottom prefer dynamic silence to prevail when it comes to the siege of Mosul.

Why?

Read the opening of Arango et al.'s piece:

ISTANBUL — After two months, the battle to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State has settled into a grinding war of attrition. The front lines have barely budged in weeks. Casualties of Iraqi security forces are so high that American commanders heading the United States-led air campaign worry that they are unsustainable. Civilians are being killed or injured by Islamic State snipers and growing numbers of suicide bombers.

As the world watches the horrors unfolding in Aleppo, Syria, where government forces and allied militias bombed civilians and carried out summary executions as they retook the last rebel-held areas, a different tragedy is transpiring in Mosul. Up to one million people are trapped inside the city, running low on food and drinking water and facing the worsening cruelty of Islamic State fighters.

“ISIS members have become like mad dogs, and every member has the power of immediate execution,” Abu Noor said by telephone from his home on the west side of Mosul, which government forces had not reached, referring to the terror group by one of its acronyms. “We live in constant fear and worry.”

There has been a blackout of Mosul news because beleaguered propagandists of the prestige press, such as Eric Schmitt, are being tasked with an impossible squaring the circle -- justifying one siege as a reasonable, proportionate use of force (Mosul) and another (Aleppo) as bloodthirsty genocide.

It is a high hurdle. We are being asked to believe that the jihadis of Mosul behave more cruelly than the jihadis of Aleppo; that somehow only the ISIS jihadis take hostages and use human shields, while the jihadis of Al Qaeda usher civilians out of harms way.

Two more points. There is a explanation towards the end of the story about why there has been a Mosul news blackout:

When the battle started, in mid-October, it moved fairly quickly as forces took outlying areas that had mostly been empty of civilians.

Journalists were given wide access to the front lines. But recently, getting the news out of Mosul has become more difficult; commanders are prohibiting most front-line embeds.

The tightening of access, apparently, was not an effort to control the narrative [!], but a reaction to the recent appearance in Mosul of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher and writer, who is producing a documentary film about the battle. Why was that controversial? Because Mr. Levy is Jewish. 

His appearance stirred outrage in Iraq, and the authorities in Baghdad moved to shut down access for all journalists.

“The rumor spread that we were having relations with Israel,” said Lt. Gen. Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a special forces commander in Mosul, who said he had no idea who Mr. Levy was when he arrived. “In fact, we had no idea who this was that came to see us.” 

He said access for journalists would be restored soon. “We will solve this problem,” he said.

So the news blackout is due to Iraqi anti-Semitism. Got that?

Finally, what about those skyrocketing civilian casualties? Here the article slams up against the limits of credulity.

Civilian casualties are soaring, even though the government, at the outset of the battle, dropped millions of leaflets over the city with instructions to stay inside their homes. Most civilians have, but those who have fled — there are some 90,000 people displaced from their homes around the city — have faced harrowing journeys, and many have been killed or maimed by crossfire.

That so many civilians have remained has hampered the fight, as Iraqi soldiers move slowly in an effort to protect them. It has also led to limited use of air power and artillery.

“Essentially, they are trying a different operational approach,” said Carl Castellano, a senior analyst at Talos, a consulting firm that focuses on security in Iraq. “They don’t have the capability to evacuate all these civilians, and so that’s limiting the amount of firepower they can use in the city. That is limiting their options in terms of what they can do — close air support and everything else.”

American air commanders have quickly sought to modify some of their bombing runs to counter shifting tactics by the Islamic State, cratering streets in Mosul with bombs to stymie car-bombers or at least slow them down, and stepping up attacks on car bomb factories in and around Mosul. Allied warplanes have destroyed nearly 140 car bombs or car-bomb factories since the Mosul offensive began, American officials said.

In the second week of December, nearly 700 civilians were wounded, from gunshots, mines and rocket fire, according to the United Nations, a 30 percent increase from the previous week.

The story does not mention that the planners of the siege originally called on the residents of Mosul to stay and fight. Residents stayed, but there was no mass rebellion.

