Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria

They don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own
countries—for oil.
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
February 22, 2016

In part because my father was murdered by an Arab, I've made an effort to understand the impact of
U.S. policy in the Mideast and particularly the factors that sometimes motivate bloodthirsty responses
from the Islamic world against our country. As we focus on the rise of the Islamic State and search for
the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might
want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology. Instead we should examine
the more complex rationales of history and oil—and how they often point the finger of blame back at
our own shores.

America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—little-known to the American people yet
well-known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic jihadism that now complicates any
effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIL. So long as the American public
and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely only to compound the crisis.
Secretary of State John Kerry this week announced a “provisional” ceasefire in Syria. But since U.S.
leverage and prestige within Syria is minimal—and the ceasefire doesn’t include key combatants such
as Islamic State and al Nusra--it’s bound to be a shaky truce at best. Similarly President Obama’s
stepped-up military intervention in Libya—U.S. airstrikes targeted an Islamic State training camp last
week—is likely to strengthen rather than weaken the radicals. As the New York Times reported in a
December 8, 2015, front-page story, Islamic State political leaders and strategic planners are working
to provoke an American military intervention. They know from experience this will flood their ranks
with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.

To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians’ perspective and particularly
the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising
that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent jihadism as a Cold War
weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.

This did not happen without controversy at home. In July 1957, following a failed coup in Syria
by the CIA, my uncle, Sen. John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the
leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing
the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America’s imperialist meddling
in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the
Mideast, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of
the idealism they expected from the U.S. Kennedy’s speech was a call for recommitting
America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter; the formal
pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination
following World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had strong-armed Winston Churchill and the
other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in
the European war against fascism.
But thanks in large part to Allen Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often
directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic
Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy,
sat on a secret committee charged with investigating the CIA’s clandestine mischief in the
Mideast. The so called “Bruce-Lovett Report,” to which he was a signatory, described CIA
coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street,
but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government’s
denials. The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then
mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today.” The Bruce-Lovett Report
pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American values and had
compromised America’s international leadership and moral authority without the knowledge
of the American people. The report also said that the CIA never considered how we would
treat such interventions if some foreign government were to engineer them in our country.
This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and
Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mideast nationalists “hate us
for our freedoms.” For the most part they don’t; instead they hate us for the way we betrayed
those freedoms—our own ideals—within their borders.

For Americans to really understand what’s going on, it’s important to review some details about
this sordid but little-remembered history. During the 1950s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles
brothers—CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—rebuffed Soviet treaty
proposals to leave the Middle East a neutral zone in the Cold War and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead,
they mounted a clandestine war against Arab nationalism—which Allen Dulles equated with
communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret
American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with
conservative Jihadist ideologies thath they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a
White House meeting between the CIA’s director of plans, Frank Wisner, and John Foster Dulles, in
September 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the
‘holy war’ aspect,” according to a memo recorded by his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency’s creation.
Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and
crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March 1949,
Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-
Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the
ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts
that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered
a coup replacing al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named
Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American
pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, four and a half months into his regime.
Following several counter-coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again
tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Quwatli and his National Party. Al-Quwatli was still a
Cold War neutralist, but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward
the Soviet camp. That posture caused CIA Director Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a
coup” and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone, to Damascus.
Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically
elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh, after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s
lopsided contracts with the British oil giant Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). Mosaddegh was the
first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000-year history and a popular champion for democracy across the
developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by U.K.
intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP. Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of
resisting his advisers’ pleas to also expel the CIA, which, they correctly suspected, was complicit in
the British plot.

Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran’s new democracy and incapable of
such perfidies. Despite Dulles’ needling, President Harry Truman had forbidden the CIA from
actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh. When Eisenhower took office in
January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation
Ajax,” Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies but
whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock
throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for
35 years.
Flush from his Operation Ajax “success” in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1957 with
$3 million to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians
to overthrow al-Quwatli’s democratically elected secularist regime, according to Safe for
Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, by John Prados. Working with the Muslim
Brotherhood and millions of dollars, Rocky Stone schemed to assassinate Syria’s chief of
intelligence, the chief of its General Staff and the chief of the Communist Party, and to
engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm” provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and
Jordan that could be blamed on the Syrian Ba’athists. Tim Weiner describes in Legacy of
Ashes how the CIA’s plan was to destabilize the Syrian government and create a pretext for
an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were already under CIA control. Kim
Roosevelt forecast that the CIA’s newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon
repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power,” according to declassified CIA documents
reported in The Guardian newspaper.

But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the
CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the
American Embassy, taking Stone prisoner. After harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised
confession of his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s
legitimate government. The Syrians ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers—the first
time any American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country. The
Eisenhower White House hollowly dismissed Stone’s confession as “fabrications” and
“slanders,” a denial swallowed whole by the American press, led by the New York Times and
believed by the American people, who shared Mosaddegh’s idealistic view of their
government. Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed for treason all
military officers associated with the coup. In retaliation, the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the
Mediterranean, threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade Syria. The Turks assembled
50,000 troops on Syria’s borders and backed down only in the face of unified opposition from
the Arab League whose leaders were furious at the U.S. intervention. Even after its expulsion,
the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria’s democratically elected Ba’athist
government. The CIA plotted with Britain’s MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee” and armed
the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped
expose “the American plot,” according to Matthew Jones in “The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-
American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957.” The CIA’s mischief pushed
Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.
Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mideast from
Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new
wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-
Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a
highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited
Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.

Having alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mideast to work as an executive for
the oil industry that he had served so well during his public service career at the CIA.
Roosevelt’s replacement as CIA station chief, James Critchfield, attempted a failed
assassination plot against the new Iraqi president using a toxic handkerchief, according to
Weiner. Five years later, the CIA finally succeeded in deposing the Iraqi president and
installing the Ba’ath Party in power in Iraq. A charismatic young murderer named Saddam
Hussein was one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA’s Ba’athist team. The Ba’ath Party’s
Secretary, Ali Saleh Sa'adi, who took office alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We
came to power on a CIA train,” according to A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite,
by Said Aburish, a journalist and author. Aburish recounted that the CIA supplied Saddam
and his cronies a murder list of people who “had to be eliminated immediately in order to
ensure success.” Tim Weiner writes that Critchfield later acknowledged that the CIA had, in
essence, “created Saddam Hussein.” During the Reagan years, the CIA supplied Hussein
with billions of dollars in training, Special Forces support, weapons and battlefield intelligence,
knowing that he was using poisonous mustard and nerve gas and biological weapons—
including anthrax obtained from the U.S. government—in his war against Iran. Reagan and
his CIA director, Bill Casey, regarded Saddam as a potential friend to the U.S. oil industry and
a sturdy barrier against the spread of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Their emissary, Donald
Rumsfeld, presented Saddam with golden cowboy spurs and a menu of chemical/biological
and conventional weapons on a 1983 trip to Baghdad. At the same time, the CIA was illegally
supplying Saddam’s enemy, Iran, with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to fight
Iraq, a crime made famous during the Iran-Contra scandal. Jihadists from both sides later
turned many of those CIA-supplied weapons against the American people.
Even as America contemplates yet another violent Mideast intervention, most Americans are
unaware of the many ways that “blowback” from previous CIA blunders has helped craft the
current crisis. The reverberations from decades of CIA shenanigans continue to echo across
the Mideast today in national capitals and from mosques to madras schools over the wrecked
landscape of democracy and moderate Islam that the CIA helped obliterate.

A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have
invoked the history of the CIA’s bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule,
repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore
well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in
the context of that history.

