Syria: Will the United States Try to Stop Israeli Militarism in the Middle East?
Photograph Source: Shark1989z – CC BY-SA 4.0
For the past several decades, the United States and Israel have tried to isolate Syria in the Middle East. Only U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, after the October War in 1973, tried and succeeded in bringing Syria into the step-by-step peace process negotiations with Israel. Since then, however, U.S. efforts to negotiate a peace such as the Reagan plan in 1982 or the unsuccessful efforts to arrange an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon have ignored any role for Syria. Currently, U.S. tolerance of Israeli military power against Syria complicates the task of reducing the violence and allowing the Syrian rebels to have the time and space to establish a stable government in Damascus.
For most of its history, Syrian authority has been marked by instability due to authoritarian leadership and a diverse population. The fragmented nature of Syrian society; the absence of a strong national identity; and the debilitating conflict with Israel have contributed to weak governance. Any Syrian government, particularly the current one that tries to take hold after 14 years of confrontation, will face a difficult geopolitical environment that limits policy options; inhibits risk-taking; and compromises central authority. The various ethnic divisions, even among the majority Sunni Moslems, will make it difficult to achieve political and economic cohesion.
One hundred years ago, the wife of the British consul described inter-communal relations in a way that still fits: “They hate one another. The Sunnis excommunicate the Shias, and both hate the Druze; all detest the Alawites; the Maronites do not love anybody but themselves are duly abhorred by all; the Greek Orthodox abominate the Greek Catholics and the Latins; and all despise the Jews.” The Alawites. who have politically dominated the country in recent times, were singled out for persecution in the past by the Sunni majority, Most of the population in Syria is Moslem, but 20 percent of the Moslems belong to various schismatic sects.
Today, Syria is in predictable chaos, and the presence of numerous foreign powers adds to the conflict. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have made it particularly difficult for the new regime by launching hundreds of air strikes against Syria, and seizing territory beyond the Golan Heights that provided a sightline to Damascus. Former Israeli Air Force officers commented on social media that these attacks were carried out as part of an operation based on plans that were drawn up years ago.
Turkey has backed various Syrian rebel groups along the Syrian-Turkish border, and plans to continue the fight against Syrian Kurds based in northeastern Syria, where the Kurds have support from nearly 1,000 U.S. military personnel. Among the foreign powers in Syria, Turkey has the greatest access and influence with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the fight against former president Bahshar al-Assad.
There are several favorable signs that point to opportunities for HTS. The Russians appear to be preparing to withdraw forces from some of its bases in Syria. Unfortunately, it is likely that Ukraine will pay the price for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s humiliation in Syria. Moscow’s setback in Syria may make it harder to get Russia to enter negotiations with Ukraine to end a war that is reaching the three-year mark.
Iran’s initial reluctance to get engaged in any effort to save the Assad regime or to threaten the new Syrian transition government also points to a possible opportunity for HTS. Iran has withdrawn its Quds forces that consisted mainly of refugees from Pakistan and Afghanistan who had fled to Iran. Syria had been the only state in Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” to weaken Israel. Iran’s ability to arm Hezbollah forces in Lebanon will become far more difficult.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; the U.S. mainstream media; and Biden’s national security team are jointly assigning credit to the United States and Israel for allowing the Syrian rebels to swiftly take over the government. In actual fact, if there is one foreign power that deserves the credit for the rebel takeover, it would be the courageous fighters from Ukraine who have fought the Russian army to a standstill and made it impossible for Russia to provide necessary support to former Syrian President al-Assad. Iran’s preoccupation with Israeli military power and the defeat suffered by Hezbollah prevented any support role for Assad.
Israel can be counted on to make every effort to destabilize the transition government in Syria, and only the United States could threaten to cut off military aid to Israel that could bring a stop to Israeli air strikes. It seems unlikely that either the Biden administration or the incoming Trump mob will consider doing so. Even worse, the Netanyahu government, which seems to favor protracted fighting everywhere, could decide to use its air power in the wake of two successful raids against Iran in April and October 2024, to try to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.
There are conflicting signals coming from the Biden administration. On the one hand, the United States has entered discussions with officials from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the wake of its overthrow of the Assad government. The United States considers HTS a terrorist organization, so the Biden administration’s willingness to engage in discussions is a healthy sign. But the Biden administration is still deploying air power in Syria against Islamic State militants. Nor has Biden ever indicated a willingness to put a stop to the obscene militancy of Israel against its Arab neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. The United States would benefit from the emergence of a stable government in Damascus that will not resort to terrorism at home or abroad. Over the long run, this could lead to a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East.
It is difficult to imagine that a Trump administration will apply any pressure against the Netanyahu government, and it is particularly threatening that both the Netanyahu national security team and the incoming Trump team support the notion of military force against Iran.
Indeed, Trump and his national security appointees have threatened to walk away from the Syrian situation, which Trump wanted to do in his first term.
The military engagement of U.S., Israeli, and Turkish forces will make it difficult for the application of international diplomacy that could ameliorate the current situation in Syria But if the United States were willing to lead an international coalition made up of European states, Japan, and Australia, it is possible that a stable interim government could be created in Syria. But if Trump decides to enforce a rigid “American First” policy and refuses to engage in an international effort to end the violence, then the Syrian situation will worsen. If so, as Garrison Keillor used to say, “things will get worse before they get worse.”
