Wikileaks and Syria: what the Clinton email archive said about Libya, Iran and Israel

In October 2016, a month before the presidential election, Wikileaks was publishing the contents of Hillary Clinton’s email archive from her years as Secretary of State, and two documents in it were read here and elsewhere as an account of why the United States was involved in Syria. The reading was that the intervention had less to do with Syria than with Iran and Israel, and that it was the second act of a plan whose first act was Libya. This page keeps the two documents and the argument, and marks the line between what they say and what was made of them.

The first document: Libya as a model

The first is a memo from Sidney Blumenthal, a long-time confidant of the Clintons, sent in 2011 as the Syrian uprising began. Its judgement was that Assad’s gestures at reform were delusional, and that “the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Qaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion”. It quoted David Lesch, described as the American expert closest to Assad, on the possibility of “another model for regime change: that of limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion”.

The United States joined the Libyan intervention shortly afterwards, at Clinton’s urging, with the White House and NATO presenting it as the protection of civilians. The Blumenthal memo does not say Libya was undertaken for Syria’s sake. It says that a successful Libya would be useful for Syria, and it was written before the decision. Those are different things, and the argument made here in 2016 elided them.

The second document: Iran and Israel

The second document, unsigned in the released form and datable from its contents to the spring of 2012, argues for American action to bring down Assad and gives its reasons. “Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil war may seem unconnected, but they are,” it says; it is the strategic relationship between Iran and the Assad regime that lets Iran threaten Israel, and removing Assad would leave Iran “strategically isolated”. Negotiations to limit Iran’s programme, it argues, “will not solve Israel’s security dilemma”, and an administration that wanted Israel to accept a nuclear deal would have to change the balance in Syria first. It concedes that “Libya was an easier case” and that Syria “is harder”, and closes with the confidence of a memo that expects to be proved right: victory may not come quickly, but the payoff would be substantial, and the resulting Syrian government would see the United States as a friend.

That last passage is the one most worth keeping, because it reads exactly like the assurances given before Iraq, and because the memo contains no mention at all of the Islamic State, which by 2016 was the public justification for every American aircraft over Syria.

What was inferred

The inference drawn here was a sequence: regime change in Libya first, as the easy case; the Libyan example and, by some accounts, Libyan weapons and fighters moved through Turkey, applied to Syria second; and the purpose of the second act being a nuclear agreement with Iran that Israel would otherwise obstruct. Seymour Hersh had reported the weapons route in 2014, and the memo supplied the motive. The conclusion was that the Syrian war was, from Washington’s side, a war about Iran and Israel, with ISIS as an afterthought and a convenient one, since a war against ISIS could be fought without saying why the United States wanted Assad gone.

Where the inference outran the evidence

Two documents from an archive of thirty thousand emails are not a policy. The first was advice to the Secretary, not a decision; the second was a memo whose author and audience are not established, and there is no record in the release of it being adopted. The Obama administration’s reluctance to intervene in Syria, which the memo itself complains of, is a matter of record, and the nuclear agreement with Iran was concluded in 2015 with Assad still in Damascus, which is the opposite of what the memo said was necessary. The strongest honest claim is this: people close to the Secretary of State argued for regime change in Syria on grounds that had nothing to do with the reasons given in public, and the public reasons arrived later. That is a serious claim and it is supported. The larger one, a two-act plan carried out as written, is not.

Later note. Assad’s government fell in December 2024, to a rebel offensive led by a group that grew out of the al-Qaeda affiliate the 2012 memo would have armed, and thirteen years after the memo predicted a quick and substantial payoff. Iran’s position in Syria collapsed with him. Whether that vindicates the memo’s analysis or its critics’ is a question this record leaves open.