Netanyahu First – The Real Reason For Washington’s Syrian Caper
This is part 2 in a series, read part 1 here.
Since Washington is now sacrificing American lives in the aid of HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) in Syria, it is timely to more fully trace its roots in what was previously known as the Nusra Front. That’s also back when its current leader and now Syria’s unelected president was known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who was a strict jihadist.
Needless to say, after his recent White House visit with the Donald, it can be well and truly said that al-Julani has come a long way. That is, from the time in 2013 when he had been sent to eastern Syria to foment an uprising against its legitimate government by his mentor and terrorist, the aforementioned (Part 1) al-Baghdadi.
Alas, al-Baghdadi was also one and the same bad guy that Trump 1.0 crowed about assassinating a few years back. In any event, the Donald’s new friend and his old enemy had been graduates together at what amounted to the massive prison-based training school for jihadists at Camp Bucca in Iraq.
The latter was dubbed as “America’s Jihadi University”. This 20,000-prisoner monstrosity had been set up by the clueless proconsuls that Bush the Younger had sent to Iraq after Saddam’s demise. As it happened, Washington’s emissaries soon needed a massive human storage facility for the fruits of their misbegotten de-bathification campaign.
Camp Bucca In Iraq
Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, Washington had soured on its Iraq liberation enterprise and was attempting to extricate itself from its failed multi-trillion misadventure. In conjunction with the Iraq wind-down, it undertook to substantially empty the above bulging prison in what became known as the “Great Prison Release of 2009.″ The latter involved releasing 5,700 high-security detainees from Bucca Prison and among these were Baghdadi and Julani.
While the former was soon organizing and leading the Sunni uprising in Mosul and Anbar province of Western Iraq, the Nusra Front was established as a separate entity in Syria by al-Julani. Initially, it was an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, but in April 2013 al-Baghdadi announced that the Nusra Front had merged with ISIS to form the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
However, al-Julani and the Nusra Front rejected this merger and went their separate way, taking on a role as an independent jihadist force based in western Syria with strongholds in Idlib and Aleppo. Thereafter, al-Julani’s Nusra Front spearheaded the 2015 conquest of this region under the banner of Jaish al-Fatah (the Army of Conquest). The latter was, in turn, described at the time by Foreign Policy magazine as a wonderful “synergy” of jihadist fanatics and lethal Western arms – most especially those supplied by Washington.
So why did the US provide what one analyst called a “cataract of weaponry” to Nusra Front, despite its clear terrorist origins in Iraq and brutal operations in western Syria?
Well, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report in August 2012, infamously written under the auspices of General Michael Flynn, let the cat out of the bag. Quite dramatically, in fact.
The Flynn report revealed that the Washington neocons and hegemonists had determined to support the establishment of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and western Iraq as part of the effort to depose President Bashar al-Assad and divide the country.
You can’t make this up. The fools in the Pentagon last weekend were actually marching US soldiers side-by-side along with the descendants of savage terrorists that Pentagon officials 12 years earlier had funded to overthrow a completely legitimate and stable government in Damascus.
And that’s not the half of it. The detailed DIA report said the US would be the creation of a radical religious mini-state, exactly of the sort later established by ISIS as its “caliphate.” It also forthrightly admitted that the so-called Syrian revolution seeking to topple Assad’s government was being driven by “Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, as indicated in Part 1, the seeds of this Salafist principality had been planted when the then ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had dispatched Julani to Syria in August 2011. Prominent Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada, who was embedded with Al-Qaeda fighters from Lebanon in Syria, met Julani in the central Syrian city of Homs at that time.
Mortada informed his readers that Julani was being hosted by the Farouq Brigades. The latter was a faction of Senator John McCain’s Free Syrian Army (FSA), which was a sectarian Salafist group that included fighters who had fought for Zarqawi’s brutal Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) after the US invasion.
That’s right. There is a straight line of connection between the Donald’s new friend in Damascus and one of the most demented, savage terrorists to arise in the Middle East in the wake of Washington’s mayhem in Iraq.
Stated differently, the current “liberators” of Syria, who are being supported by the US military as we learned last weekend, were legatees of the brutes who were flushed out of the woodwork by Washington’s foolish “Shock and Awe” campaign in Iraq way back in 2003.
In any event, after receiving his assignment from al-Baghdadi in 2011, Julani and his fighters entered the war against the Syrian government by carrying out multiple terror attacks. In Damascus, in December of the year, Julani sent suicide bombers to target the Syrian government’s General Security Directorate, killing 44, including civilians and security personnel. Two weeks later, in January 2012, Julani sent another suicide bomber to detonate explosives near a bus in the Midan district of Damascus, killing some 26 people.