The Fall of the Keystone in the Axis of Resistance
For most of the time since its 1946 independence from France, Syria has resisted all attempts to make it a vassal state. It has paid dearly, as a target of subversion, war, occupation and the most onerous economic sanctions in the world, for its anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, its support for resistance to the occupation of Palestine and its participation in the Axis of Resistance, consisting of the Palestinian resistance groups, Hezbollah, Syria, the Iraqi resistance, Iran, and Yemen (Ansarallah), as well as allied countries and movements in the Arab, Muslim and anti-imperialist world. In this axis, Syria has been a keystone, both geographically and strategically. Removal of this keystone will mean a withering and weakening of the axis to the east and west of Syria, most dramatically in the case of Hezbollah, which loses its most essential lifeline for supplies and support, chiefly from Iran. And it is also why this loss becomes a life preserver thrown to an otherwise floundering state of Israel.
Until November 26, 2024, Israel was failing in almost every way. Even after enduring more than a year of genocide against the civilian population of Gaza, Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza remained as effective a force as ever, despite its reliance on weapons made in its own underground workshops from recycled and captured Israeli ordnance and other materials. In fact, the genocide assured a constant flow of volunteers to its doors, a supply of materials for its workshops, and a network of eyes and ears throughout Gaza.
The result was a guerrilla war of attrition for which the Israeli military, built and structured to deliver rapid, overwhelming blows to destroy its adversaries, was not prepared, nor to which it adapted. Losses were not huge, but they were more than Israel had previously suffered, and it seemed without end, including both soldiers and major ground equipment, such as tanks, armored personnel carriers and lightly armored bulldozers. Furthermore, Israel was simultaneously engaged in a second protracted armed conflict with a well-armed, well-trained and battled-hardened (in Syria) Hezbollah force in Lebanon, which had driven out the Jewish settler population in the north of Israel and had struck numerous military and intelligence gathering targets in the same area and beyond, with considerable effect.
In the meantime, Yemeni Ansarallah “Houthi” forces interdicted shipping from Asia through the Red Sea to the Israeli port of Eilat, and attacked the port with missiles, forcing it to close, and the ships to go around Africa and back through the Mediterranean, restricting and delaying the supply of goods and spare parts and making them more costly – or making them unprofitable to ship at all.
Much of the rest of the world also lost its taste for trade with Israel due to the stigma of its genocide in Gaza. The relatively important tourist industry dried up, as did investment. Even the arms industry slackened. A blank check from the US allowed Israel to keep its citizens supplied with paychecks and with sufficient products and services to buy, but at least 48,000 businesses closed, including agriculture in the north and in the Gaza “envelope”.
The toll on Israel was the greatest and longest in its history of warfare. Israel keeps most of its casualty figures hidden, but it admits to more than 27,000 removed from combat due to wounds suffered. Including deaths on all fronts, the casualty total is, therefore, necessarily above 30,000, almost all military, while Israel’s targets in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are overwhelmingly civilian and more than half women and children. The Israeli military has complained that it is 20% short of the number of combat troops needed, and increasing numbers of exhausted reservists are refusing to serve. Although Gaza has lost an estimated 10% of its population to genocide, Israel has lost a similar proportion to emigration since October 8, 2023.
This was the state of Israel on November 25, 2024. Would Israel still exist after another year of this? There was reason to doubt its stamina. But the following day a truce was declared with Lebanon. There is no doubt that both Hezbollah and the Israeli military were exhausted and heavily damaged. The truce was not directly with Hezbollah but rather with the Lebanese government, because Hezbollah, in addition to its role as a defender against its aggressive neighbor to the south, participates in what is in practice a loosely consensus government, and it wants to be seen as respecting the will of all the parties.
Initially, the truce only stanched the blood on both sides of the border, and allowed both sides to halt their losses. Unfortunately, its true purpose had been determined months and even years earlier, by Turkiye, the US, Israel and their mercenary and mostly takfiri proxies in Syria. It was to make way for resumption of the war against the Syrian government, which started in 2011 but had been largely on hold since 2020. As we know now, the takfiri mercenaries, backed by Turkiye, US/NATO and Israel and furnished with the latest electronic and drone technology, quickly overwhelmed the Syrian forces, which had been weakened by years of debilitating economic sanctions and the flight of largely economic refugees, such that only half of its original population of 23 million remained. There are some reports that the operation was planned for the spring of 2025 but had been moved forward because of the losses being suffered by Israel, both economically and on the battlefield, and its internal political turmoil, as well as abandonment by a significant proportion of Zionist supporters, both through departure from Israel and from the international Jewish community.
Each of the participants in the plan had its own objectives, which are now coming to fruition in greater or lesser measure. For the takfiri forces, subsidized, trained and armed by Turkiye, the CIA, the Pentagon, and to a lesser extent Ukrainian military advisors, the Israeli military, Mossad, and radical Islamist groups in the Arabian and other countries, the objective was to conquer Syria and create a regime based on a radical and racist version of Islam shunned by most of the Muslim world. They had been recruited from at least 82 countries around the world, with the largest number from central Asia and the Arab world, including Syria, where they and their families formed a radical militant minority of 5-10% of the Syrian population allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda and its affiliates and offshoots, such as ISIS/ISIL, that had been attempting for decades to establish a regime in Damascus that would enforce its Draconian laws on the rest of the population. In the areas of Syria that they had captured off and on since 2011, they showed what such rule might be like, by slaughtering and enslaving much of the non-Muslim, non-Sunni and more secularized Muslim population. Some of that has recommenced in the newly “liberated” territory during the last two weeks, despite attempts in the Western media to make them appear more tolerant. It remains to be seen how useful their sponsors will consider them to be now that their main role has been completed.