The story would have us believe that U.S. air power is only being used to hit ISIS car-bomb factories. Bullshit. Air power is and will be used just as it is in Aleppo. To win. And much of Mosul will be destroyed, like the eastern half of Aleppo. The major difference is the propaganda.

Spain Busts Up Al Qaeda Network, Highlighting Western Schizophrenia

The BBC is reporting this morning that Spain has raided an Al Qaeda recruiting network responsible for sending fighters to Syria. The network is based in the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta and the Moroccan city of Fnideq.

This highlights the schizophrenia of the West regarding Syria. On the one hand there is an extensive anti-terrorism infrastructure built up over the last decade-plus to combat Al Qaeda and its affiliates, while on the other we are actively working to enhance terrorist networks in a catastrophic quest to collapse the sovereign nation of Syria. In fact, Secretary of State John Kerry is in Qatar today to huddle with the Gulf Arab monarchies at the forefront of the effort to export jihad to Syria. (An interesting story on the Syrian Arab News Agency from yesterday alleges, based on documentary evidence, that Saudi Arabia is offering a general amnesty for criminals to fight in Syria.)

Last weekend on the Counterpunch web site, Franklin Lamb published a story taking the temperature on Capitol Hill. He interviewed his Congressional-staffer contacts and the opinion was that a no-fly zone was an inevitability, and with a no-fly zone comes all-out war. So the prevailing wisdom was that shortly, possibly a matter of months, the United States would be in a full-scale military conflict with Syria.

Fox is reporting this morning that a bipartisan group of senators led by Kentucky's Rand Paul is trying to block Obama from sending military aid to the rebels.

Rick Gladstone has a story in the New York Times this morning about the Philippines threatening to withdraw its peacekeepers from the Golan Heights unless they are supplied with heavy weapons, antitank and antiaircraft guns, by the United Nations. The Times over the last several days has reduced its coverage of the Syrian civil war.

Patrick Cockburn has a story in The Independent from a couple days back that is worth checking out. He says that Damascus is more peaceful today than it was six months ago. "Assad's forces have a tight grip on 13 out of 14 provincial capitals and increasingly hold the main roads between them." The population is tired of war and have no sympathy for the rebels who shoot children and eat the hearts of fallen soldiers. Cockburn says the government's strategy seems to be a slow encirclement of the rebels. It seems to be working.

I think it's already obvious to anyone paying attention that the West is engaging in an obscenity by supporting the fatwas of Wahhabi clerics. Soon, when the only rebel military strategy left will be suicide attacks, this obscenity will be even more glaring.

Larger War Predicted + Al Qaeda & Israel

A much wider war is a near certainty. The BBC is reporting this morning, "Syria crisis: UN launches largest ever aid appeal," that the United Nations estimates that by year's end the number of Syrian refugees will jump from 1.5 million to 3.5 million. Take a moment to consider this projection. Syria's civil conflict began during the Arab Spring of 2011. In the next six months Syria will produce more refugees than it did in more than two years. That's why the UN is trying to raise $5 billion.

And an argument can be made that this refugee estimate could be on the conservative side. It is clear now, based on press stories of the last couple of days, that Lebanon's Hezbollah is to be punished for its part in maintaining Assad in power. The problem here is that Hezbollah is an integral part of the Lebanese state. If you bleed Hezbollah, you bleed Lebanon. Today Jodi Rudoren has a story, "As Syrian Fighting Nears Border, Israel Considers Its Options," which makes clear that Israel is going to attack Hezbollah:

Israel continued to plan intensively for a third war in Lebanon, where it believes Hezbollah has amassed 60,000 rockets aimed in its direction. Military leaders say that they have learned the lessons of their 34-day battle with Hezbollah in 2006, and that the next round will be short, deadly and urban: one top general recently described Lebanese homes as having “a living room and a missile room” right next to each other.

