Middle East: Obama’s Syria Policy: The Illusion of US Power in the Middle East - by Gareth Porter

US Middle East Policies influenced by Qatar, Saudi-Arabia and Turkey

The cost of letting US policy be determined primarily by the ambitions of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, unfortunately, has been total disaster and led to a great loss of lives of innocent people in the Middle East in addition to an exodus of refugees direction EU.

The United States has also been complicit in the Sunni project of using the jihadists and salafists to maximise the pressure for the overthrow of the Syrian regime.

Not a shred of evidence has ever surfaced suggesting that the US has done anything to pressure its allies to cut off the channels of arms that were strengthening the al-Qaeda-linked militant group, al-Nusra Front.

For almost a year, the Obama Administration relied on cooperation with the Russians as its primary political-diplomatic strategy for managing the conflict, producing two ceasefires that ultimately failed.

The fate of those two ceasefires has revealed more fully the illusory nature of the "great power" role the US has pretended to play this past year.

Kerry committed the United States to two ceasefire agreements based on the premise that the United States could separate the armed groups that the CIA had armed and trained from the Nusra Front-led military command.

The reality was that the United States had no real power over those groups because they were more heavily dependent on their jihadist allies than on the United States for their continued viability.

But underlying that failure is a much larger reality. It is that the Obama administration has allowed its policy in Syria to be determined primarily by the ambitions of its Sunni allies to overthrow Assad.

The administration has claimed that it never favored the destruction of Syrian institutions, but that claim is contradicted by its acquiescence in the Sunni allies’ support of Nusra Front.

The United States complicity in the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Syrian War, and now in the massive civilian casualties in the Russian bombing of Aleppo, does not just consist in its refusal to go to war in Syria.

Rather, it is because the US provided the political-diplomatic cover for the buildup of the al-Nusra Front and its larger interlocking system of military commands.

A U.S. administration that played a true superpower role would have told its allies not to start a war in Syria by arming jihadists, using the fundamentals of the alliance as the leverage.

But that would have meant threatening to end the alliance itself if necessary – something no U.S. administration is willing to do.

Hence the paradox of U.S. power in the Middle East: In order to play the role of hegemon in the region, with all those military bases, the United States must allow itself to be manipulated by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, its weaker completely undemocratic allies.

This, unfortunately, is a recipe for disaster, and will certainly lead to the demise of the US status as a responsible and respected super power. 

Note EU-Digest: In the same breath, the European NATO partners of the US have also shown to have very little backbone by continuing to support, without question, this totally failed US Middle East Policy. A policy which in all reality already was started with the Richard Nixon Administration and followed through by all other US Presidents.  

Read full report: Obama’s Syria Policy: The Illusion of US Power in the Middle East - The Globalist