Flying Blind: A Critique of American Policy in the Greater Middle East

The former Reuters correspondent said he foresaw a series of dangers looming in the region. These included:

- The West Bank: “A lot of experts are predicting that Israel’s far right will force an annexation of current settlements soon and that Trump will go along. This will cause a major upset in the region and strengthen Iran once again.”

- Northern Syria: “Trump is quoted by Robert Kennedy Jr. as saying he wants to pull U.S. troops out of Syria.”

- Yemen: “A third spectre on the horizon is the Houthis in Yemen, who can block Western shipping whenever they want to, with Iranian and Russian help. There’s a growing relationship between Iran and Russia, and Iran is no longer a pariah, as Saudi Arabia and others develop relations with it.”

Delivering a Baron’s Briefings online talk to an international Reuter Society audience, Gutman concluded, “It’s hard to see how Trump’s new mandate will bring any kind of stability to the Middle East.”

Gutman, who reported for Reuters from Bonn, Belgrade and Washington from 1970 to 1981, argued that years of turmoil in the Middle East had been made worse by successive U.S. administrations’ lack of understanding or interest in the history and root causes of the region’s politics.

He gave a blistering analysis of past U.S. government policy failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and, in particular, Syria, where he said Washington never mastered the workings of the Syrian police state.

The United States was "flying blind", he added, using a phrase from the title of his forthcoming book on U.S. policy in Syria (see footnote).

“The Americans never figured out who was who, and how things got to where they were. It never fully investigated. It got the players wrong. The country is still in a catastrophic state, and the U.S. role has contributed to that catastrophe,” he said.

Gutman, who interviewed dozens of defecting Syrian military and security officials for his book, said he found it extraordinary that none of them had been contacted by U.S. officials, who gave little or no support to rebel forces trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

They could have been a potent force against ISIS, he added.

“The Syrian police state, long the mastermind of terror politics in the Middle East, the major facilitator for the infiltration of Al Qaida into Iraq, played the indispensable role in the rise of ISIS on its own territory,” he said.

“(It) turned over territory and arms to it, staffed key ISIS cities with its own trusted personnel, defended ISIS from (Syrian) rebel forces, advanced its interests and supported it financially,” he added.

Footnote:

Roy Gutman’s new book, Flying Blind: The Untold Story of the American Debacle in Syria, is about the “forever war” in Syria. Washington abandoned a pro-Western revolution to attack ISIS, a terror force that sprang seemingly out of nowhere. In fact, ISIS’s enabler was Bashar al Assad, who turned over whole cities and regions without a fight, allowing ISIS to create a state within a state - a grave mistake, according to Gutman.

Gutman’s five decades of reporting culminated with assignments in Baghdad and Istanbul for McClatchy Newspapers. He covered the war in Syria from 2013 to 2018 from his base in Turkey, interviewing scores of Assad regime defectors. At Newsday, his reports on “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia-Herzegovina won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. ■