While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the
Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Arabs see the present crisis as just another
proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it
would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.
In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of
the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000, when Qatar proposed to construct a $10
billion, 1,500 kilometer pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Qatar shares
with Iran the South Pars/North Dome gas field, the world’s richest natural gas repository. The
international trade embargo until recently prohibited Iran from selling gas abroad. Meanwhile,
Qatar’s gas can reach European marketsonly if it is liquefied and shipped by sea, a route that
restricts volume and dramatically raises costs. The proposed pipeline would have linked Qatar
directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey, which would pocket
rich transit fees. The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would give the Sunni kingdoms of the Persian
Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s
closest ally in the Arab world. Qatar hosts two massive American military bases and the U.S.
Central Command’s Mideast headquarters.

The EU, which gets 30 percent of its gas from Russia, was equally hungry for the pipeline,
which would have given its members cheap energy and relief from Vladimir Putin’s stifling
economic and political leverage. Turkey, Russia’s second largest gas customer, was
particularly anxious to end its reliance on its ancient rival and to position itself as the lucrative
transect hub for Asian fuels to EU markets. The Qatari pipeline would have benefited Saudi
Arabia’s conservative Sunni monarchy by giving it a foothold in Shia-dominated Syria. The
Saudis’ geopolitical goal is to contain the economic and political power of the kingdom’s
principal rival, Iran, a Shiite state, and close ally of Bashar Assad. The Saudi monarchy
viewed the U.S.-sponsored Shiite takeover in Iraq (and, more recently, the termination of the
Iran trade embargo) as a demotion to its regional power status and was already engaged in
a proxy war against Tehran in Yemen, highlighted by the Saudi genocide against the Iranian
backed Houthi tribe.

Of course, the Russians, who sell 70 percent of their gas exports to Europe, viewed the
Qatar/Turkey pipeline as an existential threat. In Putin’s view, the Qatar pipeline is a NATO
plot to change the status quo, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle
the Russian economy and end Russian leverage in the European energy market. In 2009,
Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run
through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally.”
Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian-approved “Islamic
pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon.
The Islamic pipeline would make Shiite Iran, not Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the
European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Middke East
and the world. Israel also was understandably determined to derail the Islamic pipeline, which
would enrich Iran and Syria and presumably strengthen their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that
the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly
arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the
uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of
completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar
Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria. It is
important to note that this was well before the Arab Spring-engendered uprising against
Assad.

Bashar Assad’s family is Alawite, a Muslim sect widely perceived as aligned with the Shiite
camp. “Bashar Assad was never supposed to be president,” journalist Seymour Hersh told
me in an interview. “His father brought him back from medical school in London when his
elder brother, the heir apparent, was killed in a car crash.” Before the war started, according
to Hersh, Assad was moving to liberalize the country. “They had internet and newspapers
and ATM machines and Assad wanted to move toward the west. After 9/11, he gave
thousands of invaluable files to the CIA on jihadist radicals, who he considered a mutual
enemy.” Assad’s regime was deliberately secular and Syria was impressively diverse. The
Syrian government and military, for example, were 80 percent Sunni. Assad maintained
peace among his diverse peoples by a strong, disciplined army loyal to the Assad family, an
allegiance secured by a nationally esteemed and highly paid officer corps, a coldly efficient
intelligence apparatus and a penchant for brutality that, prior to the war, was rather moderate
compared to those of other Mideast leaders, including our current allies. According to Hersh,
“He certainly wasn’t beheading people every Wednesday like the Saudis do in Mecca.”
Another veteran journalist, Bob Parry, echoes that assessment. “No one in the region has
clean hands, but in the realms of torture, mass killings, [suppressing] civil liberties and
supporting terrorism, Assad is much better than the Saudis.” No one believed that the regime
was vulnerable to the anarchy that had riven Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia. By the spring
of 2011, there were small, peaceful demonstrations in Damascus against repression by
Assad’s regime. These were mainly the effluvia of the Arab Spring that spread virally across
the Arab League States the previous summer. However, WikiLeaks cables indicate that the
CIA was already on the ground in Syria.

