Published July 23, 2022
By Eric Zuesse
A GOOD BACKGROUNDER ON THE CIA IN THE MIDDLE EAST, I DISAGREE WITH HIS ANALYSIS OF KURDISH OPTIONS.
LONG READ
This was confirmed recently by an expert on the Middle East who was interviewed by the leading reporter on the Middle East, Steven Sahiounie.
The American and Syrian reporter, Sahiounie, is the Editor-in-Chief of Middle East Discourse, and I have found him to be the most unprejudiced and the most reliable and geostrategically aware of all journalists who specialize on the Middle East. He has made his online news organization into the best of all that report on international affairs concerning that region of the world. To the extent that he personally has an agenda, I have found that it’s in favor of the welfare of the interests of all of the residents in that region, and this orientation naturally means that he rejects the U.S. Government’s Middle-Eastern polices, which are 100% allied with the racist-Jewish theocracy that rules Israel and that consequently are against everyone there who opposes the Middle Eastern policies of the Government of America and Israel. Sahiounie is, in other words, ideologically a populist-leftist, or progressive, and this means that he’s committed to democracy, against any type of aristocracy, regardless whether theocratic, atheistic, or any other type of an alleged ‘elite’. Sahiouni is against any type of political supremacism, at all. I have, in fact, never found Sahiounie to ‘shade’ the truth in his reporting — never to be publishing propaganda, but only truth, and from a 100% democratic perspective, no aristocratic one. When he reports an interview with a person whom he has selected as being an expert on a particular topic, I have never found any reason to reject that person as being, indeed, an expert on the given topic, regarding which that person is being interviewed. In short: I have always found Sahiounie’s sources to be top-notch, for truthful reporting, from a democratic perspective.
On July 17th, Sahiounie headlined “‘The last choice to remain safe for the Kurds is to head towards Damascus’, according to Dr. Ahmad Alderzi”. The overall focus of the article was what would likely be the best option now for the formerly U.S.-backed-and-funded Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) organization that have fought against Syria’s Government in order to create a separate Kurdish nation in Syria’s northeast, and who have been targets for destruction by Turkey’s military because the SDF are an extension from the separatist-Kurdish movement (called “YPG” and labelled by Turkey as being “terrorist” as separatists) that would take territory away from Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, in order to create their “Kurdistan”. Alderzi argues there that their continued Kurdish separatism in Syria would cause them to be slaughtered there, because America is no longer protecting and arming them there; so, the Kurdish separatists in Syria should accept the longstanding all-inclusive non-sectarianism of Syria’s Government, and simply go back to being peaceful citizens of Syria, as they had been in Syria before America’s CIA had organized them into the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” so as to overthrow Assad’s Government there. The U.S. has lost the war in Syria, but now is determined to keep Syria as a failed state, and not even Kurdish separatists want to be in a failed state. The entire interview is interesting, but what especially struck me was this part of it:
#1. Steven Sahiounie (SS): The Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has recently paid a visit to Aleppo for the first time in almost a decade. Meanwhile, Turkish President Erdogan is threatening to start a military operation in northern Syria. In your opinion, does Al-Assad’s visit to Aleppo constitute a political message to Erdogan?
Ahmad Alderzi (AA): Al-Assad’s visit to Aleppo took place in highly grave and complicated international and territorial circumstances for Syria. It was intended to carry a set of local, territorial, and international messages. Locally, it was intended to imply the return of the pre-war policies, in which Aleppo constituted a central concern for the president, Al-Assad, that made it claim its ordinary position as the most important economic city in Syria, and that the aftermath of the war policies, that prevented Aleppo and its industrial men from reclaiming their positions have come to an end. It also denoted that the next phase will witness a dramatic change concerning how to deal with the doomed city and that suitable circumstances and conditions for this return will be achieved, which made the people of Aleppo grasp that message and rush, as they are full of hope, to receive him.
Territorially, the message to Erdogan’s Turkey, which is still working on taking over Aleppo again, is clear; any new attempt to reoccupy Aleppo should witness a different way of military dealing, based on the positions of the Russian and Iranian allies, who firmly stood together with it [Syria] against any new Turkish military movement.