These bloody doings—coincident with the establishment of the “Support Front for the People of the Levant,” or the Nusra Front—were revealed after a videotape was provided to journalist Mortada showing Julani and other masked men announcing the group’s existence and claiming responsibility for the brutal attacks on civilians. Thus, such is the lineage of the leader and group which purportedly “liberated” Syria from the clutches of the Assad family last year.
In any event, when the Raqqah-based epicenter of ISIL was demolished after 2017, the Nusra Front hung on, changing its name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in October 2017. This rebranding was part of an effort to distance itself from al-Qaeda and to restructure the group by merging with several other jihadist factions.
For several years HTS remained contained in its narrow Idlib territorial base, even as it was assaulted by constant attacks from the forces of Assad and his Russian allies in the area. In effect, the latter were doing god’s work, taking on the real enemies of civilization.
Nevertheless, al-Julani persevered, recently reinventing himself as Ahmed al-Sharaa – which is his real name. He now wears an even shorter beard than in the second picture below and sometimes even dons a tie, while claiming to be a “diversity friendly” pluralist friend of all Syrians – Christians, Alawites, Druze etc.
Of course, the latter three constitute the very infidel enemies of the Caliphate, who al-Julani had previously decreed were to be put to death on the ancient orders of the Prophet himself.
In short, Syria is now destined to become even a worse mess than Libya became after it was liberated by Hilary Clinton in 2011. As is evident from the above, you actually need a roster-sheet to even begin to grasp the madness now unfolding there, but the always astute Moon of Alabama has summarized the state of play as well as can be done.
And, again, the administration of the POTUS that ran against the Forever Wars and which last time around the white barn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ordered the troops (properly and belatedly) to be brought home.
It is now highly likely that the country will fall apart. Outside and inside actors will try to capture and/or control as many parts of the cadaver as each of them can.
Years of chaos and strife will follow from that.
Israel is grabbing another large amount of Syrian land. It has taken control of the Syrian city of Quneitra, along with the towns of Al-Qahtaniyah and Al-Hamidiyah in the Quneitra region. It has also advanced into the Syrian Mount Hermon and is now positioned just 30 kilometers from (and above) the Syrian capital.
It is also further demilitarizing Syria by bombing every Syrian military storage site within its reach. Air defense positions and heavy equipment are its primary targets. For years to come Syria, or whatever may evolve from it, will be completely defenseless against outside attacks.
Israel is, for now, the big winner in Syria. But with restless Jihadists now right on its border it remains to be seen for how long that will hold.
The U.S. is bombing the central desert of Syria. It claims to strike ISIS, but the real target is any local (Arab) resistance, which could prevent a connection between the U.S.-controlled east of Syria and the Israel-controlled south-west. There may well be plans to further build this connection into an Eretz Israel, a Zionist controlled state, “from the river to the sea.”
Turkey has had and has a big role in the attack on Syria. It is financing and controlling the ‘Syrian National Army’ (previously the Free Syrian Army), which it is mainly using to fight Kurdish separatists in Syria.
There are some 3 to 5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey which the wannabe-Sultan Erdogan wants, for domestic political reasons, to return to Syria. The evolving chaos will not permit that.
Turkey had nurtured and pushed the al-Qaeda derived Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to take Aleppo. It did not expect it to go any further. The fall of Syria is now becoming a problem for Turkey as the U.S. is taking control of it. Washington will try to use HTS for its own interests which are, said mildly, not necessary compatible with whatever Turkey may want to do.
A primary target for Turkey are the Kurdish insurgents within Turkey and their support from the Kurds in Syria. Organized as the Syrian Democratic Forces the Kurds are sponsored and controlled by the United States. The SDF are already fighting Erdogan’s SNA and any further Turkish intrusion into Syria will be confronted by them.
The SDF, supported by the U.S. occupation of east-Syria, is in control of the major oil, gas and wheat fields in the east of the country. Anyone who wants to rule in Damascus will need access to those resources to be able to finance the state.
Despite having a $10 million award on its head HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Golani is currently played up by western media as the unifying and tolerant new leader of Syria. But his HTS is itself a coalition of hard-line Jihadists from various countries. There is little left to loot in Syria and as soon as those resources run out the fighting within HTS will begin. Will al-Golani be able to control the sectarian urges of the comrades when these start to plunder the Shia and Christian shrines of Damascus?
