James Jeffrey, the former U.S. special envoy for Syria, gave another interview, this time to Al-Monitor published on Dec. 9, which reveals the extent to which he was involved in manipulating President Donald Trump on Syria policy and his callous attitude towards the population of Syria, the suffering of which is magnified by U.S. efforts, through sanctions and other means to prevent reconstruction of the war-devastated country.
Jeffrey, who retired from the State Department in early November, was fully aligned with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in deciding that Iran was the problem in Syria rather than Al Qaeda terrorism. “Secretary Pompeo and I convinced people in the administration of this: If you don’t deal with the underlying problem of Iran in Syria, you’re not going to deal in an enduring way with IS [never mind that Iran was actually fighting IS in Iraq and Turkey was supporting it in Syria — ed]. We saw this all as one thing,” Jeffrey said. “We then also had the Israeli air campaign. The U.S. only began supporting that when I came on board. I went out there and we saw Prime Minister Netanyahu and others, and they thought that they were not being supported enough by the U.S. military, and not by intelligence.”