Internationally, the sent message to the United States and the European Union, is that Syria’s position towards them will not change and that the Aleppo region, through which the Arab gas pipeline was supposed to pass in 2010, will not let the Israeli gas pipeline pass through it as well.
Back on 25 February 2016, RFK Jr. (son of Robert F. Kennedy) had headlined “Syria: Another Pipeline War”, and he delivered a breathtaking history of the CIA’s and U.S. Government’s Syria policy, ever since U.S. President Truman started the CIA in 1947. Here are excerpts:
The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.
Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba’ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup” and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.
Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s lopsided contracts with the oil giant, BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.
Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors’ pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran’s new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles’ needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.
When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax,” Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.
Flush from his Operation Ajax “success” in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime. …
Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria’s democratically elected Ba’athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain’s MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee” and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot.” (Matthew Jones in The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA’s mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.
Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.
Having alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mid-East to work as an executive for the oil industry that he had served so well during his public service career. …
RFK Jr. added some relevant Kennedy-family records:
In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA’s failed Syrian Coup, my uncle, Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America’s imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S.
Kennedy’s speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter, the formal pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination following World War II. FDR had strong-armed Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in the European war against fascism.
Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA’s clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report,” to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government’s denials.
The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today.” The Bruce Lovett Report pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American values and had compromised America’s international leadership and moral authority without the knowledge of the American people. The report points out that the CIA never considered how we would treat such interventions if some foreign government engineered them in our country. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mid-East nationalists “hate us for our freedoms.”
The Syrian and Iranian coups soiled America’s reputation across the Mid-East and ploughed the fields of Islamic Jihadism which we have, ironically, purposefully nurtured. A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA’s bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.
While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.
A Pipeline War
In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
RFK Jr. is a Democrat, and so his account emphasizes Republican perfidies. However, he portrays the entire matter as having resulted not from evilness on the part of the U.S. Government (its relevant top officials) but instead as having been merely errors — as if it were NOT the result of what America’s billionaires collectively demand from their politicians (which they own). To RFK Jr., the U.S.-and-allied pipeline wars in Syria resulted from errors, instead of from carefully laid plans, whose source was U.S.-and-allied billionaires — the people who buy U.S. Presidents and Congress-Members. He said:
It’s the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudis just executed a powerful Shia cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIS fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.
That ‘blundering’ is only a way to sugar-coat the reality of what the U.S. Government — BOTH of its political Parties, each of which is controlled by its respective billionaires, who are motivated virtually ONLY by their unlimited greed — has been, and is. “The million refugees now flooding into Europe” aren’t the result of U.S.-and-allied “blundering” but of consistent and very longstanding U.S. Government policy ever since at least 1949 but which Obama raised fo fever-pitch by starting in 2009 to go all the way to finally grabbing Syria for the Sauds but failing in the effort, and then using Europe to deal with the escapees from the hells that America and its allies were creating in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. (In fact, the U.S. regime had set up the first round of ‘peace talks’ in Geneva between Syria’s Government and its ‘opposition’ so that the Sauds would select the entire ‘opposition’ delegation there, to ‘negotiate’ with Syria’s Government.) The U.S. Government has been like this non-stop, ever since Truman, on 25 July 1945, reversed FDR’s anti-imperialistic foreign policies and committed this country to the opposite: taking over the entire world. It’s what has controlled America nonstop, now, for almost 78 years, under BOTH of its political Parties. The U.S. Government has been plain evil, ever since 1945. These aren’t ‘blunders’. To allege that they are is false. The motivation for that falsehood is usually to convey the impression that, if ONLY America had more COMPETENT leaders, America’s Government wouldn’t be so harmful. Barack Obama was perhaps the most skillful U.S. President in decades, but he was at least as bad as any of the U.S. Presidents after 1980 has been. Especially because of his 2014 coup in Ukraine, which now threatens to bring on World War Three, I consider him to be America’s second-worst President, Truman having been the all-time worst. The main difference between Obama and Biden is that Biden is far less competent. That doesn’t necessarily mean Biden is an even worse President than Obama was. Only time will tell (if he brings on a nuclear WW III).
The former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said it best, on 28 July 2015, when he was asked about the corruption in America’s Government:
It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.