During the last years, Russia was less invested in the Assad government than it seemed. It knew that Assad had become a mostly useless partner. The Russian Mediterranean base in Khmeimim in Latakia province is its springboard into Africa. There will be U.S. pressure on any new leadership in Syria to kick the Russians out. However any new leadership in Syria, if it is smart, will want to keep the Russians in. It is never bad to have an alternative choice should one eventually need one. Russia may well stay in Latakia for years to come.
With the fall of Syria Iran has lost the major link in its axis of resistance against Israel. Its forward defenses, provided by Hizbullah in Lebanon, are now in ruins.
Then again, the question recurs. What exactly was the point of wrecking another tiny, mostly land-locked country in the middle east with a population of just 24 million people, a GDP of only $21 billion, a per capita income of barely $1,000, no significant natural resources beyond a 65,000 barrel per day pittance of oil production, no significant steel or other industrial capacity, no tech sector, no capability to project any military power whatsoever beyond its own borders and a consumer sector so devastated by the Washington-instigated civil wars that total auto sales in 2024 were 155 units, which is less than one new car every two days in the entire country!
At the end of the day, not even Washington is stupid enough to waste $40 billion on that. What has really been going on, therefore, is that by the lights of the Empire Firsters Assad had to be removed because he had the wrong allies. The demonization about his tyranny and plunder was just a cover story for the real objective, which was undermining his Iranian ally.
As a minority Alawite, which is a branch of Shiite Islam, Assad had aligned with his Shiite kin in Tehran and permitted Syrian territory to be used by the latter to transport arms and materiale to Iran’s Hezbollah allies in southern Lebanon. In turn, that was fully within Syria’s sovereign rights—especially since Hezbollah played a leading role in the coalition government of Lebanon.
Still, destroying this Shiite nexus in Netanyahu’s behalf was the real reason for the relentless Washington war on Assad. And it explains why Washington spent $40 billion on its incessant embrace and financing of all of the unsavory flotsam and jetsam which percolated up from Syria’s devastating civil war.
Needless to say, there is no way that the homeland security of America was imperiled one little bit either by the Shiite-based Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance or the fact that one sovereign state member of that alliance (Syria) permitted its territory to used to transport weaponry and materiale. The only possible reason for Washington’s two decade folly in Syria, therefore, is the ludicrous Bibi/neocon proposition that Iran is an existential threat to the liberty and security of the American homeland – way over here 6,400 miles from Tehran.
That’s a sick joke, to say the least. Iran’s GDP of $435 billion is equal to just 1.5% or five days worth of US GDP. Likewise, its $8 billion military budget in 2024 was just 0.8% of the $1 trillion monster domiciled in the Pentagon.
Even more to the point, Iran’s tiny Navy consists of 67 mostly coastal patrol boats and fast attack crafts, none of which can operate much outside of the Persian Gulf. Also, it has no long-range aircraft and its longest range missile, the Soumar cruise missile, is non-nuclear and has a maximum range of 1850 miles. That is to say, it can barely reach the European parts of the Mediterranean basin, and can’t hit at all cities like Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Stockholm or Oslo – to say nothing of even remotely landing on our side of the Atlantic moat.
Finally, Iran is not a rogue nuclear power or wanna be nuclear threat – even according to the 17 Deep State intelligence agencies which write the so-called NIEs or National Intelligence Estimates. These NIEs have said time and again that Iran abandoned even its nuclear research program in 2003.
That’s right. Way back in 2003!
Yet the dunces in the US House of Representatives clap wildly whenever Netanyahu shows about there for another speech falsely claiming that the Iranians are an existential threat to mankind. And now, after the Donald illegally obliterated its uranium enrichment sites, these neocon maniacs nevertheless insist that Tehran is still hell-bent on getting a nuke.
In short, Iran is Bibi Netanyahu’s political pinata, not an enemy of America’s liberty and security. So there are still American troops operating in its erstwhile ally, Syria, for what? Presumably to ensure that Iran can never again receives succor from Damascus.
If Washington were not in the Empire First business and, most especially, not in the entangling alliance business in which allies and clients drag America into conflicts that have no direct bearing on its homeland security, Washington would have all along been following Thomas Jefferson’s advice: That is, it would have pursued peaceful commerce with Iran and Syria, not punished them with crippling sanctions and endless attacks on their own sovereignty and right to pursue foreign policy arrangements by their own best lights.
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.