In the case of Turkiye, one of the major sponsors, the goals are to resettle its 3.5 million Syrian refugee population back in Syria, to capture the northern portion of Syrian territory for itself, and to reward the Turkmen and Uyghur fighters, which it recruited from central Asia, with land inside Syria, displacing the existing population with one loyal to Turkiye. In addition, Turkiye seeks to crush and displace the Syrian Kurdish population along the northern and northeastern Syrian frontier, which it considers to be terrorists in league with Turkiye’s own suppressed Kurdish population. Turkiye already is calling Aleppo its 82nd province and taking military action against the Syrian Kurds, especially in the western Kurdish communities.
Syria’s Kurdish population is itself a complex participant in the fighting. Although it has maintained a largely autonomous enclave in the northeast portion of Syria under the protection of US occupying forces, it has had nonbelligerent relations with the Assad government, which asked the Kurds to help defend Syria in the early years, and on at least one occasion offered to defend them against Turkish and takfiri forces that were invading Kurdish areas. The aim of the US sponsors of the Kurds, on the other hand, was to deny Syria sovereignty over its petroleum fields and wheat production area, in order to destroy the economy and ultimately replace the government with a compliant puppet regime. In their otherwise desperate situation, the Kurds could hardly turn away the US offer of support. The US has tried to restrain the Kurds from attacks against Turkiye, a NATO ally, but not entirely successfully, and the Kurdish leaders are drawn more from the recent immigrants/refugees from Turkiye rather than the more established population, which had stronger ties to the Assad government. Unfortunately for the Kurds, the US government now has somewhat less reason to support them after the fall of the Assad government, since that was the main reason was for their backing. Nevertheless, the larger neighboring Kurdish community in Iraq is a strong ally of the US and NATO, which may be reason enough for the US to continue support. In addition, the US may consider the Syrian Kurds to be a useful tool in restraining Turkiye’s obvious regional ambitions under Erdogan.
There is no doubt that Israel and its US patron gained the most from the fall of Syria, which had been an objective for many decades, and which was a very high priority for Israel, as described at the beginning of this piece. It arguably rescued Israel from total collapse. Besides removing the major remaining frontline belligerent state with Israel, the loss of Syria severed the supply line between Iran and Iraq on the east from Lebanon and the Mediterranean on the west. This means that troops and supplies can no longer easily pass from Iran to Hezbollah. Although Hezbollah retains much of its still unused formidable capability for the time being, it is likely to degrade over time, enabling Israel to reinstate the security of its border with Lebanon and making it safe for the refugees from the northern settlements, currently living in temporary housing, mostly in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to return to their homes, as soon as they are repaired and rebuilt.
The takfiri seizure of Syria has also enabled Israel to destroy most of Syria’s stored weaponry and munitions in a massive aerial bombing campaign, using the vast quantity of bunker-buster and other bombs and missiles supplied by the US during the last 14 months. The Syrian stores are not only a supply that Hezbollah might have been able to use, but also one that the unpredictable takfiris might eventually decide to use against Israeli forces, should they be so inclined. It has also been an opportunity for Israel to capture additional territory, including the “disputed” Lebanese Shebaa farms region along the border of Lebanon, as well as much of the hitherto unoccupied portion of the Golan Heights, with strategic Mt. Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh), the highest peak in the region, that has remained under Syrian control until now.
From Israel’s point of view, the disappearance of a very strategic member of the Axis of Resistance and the weakening of Hezbollah also means that Israel regains control of its northern border and will not have to devote as many troops to its defense. This in turn means that the refugee Israeli population that had to abandon its homes along the frontier can now return, although many of them will have to be repaired or rebuilt.
These developments are also likely to reduce or stop the flight from Israel, and perhaps restore confidence in Israel’s leadership and its aims. Foremost among these is the depopulation of the Gaza Strip, using some of the military forces released from the northern frontier, and its repopulation with Israeli settlers. Although Israel’s genocidal policies have alienated much of the world, as well as a growing portion of the Jewish diaspora, Israel retains a hardcore Zionist faithful who encourage and approve of its actions, and its network of sayanim and influencers in the US and other societies and governments, coordinated by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, continues to be enormously effective in delivering to Israel whatever it may need to accomplish its goals, regardless of the views of the electorate in these countries, which are in any case heavily influenced by pro-Zionist media and censorship.
There is, finally, yet another potential benefit to Israel in the not-so-distant future. In 1967, General Moshe Dayan proclaimed at the end of the June war that Israel had achieved all of its [immediate] territorial aims – except in Lebanon. This objective, and especially southern Lebanon, had been a coveted Zionist territory since before the founding of Israel in 1948, not least because of its access to the Litani river, the largest in the eastern Mediterranean. At least four times since then, Israel has invaded the region, emptying it of most of its population of more than a million inhabitants. Each time, the resistance in Lebanon eventually repelled and defeated the incursion. With the fall of Syria, however, and the probable reduction of strength of Hezbollah, this objective now becomes more realistic and more likely in the coming years.
For the United States, the fall of Syria means a major realignment of power in West Asia, a highly important part of the globe, both strategically and for its energy production. It empowers Turkiye, Israel and other US allies in the region. It disempowers Russia, Hezbollah and Iran, and it opens the possibility of assuring that the Gulf monarchies remain in its stable, while discouraging resistance. It also potentially allows the US to reduce its forces in the region and to send them to East Asia, where it has been postponing its planned confrontation with China. For Yemen and the Ansarallah movement, little changes immediately. Its partnership with Iran will undoubtedly remain, but over time its support of the Palestinian resistance may be affected if and when that resistance weakens.
The loss of Syria is therefore a major victory for Zionism and imperialism in West Asia, and a major defeat for the Axis of Resistance and the independence, self-determination and sovereignty of nation states, both in the region and potentially across the globe.
