FOREWORD
By Jack Murphy
Whenever I talk to active duty special operations soldiers, both sergeants and officers, they all have one question in common, “What the hell are we doing?”
That may be the question of this generation of soldiers and intelligence professionals. Sorry, America, you won’t get much of an answer to that question from us, because we don’t know. Currently, the men and women of our armed services are cruising around Afghanistan, often rolling right through one ambush and straight into the next. The question is why and to what end? Indeed, today’s soldier must feel like a Roman centurion out defending the fringes of the empire while Rome burns. As I write this, America’s budget woes are back in the headlines and the government has shut down as a matter of political rhetoric. Pass our budget or else.
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FOREWORD
By Jack Murphy
Whenever I talk to active duty special operations soldiers, both sergeants and officers, they all have one question in common, “What the hell are we doing?”
That may be the question of this generation of soldiers and intelligence professionals. Sorry, America, you won’t get much of an answer to that question from us, because we don’t know. Currently, the men and women of our armed services are cruising around Afghanistan, often rolling right through one ambush and straight into the next. The question is why and to what end? Indeed, today’s soldier must feel like a Roman centurion out defending the fringes of the empire while Rome burns. As I write this, America’s budget woes are back in the headlines and the government has shut down as a matter of political rhetoric. Pass our budget or else.
While our troops are aghast at our lack of any coherent strategy in Afghanistan, the entire country is mystified by the series of missteps, false starts, gaffes, and outright stupidity when it comes to our foreign policy in Syria. Long story short, we don’t have one.
Geez, that might have taken some of the wind out of Kerry’s sails. Let me back up.
Kerry Patton is one of the intelligence professionals I mentioned above. His specialty is HUMINT, or human intelligence. That means getting out and pounding the pavement, looking people in the eye and talking to them, feeling out the human terrain. He has done this sort of thing all over the world. Some of the places he has been and some of the operations he has participated in would make your head spin.
Since I’ve known him I’ve found that very few people know the intelligence business (yes, I said business) like Kerry. He knows the trade; he knows the bureaucracies and agencies involved. He knows how they interact with one another. He knows how they work and how they don’t. Kerry is one guy I can always turn to for accurate information. He has been doing this for so long that he has an ability to quickly process, vet, and analyze data.
If you want to know what is really going on inside the quagmire that is Syria, Kerry Patton is one hell of a tour guide.
So yeah, Syria is a mess, and America has no real foreign policy in place to deal with it. Now it is time to go a few steps deeper. Peel back the layers of the onion, so to speak. Kerry will give you the historical context that Syria takes place in, as well as explain why America’s foreign policy can appear . . . schizophrenic, to put it diplomatically.
In this e-book Kerry gives the inside scoop on Syria, the story that no one else is talking about. Syria is not really about Syria, it is about Iran. Syria is simply a shape operation, an operation that is to set the stage and open up new fronts for the Western world to use to attack Iran.
Just be careful, because as I’ve found out when talking to Kerry about these subjects, when you begin to peel the onion, you may come to find out that you are standing in an onion patch.
(Part One)
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