When, in early August, the Pentagon's former highest ranking intelligence official, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, said that it had been a "willful decision" by the "West" to back the establishment of "a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria" in order to bring pressure on the Syrian government, and then went on to confirm that the recently declassified 2012 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report on the rise of ISIS in Syria, had explicitly warned of the possibility of "an Islamic State" being declared "through a union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria," there was almost silence in the mainstream media.

No one wanted to touch the "live wire" of possible U.S. collusion with Caliphate forces. But it was clear enough what the American General was saying: the jihadification of the Syrian conflict had been a "willful" policy decision, and that since Al Qaeda and the ISIS embryo were the only movements capable of establishing such a Caliphate across Syria and Iraq, then it plainly followed that the U.S. administration, and its allies, tacitly accepted this outcome, in the interests of weakening, or of overthrowing, the Syrian state.