As the debacle in Syria shows, staffing matters.
Washington’s role in the overthrow of Assad began over a decade ago with the commencement of huge amounts of U.S. financial and material aid to the so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels. The big lie in these years was that there was a kind of “third force” in Syria, but it never existed. The myth of the “moderate rebel” took hold—promoted without surcease by correspondents such as CNN’s Clarissa Ward and NBC’s Richard Engel, and mendacious regime-change enthusiasts on Capitol Hill such as the disgraced former Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez.
A CIA program called Timber Sycamore launched at the insistence of then-CIA Director David Petraeus to arm Syria’s Islamist rebels was initially rejected by President Obama in 2012. Tragically, the president, hounded by hawkish advisers who, like dozens of so-called progressive foreign policy advocates at the time, claimed incoherently that the humanitarian situation in Syria would be improved by the installation of the local branch of Al Qaeda, switched course the following year. Obama naturally was also the target of what the New York Times characterized as “intense lobbying” by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.
The operation to overthrow the sovereign Syrian government, vigorously supported throughout by Petraeus and his successor, John Brennan, was a massive failure. The agency wasted $1 billion between 2013 and early 2017 (a similar Pentagon program threw away roughly $500 million on training a handful of “rebel” fighters in this same period). The weapons they sent ended up in the hands of those Al Qaeda–linked “moderates.”
But that was hardly the end of the story.
The pressure on the Assad government in the ensuing years remained unrelenting.
Once Assad’s overthrow was announced as a strategic aim of the Israeli state, his ouster became, as night follows day, a special focus of Israel’s most dedicated American partisans in Washington. The relentless focus the Israel lobby’s most powerful and influential members, including, not least, the former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, and the soon-to-be-former Maryland Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, led the charge for the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act—an appellation for the crippling sectoral sanctions that Orwell himself would have envied. Ineffective at making life uncomfortable for Assad, the sanctions were effective in immiserating millions of ordinary Syrians. According to a UN report, the sanctions resulted in an “800 per cent rise in food prices” within a year of their enactment.
One of the more stalwart advocates for the Syrian regime change operation generally and the Caesar sanctions in particular was a little-known State Department bureaucrat with ties to the neoconservative think-tank world: Joel Rayburn, now rumored to be on the shortlist for the influential position of assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs at the State Department. Rayburn, like a number of recent Trump appointments, is a throwback to the Bush-Cheney era, when neocons like Eliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and the stable of signatories behind William Kristol’s Project for a New American Century ran roughshod over the U.S. Constitution and international law in pursuit of re-making West Asia.
Rayburn’s promotion would be seen as a victory for the Liz Cheney wing of the Republican party. That crowd, the president-elect hardly needs reminding, opposed him in the primaries through the candidacy of Nikki Haley and in the general election, when Cheney and her allies made common cause with the Harris campaign.
Staffing the U.S. national security apparatus (by which, broadly, I mean NSC, State, the IC, and Defense) presents a unique challenge to any incoming administration thanks, in part, to how (purposefully) opaque its workings are to those who remain outside of it.
As has become clear in recent years, there are elements within the national security apparatus who believe they do not answer to the will of the people as expressed in the election of the U.S. president. For some, the prerogatives of “the interagency process” or what some believe are the imperatives of “national security” take precedence over what they clearly see as a quaint, outmoded and meddlesome adherence to the Constitution.
To put it plainly, any president who seeks to restore sanity (or, as I have previously written, mesure) to American foreign policy will face fierce opposition from within the national security apparatus, which will make common cause with hawks in Congress and the legacy news media in an effort to defeat and discredit any initiative that contravenes its wishes.
Recent presidents, notably Obama and Trump, promised, albeit in wildly incompatible ways, to change the way the U.S. does business around the globe. To do that, they acted on the assumption the rules of civics textbooks still applied to Washington: once a president takes office, his appointees and the bureaucracy he inherits will follow his lead because he holds a mandate to govern.
In the realm of foreign policy, it is no exaggeration to say that both Obama and Trump I suffered defeat at the hands of the national security apparatus over which each nominally served as chief.
In a June 2015 Harper’s essay, David Bromwich observed that during Obama’s term there was an “embarrassing frequency with which his words [were] contradicted by subsequent events.”
He continued,
Bureaucracy, by its nature, is impersonal. It lacks an easily traceable collective will. But when a bureaucracy has grown big enough, the sum of its actions may obstruct any attempt by an individual, no matter how powerful and well placed, to counteract its overall drift…
When Obama entered the White House, it was imperative for him to rid the system of the people who would work against him. Often they would be people far back in the layers of the bureaucracy; and where removal or transfer was impossible, he had to watch them carefully. But in his first six years, there was no sign of an initiative by Obama to reduce the powers that were likeliest to thwart his projects from inside the government.
Hence, what one might call the the Bromwich Principle: Staffing not just at the top, but deep into the bureaucracy matters. Failing to do it properly can make or break a president’s foreign-policy legacy. Hence the imperative to be wary of people with track-records such as Rayburn’s.
The surest way then to avoid defeat at the hands of the foreign policy bureaucracy or Blob is by staffing as carefully and as wisely as is possible.
The incoming Trump administration has an obligation to the country to put itself in as strong a position as possible to carry out —in the face of unscrupulous and incessant attack—its mandate for change. Staffing the national security apparatus with the same old crowd will only stymie such efforts.
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