Rift between Obama, military advisers on Syria: Analyst

The Obama administration’s agenda in Syria hit roadblocks from his military generals, who had a “more realistic” view of the war, an American political analyst says.

President Barack Obama appears to have made “backroom deals” with Turkey and Israel to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power, but his military and intelligence advisers warned of the consequences of that plan, Mark Glenn said in an interview on Thursday.

In an investigative report, published in the January 7, 2016 edition of the London Review of Books, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that Obama ignored warnings from senior military and intelligence officials that the fall of Assad would lead to “chaos” and extremist militants taking over Syria.

"Barack Obama's repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office -- and that there are 'moderate' rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him -- has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon's Joint Staff," Hersh said.

Hersh cited a highly-classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2013 which warned the White House about the dire consequences of the push to topple the Assad government.

“Even though there may have been this difference of opinion, this rift, between Obama and his military men… nevertheless, at the end of the day, Syria has been made closer to the intended goal that Obama had set out to achieve which was the destabilization of another country in the Middle East,” Glenn told Press TV.  

“250,000 Syrians have been killed, millions more have been displaced and made homeless, Syria is a shambles in terms of its infrastructure and stability, and in that regard—at least as far as the United States and Israel are concerned—a large part of the agenda has been accomplished,” he noted.

The US and some of its regional allies, especially Turkey and Qatar, have been backing militants operating in Syria.

In his reporting, Hersh said that a senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him that the DIA/Joint Chiefs report took a "dim view" of the administration’s covert program to fund and arm “moderate” militant units battling the Assad government.

The joint report found that the program had been co-opted by Turkey and targeted all of the opposition in Syria, including terrorist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and Daesh (ISIL), according to Hersh.

"The assessment was bleak: there was no viable 'moderate' opposition to Assad, and the U.S. was arming extremists," the journalist wrote.

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