The ousting of Assad’s 50-year rule was days in the making and was led by a coalition of radical Islamist groups.
The deposed president was a friend to ISIS, and the U.S. responded quickly to Sunday’s events with dozens of air strikes against ISIS camps and operatives that U.C. Central Command (CENTCOM) said were intended to further its mission to “disrupt, degrade and defeat ISIS.”
At the very least, it’s hoped by the U.S. that the airstrikes will prevent ISIS from emerging in the power vacuum to follow Assad’s escape.
The pro-Israel news outlet Jewish Insider, based in the U.S. and the Middle East, viewed Assad’s ouster as largely positive for the Jewish state but with certain warning flags to consider.
Scott Uehlinger, a retired CIA operations officer and Navy Reserve officer, isn’t so sure.
“It’s not good news. What a lot of people don’t understand is the Assad regime was bad, but a new regime could be even worse,” Uehlinger said on American Family Radio Monday. “Assad, for all of his horrible leadership and the fact that he was a dictator, he protected minorities because he himself belonged to a minority. He protected the Christian community within Syria, relatively speaking.”
First up in the effort for control of Syria is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Uehlinger told show host Jenna Ellis.
The Sunni Islamic political and paramilitary group was formed in 2017 from a merger of several armed factions.
Sending air strikes now is a bad move, Uehlinger said.
What’s worse, Uehlinger believes Syria and recent foreign policy moves by outgoing President Joe Biden are nothing but an attempt to complicate Trump’s early days in a term-limited administration.
“It’s an unbelievable mess in Syria, and to attempt to understand it is ridiculous for U.S. policy, especially at this early point in the conflict,” Uehlinger said.
The Biden administration moves contradict the wishes of President-elect Donald Trump.
“Russia, because they are so tied up in Ukraine with the loss there of over 600,000 soldiers, seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years. They, like possibly Assad himself, are being forced out, and it may actually be the best thing that can happen to them,” Trump wrote at his social media platform Truth Social on Saturday.
He continued, “In any event, Syria is a mess, and the United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do Not get involved.”
It could soon become a fight that draws more interest from the future president.
Another key ‘branch’ of Iran goes down
For now, Jewish Insider calls the end of the Assad regime the elimination of a key branch of Iran’s “axis of resistance” to Israel.
The takeover in Syria comes after huge victories by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against Iran-backed terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
The IDF has successfully targeted and removed key leaders and has wiped out important infrastructure from both groups over the past year.
Visiting the Israel-Syria border over the weekend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Assad regime “a central link in the Iranian axis of evil” and said its downfall was a “direct result of our blows to Iran and Hezbollah, the Assad regime’s main supporters,” Jewish Insider reported.
Perhaps that’s true, but Uehlinger says the Syria situation at present has too many unknowns to get a real cost-benefit analysis for the U.S.
There are two lines of thought on U.S. intelligence on Syria, Uehlinger said.
One is that the CIA is behind the current events.
The second, and more likely, is that propping up Assad could have had more short-term benefit, and the U.S.’ failure to do so constitutes a massive intelligence failure by the CIA, Uehlinger said.
“It seems as though the CIA is absolutely flat-footed about this. They had no idea that this was happening,” he said.
CIA struggling with another acronym: DEI
Why would the CIA be so uninformed? The likely answer is another three letters: DEI, said Uehlinger, who noted another former CIA station chief, Sam Faddis, in an article written by Faddis for AND Magazine.
“The forces of DEI have destroyed the actual competence of the Agency and the people in the field and of the CIA who are filling field positions are no longer competent to really do operational spy work. So, I have no doubt that this is basically a failing of U.S. intel,” Uehlinger said.
A failure of U.S. intel would blend nicely, quite possibly, with the intentions of Biden, who in this matter may be very strategic and not the product of a doddering elderly gentleman.
“It seems pretty clear at this point that the intent of the Biden administration is to make the foreign affairs portfolio so difficult that the Trump administration is working on that and isn't working at doing things like reducing the size of the deep state through DOJ and things like that. ‘Let's distract Trump to prevent him from doing the reform that the American people demand,’” Uehlinger said.
