By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Project Syndicate

August 30-2016.

NEW YORK – Syria’s civil war is the most dangerous and destructive crisis on the planet. Since early 2011, hundreds of thousands have died; around ten million Syrians have been displaced; Europe has been convulsed with Islamic State (ISIS) terror and the political fallout of refugees; and the United States and its NATO allies have more than once come perilously close to direct confrontation with Russia.

Unfortunately, President Barack Obama has greatly compounded the dangers by hiding the US role in Syria from the American people and from world opinion. An end to the Syrian war requires an honest accounting by the US of its ongoing, often secretive role in the Syrian conflict since 2011, including who is funding, arming, training, and abetting the various sides. Such exposure would help bring to an end many countries’ reckless actions.

A widespread – and false – perception is that Obama has kept the US out of the Syrian war. Indeed, the US right wing routinely criticizes him for having drawn a line in the sand for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over chemical weapons, and then backing off when Assad allegedly crossed it (the issue remains murky and disputed, like so much else in Syria). A leading columnist for the Financial Times, repeating the erroneous idea that the US has remained on the sidelines, recently implied that Obama had rejected the advice of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to arm the Syrian rebels fighting Assad.

Yet the curtain gets lifted from time to time. In January, the New York Times finally reported on a secret 2013 Presidential order to the CIA to arm Syrian rebels. As the account explained, Saudi Arabia provides substantial financing of the armaments, while the CIA, under Obama’s orders, provides organizational support and training.

Unfortunately, the story came and went without further elaboration by the US government or follow up by the New York Times. The public was left in the dark: How big are the ongoing CIA-Saudi operations? How much is the US spending on Syria per year? What kinds of arms are the US, Saudis, Turks, Qataris, and others supplying to the Syrian rebels? Which groups are receiving the arms? What is the role of US troops, air cover, and other personnel in the war? The US government isn’t answering these questions, and mainstream media aren’t pursuing them, either.

On more than a dozen occasions, Obama has told the American people that there would be “no US boots on the ground.” Yet every few months, the public is also notified in a brief government statement that US special operations forces are being deployed to Syria. The Pentagon routinely denies that they are in the front lines. But when Russia and the Assad government recently carried out bombing runs and artillery fire against rebel strongholds in northern Syria, the US notified the Kremlin that the attacks were threatening American troops on the ground. The public has been given no explanation about their mission, its costs, or counterparties in Syria.

Through occasional leaks, investigative reports, statements by other governments, and rare statements by US officials, we know that America is engaged in an active, ongoing, CIA-coordinated war both to overthrow Assad and to fight ISIS. America’s allies in the anti-Assad effort include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and other countries in the region. The US has spent billions of dollars on arms, training, special operations forces, air strikes, and logistical support for the rebel forces, including international mercenaries. American allies have spent billions of dollars more. The precise sums are not reported.

The US public has had no say in these decisions. There has been no authorizing vote or budget approval by the US Congress. The CIA’s role has never been explained or justified. The domestic and international legality of US actions has never been defended to the American people or the world.

To those at the center of the US military-industrial complex, this secrecy is as it should be. Their position is that a vote by Congress 15 years ago authorizing the use of armed force against those culpable for the 9/11 attack gives the president and military carte blanche to fight secret wars in the Middle East and Africa. Why should the US explain publicly what it is doing? That would only jeopardize the operations and strengthen the enemy. The public does not need to know.

I subscribe to a different view: wars should be a last resort and should be constrained by democratic scrutiny. This view holds that America’s secret war in Syria is illegal both under the US Constitution (which gives Congress the sole power to declare war) and under the United Nations Charter, and that America’s two-sided war in Syria is a cynical and reckless gamble. The US-led efforts to topple Assad are not aimed at protecting the Syrian people, as Obama and Clinton have suggested from time to time, but are a US proxy war against Iran and Russia, in which Syria happens to be the battleground.

The stakes of this war are much higher and much more dangerous than America’s proxy warriors imagine. As the US has prosecuted its war against Assad, Russia has stepped up its military support to his government. In the US mainstream media, Russia’s behavior is an affront: how dare the Kremlin block the US from overthrowing the Syrian government? The result is a widening diplomatic clash with Russia, one that could escalate and lead – perhaps inadvertently – to the point of military conflict.

These are issues that should be subject to legal scrutiny and democratic control. I am confident that the American people would respond with a resounding “no” to the ongoing US-led war of regime change in Syria. The American people want security – including the defeat of ISIS – but they also recognize the long and disastrous history of US-led regime-change efforts, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

This is the main reason why the US security state refuses to tell the truth. The American people would call for peace rather than perpetual war. Obama has a few months left in office to repair his broken legacy. He should start by leveling with the American people.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, and, most recently, The Age of Sustainable Development. (From Project Syndicate).

Jeffrey David Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. Sachs is also one of the Secretary-General’s MDG Advocates, and a Commissioner of the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Development. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011). His most recent book is To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace (2013).

Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the world's leading expert on economic development and the fight against poverty. His work on ending poverty, promoting economic growth, fighting hunger and disease, and promoting sustainable environmental practices, has taken him to more than 125 countries with more than 90 percent of the world's population. For more than a quarter century he has advised dozens of heads of state and governments on economic strategy, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He also advised Pope John Paul II on the encyclical Centesimus Annus. He works closely with international organizations including the African Union, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Food Programme, UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, among others.

