NY Times: Hillary's Failed Syrian Rebel Strategy: Wasted Billions of U.S. Taxpayer $$$$$$

[amborin]

HIllary and Patreaus and Panetta pressured Obama to intervene in Syria and support Syrian rebels----against his better judgement----and against the CIA's OWN analysis of how arming rebels does NOT work:


C.I.A. Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/us/politics/cia-study-says-arming-rebels-seldom-works.html

C.I.A. Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels

By MARK MAZZETTIOCT. 14, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has run guns to insurgencies across the world during its 67-year history — from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba. The continuing C.I.A. effort to train Syrian rebels is just the latest example of an American president becoming enticed by the prospect of using the spy agency to covertly arm and train rebel groups.


An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.

The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.
The findings of the study, described in recent weeks by current and former American government officials, were presented in the White House Situation Room and led to deep skepticism among some senior Obama administration officials about the wisdom of arming and training members of a fractured Syrian opposition.


But in April 2013, President Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels..........American officials said that the fact that the C.I.A. took a dim view of its own past efforts to arm rebel forces fed Mr. Obama’s reluctance to begin the covert operation.

“One of the things that Obama wanted to know was: Did this ever work?” said one former senior administration official who participated in the debate and spoke anonymously because he was discussing a classified report. The C.I.A. report, he said, “was pretty dour in its conclusions.”

The debate over whether Mr. Obama acted too slowly to support the Syrian rebellion has been renewed after both former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta wrote in recent books that they had supported a plan presented in the summer of 2012 by David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director, to arm and train small groups of rebels.....

Mr. Obama rejected that plan, but in the months that followed, Obama administration officials continued to debate the question of whether the C.I.A. should arm the rebels. Mr. Petraeus’s original plan was reworked until Mr. Obama signed a secret order authorizing the covert training mission after intelligence agencies concluded that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had used chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians. This greatly helps to explain the President's apparent reluctance to get involved in the Syrian conflict. Short of a U.S. invasion, we just don't have the toolkit to affect the outcome.

snip

RESULTS? Syria is now in Chaos. ISIS controls huge swathes of Syria. HUGE amounts of U.S. Taxpayer Money Squandered:

The progress of the Syrian conflict has only deepened skepticism about the loyalties — and the capabilities — of the Syrian opposition. Years of a bloody civil war have splintered the forces fighting the Assad government’s troops, with an increasing number of fighters pledging loyalty to radical groups like the Islamic State and the Nusra Front.

U.S. Ends Effort to Train Rebels in Syrian Fight

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday abandoned its efforts to build up a new rebel force inside Syria to combat the Islamic State, acknowledging the failure of its $500 million campaign to train thousands of fighters and announcing that it will instead use the money to provide ammunition and some weapons for groups already engaged in the battle.

snip


The decision to scuttle a central piece of President Obama’s strategy for confronting extremists in Syria was made after mounting evidence that the training mission had resulted in no more than a handful of American-coached fighters. And it comes amid Russia’s forceful entry into the Syrian conflict, a move by President Vladimir V. Putin that has highlighted the lack of progress by the United States and its coalition.


Senior officials at the White House and the Pentagon admitted that the strategy to pull fighters out of Syria, teach them advanced combat skills and return them to face the Islamic State had simply not worked.....

....... Failure on the battlefield or the loss of weapons that could fall into the hands of extremists could result in a cutoff of military equipment, officials said. The American military has confirmed that some rebel groups surrendered their weapons when confronted by extremists, and it has acknowledged that accounting for American-supplied arms across the battlefield proved almost impossible in the past.

snip

For Mr. Obama, Friday’s answer to that question was a reversal of policy that underscored a harsh reality:
tens of billions of dollars spent in recent years to train security forces across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have rarely succeeded in transforming local fighters into effective, long-term armies.

snip


The president has long expressed skepticism that training Syrian rebels could resolve the political and military challenges in that country. ......

In a letter to the State Department, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. last week, four senators — three Democrats and a Republican — criticized the program. “The Syria Train and Equip Program goes beyond simply being an inefficient use of taxpayer dollars,” the senators wrote. “As many of us initially warned, it is now aiding the very forces we aim to defeat.”

The letter referred to a recent incident in which some of the American-trained Syrian fighters gave at least a quarter of their United States-provided equipment, including six pickup trucks and a portion of their ammunition, to the Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/world/middleeast/pentagon-program-islamic-state-syria.html

This is one of 1,000s of reasons why Bernie Sanders has better foreign policy judgement than Hillary Clinton. Bernie agreed with Obama that it was folly to arm Syrian rebels. Bernie said: what was the plan for the day after? But Hillary aligned with Republican Patreaus, the neo cons of the century went ahead. Results? Total Chaos.

[Broward]

1. Are you experienced? Go Hillary.

She probably listened to her good friend Kissinger on this one.

[californiabernin]

2. She is experienced at failure. Nt

[roguevalley]

9. how's this for that 3 am call?

this probably was vetted by a call to Kissinger

[Skwmom]

3. Obama was not served well by SOS Clinton so why in the hell would he want her to be CIC?

[cali]

4. It's frightening how poor her judgment is

Thanks for posting this.

[jakeXT]

5. Let's see ... who will they arm now ?

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday abandoned its efforts to build up a new rebel force inside Syria to combat the Islamic State, acknowledging the failure of its $500 million campaign to train thousands of fighters and announcing that it will instead use the money to provide ammunition and some weapons for groups already engaged in the battle.

[snot]

6. K&R'd & bookmarked.

[senz]

7. Hillary does not think ahead. Her Iraq war vote, SOS record, & presidential campaigns show this.

[Motown_Johnny]

8. Her foreign policy seems to be the same as John McCain.

Has she ever passed up an opportunity to increase the amount of violence in the world?

[Wig Master]

11. Feminism is all about exposing subaltern women to lawlessness and banditry

[dreamnightwind]

12. And this is the REAL Benghazi scandal

It's my understanding that Ambassador Stevens and the others were attacked because the Benghazi station house was moving arms to Syrian rebels. K & R.