State Department spokesman Jen Psaki is insisting that the solution to the situation in Syria is “political” and not “military”. She also struggled to explain why the administration is not doing a formal review of its current strategy in that country (h/t WFB):
When it comes to Syria, the U.S. has few options. The worst option at this point is the removal of Bashar al-Assad. Yet, according to recent reports, that is exactly what the Obama administration is considering.
As Obama foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said, in the fight with ISIS, Turkey is “foremost” among four countries the U.S. needs in order to help defeat ISIS. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Turkey hasn’t been stopping ISIS at all; it’s been facilitating its rise.
If the Obama administration is being driven by the premise put forth by Brzezinski, it must also understand that in order for Turkey to help with ISIS, it expects something in return.
That gets us back to these reports that the Obama administration is mulling a strategy to remove Assad, which could be just the ‘something in return’ Turkey is looking for.
In reality, this is a similar dynamic to what we saw after the 9/11 attacks. A chief culprit was Saudi Arabia but the Bush administration made a politically weak decision to let that country off the hook and focus solely on al-Qaeda as the enemy while embracing leaders of Muslim Brotherhood front groups.
Consider the diary of William Murray of the Religious Freedom Coalition. Two days after the 9/11 attacks, he wrote of a conversation he had with a prominent U.S. politician:
When I confronted one well known Senator about the millions of dollars going to Bin Laden’s terror network from Saudi businessmen, he said to me, “Yes, but they are coerced into giving it to him.”
I responded to this by saying, “Maybe those millionaire Saudi businessmen should be more fearful of us than they are of Bin Laden.”
There is nothing new under the sun. Today, if one replaces “Bin Laden” with “ISIS” and “Saudi businessmen” with “Turkey”, we have a similar concoction. We even have the element of Muslim Brotherhood front groups working to have Assad removed.
Instead of helping Assad fight ISIS, the Obama administration appears to be increasingly willing to do Turkey’s bidding by assisting in the removal of Assad so that Turkey can then ‘deal’ with ISIS.
That’s called jumping out of the ISIS frying pan and into the Turkey fire.