The
U.S. Carried Out Regime Change In Syria In 1949
… and Tried Again In 1957, 1986, 1991 and
2011-Today
By
WashingtonsBlog
February 25, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WashingtonsBlog"
- The CIA backed a right-wing coup in Syria
in 1949.
Douglas Little, Professor, Department of Clark
University History professor Douglas Little
notes:
Recently declassified records… confirm that
beginning on November 30, 1948, [CIA
operative Stephen] Meade met secretly with
Colonel Zaim at least six times to discuss
the “possibility [of an] army supported
dictatorship.” [“Cold War and Covert Action:
The United States and Syria, 1945-1958,” Middle
East Journal, Winter 1990, p. 55]
***
As
early as 1949, this newly independent Arab
republic was an important staging ground for
the CIA’s earliest experiments in covert
action.
The
CIA secretly encouraged a right-wing
military coup in 1949.
The
reason the U.S. initiated the coup? Little
explains:
In
late 1945, the Arabian American Oil Company
(ARAMCO) announced plans to construct the
Trans-Arabian Pipe Line (TAPLINE) from Saudi
Arabia to the Mediterra- nean. With U.S.
help, ARAMCO secured rights-of-way from
Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The
Syrian right-of-way was stalled in
parliament.
In
other words, Syria was the sole holdout for the
lucrative oil pipeline.
(Indeed, the CIA has carried out this type of
covert action
right from the start.)
In 1957, the
American president and British prime minister
agreed to
launch regime change again in Syria. Historian
Little notes that the coup plot was discovered
and stopped:
On
August 12, 1957, the Syrian army surrounded
the U.S. embassy in Damascus. Claiming to
have aborted a CIA plot to overthrow
neutralist President Shukri Quwatly and
install a pro-Western regime, Syrian chief
of counterintelligence Abdul Hamid Sarraj
expelled three U.S. diplomats ….
Syrian counterintelligence chief Sarraj
reacted swiftly on August 12, expelling
Stone and other CIA agents, arresting their
accomplices and placing the U.S. embassy
under surveillance.
***
More importantly, Syria also had control of
one of the main oil arteries of the Middle
East, the pipeline which connected
pro-western Iraq’s oilfields to Turkey.
***
The
report said that once the necessary degree
of fear had been created, frontier
incidents and border clashes would be staged
to provide a pretext for Iraqi and
Jordanian military intervention. Syria had
to be “made to appear as the sponsor of
plots, sabotage and violence directed
against neighbouring governments,” the
report says. “CIA and SIS should use their
capabilities in both the psychological and
action fields to augment tension.”
***
The plan called
for funding of a “Free Syria
Committee” [hmmm … sounds
vaguely familiar],
and the arming of “political
factions with paramilitary or other
actionist capabilities” within Syria.
The CIA and MI6 would instigate
internal uprisings, for instance by
the Druze [a
Shia Muslim sect]
in the south, help to free political
prisoners held in the Mezze prison,
and stir up the Muslim Brotherhood in
Damascus.
Newly-declassified
CIA documents
show that in 1986, the CIA drew up plans to
overthrow Syria by
provoking sectarian tensions.
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Neoconservatives planned regime change in
Syria once again
in 1991.
And as Nafeez Ahmed
notes:
According to
former French foreign minister
Roland Dumas,
Britain had planned covert action in Syria
as early as 2009: “I was in England two
years before the violence in Syria on other
business,” he told French television: “I met
with top British officials, who confessed to
me that they were preparing something in
Syria. This was in Britain not in America.
Britain was preparing gunmen to invade
Syria.”
Leaked emails
from the
private intelligence firm Stratfor,
including notes from
a meeting with Pentagon officials,
confirmed that as of 2011, US and UK special
forces training of Syrian opposition forces
was well underway. The goal was to elicit
the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from
within.”
Indeed.
Indeed, the U.S. has carried out regime change
in the Middle East and North Africa for
six decades.
