less then 2 months before he started the Iraq war w bush didn't know that
there was a difference Sunni and Shi Muslims.

from the article

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, and a member of the Hoover Institution’s working group on military history. He is the author of fourteen books, including Informing Statecraft, War, ends And Means, The Character of Nations, Advice to War Presidents, and To Make and Keep Peace. He served on President Ronald Reagan’s transition teams for the Department of State and the Intelligence agencies. He was a US naval officer and a US foreign service officer. As a staff member of the US Senate Intelligence committee, he supervised the intelligence agencies’ budgets with emphasis on collection systems and counterintelligence. He was instrumental in developing technologies for modern anti-missile defense. Codevilla has taught ancient and modern political thought and international affairs at major universities.
The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the view of Asia Times.

But in this series of pieces he appears to be getting into one of the great mysteries of the 21st century: "Why are US ruling elites so intent on destroying themselves with bankrupting wars in the Middle East?" I intend to read all three of them just to see what he thinks about that.

Although I think billions were skimmed off, stolen, or made on that unneeded war in Iraq.

Even Tony Blair has now admitted that Iraq war produced ISIS and the massive refugee
problem of people trying to flee the civil war in Syria.

Reading Hersh's article took up all my time and I'm wiped out after finishing it.

A new report by the Pulitzer-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh says the Joints Chiefs of Staff has indirectly supported Bashar al-Assad in an effort to help him defeat jihadist groups. Hersh reports the Joint Chiefs sent intelligence via Russia, Germany and Israel on the understanding it would be transmitted to help Assad push back Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State. Hersh also claims the military even undermined a U.S. effort to arm Syrian rebels in a bid to prove it was serious about helping Assad fight their common enemies. Hersh says the Joints Chiefs’ maneuvering was rooted in several concerns, including the U.S. arming of unvetted Syrian rebels with jihadist ties, a belief the administration was overly focused on confronting Assad’s ally in Moscow, and anger the White House was unwilling to challenge Turkey and Saudi Arabia over their support of extremist groups in Syria. Hersh joins us to detail his claims and respond to his critics.

Please check back later for full transcript.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/22/seymour_hershs_latest_bombshell_us_military

Seymour M. Hersh on US intelligence sharing in the Syrian war

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. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China, and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria; like Washington, they believe that Islamic State must be stopped.

The military’s resistance dates back to the summer of 2013, when a highly classified assessment, put together by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then led by General Martin Dempsey, forecast that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to chaos and, potentially, to Syria’s takeover by jihadi extremists, much as was then happening in Libya. A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military

Good to finally see a new article from him. Connecting lots of dots.

Different aspects of the same problem.

"We're an empire now, and we make our own reality."

And Thanks!

but, as is pointed out in the Links........"Our Own Reality" had come "Up Short"
and there are now warring factions in our Military and the Political Chain which will have to do with the coming elections. We know, now, how this usually turns out...but, what if there is a BREAK ....that wasn't thought of in the "War Plans?" Something happens to turn the balance in favor of one side or the other in the next Election Year where One Side Wins and the Other Digs Down?

By Josh Rogin

Early this year, a former top White House official secretly went to Damascus and met with leaders of the Syrian regime. The visit is part of a broader effort by the Syrian government to reach out to Washington’s power brokers and gain influence.

The former official, Steven Simon, served as the National Security Council senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs from 2011 to 2012. He has not publicly disclosed his trip, but two senior Obama administration officials said he was not acting as a back channel between the two governments. He traveled there as a private citizen and was representing only himself. The officials said he met with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

Simon had been a paid consultant at the Middle East Institute, but the think tank ended their relationship after he made the Syria trip. Two employees there told me that the institute did not want to be associated with the trip, which they did not organize and were not consulted about.