From Relative “Peace” to Chaos
The First Phase of a New War Returns to Syria
Liberals and their Western allies, among the social-imperialist left in the U.S. and Europe, are celebrating the end of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria after the stunning sweep across the country by so-called “rebels” led by the Al-Qaeda offshoot, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Their celebratory mood is informed by a tragic misunderstanding of what appears to be more of a coup d’etat in Syria than a military defeat. This was a coup orchestrated to replace the Syrian government with this coalition of Jihadists, which included the Turkish-supported Syrian National Army (SNA) and a coterie of depoliticized religious and gangster elements from the country’s Southeast. Instead of a new era of peace, stability and prosperity for the Syrian people, now that the “dictator” is gone, the opposite will be true. Just ask the people of Libya who were also “liberated” by NATO and Western-backed forces.
This is not to suggest that the events that unfolded since the HTS captured the city of Aleppo during this new phase of the war on Syria can be completely explained by the machinations of external forces. We are very much aware of the complex internal politics of Syria and the contradictory and outright reactionary, politics of the Syrian state at different points, such as the invasion of Beirut and persecution of leftists in Syria and Lebanon.
However, we must also remember that this set of events in Syria was sparked by the clumsy and predictable interventions of the U.S. to foment a new front through the Western media-created “Arab Spring.” The real character of the “Arab Spring” was revealed when it became clear that many of the activists were embracing, as a model of progress, the historically moribund forms of liberal capitalist democracy.
It must be noted that pro-democracy agitation and rebellion within Syria against the corruption of Ba’athism – the right-wing movement, constructed to counter authentic leftism in the Arab world – created conditions in which organized left resistance was making progress in challenging Assad’s rule. And despite calls from his more aggressive advisors and local political authorities to crack down in the style of his father, Assad actually started to provide some limited political space for opposition forces and the beginnings of a dialog on much needed reforms.
Unfortunately, the potential of the moment to expand more democratic space and alter the correlations of power inside the country was destroyed when the “revolutionary” romantics, the Syrian petit-bourgeoisie opposition, guided by idealistic and subjectivist notions of how revolution is made, decided to accelerate the historical process and support a premature and, ultimately, disastrous call to move from non-violent opposition to armed struggle against the state. Only the most naive or dishonest actors will argue that the abandonment of the political struggle for democratic reform in favor of a U.S-sponsored armed revolt did not play right into the subversive plans of the U.S. and Israel to, at minimum, weaken the Syrian state and, ultimately effect regime change. Despite the confusion and contradictions marking what has unfolded over the past few days in Syria, he bloody and destructive goal is clear: war has been imposed on the people of Syria. This war began a long time ago, as U.S. and Gulf State intelligence agencies armed and trained various elements within Syrian society, including militant Islamicists, to foment sectarian violence. Consequently, the forces that received the lion’s share of the external military support were groups such as the Al-Nusra Front (connected to al-Qaeda) in the Western part of the country, ISIS in the East, with the democratic and more moderate elements of the opposition groups being marginalized. But this was all according to plan. After all, Obama, in initiating the war on Syria, argued that the opposition, “made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth,” could not take on Assad alone. And, per the revelations from Obama’s Director of Intelligence General Michael Flynn, there was a willful decision to enhance the capabilities of various brutal Islamic forces in Syria.
The objective fact that HTS is essentially the rebranded al-Nusra front is one of those unpleasant realities that the anti-anti-imperialist “left” celebrating the fall of Assad tries to either skip over. It’s just as insidious as how these same unprincipled and performative “leftists” continue to whitewash the literal Nazi and extreme right-wing forces that U.S. intelligence agencies engineered into to power in Ukraine in 2014, who, in turn,i mmediately launched a genocidal attack on their own Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens.
The Syrian “civil war” was frozen by an agreement negotiated by the Russians in 2020 that allowed for the oppositional forces to retreat into the Iblid province in Northwest Syria and live in relative peace with the Syrian army. But what happened instead was the rearming of the opposition to be used at the moment most propitious to advance the interests of their paymasters.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, stated that the jihadist offensive in Syria was coordinated by the US and Israel. According to the diplomat, it is no coincidence that these jihadists attacked northern Syria right after Israel struck a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah.
Yet, “leftists” celebrating in the West, do not believe this reality and instead dismiss this analysis as a construction by the “campists” and the mindless Assadists. They refuse to recognize that the Jihadist “rebels” were outfitted with shiny new weapons and equipment to attack at the moment when the Russians are focused on Ukraine, and when Hezbollah is in need of weapons resupply across Syria from Iran. For these “leftists,” the success of the Jihadists only reflects the brilliance of the leadership or, as it were, the miracle of their new heroes in HTS.
The Western White Left Continues to Play the Role of Unwanted Junior Partners to U.S. Imperialism
Operating within the liberal idealist theoretical framework and with an unconscious propensity toward Eurocentrism, large sectors of the white left are completely unable to really grasp the “national question.” They certainly lack the ideological fitness to grasp Stalin’s materialist assertion that anti-colonialist, national liberation movements, even bourgeois ones, shifted the global balance of power away from Western capitalism. This ideological, and even cognitive, affliction renders most of the white left unable to ask the very simple question as to why, from Bolivia to Nicaragua, Peru, Ethiopia, Iran, and on to Ukraine, they always end up holding the same positions as U.S. and Western imperialism. This same white left is also unable to understand and, therefore, articulate the obvious when it comes to how members of their families, friends and colleagues can rationalize support for the genocide in Gaza: it is the entrenched but invisiblized inculcation of white supremacist ideology that explains how Palestinians can be “othered” into oblivion, which is to say that Palestinians just do not really count as human beings.
The fascists in Israel will continue their devastating genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank, and the white “left” will find ways to justify supporting the Democratic party which has been enabling the genocide for over a year. This “left” cries “Palestine must be free,” cheers the destruction of the only “Arab” state that has consistently stood with the Palestinians, but fall silent as Israeli tanks approach Damascus.
