For the past two years, the main criticism of the Obama administration's policy toward Syria has been that the U.S., "rather than read the signals early on and arm the Syrian opposition when it was making substantial gains, allowed a vacuum to form and then fretted when that vacuum was filled by jihadists."
Obama considers that to be "horsesh*t," saying the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy" because the opposition of "former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth" was fighting "a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, [and] a battle-hardened Hezbollah."
A former administration official has subsequently dismantled the president's argument.
Fred Hof, a former special adviser for transition in Syria under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, writes in Politico that the president's characterization ignores "decades of universal conscription and mandatory military service in Syria" by characterizing the armed opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad "as a hopeless collection of former butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers."
Hof notes that the recommendation to arm to the moderate opposition was offered in some form not only by Clinton, "but by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey."
When Obama made a similar "farmers" argument in June, Hof highlighted that the commander in chief "fails to mention the tens of thousands of Syrian Army officers and soldiers who abandoned the Assad regime rather than participate in that regime’s campaign of mass homicide."
And here's how Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy detailed issues with Obama's statement, speaking to The Washington Post:
“There are tens of thousands of defectors from the Syrian military, many of whom fled to neighboring countries (some were put into a refugee camp in Turkey), while others stayed to fight as part of the overall FSA,” Tabler said. “There was also the Supreme Military Council, the armed affiliate of the Syrian National Coalition, which also included a number of defected commanders. I met a lot of them in southern Turkey over the last few years."
The real problem, Tabler says, was that "as assistance didn't arrive, the defectors became disheartened so not sure where they all are at the moment.”
And ISIS took full advantage of that vacuum, as stated by journalist Michael Weiss to Nada Bakos, a former CIA targeting officer in Iraq:
@nadabakos ISIS was savvy. They let FSA-aligned groups take the lead on anti-regime victories; they started state building and resource
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) August 12, 2014@nadabakos preserving early. But competitive strands of support for different FSA factions, coupled with stalemate, made it easy for them
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) August 12, 2014Hof, along with many current and former officials in the Obama administration, agrees with that assessment.
"Had the requisite assistance started flowing two years ago, both Syria and Iraq would be in better places now," he writes. "Fantasy? Few in the administration — including at very senior levels — think so."
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