Simon declined to comment for this article. MEI also declined to comment. Several Syria scholars who were aware of this visit told me that the trip was part of Assad’s broader recent outreach to Washington scholars and officials.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-22/assad-is-reaching-out-to-washington-insiders

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How to convince the Islamic State’s ordinary Sunni subjects to turn against it or at least not to support it? The US establishment’s talk about “getting the Sunni to buy into” its ideas of what is good for them boils down to trying to replicate the 2007-8 experience of “the surge.” This would be a repeat of the earlier policy establishment belief that US aid “awakened” the local Sunnis’ moderation and led them to turn over their least favorite jihadis to us. Such talk mistakes domestic partisan advertising for the reality that, by January 2007, Iraqi Shia’s deaths squads had inflicted some 34,000 Sunni dead, that their campaign was gathering intensity, and that only the Americans could stop it. That bloody sectarian stick, not any carrots, effected such “awakening” and “moderation” as occurred in Sunni hears and minds.

Daesh/ISIS’ could not rule its realm for a month — it would itself be reduced to a guerrilla group — were it not for the willingness of the Gulf monarchies to allow donations to flow to it from their territory, and especially of the Turkish government to allow the landlocked Islamic State to buy and sell in Turkey and to transit through it. The population under its control — five million people is a mid-range estimate — can barely support themselves, much less an army at war. Living on some the world’s least productive soil, they extract some oil, but manufacture little. They attached themselves to the Islamic State for sectarian and security reasons, assuming that they could maintain their level of economic life. Only thanks to other Sunni governments has the Islamic State been able to do that.

The Gulf monarchies let the money flow because serious efforts to stop it would involve some members of royal families violating the privacy and freedom of their fellows. No one knows where the intra-regime strife would end. Since the fear of such strife is greater than any pressure to risk it, they do not risk it.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, however, chose to make his country the Islamic State’s indispensable logistical partner out of a welter of reasons and through a calculation of risks that make sense only to him. Erdogan, a Sunni Islamist and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, sees support for Daesh/ISIS as serving his personal and sectarian opposition to Syria’s Bashar al Assad. This, along with his desire to reduce Kurdish enclaves on both sides of the Syria/Turkey border. Facilitating the Islamic State is also an outgrowth of his complaisance with the government of Qatar, which was among its main financiers — and which also lent Turkey much of the money on which Erdogan built the social programs that boosted his popularity. Finally, on Dec. 5, 2015, as Russia’s Defense ministry released photos of pipelines of oil trucks delivering the products of ISIS wells to Turkish refineries and ports, Russia’s deputy defense minister declared: “In the West, no one has asked questions about the fact that the Turkish president’s son heads one of the biggest energy companies, or that his son-in-law has been appointed energy minister.” In short, Turkey’s key role in supporting the Islamic State may be understood in terms of garden variety weakness, stupidity, and corruption.

http://atimes.com/2015/12/romancing-the-sunni-a-us-policy-tragedy-in-three-acts-act-ii/

Whether one agrees or disagrees.....still interesting:

From the article:

And, more at the read.

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I was on my way to West Asia when a remarkable article by James Glanz and John Markoff in The New York Times confirmed my worst fears. It read:

"The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy 'shadow' internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks." Washington was four square behind dissidents in Syria.

"The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cell phone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype 'Internet in a suitcase' - all part of what is being called 'Liberation technology movement'.

"The suitcase can be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/how-catastrophe-was-manufactured-in-syria/articleshow/50327491.cms

Reality vs. romance

On Jan. 1, 2015, Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al Sisi told Sunni Islam’s leading scholars gathered at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, its leading temple of knowledge, that they had been leading Islam on a course disastrous for itself and leading to war with the rest of the world.

He said : “ You, imams, are responsible before Allah … that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years … is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world … Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution.”

That is reality. It is also reality that no such revolution is in the works, in part because the West continues to deal with the Sunni world by trying to appease it, romance it, seduce it.

Imagine the predicament of an Islamic scholar at Al Azhar who agrees with al Sisi: what could he say to Saudi or Qatari royals, or to the citizens Mosul or Raqqa — never mind to young people besotted with blood and enjoying their slaves that might cause them to turn against Daesh/ISIS?

http://atimes.com/2015/12/romancing-the-sunni-an-us-policy-tragedy-in-three-acts-act-iii/

Three months into his military intervention in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved his central goal of stabilizing the Assad government and, with the costs relatively low, could sustain military operations at this level for years, U.S. officials and military analysts say.

