In early 2007, the Iraq war waged by the U.S. under the George W. Bush administration had deteriorated into an utter disaster, as many of the original ambitions for the war had gone up in smoke.  In A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, an important policy document presented to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, American neoconservative intellectuals Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, among others, promoted the idea of installing a Hashemite king to replace Hussein, similar to the king that rules in Jordan.  The idea was to replace Saddam with a sock puppet regime that would be friendly to the U.S. and Israel and would check the influence of Iran, the biggest supposed adversary of America and Israel. Israel’s primary opposition to Iran, as well as fellow Shi’a dominated country Syria, stems from their support for Hezbollah, a Shi’a political party and militant group in southern Lebanon that has had numerous conflicts with the Israelis over the Israel-Lebanon border.  This alliance of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah is sometimes referred to as the “Shi’a Crescent”.

The Iraq War, however, did not go as planned and the new government of Iraq, a country also populated predominantly by Shi’a Muslims, was taken over by not just Shi’a factions, but the Shi’a factions most loyal to Iran, namely the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.  At this point, the Americans realized their plans to replace Saddam with an American and Israeli friendly government had blown up in their faces, which precipitated a major shift in overall U.S. foreign policy strategy in the Middle East. In The Redirection, Seymour Hersh explains how the U.S. began to tilt its support away from the Shi’a it had empowered in Iraq and towards various Sunni groups around the Middle East, including in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria.

Starting in December 2010 in Tunisia, with Barack Obama in power in the U.S., a wave of revolutions known as the “Arab Spring” occurred throughout the Middle East and northern Africa in countries such as Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Libya.  In March 2011, America decided to intervene in Libya and began supporting the uprising, which was led by Sunni groups.  However, these rebels were not the noble freedom fighters that the American foreign policy establishment, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leading the charge, led us to believe.  The heart of the rebellion based out of Benghazi was driven mainly by radical jihadist terrorists, including many who had come home from Iraq after fighting against the Americans in the Iraq war.  While Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was not an explicit ally of Iran or the “Shi’a Crescent” that America and Israel were intent on combatting, the regime change war was the first major battlefield for the U.S. to implement the policy shift of the “Redirection” by supporting and empowering Sunni rebels.  Backed by the Americans, the Sunni jihadists were able to overthrow and brutally kill Gaddafi. The result has been a dramatic increase in Islamic terrorism in the country, including the infamous killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi in September, 2012. This event became a political circus where Hillary Clinton was attacked for not providing adequate protection to the Americans who were killed, but the fundamental questions of why the U.S. was there in the first place with troops and diplomats stationed in the middle of a jihadist hornets nest in Benghazi, were barely asked.

Next, the U.S. turned its attention to Syria, where a popular uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad was taking place.  As in Libya, America saw an opportunity in Syria to support a Sunni-based rebellion, but this time, with the additional strategic benefit of potentially overthrowing part of the Shi’a axis and Iran’s greatest ally in the region, Assad.  In an interview with the Atlantic in 2012, President Obama admitted that a major factor contributing to America’s intervention in Syria was the desire to take Iran down a peg.  “It is our estimation that [Assad’s] days are numbered. It’s a matter not of if, but when. Now, can we accelerate that? We’re working with the world community to try to do that…if that happens, that will be a profound loss for Iran”, said Obama.

After the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya was complete, the Americans facilitated the shipment of weapons and mujahideen fighters from Libya across the Mediterranean Sea to Syria to participate in the Syrian rebellion against Assad.  As in Libya, the initially peaceful uprising quickly escalated into a full-scale war thanks to U.S, as well as Saudi, Israeli, and Turkish support for the insurgency, with the opposition led primarily by the al-Nusra front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian faction composed of jihadists loyal to Osama bin Laden, many of whom had also fought against the Americans in Iraq.  From 2012 through 2017, the CIA ran Operation Timber Sycamore, a program to train, arm, and supply weapons to the rebels fighting against Assad.  While the Obama administration assured the American people that the U.S. was only supporting “moderate” rebels, the opposition was always dominated by mujahideen terrorists.  Hillary Clinton admitted al-Qaeda’s involvement during a CBS interview she gave in 2012 before the U.S. had become more fully involved in supporting the rebellion, saying, “Zawahiri (the new leader of al-Qaeda after bin Laden’s death) is supporting the opposition in Syria, are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?”  While it’s arguable that the CIA never directly handed weapons to the al-Nusra front, any money and weapons given to these so-called moderates were simply co-opted by al-Qaeda and its allied terrorist groups to support their effort to overthrow Assad.

U.S. support not only escalated a violent conflict in Syria that led to mass chaos and destruction for the civilian population, it revitalized what had been a temporarily dormant bin Ladenite movement in Syria and Iraq.  Al-Qaeda gained strength in Syria to the point where in 2015 they threatened a major highway leading to the capital city of Damascus, at which point the Russians became so concerned that these jihadists might actually take over the country that they entered the fray and began bombing these terrorists.  Additionally, American support for the insurgency led to the outbreak of ISIS, a group that split off from the al-Nusra front and marched back into Iraq to declare themselves an Islamic Caliphate. They claimed major cities in eastern Syria and western Iraq and established a state that grew at its peak between 2014 and 2015 to nearly the size of Great Britain and ruled more people than half of the member states of the United Nations.  The rise of ISIS provoked the Americans to re-invade Iraq in 2014, after they had withdrawn from the previous Iraq war in 2011, to quash this newly formed Caliphate. It took three years and untold amounts of civilian death and destruction before the U.S., aided by Iraqi Shi’ite militias, removed ISIS from their major strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa in 2017. Today, ISIS no longer controls a state, but they remain an active insurgency, while al-Qaeda and its allies are still fighting in Syria.

The greatest irony to the Obama era policy of supporting Sunni jihadists is that at the very same time the Navy Seals were killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, 2011, the U.S. government was in the midst of revitalizing bin Laden’s forces across the region.  America’s hatred of Iran and devotion to Israel and Saudi Arabia and their desire to weaken Iran and it’s Shi’a allies motivated a policy that can only be described as treasonous, supporting and arming the very people responsible for killing nearly 3000 Americans on September 11 and the only true foreign threat to the American people.  The American empire’s desire for global hegemony, regional dominance, and control, superseded their opposition to the most ruthless terrorists on the planet and those responsible for the greatest single tragedy in American history.