It’s NOT mere ‘blundering’. It is what the Truman-created U.S. Government now is: an aristocracy (or “oligarchy”). That’s how it works: one-dollar-one-vote, not one-person-one-vote. And, so, now, America’s Presidents are s‘elected’ by the billionaires, not “elected” by the public. That’s what Carter was saying. But it started with Truman, and rose to full fruition only with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan in 1981. The American Government today is only what America’s aristocracy want it to be — and that ISN’T blunders, but instead is the carefully formulated policies of the hired agents of that group of around 1,000 people (regardless of whether their s‘elected’ President is competent like Obama, or incompetent like Biden). That’s why there has been continuity in America’s Syria-policy ever since at least 1949, when the CIA first tried to grab that country for the Sauds, in order to enable the Sauds to pipeline their oil into Europe so as to help to cripple the Soviet Union, and, subsequently, Russia. It’s NOT a “blunder.” It’s U.S. policy, ever since 25 July 1945. Only the circumstances surrounding it have been constantly changing. This neoconservatism — craving for U.S. “hegemony,” or top prioritization on achieving an all-encompassing global American empire — has become embedded into the U.S. Government’s DNA. It IS today’s U.S. Government, because it long has been.
The American and Syrian reporter, Sahiounie, is the Editor-in-Chief of Middle East Discourse, and I have found him to be the most unprejudiced and the most reliable and geostrategically aware of all journalists who specialize on the Middle East. He has made his online news organization into the best of all that report on international affairs concerning that region of the world. To the extent that he personally has an agenda, I have found that it’s in favor of the welfare of the interests of all of the residents in that region, and this orientation naturally means that he rejects the U.S. Government’s Middle-Eastern polices, which are 100% allied with the racist-Jewish theocracy that rules Israel and that consequently are against everyone there who opposes the Middle Eastern policies of the Government of America and Israel. Sahiounie is, in other words, ideologically a populist-leftist, or progressive, and this means that he’s committed to democracy, against any type of aristocracy, regardless whether theocratic, atheistic, or any other type of an alleged ‘elite’. Sahiouni is against any type of political supremacism, at all. I have, in fact, never found Sahiounie to ‘shade’ the truth in his reporting — never to be publishing propaganda, but only truth, and from a 100% democratic perspective, no aristocratic one. When he reports an interview with a person whom he has selected as being an expert on a particular topic, I have never found any reason to reject that person as being, indeed, an expert on the given topic, regarding which that person is being interviewed. In short: I have always found Sahiounie’s sources to be top-notch, for truthful reporting, from a democratic perspective.
On July 17th, Sahiounie headlined “‘The last choice to remain safe for the Kurds is to head towards Damascus’, according to Dr. Ahmad Alderzi”. The overall focus of the article was what would likely be the best option now for the formerly U.S.-backed-and-funded Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) organization that have fought against Syria’s Government in order to create a separate Kurdish nation in Syria’s northeast, and who have been targets for destruction by Turkey’s military because the SDF are an extension from the separatist-Kurdish movement (called “YPG” and labelled by Turkey as being “terrorist” as separatists) that would take territory away from Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, in order to create their “Kurdistan”. Alderzi argues there that their continued Kurdish separatism in Syria would cause them to be slaughtered there, because America is no longer protecting and arming them there; so, the Kurdish separatists in Syria should accept the longstanding all-inclusive non-sectarianism of Syria’s Government, and simply go back to being peaceful citizens of Syria, as they had been in Syria before America’s CIA had organized them into the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” so as to overthrow Assad’s Government there. The U.S. has lost the war in Syria, but now is determined to keep Syria as a failed state, and not even Kurdish separatists want to be in a failed state. The entire interview is interesting, but what especially struck me was this part of it:
#1. Steven Sahiounie (SS): The Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has recently paid a visit to Aleppo for the first time in almost a decade. Meanwhile, Turkish President Erdogan is threatening to start a military operation in northern Syria. In your opinion, does Al-Assad’s visit to Aleppo constitute a political message to Erdogan?