That assessment comes despite public assertions by President Barack Obama and top aides that Putin has embarked on an ill-conceived mission in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that it will struggle to afford and that will likely fail.

"I think it's indisputable that the Assad regime, with Russian military support, is probably in a safer position than it was," said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity. Five other U.S. officials interviewed by Reuters concurred with the view that the Russian mission has been mostly successful so far and is facing relatively low costs.

The U.S. officials stressed that Putin could face serious problems the longer his involvement in the more than four-year-old civil war drags on.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-syria-idUSKBN0UB0BA20151228

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On equal terms

The most important sign of success was the convergence of Russian and American interests, which took place during U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's recent visit to Moscow, in providing joint solutions to the most serious international problems. The Kremlin has every reason to be happy with the results of Kerry's visit.

The talks were held according to a Russian-American model that Moscow had been promoting unsuccessfully for a long time, the model of geopolitical parity: two superpowers, which more than anyone else are responsible for global security, discussing - confidentially, tête-à-tête - the most pressing issues, making joint decisions and then mobilizing other countries within the UN Security Council framework to support them.

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Military success appears more modest

After three months of bombing we are back to basically where we were at the beginning of October, while the campaign's finish line is still beyond the horizon. The condition and combat capacity of the Syrian army and the "Iranian allies" are worse than were expected. The "liberation of territory" can be measured in kilometers. Damage has been done to the militants’ infrastructure but there has been no turnaround.

The Iranians have experienced horrible losses and are now reducing their land contingent. The Syrian army has serious problems with personnel. The number of victims among civilians is increasing and consequently so is the terrorist threat for Russia.

http://rbth.com/opinion/2015/12/28/russias-political-achievements-in-syria-eclipse-modest-military-success_555629

MASNAA, Lebanon — Syrian opposition fighters, some on wheelchairs, stretchers or crutches, headed Monday in ambulances and buses from the Syrian mountain resort of Zabadani toward the Lebanon border, where they will be flown to Turkey.

At the same time, buses and ambulances carrying Syrians from two northern Syrian villages moved toward the border with Turkey before crossing; later in the day they will be flown to Lebanon on their way to Syria, according to an activist group and media reports.

The evacuation is part of a U.N.-backed truce deal reached in September for two key Syrian battleground areas that will see the transfer of thousands of Shiite and Sunni civilians and fighters from one area to another.

The agreement is another example of limited ground-level deals to end fighting in specific areas in Syria. Earlier this month, scores of fighters and their families began leaving a rebel-held neighborhood in the central city of Homs ending years of combat.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/12/28/world/middleeast/ap-ml-syria.html

BEIRUT, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Buses and ambulances carrying around 450 fighters and civilians evacuated from two besieged areas in Syria have crossed into Turkey and Lebanon, sources at the border crossings said.

Under a U.N.-sponsored deal agreed by warring parties, more than 125 fighters from the besieged rebel-held town of Zabadani near the border with Lebanon are en route to Beirut airport to board a plane to Turkey.

Simultaneously, around 330 civilians and injured fighters trapped in two pro-government Shi'ite villages in northwest Syria are heading to the Turkish city of Hatay to take a plane to Beirut, aid workers said. (Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; editing by John Stonestreet)

http://www.trust.org/item/20151228144200-re2oq/

NATO-member Turkey now appears to be more serious about acquiring offensive weapons, in particular after Russian warships in the Caspian Sea early in October fired cruise missiles at targets in neighboring Syria.

The Russian military build-up close to Turkey continued in late November when an S-400 antiaircraft system was deployed to a Russian military base in Syria two days after Turkish jets downed a Russian fighter on Nov. 24.

All this Russian military hardware has the potential to target Turkey.

A day after the Russian navy fired cruise missiles at targets in Syria and two days after Russian warplanes entered Turkey's airspace, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance "is able and ready to defend all allies, including Turkey, against any threat."

http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist/lale-kemal/turkey-may-return-to-china-for-offensive-weapons_408158.html