Sam Heller’s “A Deadly Delusion: Were Syria’s Rebels Ever Going to Defeat the Jihadists?” is just one of many post-mortems written about the Trump administration’s decision to end the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) covert arms program supplying moderate rebels in Syria with anti-tank missiles and salaries so that they could continue fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Like virtually every other analyst, Heller places the bulk of the blame for Al-Qaeda’s strength in Syria on the many failings of moderate rebels and the Syrian opposition rather than where it really belongs — on U.S. policymakers, principally the Obama administration.

In Heller’s zeal to condemn the rebels who were not only fighting Assad but also Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and then Russia, Islamic State (ISIS), and Al-Qaeda, he completely omits the Obama administration’s dogmatic anti-interventionism and continual backstabbing of its nominal rebel allies that made it impossible for rebels to successfully fight all of these foes simultaneously to the satisfaction of Western analysts and the CIA.

In Heller’s zeal to condemn the Syrian opposition’s unwillingness to face up to the reality that Al-Qaeda was intervening in their revolution from mid to late 2012 onward, he ‘forgets’ to mention that their preference was always for Western intervention. Heller points to Friday demonstrations in December 2012 organized under the slogan “There Is No Terrorism But Assad’s” but ignores the demonstrations calling for “International Protection” (September 2011), no-fly zone (October 2011), a buffer/safe zone (December 2011), arming the Free Syrian Army (March 2012), “immediate intervention” (March 2012), anti-aircraft weapons (August 2012), “we want weapons, not statements” (October 2012).

The only way moderate forces — civilian and opposition alike — could have beaten back Al-Qaeda’s intervention from 2012 onward in Syria is if there was a robust U.S.-led intervention from 2012 onward instead. Al-Qaeda’s strength in Syria 2017 was not predestined; rather, they skillfully exploited Obama’s minimalist intervention and frankly brain dead decisions to steadily accumulate power at the expense of U.S.-backed or U.S.-friendly rebel factions.

Heller dances around the obvious fact that only foreign intervention on the side of the rebels could have purged the Al-Qaeda cancer from their ranks in his discussion of the safe zone established by Turkey, writing:

“The ‘Euphrates Shield’ northern Aleppo countryside is mostly free of Jabhat al-Nusrah because of Nusrah’s 2015 withdrawal from the area, the presence of Turkish forces on the ground, and a geographic accident — this rebel enclave is disconnected from the Nusrah-dominated rebel northwest, and really from anything other than Turkey’s Gaziantep province.”

Heller’s attribution of Al-Qaeda’s absence from this area to “geographic accident” is simply dishonest — Turkey engineered this happy outcome by offering the rebels a deal: get Al-Qaeda out of this area and Turkey will send in our troops to set up a safe zone for you free of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Assad, and PKK. The rebels accepted Turkey’s offer because it was in their best interests to do so and their acceptance proves that they would be happy to throw Al-Qaeda under the bus if given a better choice by a more powerful ally like Turkey or the U.S.

Breaking the moderate rebels’ reliance on Al-Qaeda for firepower would not have been easy, quick, cheap, or without risk. It would have required something radical, along the lines of what the U.S. did in Iraq after the 2003 invasion to create and stand-up the Iraqi security forces (ISF) — a 3–5 year long program to build an actual army from the ground up. It would have cost tens of billions of dollars and precious political capital. The British plan to create such a force envisaged 100,000 part-time rebels-turned-full-time soldiers who would march on Damascus with U.S. and British air support backing them up.

If the U.S. had treated the ISF from 2014 onwards the way it treated Syrian rebels, ISIS would still control almost all of Sunni Iraq today. Then Western analysts would be writing insightful pieces like, “A Deadly Delusion: Why Did We Waste Billions of Dollars Training ISF When We Could Have Let AQI have Iraq Back in 2006?”