Reports are emerging that the so-called glorious “liberators” are rounding up and murdering Syrian soldiers and officials. This is just the beginning. The blood of Syrians will flow along the Jordan River and the blood of Palestinians will continue to flow in tandem with the blood of Russians and Ukrainians. And many around the world will continue to suffer from the source of these red rivers: the axis of imperialism formed by criminals from Western colonial nations.
These myopic celebrations will continue in the U.S. and throughout the West among the so-called left every time another “enemy” of the U.S. falls – until the tanks and “liberators” show up on their own streets painted in red, white, and blue.
The Syrian Fiasco
About 17 years ago the insufferable former general, Wesley Clark, reported on a talk he once had in the Pentagon:
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Well, it took several years longer but now six of the seven countries mentioned in that famous memo have been thrown into utter chaos, where they stumble around the Middle East and North Africa as failed states and well-springs of barbarism, crime, economic collapse and terrorism. And the ludicrous thing is that every one of these calamities were the result of intentional policy on the banks of the Potomac.
So if any more proof is needed that Imperial Washington inhabits a loony bin this week’s demise of the sixth of these target states, Syria, is surely just that. It will now become another warlord-dominated no man’s land caught in the cross-hairs of maneuver by its neighbors – Turkey, Iran, Israel, Russia and, everywhere and always, the United States.
Still, perhaps the unfolding madness now overtaking the corpus of Syria will finally demonstrate that Empire First has been a catastrophe which must be abandoned once and for all. To layout the framework for that long overdue pivot back to an America First policy, we reach back to a picture we published five years ago. This was during his first time at bat, when the Donald made a tepid effort to bring home a few hundred troops and wind down Washington’s multi-front interventions and meddling in a tiny land with 20 million people, a GDP of just $40 billion, a per capita income of barely $2,000, no significant natural resources or industrial capacity and no capability to project any military power whatsoever beyond its own borders.
In short, there was not a single attribute of this troubled corner of the Levant that had any bearing on the America’s homeland security whatsoever. Still, the Donald got thoroughly rebuked by the UniParty blob on Capitol Hill for implicitly recognizing the obvious. As we said at the time (2019):
By a vote of 354-60 yesterday the U.S. House of Representative proved that Imperial Washington is addicted to war, and that the level of ignorance, bellicosity and mendacity among the people’s representative has reach appalling heights.
Having never voted for Washington’s pointless, illegal and destructive fomenting of Syria’s calamitous civil war in the first place, as the constitution requires, the bipartisan congressional mob actually had the gall to vote to keep US forces in the middle of a centuries old Kurd/Turk conflict that has zero implications for the security and safety of the American homeland. And we mean that as in zero, nichts, nada and nugatory.
The pretext, of course, is that the ISIS caliphate will come roaring back to life absent the armed resistance of the Kurdish-SDF forces positioned in Syria’s northeast quadrant; and that with these bombed-out, impoverished, no-count towns, villages, farms and dusty plains back under the black flag of ISIS, next up will be IEDs in the New York City subways.
That’s just blatant claptrap. If Syria becomes whole again, the Islamic State doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in the hot place of reviving. And letting Syria become whole again was exactly the purpose and consequence of Trump’s sensible decision to remove American forces from the Syria/Turkey border.
Well, the fools in the Biden national security apparatus were not about to let Syria become whole again. Instead, they kept up the pressure on the Assad government via intensified economic sanctions, continued US military occupation of Syria’s oil and wheat producing provinces in the east and military aid to a motley array of so-called rebel forces – including the Kurdish SDF militias which occupy a strip along the northern border and are the mortal enemy of, well, Washington’s NATO partner, Turkey.
In any event, the aforementioned picture was the smoke cloud below, which was the handiwork of a pair of American F-15s. These uninvited interlopers in Syria’s purportedly sovereign air space had bombed a large ammo storage dump US forces had left behind, after they had hastily vacated SDF-held territory near Kobani on the Syria/Turkey border.
The purpose, as we explained at the time, was to insure that this ammo did not end up in hostile hands. That is to say, the hands of the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). That pack of brutes, however, had earlier been called the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which had been stood up by the CIA as part of Washington’s idiotic quest to overthrow Assad after the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.
Nor was there any doubt about the FSA’s Washington sponsor. In fact, it should have been been called the John McCain Memorial Brigade – since under his legislative mandate it had been brought, trained, paid-for and stood-up by the CIA.
So to clarify the story, Trump was bombing a US arms depot so that it would not fall into the hands of the “hostile forces” that Senator McCain and the CIA had created! And that was happening even as the Donald was being rebuked by the UniParty warmongers on Capitol Hill for trying to get a small detachment of US servicemen out of harms’ way in a country that had zero implications for national security!
Now five years later during last week’s contretemps, these “hostile forces” (the SNA) had joined forces with the remnants of al Qaeda (nee the Nusra Front), which lately had rechristened itself for the third time under the name of HTF ( Hayat Tahrir al-Sham). Together, they managed to overthrow a regime in Damascus that had never posed any threat whatsoever to America’s homeland security.
Nevertheless, back in 2019 the situation had been far different. These SNA nee McCain Brigade brigands had attacked Washington’s Kurdish allies in the aforementioned Syrian Defense Forces (SDF), which had also been funded by Washington through a military channel.
Moreover, the SNA all along had consisted of buccaneers, thugs, criminals, mercenaries, jihadist and plain old job-seekers that were wearing the same uniforms mainly owing to Washington’s billions of blood money; and who had ended up mercenaries for pay mainly because Washington’s demented policy of Regime Change in Damascus had destroyed the Syrian civilian economy and turned it into a poison pit of war-lordism. That is, the SNA had replaced the civilian economy as a place for desperate men to find a paycheck.