Professor Sachs' work has been pivotal in many of the key junctures of globalization during the past thirty years. In the 1980s he helped several Latin American countries including Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to end hyperinflations and renegotiate their external debts. He was the leading academic advocate in the United States for reducing the debt overhang of the developing countries and his ideas were incorporated in the global debt-reduction plans undertaken from the mid-1980s onward, including the Brady Plan and the HIPC Program.

In 1989, Professor Sachs advised Poland's anti-communist Solidarity movement and the first post-communist Government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He wrote the first-ever comprehensive plan for the transition from central planning to a market democracy, which became incorporated into Poland's highly successful reform program led by Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz. Professor Sachs was the main architect of Poland's successful debt reduction operation. The Government of Poland awarded Sachs with one of its highest honors in 1999, the Commanders Cross of the Order of Merit. He also received an honorary doctorate from the Cracow University of Economics.

Sachs's ideas and methods of transition from central planning were successfully adopted throughout the transition economies. He helped Slovenia (1991) and Estonia (1992) to introduce new stable and convertible currencies. Based on Poland's success, he was invited first by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then by Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the transition to a market economy. He served as advisor to Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and Finance Minister Boris Federov during 1991-93 on macroeconomic policies. He received the Leontief Medal of the Leontief Centre, St. Petersburg, for his contributions to Russia's economic reforms.

From the mid-1990s till today, Prof. Sachs has been involved with economic reforms in many parts of Asia, including India and China. He has been a senior advisor to the Indian Government, most recently on the scaling up of primary health care in rural areas (the National Rural Health Mission), a policy that he recommended and helped to promote through the Indian Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. For his broad-based support of India's economic reforms he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, one of India's highest honors. He has similarly engaged with the Chinese Government on many issues of sustainable development, and during 2001-3 worked with senior government officials on China's Western Development Strategy. He has authored many scholarly and policy papers on India's and China's economic reforms. Sachs has also worked in other parts of Asia on a number of development and research projects, including in Malaysia, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and others. He actively supports Bhutan's innovative strategy of Gross National Happiness. He works with the Government of Jordan on a national program of poverty reduction and with the Government of Qatar on education and ICT initiatives throughout the Arab region.

Since 1995, Professor Sachs has been deeply engaged in Africa's escape from poverty. He has worked in more than two-dozen African countries, and has advised the African leadership at several African Union summits. In the mid-1990s he worked with senior officials of the Clinton Administration to develop the concept of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). He has engaged with dozens of African leaders to promote smallholder agriculture and to fight high disease burdens through strengthened primary health systems. His pioneering ideas on investing in health to break the poverty trap have been widely applied throughout the continent. He currently serves as an advisor to several African governments, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda, among others.

The Millennium Villages Project, which he directs, operates in more than one dozen African countries, and covers more than 500,000 people. The MVP has achieved notable successes in raising agricultural production, reducing children's stunting, and cutting child mortality rates, with the results described in several peer-reviewed publications. Its key concepts of integrated rural development to achieve the MDGs are now being applied at national scale in Nigeria and Mali, and are being used by many other countries to help support national anti-poverty programs. He works very closely with the Islamic Development Bank to scale up programs of integrated rural development and sustainable agriculture among the Bank's member countries. One such project supports pastoralist communities in the Horn of Africa, with six participating nations: Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan.

Since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, Professor Sachs has been the leading academic scholar and practitioner on the MDGs. He chaired the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2000-1), which played a pivotal role in scaling up the financing of health care and disease control in the low-income countries to support MDGs 4, 5, and 6. He worked with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000-1 to design and launch the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. He worked closely with senior officials of the administration of George W. Bush to develop the PEPFAR program to fight HIV/AIDS, and the PMI to fight malaria. On behalf of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, from 2002-2006 he chaired the UN Millennium Project, which was tasked with developing a concrete action plan to achieve the MDGs. The UN General Assembly adopted the key recommendations of the UN Millennium Project at a special session in September 2005. The recommendations for rural Africa are currently being implemented and documented in the Millennium Villages, and in several national scale-up efforts such as in Nigeria.

Professor Sachs has been the Director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University since 2002. In that capacity, he leads a university-wide organization of more than 850 professionals from natural-science and social-science disciplines, in support of sustainable development. Sachs has consistently advocated for the expansion of University education on sustainable development, and helped to introduce the PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, one of the first PhD programs of its kind in the U.S. He championed the new Masters of Development Practice (MDP), which has led to a consortium of major universities around the world offering the new degree. The Earth Institute has also guided the adoption of sustainable development as a new major at Columbia College. The Earth Institute is home to cutting-edge research on all aspects of earth systems and sustainable development.

Sachs is the recipient of many awards and honors, including membership in the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, and the Fellows of the World Econometric Society. He has received more than 20 honorary degrees, and many awards and honors around the world. His syndicated newspaper column appears in more than 80 countries around the world, and he is a frequent contributor to major publications such as the Financial Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, Scientific American, and Time magazine.

Sachs' policy and academic works span the challenges of globalization, and include: the relationship of trade and economic growth; the resource curse and extractive industries; public health and economic development; economic geography; strategies of economic reform; international financial markets; macroeconomic policy; global competitiveness; climate change; and the end of poverty. He has authored or co-authored hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including three bestsellers and a textbook on macroeconomics that is widely used around the world.

Prior to his arrival at Columbia University in July 2002, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development and the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade.

Sachs was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954. He received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 1976, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 and 1980 respectively. He joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982 and Full Professor in the fall of 1983, at the age of 28. (From Wikipedia)

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