In his memoir of his time as a senior aide to President Obama, Ben Rhodes recalled one of the administration’s top quandaries in Syria.
Back in late 2012, the CIA was waging a multi-billion dollar covert war to help insurgents topple then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. By that point, Al Qaeda had established a powerful franchise in Syria known as Jabhat al-Nusra, which international actors were promptly designating as a terrorist organization.
Yet for a US government seeking regime change in Damascus, adding al-Nusra to the State Department terror list posed a problem. On the ground, Rhodes acknowledged, al-Nusra “was probably the strongest fighting force” against the Syrian government. Moreover, rather than coming into conflict with one another, it was “also clear that the more moderate opposition” favored by the US was in fact “fighting side by side with al-Nusra.” Therefore, Rhodes recalled arguing to his colleagues, designating al-Nusra as a terrorist organization “would alienate the same people we want to help.”
Rhodes and his compatriots ended up losing that debate. Yet while the State Department designated al-Nusra in December 2012, it turns out that the US still found a way to help. By placing Nusra on the terrorist list, the New York Times explained that month, the Obama administration hoped “to remove one of the biggest obstacles to increasing Western support for the rebellion: the fear that money and arms could flow to a jihadi group that could further destabilize Syria and harm Western interests.”
In other words, designating al-Nusra as a terrorist group was a toothless move that helped the Obama administration continue arming the insurgency that the Nusra militants dominated. The notion that US sanctions would force an Al Qaeda-dominated rebellion to abandon its leading fighting force was a fantasy – if not a deliberate ruse — that ensured that US weapons would continue to flow.
And that they did: three months after Nusra’s terrorist designation, the Associated Press reported that the US and its proxy war allies had “dramatically stepped up weapons supplies to Syrian rebels” to help them “seize Damascus.” Despite the Obama administration’s public opposition to Nusra, “there is little clear evidence from the front lines that all the new, powerful weapons are going to groups which have been carefully vetted by the U.S.” Instead, insurgents “including Jabhat al-Nusra” had been seen “with such weapons.” Once U.S. weapons arrived in Syria, the Obama administration quietly acknowledged that it had no way of controlling who would use them. “We needed plausible deniability in case the arms got into the hands of al-Nusra,” a former senior administration official explained in 2013.
Hellbound and Down 