When this happens, and if the reporting is accurate, there will be a lot of cognitive dissonance for Western consumers of information because Israeli soldiers will be fighting in alliance with bin Laden-inspired jihadists (as they are now in a more clandestine fashion). We in the West will be forced to ask ourselves questions that only seem to be voiced by outlets such as Alex Jones' Infowars.com. Why has Al Qaeda never directly attacked Israel? If one studies the timeline of Al Qaeda bombings one struggles to find any assault on Israel. The only thing that provides a tenuous connection is the Ghriba synagogue bombing in 2002. But it is unclear what the connection of the suicide bomber, Nizar bin Muhammad Nasar Nawar, was to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

A world war in the Middle East seems to be coming just when troops were to be pulled out of Afghanistan. Of course it doesn't have to be this way. But clearly the West and its allies in the Gulf cannot operate without war.

Desecration Hijr bin Adi al-Kindi's Shrine

At the end of a story today by Thomas Erdbrink and Hania Mourtada about the desecration of a Shiite shrine in a Damascus suburb by Syrian rebels readers are treated to a rare unvarnished -- albeit brief -- description of the Iranian perspective on Islamic sectarian conflict:

Iranian officials blamed the United States and Israel, saying they were supporting the Syrian rebels and Sunni extremist forces in the region. 

“They have launched a war between Shiites and Sunnis,” Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Sunday. “They plant bombs in Pakistan and Iraq, and recently the Zionist regime has hit Syria. We should be careful about colonizers and Israel.” 

Iran’s ideological narrative is that there are no real conflicts between the sects, but that Western powers and Iran’s enemies in the region deliberately mislead certain Muslim groups. Its leaders blame ultraconservative Wahhabis and Salafists, who they say are backed by the United States and Israel, through their regional allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 

“This Syrian so-called front, Al Nusra, is the symbol of Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” said Mojtaba Bigdeli, a former leader of a Shiite pressure group. “We respect Sunni shrines. We do not desecrate them. We may form self-sacrifice battalions to react to the Wahhabis and Salafists in Syria. For sure we will not remain silent.”

Any regular consumer of the news will have to acknowledge that the Iranian "ideological narrative" is more consistent than the one coming from the United States government. The United States says it acts in support of popular democracy and human rights, but then it tacitly approves a brutal crackdown on Arab Spring activists in Bahrain, not to mention decades of occupation by Israel in the West Bank; its chief allies in the Persian Gulf region are among the most despotic, unegalitarian states on the planet.

What's the rationale for aiding rebel groups in Syria? -- Freedom? Democracy? There are few secular fighters left in the Syrian opposition. So the United States is on the brink of arming the very people we've been engaging in global warfare since 9/11. It's crazy. The U.S. must think that through its gulf state allies it can control the Al Qaeda types. But time and again this has proven to be folly. The desecration of Hijr bin Adi al-Kindi's shrine is the latest example.

Predictably, the United States is sticking to its flimsy story that it is the Assad government not the opposition that is responsible for the use of nerve gas. No proof is supplied, just bald assertion; that and a whispering campaign has begun against Carla Del Ponte. This from today's frontpage story, "White House Holds Firm on Cautious Path in Syria Crisis," by Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt:

The assertion that there is evidence suggesting the rebels have used sarin was made by Carla Del Ponte, a former chief prosecutor for international criminal tribunals that investigated Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia who is now serving on a commission looking into human rights abuses in Syria. 

But that commission later issued a statement clarifying that it had not reached a conclusion about which side used the gas, and the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, added the administration’s doubts. 

“We are highly skeptical of the suggestion that the opposition could have or did use chemical weapons,” Mr. Carney said. “We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position.” 

A senior State Department official told reporters that the United States took Ms. Del Ponte’s allegations seriously, but said of the rebels, “We have no information that they have either the capability or the intent to deploy or use such weapons.” 

Another senior official noted that Ms. Del Ponte was not a member of another United Nations panel that is investigating chemical weapons.

With the rebels' desecration of Shiite shrines threatening a huge expansion of the war, I'm not hopeful that Obama is going to do the right thing. At a certain point, when the warhawks get amped up and Israeli bombs are falling, there's not much (apparently) that even POTUS can do.