But the Sunni kingdoms with vast petrodollars at stake wanted a much deeper involvement
from America. On September 4, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry told a congressional
hearing that the Sunni kingdoms had offered to foot the bill for a U.S. invasion of Syria to oust
Bashar Assad. “In fact, some of them have said that if the United States is prepared to go do
the whole thing, the way we’ve done it previously in other places [Iraq], they’ll carry the cost.”
Kerry reiterated the offer to Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.): “With respect to Arab countries
offering to bear the costs of [an American invasion] to topple Assad, the answer is profoundly
yes, they have. The offer is on the table.”

Despite pressure from Republicans, Barack Obama balked at hiring out young Americans to
die as mercenaries for a pipeline conglomerate. Obama wisely ignored Republican clamoring
to put ground troops in Syria or to funnel more funding to “moderate insurgents.” But by late
2011, Republican pressure and our Sunni allies had pushed the American government into
the fray.

In 2011, the U.S. joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UK to form the Friends
of Syria Coalition, which formally demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA provided $6
million to Barada, a British TV channel, to produce pieces entreating Assad’s ouster. Saudi
intelligence documents, published by WikiLeaks, show that by 2012, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi
Arabia were arming, training and funding radical jihadist Sunni fighters from Syria, Iraq and
elsewhere to overthrow the Assad’s Shiite-allied regime. Qatar, which had the most to
gain, invested $3 billion in building the insurgency and invited the Pentagon to train insurgents
at U.S. bases in Qatar. According to an April 2014 article by Seymour Hersh, the CIA weapons
ratlines were financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The idea of fomenting a Sunni-Shiite civil war to weaken the Syrian and Iranian regimes in
order to to maintain control of the region’s petrochemical supplies was not a novel notion in
the Pentagon’s lexicon. A damning 2008 Pentagon-funded Rand report proposed a precise
blueprint for what was about to happen. That report observes that control of the Persian Gulf
oil and gas deposits will remain, for the U.S., “a strategic priority” that “will interact strongly
with that of prosecuting the long war.” Rand recommended using “covert action, information
operations, unconventional warfare” to enforce a “divide and rule” strategy. “The United
States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch a proxy campaign” and
“U.S. leaders could also choose to capitalize on the sustained Shia-Sunni conflict trajectory
by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements
in the Muslim world ... possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a
continuingly hostile Iran.”

As predicted, Assad’s overreaction to the foreign-made crisis—dropping barrel bombs onto

Sunni strongholds and killing civilians—polarized Syria’s Shiite/Sunni divide and allowed U.S.
policymakers to sell Americans the idea that the pipeline struggle was a humanitarian war.
When Sunni soldiers of the Syrian Army began defecting in 2013, the western coalition armed
the Free Syrian Army to further destabilize Syria. The press portrait of the Free Syrian Army
as cohesive battalions of Syrian moderates was delusional. The dissolved units regrouped in
hundreds of independent militias most of which were commanded by, or allied with, jihadi
militants who were the most committed and effective fighters. By then, the Sunni armies of Al
Qaeda in Iraq were crossing the border from Iraq into Syria and joining forces with the
squadrons of deserters from the Free Syrian Army, many of them trained and armed by the
U.S.

Despite the prevailing media portrait of a moderate Arab uprising against the tyrant Assad,
U.S. intelligence planners knew from the outset that their pipeline proxies were radical
jihadists who would probably carve themselves a brand new Islamic caliphate from the Sunni
regions of Syria and Iraq. Two years before ISIL throat cutters stepped on the world stage,
a seven-page August 12, 2012, study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, obtained by
the right-wing group Judicial Watch, warned that thanks to the ongoing support by U.S./Sunni
Coalition for radical Sunni Jihadists, “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (now
ISIS), are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” Using U.S. and Gulf state funding,
these groups had turned the peaceful protests against Bashar Assad toward “a clear sectarian
(Shiite vs. Sunni) direction.” The paper notes that the conflict had become a sectarian civil
war supported by Sunni “religious and political powers.” The report paints the Syrian conflict
as a global war for control of the region’s resources with “the west, Gulf countries and Turkey
supporting [Assad’s] opposition, while Russia, China and Iran support the regime.” The
Pentagon authors of the seven-page report appear to endorse the predicted advent of the
ISIS caliphate: “If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or
undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor) and this is exactly what
the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime.” The
Pentagon report warns that this new principality could move across the Iraqi border to Mosul
and Ramadi and “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations
in Iraq and Syria.”