Ahmad Alderzi (AA): Al-Assad’s visit to Aleppo took place in highly grave and complicated international and territorial circumstances for Syria. It was intended to carry a set of local, territorial, and international messages. Locally, it was intended to imply the return of the pre-war policies, in which Aleppo constituted a central concern for the president, Al-Assad, that made it claim its ordinary position as the most important economic city in Syria, and that the aftermath of the war policies, that prevented Aleppo and its industrial men from reclaiming their positions have come to an end. It also denoted that the next phase will witness a dramatic change concerning how to deal with the doomed city and that suitable circumstances and conditions for this return will be achieved, which made the people of Aleppo grasp that message and rush, as they are full of hope, to receive him.
Territorially, the message to Erdogan’s Turkey, which is still working on taking over Aleppo again, is clear; any new attempt to reoccupy Aleppo should witness a different way of military dealing, based on the positions of the Russian and Iranian allies, who firmly stood together with it [Syria] against any new Turkish military movement.
Internationally, the sent message to the United States and the European Union, is that Syria’s position towards them will not change and that the Aleppo region, through which the Arab gas pipeline was supposed to pass in 2010, will not let the Israeli gas pipeline pass through it as well.
Back on 25 February 2016, RFK Jr. (son of Robert F. Kennedy) had headlined “Syria: Another Pipeline War”, and he delivered a breathtaking history of the CIA’s and U.S. Government’s Syria policy, ever since U.S. President Truman started the CIA in 1947. Here are excerpts:
The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.
Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba’ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup” and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.
Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s lopsided contracts with the oil giant, BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.
Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors’ pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran’s new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles’ needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.
When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax,” Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.
Flush from his Operation Ajax “success” in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime. …
Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria’s democratically elected Ba’athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain’s MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee” and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot.” (Matthew Jones in The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA’s mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.
Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.
Having alienated Iraq and Syria, Kim Roosevelt fled the Mid-East to work as an executive for the oil industry that he had served so well during his public service career. …
RFK Jr. added some relevant Kennedy-family records:
In July 1956, less than two months after the CIA’s failed Syrian Coup, my uncle, Senator John F. Kennedy, infuriated the Eisenhower White House, the leaders of both political parties and our European allies with a milestone speech endorsing the right of self-governance in the Arab world and an end to America’s imperialist meddling in Arab countries. Throughout my lifetime, and particularly during my frequent travels to the Mid-East, countless Arabs have fondly recalled that speech to me as the clearest statement of the idealism they expected from the U.S.
Kennedy’s speech was a call for recommitting America to the high values our country had championed in the Atlantic Charter, the formal pledge that all the former European colonies would have the right to self-determination following World War II. FDR had strong-armed Churchill and the other allied leaders to sign the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a precondition for U.S. support in the European war against fascism.
Thanks in large part to Allan Dulles and the CIA, whose foreign policy intrigues were often directly at odds with the stated policies of our nation, the idealistic path outlined in the Atlantic Charter was the road not taken. In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating CIA’s clandestine mischief in the Mid-East. The so called “Bruce Lovett Report,” to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government’s denials.
The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today.” The Bruce Lovett Report pointed out that such interventions were antithetical to American values and had compromised America’s international leadership and moral authority without the knowledge of the American people. The report points out that the CIA never considered how we would treat such interventions if some foreign government engineered them in our country. This is the bloody history that modern interventionists like George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio miss when they recite their narcissistic trope that Mid-East nationalists “hate us for our freedoms.”
The Syrian and Iranian coups soiled America’s reputation across the Mid-East and ploughed the fields of Islamic Jihadism which we have, ironically, purposefully nurtured. A parade of Iranian and Syrian dictators, including Bashar al-Assad and his father, have invoked the history of the CIA’s bloody coups as a pretext for their authoritarian rule, repressive tactics and their need for a strong Russian alliance. These stories are therefore well known to the people of Syria and Iran who naturally interpret talk of U.S. intervention in the context of that history.
While the compliant American press parrots the narrative that our military support for the Syrian insurgency is purely humanitarian, many Syrians see the present crisis as just another proxy war over pipelines and geopolitics. Before rushing deeper into the conflagration, it would be wise for us to consider the abundant facts supporting that perspective.
A Pipeline War
In their view, our war against Bashar Assad did not begin with the peaceful civil protests of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead it began in 2000 when Qatar proposed to construct a $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.