Israel's Dangerous Escalation

A dangerous escalation, initiated by Israel, has begun in the Syrian civil war. This from a Sunday story by Anne Barnard, Michael Gordon and Jodi Rudoren, "Israel Targeted Iranian Missiles in Syria Attack":

On Sunday, the Syrian government said that the Israelis had launched a missile attack against the military complex at Jamraya just outside Damascus overnight. 

Large blasts sent towering plumes of flame and smoke into the night sky above Qasioun Mountain, which towers over downtown Damascus, according to residents and videos posted by opposition activists. The videos showed multiple explosions over a period of several minutes, suggesting that more than one target may have been hit. 

The mountain is home to an array of Syrian military facilities, including military research centers, and is the source of much of the government shelling of rebel positions in the suburbs. Residents and activists said the explosions struck the mountain headquarters of the army’s Fourth Division, the elite and feared unit run by the president’s brother Maher, as well as al-Hamah, where the command of the Republican Guard, one of the government’s elite forces, is located.

Ikhbariya television, a state-owned channel, asserted that Israeli had carried out the strikes. “The new Israeli attack is an attempt to raise the morale of the terrorist groups which have been tottering after facing strikes by our noble army,” the station said.The government has long said that the uprising against it was fueled by foreign-backed “terrorists” and served Israeli and American interests. 

Israeli officials had no comment on the explosions. Nor did American officials, who signaled that the United States did not carry out the attack. 

“They are definitely going after military facilities on or around Qasioun,” said Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Syria as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “There are a lot of research and military facilities there that are tied into the command and control structure of the regime.” 

“It is unprecedented and something all of Damascus can see,” he added, stressing that it would likely have an important political impact in Syria.

The cat is out of the bag. This no longer has anything to do with the Arab Spring. This is pure power politics. It's the United States operating through its Israeli cat's paw along with an Al Qaeda-affiliated opposition funded and armed by the gulf states. What does this tell you about the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT)? It should be obvious by now that it's a ruse to maintain our permanently militarized state along the lines of the Cold War that it replaced. If we are willing to align ourselves with Al Qaeda against a secular state then GWOT is obviously secondary to other considerations, such as the addiction that elites in power have to the fantasy of full-spectrum dominance and perpetual war.

This is not going to end well. Russia, which has a naval installation in Syria and is a great power, is not going to look the other way. Lebanon will be destabilized because Hezbollah will do whatever it can to aid Assad. Iraq will split along a Shiite-Sunni fault, as it is already.

Israel must have done what it did because the Syrian offensive against the rebels at the end of last week was successful.

Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty, the ambitious two hour and 27 minute Kathryn Bigelow film about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, was my choice for a movie last night.

The first thing that has to be said is that Bigelow is taking on a lot here, basically our present history of the last 12 years. Everything changes after 9/11. The film begins with a black screen and audio of  911 calls and news flashes from that morning and then shifts to a spartan interrogation room at a nameless military camp where we see Dan, played excellently by Jason Clarke, administer the water torture to an al-Qaeda-affiliated sad sack while Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, looks on.

Overall the best thing about Zero Dark Thirty is Chastain. The movie is about her character's obsessive pursuit of bin Laden; and except for the end when the Navy SEAL team assassinates bin Laden at Abbottabad, Chastain is almost always on screen. She is terrific, magnetic, stunning -- all the superlatives. She presents Maya tough as nails yet vulnerable and fragile, a lonely hunter. In fact, all the performances are topnotch. Kyle Chandler as the Islamabad CIA Station Chief is super, as is Mark Strong as a high-up CIA bureaucrat.

One problem I have with the movie is the way it condenses time; it creates the impression that Osama was pulling the strings on the myriad post-9/11 terrorist bombings when I don't think this was the case. I understand this is something that Bigelow has to do to keep a narrative spanning a decade moving along at a clip that sustains the interest of her viewers, and I was struck by the number of attacks, successful and botched, I had forgotten about like the summer 2005 London bombings or the 2010 Times Square car bomb plot, but still it feels like a screenwriter's contrivance.

