The United States hasn’t been willing to send American soldiers into Syria, but it continues to fund Syrian rebels, regardless of the policy wisdom.
Now, the Obama administration is doubling down.
“President Barack Obama has signed off on a new plan to train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, a move that comes just months after the Pentagon shut down a more ambitious train-and-equip program that burned through hundreds of millions of dollars with little to show for the effort,” Paul McLeary wrote in Foreign Policy.
The first effort ran about $500 million to train rebels, but produced “virtually no fighters.” Though Obama’s foreign policy has received laudatory press coverage for his restraint against the “Washington foreign-policy establishment,” his policy has been anything but non-interventionist.
The first foray into rebel training resulted in desertions, intra-force fighting, and “about five trained fighters” before the program shut down,” McLeary noted.
The new plan, purported to be more focused, involves “special operations forces” to train Syrian Arab commanders across the border in Turkey, then send them back to Syria with American equipment.
The administration is reluctant to provide details on the size and scope of the plan, but it’s a tilt toward current and former officials such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current Secretary of State John Kerry.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said in a 2014 interview.
Nor is it her first demand for American military intervention. Clinton voted to authorize the Iraq War and continues to tout the Libyan intervention as “smart power at its best,” even though the outcome of that undeclared 2011 war was a “failed state and a terrorist haven,” as the New York Times noted.
Greater involvement in Syria, as was greater involvement in other Middle Eastern wars of choice, does not bode well for the international strength of the United States, nor the Syrian people.
Previous Syrian intervention has failed to produce any cohesive benefit, and the refusal of former and current Obama administration officials to recognize their disastrous decisions in foreign policy, doesn’t inspire optimism for this next round.