Stated differently, without Washington’s endless payroll and weapons supply, the McCain Brigade and its heirs and assigns (SNA) would not have existed in 2019 or 2024. And they would not have been attacking and executing soldiers of Washington’s Kurdish SDF back then, nor marauding the country-side of a completely failed state today.
To be sure, at the time the War Party and its media megaphones were revising history so fast as to make even Uncle Joe Stalin blush with envy. The New York Times, as usual, gave the McCain Brigades an instant do-over, turning them into the darkest of bad guys, which in this instance they likely were – notwithstanding that John McCain and his Deep State network had lavished billions for the purpose of attacking the legitimate government in Damascus under the guise of fighting ISIS.
…Grandly misnamed the Syrian National Army, this coalition of Turkish-backed militias is in fact largely composed of the dregs of the eight-year-old conflict’s failed rebel movement… Early in the war the military and the C.I.A. sought to train and equip moderate, trustworthy rebels to fight the government and the Islamic State… A few of those now fighting in the northeast took part in those failed programs, but most were rejected as too extreme or too criminal.
In any event, just a few weeks earlier the Syrian Interim Government had come together bringing 41 different factions under the newly christened SNA or “Syrian National Army”. So doing, they elected Abdurrahman Mustafa as president and Salim Idriss as defense minister.
These good folks are pictured below at the launch of Senator McCain’s Free Syrian Army (FSA) back in 2013:
For want of doubt, Salim Idriss made the ambitions of the new Syrian Interim Government clear when during an announcement press conference, he stated one of its main purposes was to fight the Washington sponsored SDF or militia of the Kurdish PYD/PKK:
“We will fight all terrorist organizations, especially the PYD/PKK terrorist organization.”
That’s right. Idriss had made a career shaking the Washington money and sponsorship tree and had never hidden his bitter anti-Kurd agenda. Yet suddenly, the knuckleheads inside the beltway got amnesia and were shocked, shocked that he was leading the attack against Washington’s Kurdish/SDF.
In other words, Washington had sown the seeds of sectarian mayhem in Syria and was now arbitrarily shedding crocodile tears for one of the victims of its madness. Yet a Turkey-friendly analysis of this newly unified opposition (i.e. the forces attacking the Kurds) at the time showed that these factions have been in the Syrian civil war business at all points on the compass – nourished mainly by money, material and weapons supplied by Washington.
Accordingly, 11 of these factions 41 factions had fought battles against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) or the old Al-Nusra Front nee al Qaeda. But to fast forward to today, they are now in a tacit alliance with HTS, which led the overthrow of Assad last week.
Another 27 of the 41 factions were previously engaged in fighting DAESH/ISIS; 30 factions had fought the Assad regime; and 31 fought the YPG/SDF!
That’s right. The largest share of the 41 factions that came together in 2019 and which are now operating under the banner of the Syrian National Army (SNA) had been fighting the Washington-armed Kurds – along with practically everyone else.
Moreover, at least 21 of the factions amalgamated into the Syrian National Army were previously funded and armed by the Washington.
But here’s the thing: Just 3 of them had received help via the Pentagon’s program to combat DAESH/ISIS. By contrast, 18 of these factions had been supplied by the CIA via the so-called MOM Operations Room in Turkey.
The latter was a joint intelligence operation of the ‘Friends of Syria’. It was organized for the explicit purpose of supporting the armed opposition to Assad and the then legitimate government in Damascus. Fourteen factions of the 28 were also recipients of Washington-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles, which are heavy-duty lethal and costly to boot.
Yet at the time of the Donald’s Congressional rebuke in 2019, the NYT wanted us to believe that the 70,000-90,000 armed ruffians that had been aligned under the Syrian National Army were simply outcasts and misfits who came together spontaneously and that Washington had nothing to do with it!
Indeed, the facts on the ground were so damn obvious that it was clear the Imperial City and its media megaphones have been reduced to blithering stupidity and mendacious humbug, staring with the flagrant contradictions and lies that has flowed from the lips of every War Party factotum and bag-carrier that filled the airways and cyberspace when the Donald unsuccessfully tried to pull the plug on American ground forces in Syria.
To wit, the risible claim that Trump’s action was a signal to the rag-tag remnant of ISIS to reconquer the territory in north and eastern Syria from which they had recently been routed. But for crying out loud, the only reason the caliphate briefly implanted itself in the god-forsaken region of eastern Syria was that Washington and the petro-states had prevented the Syrian government and its allies from policing and protecting its own territory; and from safeguarding Syria’s meager oil fields in the northeast, which for a brief period of time ISIS looted in order to fund its pretensions to being a state with an army.
But as this map below from the end of September 2019 shows, the caliphate was long gone. And the remnants of the affiliated jihadi forces in Idlib (purple area) would likely rendezvous with their 13 virgins soon – once Trump had greenlighted the Syrian government and its Russian/Iranian allies to finish them off.
Equally, importantly, all the handwringing about the Kurds was vastly exaggerated. They had made their deal with Assad. In completing the re-conquest and unification of his own country, he had every reason to abide by the arrangement which has already re-established Syrian military control in strategic towns on the Turkish border.
Moreover, for reasons amplified further below, Turkey’s goal was the establishment of a “safe zone” signified by the white hash marks over the then Kurdish controlled (blue area) part of Syria. The purpose was to move the US-armed YPG/SDF 20 miles inland from its border – given the fact that rightly or wrongly Erdogan considers Kurdish separatism and armed insurrection an existential threat to the Turkish state.