Of course, this is precisely what has happened. Not coincidentally, the regions of Syria
occupied by the Islamic State exactly encompass the proposed route of the Qatari pipeline.
But then, in 2014, our Sunni proxies horrified the American people by severing heads and
driving a million refugees toward Europe. “Strategies based upon the idea that the enemy of
my enemy is my friend can be kind of blinding,” says Tim Clemente, who chaired the FBI’s
Joint Terrorism Task Force from 2004 to 2008 and served as liaison in Iraq between the FBI,
the Iraqi National Police and the U.S. military. “We made the same mistake when we trained
the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The moment the Russians left, our supposed friends started
smashing antiquities, enslaving women, severing body parts and shooting at us,” Clemente
told me in an interview.
When the Islamic State’s “Jihadi John” began murdering prisoners on TV, the White House
pivoted, talking less about deposing Assad and more about regional stability. The Obama
dministration began putting daylight between itself and the insurgency we had funded. The
White House pointed accusing fingers at our allies. On October 3, 2014, Vice President Joe
Biden told students at the John F. Kennedy Jr. forum at the Institute of Politics at Harvard that
“our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria.” He explained that Turkey, Saudi
Arabia and the UAE were “so determined to take down Assad” that they had launched a
“proxy Sunni-Shia war” funneling “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of
tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except the people who were
being supplied were al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda”—the two groups that merged in 2014 to form
the Islamic State. Biden seemed angered that our trusted “friends” could not be trusted to
follow the American agenda.

Across the Mideast, Arab leaders routinely accuse the U.S. of having created the Islamic
State. To most Americans, such accusations seem insane. However, to many Arabs, the
evidence of U.S. involvement is so abundant that they conclude that our role in fostering the
Islamic State must have been deliberate.

In fact, many of the Islamic State fighters and their commanders are ideological and
organizational successors to the jihadists that the CIA has been nurturing for more than 30
years from Syria and Egypt to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Prior to the American invasion, there was no Al Qaeda in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. President
George W. Bush destroyed Saddam’s secularist government, and his viceroy, Paul Bremer,
in a monumental act of mismanagement, effectively created the Sunni Army, now named the
Islamic State. Bremer elevated the Shiites to power and banned Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath
Party, laying off some 700,000 mostly Sunni, government and party officials from ministers to
schoolteachers. He then disbanded the 380,000-man army, which was 80 percent Sunni.
Bremer’s actions stripped a million of Iraq’s Sunnis of rank, property, wealth and power;
leaving a desperate underclass of angry, educated, capable, trained and heavily armed
Sunnis with little left to lose. The Sunni insurgency named itself Al Qaeda in Iraq. Beginning
in 2011, our allies funded the invasion by AQI fighters into Syria. In April 2013, having entered
Syria, AQI changed its name to ISIL. According to Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker, “ISIS is
run by a council of former Iraqi generals. ... Many are members of Saddam Hussein’s secular
Ba’ath Party who converted to radical Islam in American prisons.” The $500 million in U.S.
military aid that Obama did send to Syria almost certainly ended up benefiting these militant
jihadists. Tim Clemente, the former chairman of the FBI’s joint task force, told me that the
difference between the Iraq and Syria conflicts is the millions of military-aged men who are
fleeing the battlefield for Europe rather than staying to fight for their communities. The obvious
explanation is that the nation’s moderates are fleeing a war that is not their war. They simply
want to escape being crushed between the anvil of Assad’s Russian-backed tyranny and the
vicious jihadist Sunni hammer that we had a hand in wielding in a global battle over competing
pipelines. You can’t blame the Syrian people for not widely embracing a blueprint for their
nation minted in either Washington or Moscow. The superpowers have left no options for an
idealistic future that moderate Syrians might consider fighting for. And no one wants to die for
a pipeline.

***
What is the answer? If our objective is long-term peace in the Mideast, self-government by
the Arab nations and national security at home, we must undertake any new intervention in
the region with an eye on history and an intense desire to learn its lessons. Only when we
Americans understand the historical and political context of this conflict will we apply
appropriate scrutiny to the decisions of our leaders. Using the same imagery and language
that supported our 2003 war against Saddam Hussein, our political leaders led Americans to
believe that our Syrian intervention is an idealistic war against tyranny, terrorism and religious
fanaticism. We tend to dismiss as mere cynicism the views of those Arabs who see the current
crisis as a rerun of the same old plots about pipelines and geopolitics. But, if we are to have
an effective foreign policy, we must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of
resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have
been fighting in the Mideast for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war
over a pipeline do events become comprehensible. It’s the only paradigm that explains why
the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change
rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to
fight the war, why ISIL blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudis just executed a
powerful Shiite cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing
non-ISIL fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to shoot down a Russian jet. The million
refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.

Clemente compares ISIL to Colombia’s FARC—a drug cartel with a revolutionary ideology to
inspire its footsoldiers. “You have to think of ISIS as an oil cartel,” Clemente said. “In the end,
money is the governing rationale. The religious ideology is a tool that inspires its soldiers to
give their lives for an oil cartel.”

Once we strip this conflict of its humanitarian patina and recognize the Syrian conflict as an
oil war, our foreign policy strategy becomes clear. Like the Syrians fleeing for Europe, no
American wants to send their child to die for a pipeline. Instead, our first priority should be the
one no one ever mentions—we need to kick our Mideast oil jones, an increasingly feasible
objective, as the U.S. becomes more energy independent. Next, we need to dramatically
reduce our military profile in the Middle East and let the Arabs run Arabia. Other than
humanitarian assistance and guaranteeing the security of Israel’s borders, the U.S. has no
legitimate role in this conflict. While the facts prove that we played a role in creating the crisis,
history shows that we have little power to resolve it.

As we contemplate history, it’s breathtaking to consider the astonishing consistency with

which virtually every violent intervention in the Middle East since World War II by our country
has resulted in miserable failure and horrendously costly blowback. A 1997 U.S. Department
of Defense report found that “the data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement
abroad and an increase in terrorist attacks against the U.S.” Let’s face it; what we call the
“war on terror” is really just another oil war. We’ve squandered $6 trillion on three wars abroad
and on constructing a national security warfare state at home since oilman Dick Cheney
declared the “Long War” in 2001. The only winners have been the military contractors and oil
companies that have pocketed historic profits, the intelligence agencies that have grown
exponentially in power and influence to the detriment of our freedoms and the jihadists who
invariably used our interventions as their most effective recruiting tool. We have compromised
our values, butchered our own youth, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people,
subverted our idealism and squandered our national treasures in fruitless and costly
adventures abroad. In the process, we have helped our worst enemies and turned America,
once the world’s beacon of freedom, into a national security surveillance state and an
international moral pariah.
America’s founding fathers warned Americans against standing armies, foreign
entanglements and, in John Quincy Adams’ words, “going abroad in search of monsters to
destroy.” Those wise men understood that imperialism abroad is incompatible with
democracy and civil rights at home. The Atlantic Charter echoed their seminal American ideal
that each nation should have the right to self-determination. Over the past seven decades,
the Dulles brothers, the Cheney gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that
fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence
apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the
petroleum companies and military contractors that have literally made a killing from these
conflicts.

It’s time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path
of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to
the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading
Syria, but by ending the ruinous addiction to oil that has warped U.S. foreign policy for half a
century.