Konflikten i Syrien

“We deconflict with the Russians; it’s a very active deconfliction line,” Mattis said. “It’s on several levels, from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the secretary of state with their counterparts in Moscow, General Gerasimov and Minister Lavrov.”

“So we just refuse to get drawn into a fight there in the Syria civil war,” the secretary of defense said, adding that the conflict can be ended “through diplomatic engagement.”

Mattis added that while US forces open fire only on Islamic State enemies, they will fire back “under legitimate self-defense” if somebody “takes a heading on us or fires on us.”

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.

On April 6, United States President Donald Trump authorized an early morning Tomahawk missile strike on Shayrat Air Base in central Syria in retaliation for what he said was a deadly nerve agent attack carried out by the Syrian government two days earlier in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun. Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with a Syrian rebel commander and half a dozen fighters, who confirmed the worst kept secret of the Syrian conflict: Israel is directly aiding Syrian rebel factions with both humanitarian and financial aid.

Israel's involvement "is much deeper and more coordinated than previously known and entails direct funding of opposition fighters near its border for years," the report said.
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Israel wants a divided Syria.
It wants a country riven by ethnic
and religious disputes so that it can
dominate the Golan and protect its northern border

Israel has had numerous opportunities to negotiate a peace deal with Bashar al-Assad and, even earlier, with his father. It turned away from each of these efforts. It does not want an agreement with Assad.

To avoid an internal political fight with nationalist forces over returning the Golan, Israel's right-wing government prefers maintaining its illegal conquest of the Golan and the status quo. To do so, it must continue to sow discord and military adventures in the Golan.

Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog, devoted to exposing the excesses of the Israeli national security state. His work has appeared in Haaretz, the Forward, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. He contributed to the essay collection devoted to the 2006 Lebanon war, A Time to Speak Out (Verso) and has another essay in the upcoming collection, Israel and Palestine: Alternate Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman & Littlefield) Photo of RS by: (Erika Schultz/Seattle Times)

The Trump administration said there was there was indication Assad's regime was preparing for another chemical attack on its people - and that the U.S. was ready to intervene militarily. But should we? A #Tucker debate with Katrina Vanden Heuvel.