At the end, watching the lengthy SEAL assault on the bin Laden compound under the cover of darkness after one of the stealthy helicopters crashes, I realized that both Zero Dark Thirty and Argo act as an exorcism from the American psyche of Carter's failed Operation Eagle Claw. Reagan likely would have won anyway in 1980 -- the country was headed fast toward the Right -- but the fatally bungled Delta Force rescue attempt of the hostages in Tehran definitely doomed Carter. In Argo, Ben Affleck's film dramatizes a successful Tehran rescue; in Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow dramatizes a successful military helicopter raid, crash and all. After more than thirty years, yes, we might still be wrapped up with Afghanistan and Iran, but look, we're really winners.

Zero Dark Thirty is not a perfect film. It's definitely a good one though, and it might even be great. The final scene is of Maya as the sole passenger on an enormous spotless military transport plane. The camera pulls tight on her face, and she cries. The United States is a hollowed-out power animated by elites. That's the message. Everyone in Zero Dark Thirty is an elite, from the Navy SEAL studs with their beards and keffiyeh to the CIA analysts in their futuristic "Predator Bay." Maya herself is the ultimate elite -- smart, beautiful, focused on her career, feared by the bureaucracy. The only time we really see regular people is when the crying bin Laden children and women appear during the final raid.

CIA Drone Base in the Land of Mecca and Medina

In case you missed it, because it was easy to do, last Tuesday there was a great piece written by Tom Engelhardt and posted on his web site, TomDispatch.com.  Titled "Dumb and Dumber: A Secret CIA Drone Base, a Blowback World, and Why Washington Has No Learning Curve," it tells how the media at the behest of the Obama administration sat for over a year on the story that a secret CIA drone facility had been established on Saudi Arabian soil:

Last Tuesday [two weeks ago, February 5], the Washington Post published a piece by Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung about a reportorial discovery which that paper, along with other news outlets (including the New York Times), had by “an informal arrangement” agreed to suppress (and not even very well) at the request of the Obama administration. More than a year later, and only because the Times was breaking the story on the same day (buried in a long investigative piece on drone strikes), the Post finally put the news on record. It was half-buried in a piece about the then-upcoming Brennan hearings. Until that moment, its editors had done their patriotic duty, urged on by the CIA and the White House, and kept the news from the public. Never mind, that the project was so outright loony, given our history, that they should have felt the obligation to publish it instantly with screaming front-page headlines and a lead editorial demanding an explanation.

According to the Post, approximately two years ago, the CIA got permission from the Saudi government to build one of its growing empire of drone bases in a distant desert region of that kingdom. The purpose was to pursue an already ongoing air war in neighboring Yemen against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula. 

The first drone mission from that base seems to have taken off on September 30, 2011, and killed American citizen and al-Qaeda supporter Anwar al-Awlaki. Many more lethal missions have evidently been flown from it since, most or all directed at Yemen in a campaign that notoriously seems to be creating more angry Yemenis and terror recruits than it’s killing. So that’s the story you waited an extra year to hear from our watchdog press (though for news jockeys, the existence of the base was indeed mentioned in the interim by numerous media outlets).

Engelhardt then proceeds to provide an excellent thumbnail sketch -- his article is worth reading just for this -- of our involvement with Osama bin Laden in bloodying the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan; and from there our first war with Saddam Hussein that led to a U.S. military presence in the Muslim holy land of Mecca and Medina; thereby creating the main rationale for al-Queda's 9/11 attack. One notable accomplishment of Bush's 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq is that it led to the withdrawal of combat troops from Saudi Arabia. But now, after enormous amounts of blood and treasure, we're back. As Engelhardt says,

And so we reach this moment and the news of that two-year-old secret Saudi drone base. You might ask yourself, given the previous history of U.S. bases in that country, why the CIA or any administration would entertain the idea of opening a new U.S. outpost there. Evidently, it’s the equivalent of catnip for cats; they just couldn’t help themselves. 