In any event, within days the YPG/SDF had moved out of the safe zone, thereby permitting Turkey to call off the attack permanently, and re-purposing the corridor into a staging and processing area for the repatriation of some 3.6 million Syrian who have fled to refugee camps in Turkey.
In fact, deals made behind the scenes had already paved the way for a sustainable pacification of Syria for the first time since Washington and its allies mugged the Syrian state during the 2011 Arab Spring:
- During the summer of 2019 Trump announced his intention to withdraw US troops from all of Syria, starting with Rojava on the express condition of cutting the line of communication between Iran and Lebanon.
- Turkey entered into this commitment in exchange for a military occupation of the Syrian border strip from which YPG “terrorist” artillery could otherwise bombard it.
- Russia has indicated that it does not support the YPG/SDF armed state of Rojava and would accept Turkish intervention if the Christian population were allowed to return to its land – a condition to which Turkey has acquiesced.
- Syria has indicated that it would not repel a Turkish move into the safe zone if it could liberate an equivalent territory in the Idleb govern orate. Turkey had accepted this.
- Iran has indicated that, although it disapproved of Turkish intervention, it would intervene only for the benefit of the Shiites and was not interested in the fate of the incipient Kurdish state of Rojava.
And, yet, as we will see in my next piece, it all came apart under the Biden Administration for one simple reason: The Trump Derangement Syndrome afflicted Dems could not abide a deal that Trump had greenlighted and which his alleged doppelganger, Vlad Putin, had also embraced.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
Framing the Narrative in Post-Assad
Syria
Photograph Source: khamenei.ir – CC BY 4.0
Unlike many privileged kids around the globe, including those who had or have the luxury to be brought up calmly, and nourished physically and mentally in a playful and stress-free environment, I came of age witnessing the horrors of the Israeli occupation, reading deeply stressful, if not deeply traumatizing stories and books about the torture of Palestinian detainees in notorious Israeli jails. One of the books that affected me deeply during my adolescence years was With My Own Eyes by Felicia Langer. In the book, Langer documented with vivid details the methods the Israeli prison system devised to torture Palestinians. From the typical beating and breaking of bones to inserting boiled eggs into the rectums of detainees. All were documented by one of the most decorated human rights lawyers who was given some of the highest human rights and state awards in Germany (in her latter years).
Why now this piece of history? The stories of political detainees or those of any type of prisoners always touch a sensitive cord within a human. Even if a detainee was a murderer, the inhumane treatment and torture of a human creates a sense of revulsion, anguish, and a deep sense of insecurity. From the creative torture techniques of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel in Spain, where Muslims were put inside an iron bull with nostrils so when placed above fire, the smoke blows from the nostrils resembling a bellowing charging bull, to stories of maltreatment of inmates in the US prison system where torture and rape of inmates take place by other inmates under the patronage and support of the prison system itself, all creates that deep sense of revulsion and abhorrence. So one can sense the heightened sense of revulsion one feels when imagining the prison system of a brutal dictatorship such as the one that is no more in Syria. Or the ones that the CIA supported during its dirty wars in Latin and South America.
But were the torture techniques of the former Syrian regime a secret? Perhaps the efficacy of those techniques was will-document and understood, if not admired, by the US government who chose, in 2002, to send Maher Arar to Syria against his own will, for no other purpose but to be interrogated using “advanced” techniques that the US personnel could not perform. The shipping of Arar to Syria took place under the infamous Extraordinary Rendition program, which sent people the US detained (i.e., kidnapped) in the high seas to be interrogated at secret sites around the world, with the assumption that the interrogation would involve torture. The same Syrian government of Bashar Al-Assad, who inherited the torture techniques from his father’s reign, was heavily collaborating with the US on its so-called War on Terror in the early 2000s.
This background and much more is important to lay the ground for the concerted deep state media and its worldwide affiliates to focus the world’s attention after the fall of the Assad regime on those who were languishing in his prisons. The suffering of political detainees under the former Assad regime, and more broadly, the creative torture techniques of brutal Middle Eastern regimes such as that of Sisi in Egypt, were nothing new to many Middle Easterners, and to many “think-tank” type specialists of the West, such as Stewart Seldowitz who, in November 2023, threatened a fearful New York food vendor with sending him back to Egypt to have his nails plucked one by one.
But has the Western media and the governments’ run Middle Eastern media become sympathetic to the plight of political detainees inside the brutal regimes of the Middle East, including those under US proxy banana republics such as Mahmoud Abbas’s brutal Palestinian Authority?
Starting with CNN, which led the charge, along with Qatar’s professional money-soaked media empire such as Al-Jazeera, Al-Quds Al-Arabi (alquds.co.uk), and others who are within the Qatari money orbit, and, naturally, Arabic language American Saudi media conglomerates, the narrative setters post Syrian “liberation” focused on the plight of the detainees. Stories of exaggeration and fairytales flooded the media. Claims that tens of thousands were detained underground in the infamous Saydnaya prison started to surface, with CNN and Aljazeera broadcasting efforts to excavate the concrete floors to rescue alleged “tens of thousands” of detainees. Participating in the media foray were shadowy figures such as Mohammad Ghassan Aboud offering awards of tens of thousands of dollars to anyone who would provide codes to open the gates of those secret detention chambers (if there is a gate, one can bring a jackhammer to crack it open, unless it’s a nuclear-hardened several feet thick bunkers). The exaggerations frenzy and lies were easily detectable for those who understand both English and Arabic. One reporter claimed that Saydnaya prison was purely for political detainees and claiming that a banner on the prison stated that people can only enter the prison but never leave it, while another stated that the upper floors housed criminal of minor offenses and were there for short periods of time. An Aljazeera reporter (amongst many that mysteriously flooded Syria within a very short period) was asking one of the presumed liberated detainees about the Red ward of the prison (which is allegedly the most notorious in the prison). The detainee, to the disgruntlement of the reporter who was hoping for a different answer, answered “it is “upstairs”. The reporter was presumably expecting to hear that it was buried underground.