RFK Jr. is a Democrat, and so his account emphasizes Republican perfidies. However, he portrays the entire matter as having resulted not from evilness on the part of the U.S. Government (its relevant top officials) but instead as having been merely errors — as if it were NOT the result of what America’s billionaires collectively demand from their politicians (which they own). To RFK Jr., the U.S.-and-allied pipeline wars in Syria resulted from errors, instead of from carefully laid plans, whose source was U.S.-and-allied billionaires — the people who buy U.S. Presidents and Congress-Members. He said:
It’s the only paradigm that explains why the GOP on Capitol Hill and the Obama administration are still fixated on regime change rather than regional stability, why the Obama administration can find no Syrian moderates to fight the war, why ISIS blew up a Russian passenger plane, why the Saudis just executed a powerful Shia cleric only to have their embassy burned in Tehran, why Russia is bombing non-ISIS fighters and why Turkey went out of its way to down a Russian jet. The million refugees now flooding into Europe are refugees of a pipeline war and CIA blundering.
That ‘blundering’ is only a way to sugar-coat the reality of what the U.S. Government — BOTH of its political Parties, each of which is controlled by its respective billionaires, who are motivated virtually ONLY by their unlimited greed — has been, and is. “The million refugees now flooding into Europe” aren’t the result of U.S.-and-allied “blundering” but of consistent and very longstanding U.S. Government policy ever since at least 1949 but which Obama raised fo fever-pitch by starting in 2009 to go all the way to finally grabbing Syria for the Sauds but failing in the effort, and then using Europe to deal with the escapees from the hells that America and its allies were creating in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. (In fact, the U.S. regime had set up the first round of ‘peace talks’ in Geneva between Syria’s Government and its ‘opposition’ so that the Sauds would select the entire ‘opposition’ delegation there, to ‘negotiate’ with Syria’s Government.) The U.S. Government has been like this non-stop, ever since Truman, on 25 July 1945, reversed FDR’s anti-imperialistic foreign policies and committed this country to the opposite: taking over the entire world. It’s what has controlled America nonstop, now, for almost 78 years, under BOTH of its political Parties. The U.S. Government has been plain evil, ever since 1945. These aren’t ‘blunders’. To allege that they are is false. The motivation for that falsehood is usually to convey the impression that, if ONLY America had more COMPETENT leaders, America’s Government wouldn’t be so harmful. Barack Obama was perhaps the most skillful U.S. President in decades, but he was at least as bad as any of the U.S. Presidents after 1980 has been. Especially because of his 2014 coup in Ukraine, which now threatens to bring on World War Three, I consider him to be America’s second-worst President, Truman having been the all-time worst. The main difference between Obama and Biden is that Biden is far less competent. That doesn’t necessarily mean Biden is an even worse President than Obama was. Only time will tell (if he brings on a nuclear WW III).
The former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said it best, on 28 July 2015, when he was asked about the corruption in America’s Government:
It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.
It’s NOT mere ‘blundering’. It is what the Truman-created U.S. Government now is: an aristocracy (or “oligarchy”). That’s how it works: one-dollar-one-vote, not one-person-one-vote. And, so, now, America’s Presidents are s‘elected’ by the billionaires, not “elected” by the public. That’s what Carter was saying. But it started with Truman, and rose to full fruition only with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan in 1981. The American Government today is only what America’s aristocracy want it to be — and that ISN’T blunders, but instead is the carefully formulated policies of the hired agents of that group of around 1,000 people (regardless of whether their s‘elected’ President is competent like Obama, or incompetent like Biden). That’s why there has been continuity in America’s Syria-policy ever since at least 1949, when the CIA first tried to grab that country for the Sauds, in order to enable the Sauds to pipeline their oil into Europe so as to help to cripple the Soviet Union, and, subsequently, Russia. It’s NOT a “blunder.” It’s U.S. policy, ever since 25 July 1945. Only the circumstances surrounding it have been constantly changing. This neoconservatism — craving for U.S. “hegemony,” or top prioritization on achieving an all-encompassing global American empire — has become embedded into the U.S. Government’s DNA. It IS today’s U.S. Government, because it long has been.
Eric Zuesse
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
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