We don’t, of course, know whether they blanked out on recent history or simply dismissed it out of hand, but we do know that once again garrisoning Saudi Arabia seemed too alluring to resist. Without a Saudi base, how could they conveniently strike al-Qaeda wannabes in a neighboring land they were already attacking from the air? And if they weren't to concentrate every last bit of drone power on taking out al-Qaeda types (and civilians) in Yemen, one of the more resource-poor and poverty-stricken places on the planet? Why, the next thing you know, al-Qaeda might indeed be ruling a Middle Eastern Caliphate. And after that, who knows? The world? 

Honestly, could there have been a stupider gamble to take (again)? This is the sort of thing that helps you understand why conspiracy theories get started -- because people in the everyday world just can’t accept that, in Washington, dumb and then dumber is the order of the day. 

When it comes to that “secret” Saudi base, if truth be told, it does look like a conspiracy -- of stupidity. After all, the CIA pushed for and built that base; the White House clearly accepted it as a fine idea. An informal network of key media sources agreed that it really wasn’t worth the bother to tell the American people just how stupidly their government was acting. (The managing editor of the New York Times explained its suppression by labeling the story nothing more than "a footnote.") And last week, at the public part of the Brennan nomination hearings, none of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to provide the CIA and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community with what little oversight they get, thought it appropriate to ask a single question about the Saudi base, then in the news. 

The story was once again buried. Silence reigned. If, in the future, blowback does occur, thanks to the decision to build and use that base, Americans won’t make the connection. How could they? 

It all sounds so familiar to me. Doesn’t it to you? Shouldn’t it to Washington?

To get a feeling why the Obama administration is engaging in what seems so obviously a retrograde geopolitical move read yesterday's article by Robert Worth on the current state of affairs in Yemen. To summarize quickly, it's a mess. If not a "failed state," in national security parlance, then certainly a state close to coming apart. The south, which as recently as 1990 was its own state, is moving towards independence.

Some progress has been made. A military campaign last year recaptured several southern towns from the jihadist militants who had controlled them for more than a year. But most of the fighters seem to have melted back into the population, and in the wake of the military’s withdrawal, large areas of the south remain a checkerboard of mysterious armed groups with no government presence. 

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate has adopted a new tactic: a ruthless campaign of assassinations that has left 74 military and intelligence officers dead since the start of last year, according to Interior Ministry officials. Almost all of the killings have been carried out by masked gunmen on motorcycles — often with pistols equipped with silencers — and only a few suspects have been arrested.

The new president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, is weak. He's a southerner who is reviled in the south; a man without an independent base of support in a tribal society. On top of all of this -- a weak chief executive, a secessionist movement, a surging al-Qaeda -- there is a burgeoning proxy sectarian war:

Another rising threat is the growth of an increasingly violent and sectarian confrontation between two of Yemen’s largest political groups. One of those groups, known as the Houthi movement, is led by radical adherents of a variant of Shiite Islam and has been accused of receiving support from Iran. Its followers have clashed repeatedly with youths from Islah, Yemen’s main Sunni Islamist party and the local equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

This conflict has taken on aspects of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia — which supports Islah — and Iran, with troubling Sunni-Shiite overtones. The Houthis have grown increasingly strident, holding vast public rallies modeled after those of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement. The two groups regularly malign each other in sectarian terms — a new occurrence in Yemen — and on several occasions, rallies have devolved into rock-throwing and even gun battles between members of the two camps.

So all the ingredients are there for a failed state and anarchy and chaos. And you can tell what the Obama administration is thinking, since its answer to all sources of turbulence in the Muslim world is the drone, "Let's get a base close to Yemen so we can bomb it when it all goes to hell." What are the lessons of history compared to a clear flight path for a bombing run?

While not totally apposite here, why not Roots Manuva meets Wrongtom on "Jah Warriors"?