Daniel Lazare at ConsortiumNews
The Memo That Helped Kill a Half Million People in Syria
A memo sent to Hillary Clinton that WikiLeaks made public in 2016 has not gotten the attention it deserves. Now is the time. After President Donald Trump tweeted that he was pulling American troops out of Syria, Clinton joined his vociferous critics who want more war in Syria.
“Actions
have consequences, and whether we’re in Syria or not, the people who
want to harm us are there & at war,” Clinton tweeted in response to
Trump. “Isolationism is weakness. Empowering ISIS is dangerous. Playing
into Russia & Iran’s hands is foolish. This President is putting our
national security at grave risk.”
Actions indeed have consequences.
The
memo shows the kind of advice Clinton was getting as secretary of state
to plunge the U.S. deeper into the Syrian war. It takes us back to 2012
and the early phase of the conflict.
At that point, it was largely an internal affair, although Saudi arms shipments were playing a greater and greater role in bolstering rebel forces. But once the President Barack Obama eventually decided
in favor of intervention, under pressure from Clinton, the conflict was
quickly internationalized as thousands of holy warriors flooded in from
as far away as western China.
The 1,200-word memo written
by James P. Rubin, a senior diplomat in Bill Clinton’s State
Department, to then-Secretary of State Clinton, which Clinton twice
requested be printed out, begins with the subject of Iran, an important
patron of Syria.
The
memo dismisses any notion that nuclear talks will stop Iran “from
improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program—the capability
to enrich uranium.” If it does get the bomb, it goes on, Israel will
suffer a strategic setback since it will no longer be able to “respond
to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon,
as it can today.” Denied the ability to bomb at will, Israel might
leave off secondary targets and strike at the main enemy instead.
Consequently,
the memo argues that the U.S. should topple the Assad regime so as to
weaken Iran and allay the fears of Israel, which has long regarded the
Islamic republic as its primary enemy. As the memo puts it:
“Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted.”
This document,
making the case to arm Syrian rebels, may have been largely overlooked
because of confusion about its dates, which appear to be inaccurate.
The
time stamp on the email is “2001-01-01 03:00” even though Clinton was
still a New York senator-elect at that point. That date is also out of
synch with the timeline of nuclear diplomacy with Iran.
But
the body of the email gives a State Department case and document number
with the date of 11/30/2015. But that’s incorrect as well because
Clinton resigned as secretary of state on Feb. 1, 2013........
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