No U.S. 'boots on the ground' in Syria is a lie says analyst

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: Nov 4, 2015 - 1:41:39 PM

The Obama administration in sending Special Forces advisors into Syria to train rebel forces. U.S. soldiers shown here are engaged in a training exercise. Photo: Defense Department

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - Since 2013, President Barack Obama has repeatedly—at least 16 times by one published account—vowed there would be no “boots on the ground” in Syria.

But the United States is sending Special Forces to advise insurgents fighting jihadists in a newly formed U.S.-backed rebel offensive against Islamic State militants.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters the president’s decision to send up to 50 Special Forces troops to Syria doesn’t change the fundamental U.S. strategy: “This is an important thing for the American people to understand. These forces do not have a combat mission,” Mr. Earnest said Oct. 31.

The promises of “no boots on the ground,” he explained, first came in the context of removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad because of his alleged use of chemical weapons. Since then, Syria has become a haven for Islamic State fighters, and it is those fighters the U.S. is sending troops to train “moderate” Syrian opposition forces to fight and defeat.

The president said “there will be boots on the ground, but not to worry, it will only be about 50,” Phyllis Bennis, director of the Project for a New Internationalism and a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies told The Final Call.

“Fifty in Syria, 3,500 in Iraq—that we know about—that of course doesn’t take into account the unknown numbers of CIA and Special Forces operation people. Maybe they wear sneakers instead of boots, so they don’t count. But we don’t know how many of them are on the ground, but there are troops on the ground. So all of this stuff about there won’t be troops on the ground is already false, it’s already a lie, and they know that.”

Ironically, at virtually the same time, world powers and Syrian regional rivals convened in Vienna to seek a joint solution to the four-year conflict that escalated dramatically when Russia intervened on the side of President Assad with an intense air campaign.

“The problem is that the two main parties backing the factions in Syria—the United States and Russia—have not budged from their positions,” said author Charles Glass in a statement released by the Institute for Public Accuracy. “Russia’s position is that Bashar al-Assad must remain as president, and the American position is that Bashar al-Assad must go as president. And they haven’t seemed to have reconciled these two points of view.” Mr. Glass is author of the just-released book Syria Burning: ISIS and the Death of the Arab Spring. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent and recently wrote an article “In the Syrian Deadlands” for Harper’s Magazine.

“If you look at a map of the Arab world, there are about 22 members of the Arab League stretching from Mauritania all the way to the borders of Iran. Almost every one of those countries is an American client state. Only one is a Russian client state. That’s Syria,” Mr. Glass explained.

President Obama may have been drawn into the conflict reluctantly because of the Russian escalation, according to Ms. Bennis. “It’s hard to know. I think it is true that President Obama, personally is reluctant to jump in full-throatedly, but he certainly is doing it, and so the reluctance becomes kind of historically irrelevant at the end of the day. It doesn’t really matter what he’s thinking. What matters to history and to Syrians on the ground is what he does.

“Ironically, I think the Pentagon leadership is (also) actually far more divided on this issue. I don’t think the Pentagon is a united force calling for greater military intervention: 1. because the Pentagon doesn’t like to lose; 2. the Pentagon doesn’t like to lose people unnecessarily in wars that don’t make a lot of sense, which this one would certainly qualify as.”

The U.S. strategy in Syria has shifted from trying to train fighters outside the country to supplying groups headed by U.S.-vetted commanders to “limited” intervention.

“I think part of the problem is this lack of willingness, not only from President Obama, but from people in power in Congress, in the White House, in the Pentagon, in the mainstream think tanks, the mainstream media, everybody is reluctant to acknowledge that there are other alternatives that are not as dramatic, that may not look as great on TV, but ultimately are the only way that there is going to be an end to this war. The military option, simply doesn’t work,” Ms. Bennis continued.

“Ironically, we hear it over and over from the president: ‘There is no military solution.’ Okay, then if that’s the case, why is it that the only action we see is military action? This is taking the lesson of George W. Bush on the day after the 9-11 attacks, when he said: ‘The choice is, we either go to war or we let them get away with it.’ And since nobody wanted to, quote: ‘Let them get away with it,’ a huge percentage of people in this country supported a war at that point in Afghanistan, that was already based on lies, that was never about justice, that was never going to accomplish anything, either for Afghans or for Americans, making us safer.

“But there was this notion, that there was nothing else. It’s either war or nothing. That’s never the case. It’s never war or nothing. The problem is they’re not willing to acknowledge that the things in between war and nothing are harder. They’re more complicated. They take a longer time. They look ahead to long term consequences, not only immediate and short term consequences, and they’re much harder to do.

“When you’re the United States and you’ve lost a lot of your economic clout, you’ve lost a lot of your political clout, you’ve lost a lot of your diplomatic clout, you’re losing a lot of your cultural influence, really all you have left where you are unsurpassed in the world is the military, because that’s what you fall back on. Because if you think the choice is war or nothing, you’re going to chose war, because superpowers don’t do nothing,” said Ms. Bennis.

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