By Dr. Joseph Campos
Program Director, Intelligence Studies at American Military University
Since April 2011’s deployment of the Syrian Army to quell opposition uprisings, there have been many questions as to why the U.S. had only provided humanitarian aid and not armed the Syrian opposition. Recently the debate has grown stronger as multiple news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, revealed that “a proposal to arm Syrian rebels was backed by the Pentagon, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, but the White House decided not to act on the plan.” This will continue to be a point of contention for many years to come, but it is now important to explore what could be some of the reasons the President chose a specific path.
The WSJ stipulated three possible reasons for why the White House delayed action on the proposal of the National Security Team to arm Syrian opposition. The possible reasons centered on questions such as:
- Who exactly the oppositions groups were?
- What were their underlying sentiments, mission, and goals (besides regime change)?
- Which opposition groups were to be trusted? Would the transfer of arms make a difference in the removal of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad?
- Would the weapons intensify damage and suffering and add to the trust for these opposition groups?
As stated in the Feb. 8 Washington Post, “President Obama is unlikely to shift his stance against the expansion of a U.S. role in Syria’s civil war, despite a death toll topping 60,000 and acknowledgment that key members of his national security staff favored a plan first proposed in June to arm the Syrian rebels.”
The American political imagination is well aware of the political and security implications of funding unknown entities. Starting in 1978, the US government funded Afghan Mujahedeen. Some of the sub-entities of the Afghan Mujahedeen later became the Taliban and eventual harborers of terror and the September 11th terror attack on the United States. As a result, in my mind, the President is right to proceed cautiously. The United States cannot and, under the current administration, will not find itself embroiled in effects and consequences of funding and arming unknown entities.
From an intelligence studies perspective, this situation provides a perfect discussion point regarding the importance of intelligence in a variety of areas. Only through credible and reliable intelligence collections will the questions facing the U.S. in its decision to fund and arm Syrian opposition be answered.
About the Author:
Joseph Campos is an Associate Professor and Program Director of the Intelligence Studies Program at APUS. He is the author of “The State and Terrorism: National Security Discourse and the Mobilization of Power”, 2007. His research lies in state’s discursive maneuvers that are used to inscribe and prescribe specific agency to issues and events. As well as, how the state constructs imagined states of relevance that are the convergence of knowledge, powers, histories, institutions, and agents. It is in the convergence of these categories that a practice of statecraft is revealed. Once constructed, an issue’s relevance is consistently articulated and re-articulated, produced and re-produced for the consumption of the citizenry.
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