US policies against Syria ‘total failure’: Scholar

The Obama administration’s plan to end a Pentagon program to train militants in Syria is a formal acknowledgment of the total failure of US policies against the Syrian government, an American scholar says.

The failed US policies in Syria include support for the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist organization in order to overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and benefit Israel, said James Henry Fetzer, a retired professor in Madison, Wisconsin.

“We have known that ISIS was being funded by the United States, that it’s being advised by two American generals,” Fetzer told Press TV on Friday, using another acronym for the terror group.

“What we’re seeing today is the complete and utter collapse of a misguided foreign policy that was initiated by 9/11 which was brought to us by the CIA, the neocons and the Department of Defense and the Mossad in order to engage the US in a series of wars,” he added.

“The Middle East is in chaos because of American intervention,” the scholar argued.

Senior Pentagon officials said on Friday that the US Defense Department plans to stop training militants in Syria, in an acknowledgment that the $500-million program has failed to produce an effective proxy force in the war-torn country.

The beleaguered program managed to field only a handful of militants into the battle against Daesh in Syria at a cost of about $50 million.

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Friday that Washington will overhaul the failed training program and instead aid existing militant units and their vetted leaders.

Carter called it a “more strategic approach” than what the Pentagon has been doing from the beginning. “We have been looking for now several weeks at ways to improve that program,” he said. “I wasn’t satisfied with the early efforts in that regard.”

Administration officials have previously suggested that the US should shift focus to aiding Kurdish forces and other factions instead of trying to build up separate militant units.

The shift in strategy also comes as US officials have complained that Russian warplanes and cruise missiles are targeting militant groups backed by the CIA in Syria.

Russia started its air campaign in Syria on September 30 to target terrorist groups fighting the Syrian government.

Russian warships also began to launch missiles into Syria from the Caspian Sea on Wednesday. The missiles mark a significant escalation of Russian involvement in the region, deepening US anger at Moscow.

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