What matter is that the media blitz by the deep state outlets and the Qatari and Saudi media, which were instrumental in peddling a deluge of lies about the war in Syria (including the claim that the Syrian government attacked its own people with chemical weapons, which later turned out to be the work of the “revolutionaries”). The nonsurprise (to many who follow Middle Eastern conflicts closely), came several days later, on the 10th of December, when the Syrian Civil Defence issued a statement stating that after extensive search using dogs and other equipment, that they could not find any prisoners underground, and that the search was concluded! Part of the Syrian civil defence statement stated, “and the civil defence emphasizes that its special unit searched all sections and wards and facilities of the prison, and its basements, courtyards and external yards, using people that had full knowledge of the prison layout, and could not find any evidence indicating the presence of undiscovered secret underground wards.”
Of course, the conclusion of the civil defence teams was not the “right news” that the same outlets wanted to hear, nor to report. (Typically, such news shows up in the form of a lowkey tweet with equally lowkey media coverage.) This reminds me of the story of the incubators that was peddled by the Western media during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990; a story that was the work of public relations (i.e., deception) guns-for-hire firms. Once the lie is perpetrated and has the suitable and impactful outlets to propagate it, the efficacy is maximized. Later, when it is discovered and proven that it was a lie and the product of state-crafted deception, the media that reported the first lie would not there to give its rebuttal the same prominent coverage–Old rotten craft, but fully effective.
The deception continued unabated. AlHadath, a Saudi media channel, conducted a seemingly staged interview with a Syrian boy who is presented as disparately scouring the compounds of Saydnaya prison allegedly in search of his missing father. The interviewer asked the boy “how old are you?” The boy replied “10 years old”. Then the interviewer asked him “for how long you have not seen your father?” The boy answered “14 years.” The man next to the boy, his handler, immediately intervened to correct the boy that it was 10 years, not 14.
All this perfectly concerted media blitz, deception and lies, all seemingly deeply sympathetic with the plight of the former regime’s detainees, was happening while Israel was obliterating the entire armed forces of Syria. The Syrian navy, the Syrian air force, government research labs, all strategic assets, and much more were all obliterated by Israel’s intensive bombardment that, according to Israeli officials, was unprecedented in the history of the Zionist State. CNN chose to refer to this unprecedented attack on the assets of Syria using headlines such as “Israel bombed Syria”. Aljazeera on the other hand, equally decided to tone down the massive Israeli bombardment of Syria’s naval and air force assets, choosing headlines such as “because of these reasons, Israel moved in Syria after the fall of Assad” which were carefully crafted to dilute any sense of alarm at Isarel’s massive bombardment. BBC, a British-government bank-rolled media organization, decided that Israel is not part of the forces and countries that control part of Syrian territories. The Western media referred to Israel’s land grab and occupation of additional Syrian strategic territory as mere “capture”. “Occupation” is a term that is purely political deserving of Russian actions only.
To top it off, Israel occupied additional and extremely strategic chunks of the Syrian territory. Such occupation was not sufficient news to even solicit any denunciation from Al-Jolani (who chooses now to be called by his other real name Ahmed Al Sharaa), the new de-facto emir of Syria. (Emir is the “Islamic” Khilafat’s designation for someone of absolute and high authority, the equivalent of “emperor”). Al-Jolani was one of the most wanted terrorists by the US just a week ago. The same “head-chopper” of ISIS and its derivatives, has now been transformed into a stateman, with CNN, the US Deep state media outlet, granting him a major public relations boost with a far-reaching interview.
The US must have struck a deal with Al-Jolani. If Israel celebrated the downfall of the Assad regime and the removal of any military threat to its security by neighboring Syria, what would have justified the obliteration of the entire Syrian state’s military assets? In a recent statement, Al-Jolani made it clear that he has no conflict with Israel. That was the trigger that the US needed to start the transformation of Al-Jolani from the most wanted terrorist that he was few days ago, to the groomed stateman that “we can work with to advance peace in the region.” Incidentally, while “groomed” is used as a euphemism for changing one’s old habits or refining them, the literal meaning applies to Al-Jolani since he already dropped the “Islamic” white turban and has trimmed his thick beard, both of which were needed over the past 10 years to warrant his elevation to an Emir in the eyes of the multitudes of Central Asian dye-hard Saudi-style Wahabi-Salafi fanatics.
If CNN et al., are deeply concerned about the plight of political prisoners, they can request visits to the notorious Egyptian prison system, or to the Saudi prison system, especially the Ha’er prison facility outside Riyadh, where mere opinions, including objecting to the presence of erotic dancers in the midst of a Muslim conservative country, qualifies you to be deserving of its hospitality and long-term residency).
Since the US trained and funds the banana republic of Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, CNN should have no problem requesting visits to the notorious detention and torture facilities of Abbas, where a mere one week visit to those facilities is sufficient to create permanent mental damage.
When a person takes the stand in a court, the judge asks the person to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Choosing one or two is sufficient ground for deception and deceit. Deep state and state-craft deception has been put into high gear to create the narrative in post-Assad Syria, focusing on the plight of the Syrian detainees. All media outlets operating in Syria could have also documented the obliteration of the Syrian state military assets, a massive bombardment of the entire armed forces assets of an entire country that is arguably unprecedented in history.
We should only expect a heavier does of deception in the days and months to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment