The U.S. Role in the Destruction of Syria
By David Ray Griffin
(Excerpt from Chapter 6, "Global Chaos," of Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World [Interlink Books, 2017])
April
20, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
-
In Syria, the goal of creating chaos has
succeeded in spades. Mnar Muhawesh wrote: [F]oreign
powers have sunk the nation into a nightmare
combination of civil war, foreign invasion
and terrorism. Syrians are in the impossible
position of having to choose between living
in a warzone, being targeted by groups like
ISIS and the Syrian government’s brutal
crack- down, or faring dangerous waters with
minimal safety equipment only to be denied
food, water and safety by European
governments if they reach shore.
Of course, many Syrians were unable, or
chose not to try, to reach Europe.
Continuing her discussion of the refugee
crisis created by the destabilization of
Syria, Muhawesh added:
Other Syrians seeing the chaos at home have
turned to neighboring Arab Muslim countries.
Jordan alone has absorbed over half a
million Syrian refugees; Lebanon has
accepted nearly 1.5 million; and Iraq and
Egypt have taken in several hundred
thousand. . . . Turkey has [by 2015] taken
in nearly 2 million refugees.55
By the end of 2015, the conflict in Syria
had “displaced 12 million people, creating
the largest wave of refugees to hit Europe
since World War II.”56
Planning to Destabilize Syria
Some neocons had come into office with
preformed ideas about destabilizing Syria.
As mentioned earlier, Richard Perle and
other neocons had prepared a 1996 paper for
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
en- titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy
for Securing the Realm.” It suggested that
Israel seek peace with some neighbors while
beginning to topple the regimes of its
enemies, especially Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
Although regime change in Iraq would be the
first goal, it would be achieved primarily
for the sake of “weakening, containing, and
even rolling back Syria,” ultimately
overthrowing Bashar al-Assad. In other
words, the road to Damascus would run
through Baghdad.57
When Bush and Cheney took control of the
White House, a new largely neocon document,
“Navigating through Turbulence: America and
the Middle East in a New Century,” had the
same message: “ e two main targets” of the
new administration, the document said,
“should be Syria and Iraq.”58 In 2001, a
week after the 9/11 attacks, 40 members of
the Project for the New American Century,
led by Bill Kristol, wrote a letter to
President Bush saying:
We believe the administration should demand
that Syria and Iran immediately cease all
military, financial and political support
for Hizbollah [sic] and its operations.
Should Iran and Syria refuse to comply, the
Administration should consider appropriate
measures of retaliation against these known
state sponsors of terrorism.59
A few months later, Assistant Secretary of
State John Bolton accused Syria of
developing chemical and biological weapons
and warned Damascus that it might be
included in the “axis of evil.” Shortly
thereafter, the State Department declared
Syria to be a sponsor of terrorism, after
which Congress made most US dealings with
Syria illegal.60
The Bush-Cheney Hostility to Syria
The Bush-Cheney administration was hostile
to Syria partly because Israel was hostile
to Syria, and especially to its president,
Bashar al-Assad. Syria had opposed Israel
and especially Zionism; Syria had been
aligned with Iran, which Israel considers
its major threat.
More generally, Assad is an Alawite, which
is a branch of Shiite Islam, and Assad has
been viewed as, said Parry, the centerpiece
of the “Shiite crescent” stretching from
Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon.
Since Israeli leaders (and thus the American
neocons) see Iran as Israel’s greatest
enemy, the goal of collapsing the “Shiite
crescent” has concentrated on bringing down
Assad.61
More particularly, Israel has been hostile
to Syria because it had sup- ported
Lebanon’s paramilitary fighting force,
Hezbollah, which defeated Israel militarily
in 2006; and although Israel in the 1967 war
took Syria’s Golan Heights—which now
provides 15 percent of Israel’s water—Syria
wants it back. More generally, Syria, with
the assistance of Hezbollah, had prevented
Israel from realizing its goal of taking
control of land that, it claims, belongs to
it by divine right.
There have been, in addition, several other
reasons for the US hostility to Syria, Assad
in particular. An overarching one is that
Syria has remained independent of the
US-dominated global order. For example,
Syria has its own state-owned bank and has
no IMF loans through which it could be
ordered around. And Syria has refused to be
included within the American empire. The
document “Navigating through Turbulence”
complained that “[m]aintaining a strong
alliance with Israel” had not prevented
“every state on Israel’s border, except
Syria, from accepting America as their
principal source of military aid and
matériel.”62
As to why Syria did not want to be absorbed
into the American empire: American
politicians and media do not remind the
world that four years before the CIA
overthrew Iran’s elected government in 1953,
it had over- thrown Syria’s government for
the same reason—the price of oil.63
For a variety of reasons, “ousting the Assad
dynasty,” said Parry, had been “a top neocon/Israeli
goal since the 1990s,” so the Bush-Cheney
administration was from the beginning intent
on destabilizing Syria. In 2002,
Under-Secretary of State John Bolton named
Syria as one of the “rogue states” that “can
expect to become our targets.”64
Knowing how he was regarded, Assad made many
attempts to develop better relations. In
2004, Assad started secret peace talks in
Turkey with Israel, offering what Israel’s
leading newspaper called “a far reaching and
equitable peace treaty that would provide
for Israel’s security.”65
Although the talks were supported by a large
number of senior Israelis, “the Bush
administration nixed them”— not
surprisingly, because Cheney was “an
implacable opponent of engagement with
Syria.”66 In 2007, the Bush-Cheney
administration, discussing “a new strategic
alignment in the Middle East,” distinguished
between “reformers” and “extremists,”
placing Syria, along with Iran and
Hezbollah, in the latter category. According
to Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article “The
Redirection,” the US participated in
clandestine operations aimed at Syria as
well as Iran.67
Information about what went on behind the
scenes in the Bush-Cheney administration has
been provided by WikiLeaks, which had
obtained the cables of William Roebuck, the
political counselor for the US Embassy in
Damascus. These cables are discussed by
Robert Naiman in a chapter of Julian
Assange’s The WikiLeaks Files, entitled
“WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively
Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a
Bloodbath.” Roebuck’s cables show, according
to Naiman, that regime change had been a
long-standing goal of US policy; [and] that
the US promoted sectarianism in support of
its regime-change policy, thus helping lay
the foundation for the sectarian civil war
and massive bloodshed that we see in Syria
today.68
Some commentators today suggest that the US
hostility to Assad began with his brutal
response to the Arab Spring protests in
2011. However, “as far back as 2006— five
years before ‘Arab Spring’ protests in
Syria,” reported Naiman, the cables show
that “destabilizing the Syrian government
was a central motivation of US policy,” and
Roebuck’s cables suggested strategies for
doing this. Accordingly, said Naiman:
We are told in the West that the current
efforts to topple the Syrian government by
force were a reaction to the Syrian
government’s repression of dissent in 2011,
but now we know that “regime change” was the
policy of the US and its allies ve years
earlier.
According to these cables, Naiman
summarized, the top US diplomat in Syria
believed that the goal of US policy in Syria
should be to destabilize the Syrian
government by any means available; that the
US should work to increase Sunni-Shia
sectarianism in Syria. . . ; the US should
try to strain relations between the Syrian
government and other Arab governments, and
then blame Syria for the strain; that the US
should seek to stoke Syrian government fears
of coup plots in order to provoke the Syrian
government to overreact. . . ; the US should
work to undermine Syrian economic reforms
and discourage foreign investment; that the
US should seek to foster the belief that the
Syrian government was not legitimate; that
violent protests in Syria were
praiseworthy.69
The 2011 Protests and the Obama
Administration
The Obama administration publicly gave the
same reason for hostility to Assad, namely,
his excessive reaction to the 2011 uprising
against him— a reaction that led to major
protests, which soon turned into a civil war
between Assad and rebel forces.
The Need for a Balanced View: However, that
was a very limited understanding of the
events: The conflict resulted from a complex
interplay of factors, some of which were
Assad’s fault, some of which were not. One
of the factors that was not his fault was
the beginning in 2006 of a drought in Syria,
which some climate scientists said to be the
worst in 900 years; other scientists even
call it the worst since agricultural
civilization began many thousands of years
ago.70 Describing the context for the war,
William Polk wrote:
In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In
others crop failures reached 75%. And
generally as much as 85% of livestock died
of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands
of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their
farms and ed to the cities and towns in
search of almost non-existent jobs and
severely short food supplies. Outside
observers including UN experts estimated
that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10
million rural inhabit- ants were reduced to
“extreme poverty.”
Also, added Polk, “hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians and Iraqis had in previous
years taken refuge there, so that the new
Syrian refugees had to compete with them for
jobs, water, and food.”71
By 2008, the representative of the UN’s Food
and Agriculture Organization had described
the situation as “a perfect storm,” which
threatened Syria with “social
destruction.”72
However, Assad made the effects of the
drought worse by poor governance. Central to
this was what Francesco Femia and Caitlin
Werrell called criminal mismanagement of
Syria’s natural resources, which contributed
to water shortages for farmers. Favoring the
big farmers over the poor farming
communities, Assad’s regime subsidized wheat
and cotton, which are water-intensive, and
it also allowed unsustainable farming and
irrigation techniques. It even allowed the
big farmers to take all the water they
wanted from the aquifer (although this was
illegal), while the government’s wasteful
use of water also meant that rural people
needed to drill for water, thereby emptying
the aquifers. Moreover, Assad gave no aid to
the increas- ingly poor farmers, and even
raised their expenses: While subsidizing the
wheat and cotton farmers, Assad damaged
ordinary farmers by cutting subsidies for
diesel and fertilizers.73
Because of the severe drought and Assad’s
mismanagement, almost a million people,
having lost their livelihoods by 2009, were
forced to move to the slums, and many more
were to follow. By 2011, about a million
people had insufficient food. There is
little room for doubt, therefore, that the
beginnings of the Syrian opposition movement
were originally rooted in Assad’s own
destructive policies (in conjunction with
the drought).74
An important factor in this insufficient
food supply was another feature of criminal
mismanagement: “Lured by the high price of
wheat on the world market, it sold its
reserves.” Accordingly, Polk said:
[T]ens of thousands of frightened, angry,
hungry and impoverished former farmers
constituted a ‘tinder’ that was ready to
catch fire. The spark was struck on March
15, 2011, when a relatively small group
gathered in the town of Dara’a to protest
against government failure to help them.75
The protest in Dara’a began after a group of
children had “painted some anti-government
graffiti on a school wall” and then were
arrested and tortured by city police. Some
protesters were shot. This excessive
response by the government led to protests
in the city. Assad made several attempts to
calm the situation: He fired government and
security officials for their roles in the
overreaction; he assured the residents that
the shooters would be prosecuted; and he
announced several national reforms. But his
response did not satisfy the protestors and
they continued destroying property and
attacking police and soldiers. Dara’a was
declared a “liberated zone.” And the
protests spread to other towns.76 But why
did the protests turn violent?
The Turn of Violence: The standard portrayal
of the protest movement, summarized
independent researcher Jonathan Marshall,
was that “the protest movement in Syria was
overwhelmingly peaceful until September
2011.”77 The Syria government rejected this
view from the beginning, but its claim was
long dismissed. But Marshall has provided
evidence that the government’s view was
essentially correct on this point. In an
essay entitled “Hidden Origins of Syria’s
Civil War,” Marshall said, “opposition to
the government had turned violent almost
from the start.” For example, unknown gunmen
in Dara’a reportedly killed 19 Syrians; in
addition “nine Syrian soldiers on their way
to quell demonstrations in Banyas were
ambushed and gunned down on the highway
outside of town.”78
Professor Joshua Landis, the head of Center
for the Middle East Studies at the
University of Oklahoma, reported that video
footage of the fighting showed that the
government account was correct: “the
soldiers stationed in the town were overrun
by armed and organized opposition.”79
The protests in other towns also involved
armed men. In one city, about 140 members of
the police and security forces were
massacred. But media largely ignored this
side of the story. After studying the
protests and the press’s coverage of them,
Landis concluded: “Western press and
analysts did not want to recognize that
armed elements were becoming active. They
preferred to tell a simple story of good
people fighting bad people.”80
It is important to recognize that this
method of setting up a leader to be
overthrown was an oft-repeated modus
operandi by the US govern- ment. Besides
being used in Libya as well as Syria, it was
previously used in the 1990s, recalled
William Engdahl, when the Bill Clinton
administration wanted to split up Yugoslavia
into its six republics. Making a deal with
Bosnia to start a war with Serbia, the
Washington propaganda machine began
demonizing the Serbs as Nazis, and made up
fake stories claiming that they not only
bombed civilians and hospitals but also
raped thousands of Muslim women.81
In any case, at some point the Syrian
government cracked down ruth- lessly on the
protestors, and several hundred protestors
were reportedly killed. But even here it
appears that the press, as well as giving a
one-sided account, exaggerated. The private
intelligence firm Stratfor, sometimes called
the “Private CIA,” warned their clients not
to be misled by opposition propaganda.
“Although it is certain that protesters and
civilians are being killed,” said Stratfor,
“there is little evidence of massive
brutality compared to . . . other state
crackdowns in the region.”82
Some human rights organizations also,
pointed out Jonathan Marshall, acknowledged
that armed opposition forces had begun
committing crimes against civilians.
For example:
Human Rights Watch sent an “open letter” to
leaders of the Syrian opposition, decrying
“crimes and other abuses committed by armed
opposition elements,” including the
kidnapping and detention of government
supporters, the use of torture and the
execution of security force members and
civilians, and sectarian attacks against
Shias and Alawites.83
Not incidentally, this same pattern—armed
elements joining a largely peaceful protest
and shooting police as well as
civilians—would occur with the protest
leading to the coup d’etat in Ukraine as
discussed in Chapter 9. In fact, said
Engdahl,
Washington’s Arab Spring protests often used
secret CIA and mercenary snipers to enflame
and anger the population against their
government by creating innocent martyrs and
blaming the killings on the regime.84
Accordingly, the beginning of the opposition
was due not only to the drought, Assad’s
mismanagement of the country’s natural
resources, his foolish and immoral responses
to the drought, and his neo-liberal economic
policies. The 2011 violence did begin with
the Assad regime’s brutal response to the
protests, but this response was stimulated
by armed elements. Accordingly, whereas
Western propaganda has portrayed Assad as
almost uniquely evil, said Marshall, “the
deadly provocations against Syrian
government forces put an entirely different
cast on the origins of the conflict.”85
In sum, the Obama administration’s
interpretation of the origins of the
anti-Assad movement was one-sided to the
point of being false.
US Contributions to the anti-Assad War: An
adequate understanding of the war in Syria
requires an expanded discussion of the role
played by the United States. Some of this
role was played by the Bush-Cheney
administration.
In 2008, that administration withdrew its
ambassador from Damascus as part of an
effort to weaken and isolate Assad.86 It
also played a role in the Assad regime’s
failure to prevent the drought from
resulting in so much social destruction. In
November 2008, the representative of the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization in Syria
appealed to USAID for assistance, noting
that Syria’s minister of agriculture said
that the economic and social fallout from
the drought was “beyond our capacity as a
country to deal with.” However, the
Bush-Cheney USAID director said (in a cable
that was later published by WikiLeaks), “we
question whether limited USG resources
should be directed toward this appeal at
this time.”87
More generally, as pointed out above, the
Bush-Cheney administration had begun talking
about how to destabilize Syria, such as
undermining its attempts at economic reform,
toward the goal of bringing about regime
change.
But the actual beginning of the war in Syria
occurred during the Obama administration.
His administration made part of its
contribution to the war by its false
interpretation of the origins of the
anti-Assad movement—by saying that that the
civil war arose out of a spontaneous and
peaceful uprising against Assad. But like
Marshall, Muhawesh said that it was not
entirely spontaneous: Wikileaks cables
“reveal CIA involvement on the grounds in
Syria to instigate these very demonstrations
as early as March 2011.”88 That is, of
course, what should be expected, given
Naiman’s report of the Wikileaks cables
during the Bush-Cheney administration about
ways to destabilize Syria.
Robert Parry also agreed with Marshall’s
account of the instigation of violence:
“Since the start of the Syrian conflict in
2011,” wrote Parry,
the powerful role of Al Qaeda and its
spinoff, the Islamic State, has been a
hidden or downplayed element of the
narrative that has been sold to the American
people. at storyline holds that the war
began when “peaceful” protesters were
brutally repressed by Syria’s police and
military, but that version deletes the fact
that extremists, some linked to Al Qaeda,
began killing police and soldiers almost
from the outset.89
The Number of Protesters
Another issue raised by Muhawesh relates to
the reports by major media outlets, such as
the BBC and the Associated Press, that “the
demonstrations that supposedly swept Syria
were comprised of only hundreds of people.”
Writing in 2015, she asked:
How did demonstrations held by “hundreds” of
protesters demanding economic change in
Syria four years ago devolve into a deadly
sectarian civil war, fanning the flames of
extremism haunting the world today and
creating the world’s second largest refugee
crisis?
She replied:
Just a few months into the demonstrations
which now consisted of hundreds of armed
protesters with CIA ties, demonstrations
grew larger, armed non-Syrian rebel groups
swarmed into Syria, and a severe government
crackdown swept through the country to deter
this foreign meddling. It became evident
that the United States, United Kingdom,
France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey would
be jumping on the opportunity to organize,
arm and finance rebels to form the Free
Syrian Army as outlined in the State
Department plans to destabilize Syria.90
In other words, without the intervention of
the United States and other countries, the
protestations could have never turned into a
civil war.
Regarding the Free Syrian Army, the BBC said
that by 2013 there were “believed to be as
many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in
Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000
fighters.”91 The most powerful of these
groups were ISIS and al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra
Front (which had joined ISIS only briefly).
Can anyone say that Assad did not have the
right to defend his democratically-elected
government against these outside forces?92
As for the United States in particular, its
CIA started sending large shipments of
weapons by 2012. “The CIA,” reported Seymour
Hersh, “was responsible for getting arms
from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”93 In
fact, Chris Stevens, who had become the
American ambassador in Libya, was killed in
Benghazi after he had come there to
negotiate a transfer of several hundred tons
of Gaddafi’s weapons to Syria. In what Hersh
called a “rat line,” these weapons were sent
from Libya to Syria via southern Turkey, in
an operation headed by General David
Petraeus, the then-director of the CIA,
under the supervision of Secretary Clinton.
Indeed, the “consulate” where Stevens was
killed was really only a mission, which
existed merely “to provide cover for the
moving of arms,” according to a former
intelligence officer.94
In 2013, during a Congressional
investigation of the Benghazi attack,
Clinton swore under oath that she knew
nothing about the weapons shipments to
Syrian rebels prior to the attack. But in
2015, Judicial Watch obtained previously
classified documents from the State
Department and DOD that provided the first
official confirmation that the US government
knew about the shipments of arms from
Benghazi to Syria.95
In 2016, moreover, Julian Assange reported
that Clinton’s claim was disproven by 1,700
hacked emails about Libya in Wikileaks’
Hillary Clinton collection. These emails
included, said Assange, proof that Clinton
pushed for weapons to be sent to “jihadists
within Syria, including ISIS.”96 This would
seem to mean that she had lied under oath.
In any case, the CIA, beginning in 2012,
spent $1 billion a year and trained some
10,000 “moderate” rebel forces.97 This was
done in spite of the fact that then-DIA
director Michael Flynn, reported Hersh, “had
sent a constant stream of classified
warnings to the civilian leadership about
the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The
jihadists, he said, were in control of the
opposition.” His reports, Flynn told Hersh,
“got enormous pushback” from the Obama
administration. “I felt,” said Flynn, “that
they did not want to hear the truth.” The
Joint Chiefs of Staff likewise believed,
reported one of their advisors, “that Assad
should not be replaced by
fundamentalists.”98
Indeed, the idea that the United States and
its allies were funding only moderate
rebels—ones who were fighting both against
Assad and the al- Qaeda jihadists—was
increasingly regarded as a myth. Many
observers provided evidence that there were
now no moderate rebels in Syria.99
In fact, Vice President Biden admitted this.
Saying that America had been trying to
identify a moderate middle for a long time,
he added:
[T]he idea of identifying a moderate middle
has been a chase America has been engaged in
for a long time. The fact of the matter is .
. . there was no moderate middle, because
the moderate middle are made up of
shopkeepers, not soldiers.100
Admitting that the jihadists had been armed
by America’s allies, Biden went on to say
that America’s “allies in the region were
our largest problem in Syria.” Turkey, Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he
explained, had “poured hundreds of millions
of dollars and tens, thousands of tons of
weapons into anyone who would fight against
Assad.” The result, Biden added, was that
“the people who were being supplied were Al
Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist
elements of jihadis coming from other parts
of the world.” Biden thereby contradicted
the Obama administration’s public posture,
according to which, in Secretary Kerry’s
words, armed “legitimate opposition groups”
exist separately from Al Qaeda’s Nusra
Front.101 (Gareth Porter called this
“Obama’s ‘Moderate’ Syrian Deception.”102)
The administration’s claim, that the Free
Syrian Army (FSA) consisted of non-terrorist
rebels, was contradicted by many facts. A
2016 story reported that al-Nusra (which had
changed its name to Jabhat Fatah al-Sham
[Conquest of Syria Front], claiming that it
was breaking ties with the al- Qaeda
network103) reportedly took orders from
Israel. Alastair Crooke, who had been a
senior figure in British intelligence, said
that “the FSA is little more than a cover
for the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra.”104
In any case, besides starting to fund
so-called moderate anti-Assad rebels
covertly, Obama declared that Assad needed
to step down. After it was learned in 2012
that Assad had chemical weapons, Obama
announced that using them would be a “red
line,” to which America would respond
militarily. Then in 2013, there was a
chemical attack, using deadly sarin gas,
which reportedly killed seven hundred
civilians. Arguing that Assad was
responsible, neocons and other hawks
pressured Obama to carry through with his
“red line” declaration, and he planned a
major attack on Assad’s military.
At the last minute, however, Obama cancelled
the attack order. There were evidently two
reasons for this cancelation. On the one
hand, President Vladimir Putin convinced
Assad to destroy his chemical weapons,
thereby giving Obama a face-saving out.105
On the other hand, Obama became convinced,
according to Seymour Hersh, that there was
insufficient evidence to claim that Assad
had been responsible for the sarin gas.
There seem to have been three reasons for
Obama’s reevaluation of the evidence:
James Clapper, he director of national
intelligence, told Obama that the
intelligence community lacked “slam dunk”
evidence of Assad’s responsibility.
A "vector" analysis, which supposedly showed
that the rockets carrying the sarin gas
could have come only from Damascus, broke
down, showing that they could have come from
rebel territory. Relevant to this
possibility is the fact that, Hersh
reported, “the US and its allies knew from
highly classified CIA and allied
intelligence reporting throughout the spring
and summer of 2013, that the jihadist
opposition to Assad (primarily al-Nusra) had
the ability to manufacture a crude form of
sarin.”106
A British laboratory showed that, it Hersh's
words, "the gas used didn’t match the
batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s
chemical weapons arsenal.” The sarin gas,
Hersh concluded, was a false-flag attack
launched by Turkey “to instigate an event
that would force the US to cross the red
line.”107
It is good that Obama resisted the
temptation to support an attack on Syria as
a “humanitarian intervention.” But his
decision not to start a war against Syria
led to great pressure on him to reverse it.
In 2015, for example, 51 members of the
State Department—which Hillary Clinton had
headed for four years, during which she gave
important posts to neocons108— issued a
“dissent,” saying against Obama’s policy
that the US should bomb Syria until it
agrees to our wishes. The dissent’s argument
was based on an extremely superficial
understanding of the reasons for the Syrian
war. “The government’s barrel bombing of
civilians,” the dissent said (according to a
summary by the New York Times), “is the
‘root cause of the instability that
continues to grip Syria and the broader
region.’”109
This interpretation was
rejected by Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity, who said:
It’s true that the initial phase of the
Syrian Spring seems to have been largely
spontaneous. Facts show, however, that
outside interveners—primarily the United
States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Israel
and Saudi Arabia—cooperated in lighting the
match that brought the inferno of civil war.
Covert funding and provision of weapons and
other material support to opposition groups
for strikes against the Syrian Government
provoked a military reaction by Assad—which
created a pretext for our enlarged support
to the rebel groups.110
Besides evidently not understanding what had
been going on in Syria in 2011, the State
Department “dissenters” ignored the fact
that they had suggested a policy that would
be completely illegal under international
law.111 Moreover, they also seemed to be
unaware of how terribly unwise their
proposed policy would have been.
In an article asking the question “Risking
Nuclear War for Al Qaeda?” Parry pointed out
that for Obama to have followed the urging
of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Hillary Clinton
to permit a full-out attack on Syria would
have been insane. If these powers attacked
Syria while Russia’s troops were there,
Russia—having insufficient ground forces and
conventional weapons to protect them—might
have been tempted to resort to tactical
nuclear weapons, and this response could
easily have led to a nuclear showdown. The
insanity is that “the United States [is]
being urged to take on that existential risk
for all humankind on behalf of preserving Al
Qaeda’s hopes for raising its black flag
over Damascus.”112 (An extensive discussion
of the threat of nuclear war is reserved for
Chapter 9.)
The Main Reason for Attacking Assad
If the US desire for regime change in Syria
was not based on Assad’s crack-down on
rebels, we must deal with the question about
the real reason (aside from the desire of
neocons in general and Hillary Clinton in
particular to help Israel—see the section on
Israel below). Mnar Muhawesh said that what
has been driving the chaos is “control over
gas, oil and resources.”113 Wesley Clark—in
his report on the Bush administration’s plan
to take out seven regimes, including
Syria’s—indicated that this strategy was
fundamentally about the region’s oil and
gas.114
Chris Floyd likewise wrote:
Vast interests in oil and natural gas—both
existing and potential—are in play. . . .
Competing pipelines—one favoring the West,
undercutting Russia, the other bolstering
Moscow and Tehran—are in the mix.115
Dmitry Minin, an independent analyst, wrote:
A battle is raging over whether pipelines
will go toward Europe from east to west,
from Iran and Iraq to the Mediterranean
coast of Syria, or take a more northbound
route from Qatar and Saudi Arabia via Syria
and Turkey.116
Minin based his ideas primarily upon
“renowned researcher on energy issues F.
William Engdahl.” Engdahl is, in fact, the
researcher who—along with Pepe Escobar, the
author of Empire of Chaos117—has over the
years written the most about gas pipelines
in relation to Syria.
F. William Engdahl on the Syrian Pipeline
War
“In a fundamental sense the entirety of the
five-year-long war over Syria,” Engdahl
wrote in 2016, “has been about control of
hydrocarbon resources— oil and natural
gas—and of potential hydrocarbon pipelines
to the promising markets of the European
Union.”118 Political assessments, he had
said in 2012, had not fully appreciated “the
dramatically rising importance of the
control of natural gas to the future.” This
importance had been greatly enhanced in the
European Union by its mandate to reduce CO2
emissions significantly by 2020, and natural
gas has been considered far less polluting
than coal (even if that is questionable119).
The importance of this situation to the
Middle East was enhanced still further by
the discovery of huge natural-gas sources in
Syria as well as Israel and Qatar.120
The movement toward the Syrian war as a
pipeline war began in 2009, Engdahl said,
after “it became clear to some geopolitical
Washington strategists that Qatar could play
a strategic role in pushing Russia out of
the EU natural gas game and put a
US-controlled supplier, Qatar, in the
dominant role.” Accordingly, the Emir of
Qatar, which owns the world’s largest gas
field, went to Damascus in 2009 to propose
to Bashar al Assad the construction of a
natural gas pipeline that would begin in
Qatar, cross Saudi Arabia and Syria, then
end up in Turkey, where the gas would be
sold to EU markets.
However, Assad declined the offer, saying
that he wanted “to protect the interests of
[his] Russian ally, which is Europe’s top
supplier of natural gas.” Engdahl continued:
“This was the beginning of the NATO decision
to militarily destroy the Assad regime.”
That this decision was made in 2009—rather
than after Assad’s 2011 response to the
protesters—was made clear by Ronald Dumas, a
former French Foreign Minister, who in 2009
“revealed that British military were
preparing for invasion of Assad’s Syria.”
Also, the previously mentioned intelligence
firm, Stratfor, reported that by 2011, “US
and UK special forces’ training of Syrian
opposition forces was well underway.” 121
In any case, Syria chose a competing
project, an Iran-Iraq-Syria pipe- line. Iran
would get its natural gas from its part of
the Pars field (Qatar gets its gas from its
portion of the same field) then cross Iraq
and end up in Syria. “ The deal was formally
announced in July 2011,” pointed out Pepe
Escobar, “when the Syrian tragedy was
already in motion.”122
Then in July 2012, the three countries
signed a Memorandum of Understanding to
construct a pipeline from Iran through Iraq
to Syria. This route, sometimes called the
Shi’ite Pipeline, would leave Turkey and
Qatar out in the cold, so they began doing
everything they could to thwart the
construction of that pipeline, including
arming the anti-Assad rebels. The signing of
this Memorandum was also, Engdahl added,
“the precise point when the US gave the
green light to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and
Turkey to back regime change in Damascus—mad
pipeline geopolitics.”123
Victory would open the door for the
Qatar-Saudi Arabia-Turkey gas pipeline to
Europe, with its huge natural gas import
market. Besides bringing riches to Qatar,
Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, the war would
intend, said Dmitry Minin, to accomplish
three goals: “to break Russia’s gas monopoly
in Europe; to free Turkey from its
dependence on Iranian gas; and to give
Israel the chance to export its gas to
Europe by land at less cost.”124
The first of these goals
was most important to Washington. Whereas
Russia had been filling 40 percent of the
EU’s natural gas demand, Washington wanted
it and her allies to control much of the gas
to meet this demand. Here we find “the true
agenda behind Washington’s five-year-long
war for regime change in Damascus,” said
Engdahl, “a war with terrorist groups such
as ISIS or Al Nusra Front-Al Qaeda in Syria
financed largely by money from Qatar.”125
In sum, from the perspective of Engdahl and
the other researchers discussed in this
section, the Syrian War has been primarily
about energy and money (not good and bad
people). Indeed, Escobar’s 2015 essay on the
war in Syria as a pipeline war began by
stating, “Syria is an energy war.”126
The Extreme Moral Charges against
Assad
Contributed to Chaos
The claim that Assad was unbearably evil,
like the claims about Saddam and Gaddafi,
was used to get politicians and others in
America and Europe to support the US drive,
begun by the Bush-Cheney administration, to
bring about regime change in Syria.
But even if he were as evil as he was
portrayed by US officials, this would not
have justified the attempt to depose him.
Colin Powell, referring to his “old Pottery
Barn rule,” cautioned:
I think you have to be extremely careful. We
thought we knew what would happen in Libya.
We thought we knew what would happen in
Egypt. We thought we knew what would happen
in Iraq, and we guessed wrong. In each one
of these countries the thing we have to
consider is that there is some structure . .
. that’s holding the society together. And
as we learned, especially in Libya, when you
remove the top and the whole thing falls
apart. . . you get chaos.127
This chaos has resulted in a tragedy for the
Syrian people. In July 2016, international
lawyer Franklin Lamb wrote:
The conflict here has, according to some NGO
estimates, now claimed the lives of nearly
half a million Syrians, out of a pre-war
population of 22 million. More than 11
percent of the Syrian population is
estimated to have been killed or injured.
More than five million have fled the country
while approximately 8 million are internally
displaced. The UN estimates that nearly 12
million people are in urgent need of
humanitarian assistance, more than six
million being children ranging from infants
to age 12.128
The Syrian chaos resulted primarily from the
Bush-Cheney administration and its neocon
attitudes, which continued significantly in
the Obama administration. Robert Parry
observed:
In Neocon Land, it goes without saying that
once the United States judges some world
leader guilty for having violated
international law or human rights or
whatever, it is fine for the US government
to “take out” that leader. . . . In this
view, the “exceptional” United States has
the right to invade any country of its
choosing and violently remove leaders not to
its liking.129
Unless this neocon way of thinking can be
overcome, there will be little hope that the
United States will quit causing chaos in the
Greater Middle East. When this book was
first planned, it appeared that the Queen of
Chaos herself would be the next US
president. She made it clear, said Parry,
that she was “eager to use military force to
achieve ‘regime change’ in countries that
get in the way of US desires.”130 Indeed,
argued Andre Damon, “There is little doubt
that talks were underway between the Clinton
campaign and the Obama administration, and
planning was well advanced, for a massive US
military escalation in Syria to be launched
after the expected election victory of the
Democratic candidate.131
Evidently realizing that the United States
under Obama and Clinton was going to
continue its assault on Syria, rather than
helping to achieve a tolerable resolution to
the Syrian situation, Russia, Iran, and
Turkey set up talks without inviting the
United States.132 Excluding the United
States, at least under the neocon-inspired
Democrats, seemed necessary to begin
bringing the ruination of Syria to an end.
Moreover, the ruination resulting from the
neocon ideology of the Bush-Cheney
administration, continued by Obama and
Secretaries Clinton and Kerry, has not been
limited to the Greater Middle East. As a
2016 Newsweek article said, “The Tide of
Syrian Refugees Is Unraveling Europe”133—a
problem to be explored after a discussion of
ISIS and Russia. . . .
Russia, Syria, and ISIS
Near the end of 2015, Russia’s airforce
intervened in Syria to protect Assad—at
Assad’s invitation. This invitation made
Russia’s intervention legal, according to
international law, whereas any US
intervention in Syria would be illegal.
(Secretary Kerry has even admitted this in
private.147)
Russia’s intervention allowed Assad to take
the offensive against ISIS and the other
jihadists. The success of this intervention
led the Obama administration to drop its
public insistence that Assad had to go, but
it continued to try to protect al-Nusra and
other jihadists.148
Russia tried to work out a plan in which it
and the United States would join forces
against ISIS and other jihadists, but it
soon concluded that the US was not going to
cooperate but instead wanted to use ISIS
against Assad’s government. So Russia, along
with Syria and Hezbollah, launched “a
three-prong attack intended to dispose of
the US-backed jihadists.”149
The effort to clean the jihadists out of
Syria focused first on Aleppo—in particular,
East Aleppo, which had been under the
control of al-Nusra since 2012. Not
appreciating the successful beginning of
this effort, the United States used this as
an opportunity to claim that Russia and
Syria, having deliberately targeted children
and hospitals, were guilty of war crimes.
The US corporate press, being almost
unanimous in repeating these charges,
evidently convinced most Americans that
these claims were true.
The White Helmets
However, Finian Cunningham pointed out that
these press claims should not be accepted at
face value, because claims of Russian and
Syrian “war crimes” made by Western
reporters were based on “rebel sources,” not
on interviews with ordinary citizens in
Aleppo. Also, much of the “information” that
got reported came from the so-called
“volunteer aid” group known as the White
Helmets, which made many false claims about
itself.
For one thing, it called itself the Syria
Civil Defense, but it is not Syrian. Rather,
it was created by the U.K. and the USA; it
was established in Turkey; and its
“volunteers” were mainly trained in Turkey
and Jordan. In addition, whereas the real
Syria Civil Defense has existed since 1953,
the White Helmets was formed in 2013 by
James Le Mesurier, a former British
intelligence officer who was involved in
NATO’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.
He then “moved into the lucrative private
mercenary industry,” where he became “a
mercenary with the Olive Group, a private
contracting organization that is now merged
with Blackwater-Academi.”150
The real Syria Civil Defense, which was
founded in 1953, is the only one. “The White
Helmets,” said the International Civil
Defense Organization, “are not even civil
defense concretely. We are working . . .
only with official governments... , not the
White Helmets.”151
The real Syria Civil Defense no longer
operated in East Aleppo. Journalist Vanessa
Beeley, who probably wrote the most about
the White Helmets, said that in an interview
with the real Syrian Civil Defense, inside
West Aleppo, she was told that, in 2012,
when various militant factions infiltrated
East Aleppo, they drove out the real Syria
Civil Defense crew—they massacred many, they
kidnapped others, they stole equipment,
including all of the ambulances and three to
five re engines.152
Another false claim by White Helmets was
that it was composed of “volunteers” and
that it is “fiercely independent and accepts
no money from governments.” In truth, it
received funding from various governments,
especially the U.K. ($65 million) and the US
($23 million), which had collaborated with
Le Mesurier in creating the White Helmets.
In particular, calling themselves
“impartial,” the White Helmets claimed,
“We’re not being paid by anybody to pursue a
particular line.”153 However, Abdulrahman Al
Mawwas, the chief liaison officer of the
White Helmets, confirmed that the group was
sponsored by the Western governments.154
In any case, this organization did have a
very particular, twofold purpose: First, to
demonize Assad as a butcher, who killed his
own people indiscriminately, so as to argue
the need for a no-fly zone (which was, of
course, how the attacks on Iraq and Libya
began). In campaigning for a no-fly zone,
the White Helmets were working together with
the public relations organization Avaaz,
which had delivered a petition with
1,203,000 signatures to the UN for the Libya
no-fly zone. In 2015, Avaaz began trying for
a million signatures for a “Safe Zone”
petition for Syria.155
Second, although the White Helmets served as
a terrorist support group, “in the sense of
bringing equipment, arms, even funding, into
Syria,” said Beeley, their “primary function
is propaganda,” as investigative journal
Rick Sterling explained.156
Whereas the US press willingly accepts such
propaganda, which supports our government’s
negative description of Assad and hence
Putin, independent journalists who have
spent time in Syria, where they have talked
to ordinary Syrians, have presented views of
Assad that disagree radically with the
claims of White Helmets and the US press.
See, for example, interviews of journalist
Eva Bartlett, who said, “The Media Is Lying
to You!” and Vanessa Beeley, who said,
“Everything the US Media Says about Aleppo
Is Wrong.”157
Similarly, the highly respected journalist
Stephen Kinzer wrote a Boston Globe article
entitled “The Media Are Misleading the
Public on Syria.” Although the truth about
Aleppo was being reported by “brave
correspondents in the war zone,” Kinzer
said, their reports do “not fit with
Washington’s narrative. As a result, much of
the American press is reporting the opposite
of what is actually happening.”158
David Ray Griffin is a retired American
professor of philosophy of religion and
theology, and a political writer.
ENDNOTES
55 Mnar Muhawesh, “Refugee Crisis & Syria
War Fueled by Competing Gas Pipelines,”
MintPress News, 9 September 2015.
56 Lydia Depillis et al., “A Visual Guide
to 75 Years of Major Refugee Crises around
the World,” Washington Post, 21 December
2015.
57 Tyler Durden, “A Short History: The
Neocon ‘Clean Break’ Grand Design & the
‘Regime Change’ Disasters It Has Fostered,”
Zero Hedge, 1 July 2015.
58 “Navigating through Turbulence: America
and the Middle East in a New Century,”
Washington Institute for Near East Policy,
2001.
59 William Kristol, “Lead the World to
Victory,” Project for the New American
Century, 20 September 2001.
60 Charles Glass, “Is Syria Next?” London
Review of Books, 3 July 2003.
61 Robert Parry, “Risking Nuclear War for
Al Qaeda?” Consortium News,
18 February
2016.
62 Adrian Salbuchi, “Why the US, UK, EU &
Israel Hate Syria,” RT, 10 September, 2013;
William Blum, “Why Does the Government of
the United States Hate Syrian President
Bashar Al-Assad,” Information Clearing
House, 4 November 2015.
63 Andrew Cockburn, “The United States
Teams Up With Al Qaeda . . . Again,”
Harper’s, 18 December 2015.
64 Jonathan Marshall, “The US Hand in the
Syrian Mess,” Consortium News, 20 July 2015.
65 Robert Parry, “Democrats Are Now the
Aggressive War Party,” Consortium News, 11
June 2016.
66 Marshall, “The US Hand in the Syrian
Mess.”
67 Seymour M. Hersh, “The Redirection,” New
Yorker, 5 March 2007.
68 Robert Naiman, “WikiLeaks Reveals How
the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in
Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath,” The WikiLeaks
Files: The World According to US Empire
(Verso, 2015), Chapter 10.
69 Ibid.
70 Andrew Freedman, “The Worst Drought in
900 Years Helped Spark Syria’s Civil War,”
Mashable, 2 March 2016; Elaisha Stokes, “The
Drought that
Preceded Syria’s Civil War Was
Likely the Worst in 900 Years,” Vice News, 3
March 2016; Francesco Femia and Caitlin
Werrell, “Syria: Climate Change, Drought and
Social Unrest,” Think Progress, 3 March
2012.
71 James Fallows, “Your Labor Day Syria
Reader, Part 2: William Polk,” Atlantic, 2
September 2013.
72 Femia and Werrell, “Syria.”
Ibid.; Jan
Selby and Mike Hulme, “Is Climate Change
Really to Blame for Syria’s Civil War?”
Guardian, 29 November 2015.
73 Femia and Werrell, “Syria.”
74 Fallows, “Your Labor Day Syria Reader,
Part 2: William Polk.”
76 Jonathan Marshall, “Hidden Origins of
Syria’s Civil War,” Consortium News, 20 July
2015.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Joshua Landis, “The Armed Gangs
Controversy,” Syria Comment, 3 August 2011.
80 Ibid.
81 F. William Engdahl, The Lost Hegemon:
Whom the Gods Would Destroy (mine.Books,
2016).
82 Marshall, “Hidden Origins of Syria’s
Civil War.”
83 Ibid.
84 Engdahl, The Lost Hegemon, 261.
85 Marshall, “Hidden Origins of Syria’s
Civil War.”
86 Jim Lobe, “US Brief Talks with Syria Spur
Speculation,” Inter Press Service, 30
September 2008.
87 Fallows, “Your Labor Day Syria Reader,
Part 2: William Polk.
88 Muhawesh, “Refugee Crisis & Syria War
Fueled by Competing Gas Pipelines.”
89 Robert Parry, “The NYT’s Neocon ‘Downward
Spiral,’” Consortium News, 6 October 2016.
90 Muhawesh, “Refugee Crisis & Syria War
Fueled by Competing Gas Pipelines.”
91 “Guide to the Syrian Rebels,” BBC News,
13 December 2013.
92 In June of [2014], wrote Steve MacMillan,
“Assad won Syria’s Presidential election
with 88.7 percent of the vote. . . . A
group
of international observers emphasized
that the election was a valid and democratic
expression of the views of the Syrian
people.” Steve MacMillan, “Bashar al-Assad:
The Democratically Elected President of
Syria,” Near Eastern Outlook, 20 December
2015.
93 Seymour M. Hersh, “The Red Line and the
Rat Line,” London Review of Books, April
2014; see also Frederick Reese, “Seymour
Hersh: Benghazi Attack a Consequence of
Weapons ‘Rat-Line’ to Syria,” Mint Press
News, 21 April 2014.
94 Ibid.; Aaron Klein, “CIA Ops Finally
Revealed: What the US Ambassador in Benghazi
was Really Doing,” Global Research, 23
October 2015; Gareth Porter, “Why the US
Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria
Disaster,” TruthDig, 8 October 2015.
95 “Defense, State Department Documents
Reveal Obama Administration Knew that al
Qaeda Terrorists Had Planned Benghazi Attack
10 Days in Advance,” Judicial Watch, 18 May
2015.
96 Alex Christoforou, “Julian Assange Says
‘1,700 Emails in Hillary Clinton’s
Collection’ Proves She Sold Weapons to ISIS
in Syria,” The Duran/Democracy Now; James
Barrett, “WikiLeaks: Hacked Emails Prove
Hillary Armed Jihadists In Syria—Including
ISIS,” Daily Wire, 1 August 2016.
97 Eric Schmitt, “C.I.A. Said to Aid in
Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” New
York Times, 21 June 2012; C.J. Chivers and
Eric Schmitt,” Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels
Expands, With Aid from C.I.A.,”
International New York Times, 24 March 2013;
Trevor Timm, “The
US Decision to Send
Weapons to Syria Repeats a Historical
Mistake,” Guardian, 19 September 2015; Adam
Johnson, “Down the Memory Hole: NYT Erases
CIA’s Efforts to Overthrow Syria’s
Government,” Common Dreams, 21 September
2015.
98 “Military to Military—Seymour M. Hersh
on US Intelligence Sharing in the Syrian
War,” London Review of Books, January 2016.
99 Ben Reynolds, “There Are No Moderate
Syrian Rebels,” Counterpunch, 3 October
2014; Stephen Lendman, “No Moderate Syrian
Rebels Exist,” Global Research, 6 November
2015.
100 Quoted in Jonathan Marshall, “The US
Hand in the Syrian Mess.”
101 Ibid.; Parry, “Risking Nuclear War for
Al Qaeda?”
102 Gareth Porter, “Obama’s ‘Moderate’
Syrian Deception,” Consortium News, 16
February 2016.
103 “Nusra Front’s Rebranding: Story of
Rats Trying to Pass for Flurry White
Rabbits” Sputnik International, 6 August
2016.
104 “Syrian Militants in Tumult after
Israel Moves to Restructure Fatah Al-Sham
Command in Quneitra,” FARS News Agency, 28
September 2016; Alastair Crooke, “How the US
Armed-Up Syrian Jihadists,” Consortium News,
September 29, 2016.
105 Mark Landler and Jonathan Weisman,
“Obama Delays Syria Strike to Focus on a
Russian Plan,” New York Times, 10 September
2013; Juan Cole, “How Putin Saved Obama,
Congress and the European Union
from
Further Embarrassing Themselves on Syria,”
Informed Comment, 10 September 2013.
106 Mark Karlin, “Seymour Hersh on White
House Lies about bin Laden’s Death, Pakistan
and the Syrian Civil War,” Truthout, 14
August 2016.
107 Robert Parry, “Will We Miss President
Obama?” Consortium News, 19 March 2016;
Parry, “ e Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case,”
Consortium News, 7 April 2014; Seymour M.
Hersh, “ e Red Line and the Rat Line,”
London Review of Books, April 2014.
108 Robert Parry, “Neocons Have Weathered
the Storm,” Consortium News, 15 March 2014.
109 Mark Landler, “51 US Diplomats Urge
Strikes Against Assad in Syria,” New York
Times, 16 June 2015.
110 Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity, “Intel Vets Call ‘Dissent Memo’ on
Syria ‘Reckless,’” Consortium News, 25 June
2016.
111 Center for Citizen Initiatives, “Seeking
a Debate on ‘Regime Change’ Wars,”
Consortium News, 20 June 2016; Marjorie
Cohn, “US Bombing Syrian Troops Would Be
Illegal,” Consortium News, 22 June 2016.
112 Parry, “Risking Nuclear War for Al
Qaeda?”
113 Muhawesh, “Refugee Crisis & Syria War
Fueled by Competing Gas Pipelines.”
114 James Huang, “Who Exclusive: Gen. Wesley
Clark on Oil, War and Activism,” Who. What.
Why., 24 September 2012.
115 Chris Floyd, “Seeing Ghosts: History’s
Nightmares Return in Syria,” Empire
Burlesque, 12 January 2016.
116 Dmitry Minin, “The Geopolitics of Gas
and the Syrian Crisis,” Strategic Cultural
Foundation, 31 May 2013.
117 Pepe Escobar, Empire of Chaos (Nimble
Pluribus, 2014).
118 F. William Engdahl, “The Syrian Pipeline
War: How Russia Trumped USA Energy War in
the Mideast,” Russia Insider, 21 September
2016.
119 See David Ray Griffin, Unprecedented:
Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis?
(Clarity Press, 2015), 369-72.
120 F. William Engdahl, “Syria, Turkey,
Israel and the Greater Middle East Energy
War,” Global Research, October 11, 2012
121 F. William Engdahl, “Silence of the
Lambs-Refugees, EU and Syrian Energy Wars,”
NEO, 10 November 2016.
122 Pepe Escobar, “Syria: Ultimate
Pipelineistan War,” Strategic Culture, 7
December 2015.
123 Engdahl, “The Syrian Pipeline War.”
124 Minin, “The Geopolitics of Gas and the
Syrian Crisis.
125 Engdahl, “The Syrian Pipeline War.”.
126 Escobar, “Syria: Ultimate Pipelineistan
War.”
127 Kathy Gilsinan, “The Pottery Barn Rule:
Syria Edition,” Atlantic, 30 September 2015.
128 Franklin Lamb, “Don’t Cry for Us Syria.
. . . The Truth Is We Shall Never Leave
You!” Counterpunch, 29 July 2016.
129 Parry, “Delusional US ‘Group Think’ on
Syria, Ukraine.”
130 Parry, “Democrats Are Now the
Aggressive War Party.”
131 Andre Damon, “The Media Disinformation
Campaign on Russian Hacking and the US
Debacle in Syria,” Global Research, 9
January 2017.
132 Ben Hubbard and David E. Sanger,
“Russia, Iran and Turkey Meet for Syria
Talks, Excluding US,” New York Times, 20
December 2016.
133 Judy Dempsey, “The Tide of Syrian
Refugees Is Unraveling Europe,” Newsweek, 25
February 2016.
134 Karen Yourish et al., “Where ISIS Has
Directed and Inspired Attacks around the
World,” International New York Times, 22
March 2016; “List of Terrorist Incidents
Linked to ISIL,” Wikipedia.
135 Terrence McCoy, “How the Islamic State
Evolved in an American Prison,” Washington
Post, 4 November 2014.
136 Bobby Ghosh, “ISIS: A Short History,”
Atlantic, 14 August 2014; “Islamic State of
Iraq and the Levant,” Wikipedia.
137 Bill Palmer, “Why President Obama’s
Correct Usage of ‘ISIL’ vs ‘ISIS’ Drives
Ignorant People Crazy,” Daily News Bin, 20
December 2015; Kathya, “Why Obama Says
‘ISIL’ instead of ‘ISIS’ — Conspiracy Theory
v. Logic,” Liberal America, 11 December
2015.
138 Stephen Zunes, “The US and the Rise of
ISIS,” National Catholic Reporter, 10
December 2015.
139 Lauren Boyer, “Former US Military
Official Says George W. Bush Created ISIS,”
US News, 1 December 2015.
140 Andrew Bacevich, “ e George W. Bush
Refugees,” Politico, 18 September 2015.
141 Andrew Kirell, “4 Most Noteworthy
Moments from Obama’s Interview with Vice
News,” 16 March 2015.
142 Savage, Power Wars, 684-86.
143 Pamela Engel, “ e Air War against ISIS
Is Costing the US about $11
Million a Day,”
Business Insider, 19 January 2016.
144 David Swanson, “ e US Wants the Islamic
State Group to Win in
Syria,” TeleSUR, 29
March 2016.
145 Chris Floyd, “Seeing Ghosts: History’s
Nightmares Return in Syria,” Empire
Burlesque, 12 January 2016.
146 Eric Margolis, “US Fight against ‘Covert
Western Asset’ ISIS Is a ‘Big Charade,’” Ron
Paul Institute, 2 October 2015; “‘US Has
Always Been Main Sponsor of Islamic
State’—Former CIA Contractor to RT,” RT, 29
September 2016.
147 Anne Barnard, “Audio Reveals What John
Kerry Told Syrians Behind Closed Doors,” New
York Times, 30 September 2016.
148 Simon Tidsdall, “US Changes Its Tune on
Syrian Regime Change as ISIS Threat Takes
Top Priority,” Guardian, 25 January 2015.
149 Mike Whitney, “Putin Ups the Ante: Cease
re Sabotage Triggers Major Offensive in
Aleppo,” Smirking Chimp, 27 September 2016.
150 Vanessa Beeley, ‘’White Helmets Campaign
for War Not Peace—RLA & Nobel Peace Prize
Nomination should be Retracted,” 2 October
2016; Beeley, “ e REAL Syria Civil Defence
Exposes Fake ‘White Helmets’ as
Terrorist-Linked Imposters,” 21st Century
Wire, 23 September 2016; Max Blumenthal,
“How the ‘White Helmets’ Became Global
Heroes While Pushing for US Military
Intervention in Syria,” Alternet, 4 October,
2016; Tim Anderson, The Dirty War On Syria:
Washington, Regime Change and Resistance
(Global Research Publishers, 2016), 75.
151 “Syria’s White Helmets Are Multi-million
Funded, ‘Can’t Be Independent,’” RT, 7
October 2016.
152 “Syrian White Helmets a ‘Terrorist
Support Group & Western Propaganda Tool,’”
RT, 25 October 2016.
153 Beeley, ‘’White Helmets Campaign for War
Not Peace.”
154 “‘We Don’t Hide It’: White Helmets
Openly Admit Being Funded by Western Govts,”
RT, 19 October 2016.
155 Max Blumenthal, “Inside the Shadowy PR
Firm That’s Lobbying for Regime Change in
Syria,” Alternet, 3 October 2016.
156 “Syrian White Helmets a ‘Terrorist
Support Group’”; Sterling, “Seven Steps of
Highly Effective Manipulators.”
157 See “Journalist Eva Bartlett, ‘I’m Back
from Syria. The Media Is Lying to You!’” The
Event Chronicle, 13 February 2016; “Liberty
Report Talks to Vanessa Beeley: ‘Everything
the US Media Says about Aleppo Is Wrong,’”
Liberty Report, 29 September 2016. She
should not be described as an “Assad
supporter,” Beeley said, because she has
various criticisms of him. She simply
disagrees with the view that Syria should be
destroyed in order to save it.
158 Stephen Kinzer, “The Media Are
Misleading the Public on Syria,” Boston
Globe, 18 February 2016.
159 David W. Lesche and James Gelvin, “Assad
Has Won in Syria. But Syria Hardly Exists,”
New York Times, 11 January 2017.
160 “Audio Evidence: John Kerry Privately
Confirms Supporting and Arming Daesh,”
Voltaire Network, 13 January 2017; referring
to “Absolutely Stunning—Leaked Audio of
Secretary Kerry Reveals President Obama
Intentionally Allowed Rise of ISIS,” The
Last Refuge (The Conservative Tree House), 1
January 2017.
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Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? |
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