Will Trump Loosen US Intel Agencies’ Grip on Foreign Policy?

With Trump’s arrival on the scene, the stranglehold of the intelligence community on foreign policy may weaken.

Donald Trump. (Photo: AP)

Pardon my naivete, but I cannot for the life of me comprehend why the entire US establishment, with the intelligence community in the vanguard, is in convulsions about the alleged Russian efforts to hack into email accounts to influence the US elections which brought Donald Trump to power. The CIA must be lazy if it doesn’t hack into computers in Moscow, Beijing, everywhere.

The Washington Post on 23 December published a story by Lindsey A Rourke under the headline: ‘The US Tried to Change Other Countries' Governments 72 Times During the Cold War.’

Rajiv Gandhi’s Peace Delegation to Tripoli

As a journalist, I have been witness to efforts at regime change or attempted assassination of leaders. Ronald Reagan bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986, killing Gaddafi’s six-month-old daughter. Gaddafi barely escaped.

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was so moved that he arranged for a delegation of non-aligned foreign ministers to Tripoli to commiserate with the Libyan leader.

The Reagan White House was not pleased. The power a particular Indian ambassador to Washington had acquired depended largely on extraordinary access to key officials around the President. To preserve this priceless access, Rajiv Gandhi was persuaded to sack Foreign Minister Bali Ram Bhagat. His guilt? He led the “peace” delegation to Tripoli – at Rajiv’s behest.

Post-Cold War Enterprises

In 1987, in Managua, Nicaragua, Cardinal Ovando Bravo led me to Mother Mary’s statue in the centre of the town which had not stopped “shedding tears” ever since the Daniel Ortega-led Sandinistas came to power.

Mary’s tears were not in vain. God was working through the US, which was financing and arming the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels. Mysterious were God’s ways. The money for the Contras came from a secret fund in Iran (Devil incarnate for neocons) which was receiving arms from the US for this extraordinary munificence.

It might be argued that the examples listed above belong to the Cold War era. Well, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, all victims of US interventions, are clearly post-Cold War enterprises. Agreed, the creation of the Islamist mujahideen did result in the Soviet Union vacating Afghanistan, but at the cost of the Afghan nation. Zbigniew Brzezinski placed the matter in a kind of perspective: “Our aim was to defeat the Soviet Union,” he said. “And not worry about stirred-up Muslims.”

Revisiting the Syrian Story

The tizzy in which the US intelligence community finds itself might be a good occasion to revisit the Syrian story to which I am witness from the very beginning. During a visit to Syria, I extricate myself from a group of Arab experts at the Semiramis hotel in Damascus to keep an appointment with Bouthaina Shaaban, senior adviser to President Bashar al Assad.

“How do you explain US Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford and his French counterpart holding meetings in Hama, Homs and Darra with rebel groups in full public gaze?” I ask her.

Shaaban, elegant and articulate, shrugs her shoulders. “Just shows how much we have been penetrated.” Ford, it is commonly known, was a great favourite of Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State.

‘Ford School of Diplomacy’

Among the senior Arabists in Damascus at that time is also Edward Lionel Peck, a former US ambassador to Arab countries. His disgust with Ford’s behaviour is contained in a letter he wrote to members of the group who were in Damascus with him. There is such universal endorsement of the Ford school of diplomacy which borders on secret-service-type operations that I feel obliged to quote Peck as much as I can.

He wrote: “I have been dismayed by the accolades and support given to Ambassador Ford, our man in – and now out of Syria, for stepping well out of the traditional and appropriate role of a diplomat and actively encouraging the revolt/insurrection/sectarian strife/outside meddling, call it what you will, that is still going on. “

It is easy to imagine the US reaction if an ambassador from anywhere were to engage in even distantly related activities here. I fear my country remains somewhat more than merely insensitive, and is sliding into just plain rampant and offensive arrogance.

Will Trump put an end to such shenanigans?

‘Policy Riddled with Ambiguity’

There is something strained and edgy in the way the neocons, the media, with the intelligence community in front, have mounted a virtual war on the incoming administration.

It is actually a kind of blackmail. The message seems to be: You will get more of the same if you deviate from the ongoing policy which sees Vladimir Putin as arch enemy.

Trump’s commitment to “bomb the shit” out of terrorists threatens to expose the doublespeak of established policy on Syria too.

So far the US and its allies have pursued a policy riddled with ambiguity: Fight IS and al Nusra, but also oust or at least weaken the Assad regime – a paradox which, in the given circumstances, cannot be reconciled. The Russian policy is more straightforward: Fight the IS and al Nusra in a manner in which the regime troops can be decisive.

Trump is quite clear: Seek Russian cooperation to defeat terrorism. Who can quarrel with this line? The moment of reckoning may also have arrived in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are to be mobilised by Russia and China to fight IS and al-Qaeda.

Can Trump be far behind? That’s the tricky one.

In brief, with Trump’s arrival on the scene, the stranglehold of the intelligence community on foreign policy may well weaken.

The world of Western intelligence is therefore all upside down.

(This article has been published in an arrangement with IANS. A senior commentator on political and diplomatic affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on [e-mail]. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)