By
Jonathan Cook
October 21, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -
There is something profoundly deceitful in the
way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are
framing Donald Trump’s decision to
pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need
to defend Trump’s actions or ignore the dangers
posed to the Kurds, at least in the short-term, by
the departure of US forces from northern Syria to
understand that the coverage is being crafted in
such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger
picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line
from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s meeting this week with Trump,
who is described as having had a “meltdown”.
Explaining why she and other senior Democrats
stormed out, the paper
writes that “it became clear the president had
no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in
the Middle East”.
Hang on a minute! Let’s pull back a little, and
not pretend – as the media and Democratic party
leadership wish us to – that the last 20 years did
not actually happen. Many of us lived through those
events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn’t emerge out of
nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades
of US interference in the Middle East. And I’m not
even referring to the
mountains of evidence that US officials backed
their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming
Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington, in
their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the
region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become
al-Qaeda.
No, I’m talking about the fact that in destroying
three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that
refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of
Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington’s local client
states, the US created a giant void of governance at
the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that
void would be filled soon enough by religious
extremists like Islamic State – and they didn’t
care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don’t have to be a
Saddam Hussein,
Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad
apologist to accept this point. You don’t even have
to be concerned that these so-called “humanitarian”
wars violated each state’s integrity and
sovereignty, and are therefore defined in
international law as “the supreme war crime”.
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The bigger picture – the one no one appears to
want us thinking about – is that the US
intentionally sought to destroy these states with no
obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my
book
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, these
haven’t so much been regime-change wars as
nation-state dismantling operations – what I have
termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools
of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic
foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of
neoconservatism – the so-called “Washington
consensus” since 9/11.
The first was Israel’s long-standing approach to
the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any
emerging Palestinian institution or social
structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model
on steroids, creating a leaderless, ravaged,
enfeebled society that sucked out all the local
population’s energy. That strategy proved very
appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one
they could export to non-compliant states in the
region.
The second was the Chicago school’s Shock
Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein’s book of that
name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the
psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation
created by these overthrow wars were supposed to
engender a far more malleable population that would
be ripe for a US-controlled “colour revolution”.
The recalcitrant states would be made an example
of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources
and eventually remade as new dependent markets for
US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney
and Halliburton really meant when they talked about
building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents,
the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of
dismal economic failure everywhere it has been
attempted – from Pinochet’s Chile to Yeltsin’s
Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this
policy with any kind of acumen for learning from
past errors. As Bush’s senior adviser
Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he
rebuked for being part of the “reality-based
community”: “We’re an empire now and, when we act,
we create our own reality.”
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq,
Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and
structures that held these societies together,
however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention
it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian
though they were – were also secular, and had
well-developed welfare states that ensured high
rates of literacy and some of the region’s finest
public health services.
One can argue about the initial causes of the
uprising against Assad that erupted in Syria in
2011. Did it start as a popular struggle for
liberation from the Assad government’s
authoritarianism? Or was it a sectarian insurgency
by those who wished to replace Shia minority rule
with Sunni majority rule? Or was it driven by
something else: as a largely economic protest by an
under-class suffering from food shortages as climate
change led to repeated crop failures? Or are all
these factors relevant to some degree?
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and
how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence
in ways that are likely to prove convincing to those
not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside
too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture
I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its
Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as
an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as
they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no
uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would
be found and that served as the pretext for Bush’s
campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned
into a much larger and far more vicious war because
the Gulf states, with US backing, flooded the
country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to
overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia
influence in the region. The events in Syria and
earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni
religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even more
barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic
State.
A dark US vanity project
After Rove and Cheney had their fill playing
around with reality, nature got on with honouring
the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic
State filled the vacuum Washington’s policy had
engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US
and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war
against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a
state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia’s
Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their
planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by
destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other
religious groups as infidels and killed fellow
Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute
rule, became the west’s chief allies in Syria.
Directly and covertly, we gave them money and
weapons to begin building their state on parts of
Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in
helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the
supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered
world would ensure every senior Washington official
faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too
for the moment that the US, consciously through its
actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death
and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in
Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and
the Gulf states were waging through Islamic State
and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of
time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who
was killed and every single Syrian made homeless –
and there were hundreds of thousands of them –
suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in
US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war
became instead something darker still: a
neoconservative vanity project that ravaged
countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump now appears to be ending part of that
policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons.
But very belatedly – and possibly only temporarily –
he is seeking to close a small chapter in a
horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in
the Middle East, one intimately tied to Islamic
State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the
Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in
Syria took place. They should have no credibility on
the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has “no plan to deal
with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East”
is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping
us in the face with in the hope the spray of
seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic
State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis –
or something very like it – was inevitably going to
fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by
assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in
Syria with money and arms that came with only one
string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist
ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in
Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy
for preventing the revival of Islamic State is
preventing the US and the Gulf states from
interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian
territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill.
The jihadists’ state-building project is now
unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will
continue to wither, as it would have done years
before if the US and its Gulf allies had not fuelled
it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the
experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom
they managed to carve out in northern Syria during
the war survived till now only because of continuing
US military support. With a US departure, and the
Kurds too weak to maintain their improvised
statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time
has risked sucking in the Turkish army, which fears
a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds’ predicament is simple: face a
takeover by Turkey or seek Assad’s protection to
foil Turkish ambitions. The best hope for the Kurds
looks to be the Syrian army’s return, filling the
vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term
stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria
many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the
corporate media suggest, those deaths were lost not
in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even
if it was an early aspiration for some fighters,
quickly became a goal that was impossible for them
to realise. No, those deaths were entirely
pointless. They were sacrificed by a western
military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game
that dragged on for many years after everyone knew
it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi’s purported worries about Isis
reviving because of Trump’s Syria withdrawal are
simply crocodile fears. If she is really so worried
about Islamic State, then why did she and other
senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under
Barack Obama spent years spawning, cultivating and
financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was
best placed to serve as a bulwark against the
head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership’s bad faith
– and that of the corporate media – are revealed in
their ongoing efforts to silence and smear
Tulsi Gabbard,
the party’s only candidate for the presidential
nomination who has pointed out the harsh political
realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years
of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership
don’t care about Syria, or its population’s welfare.
They don’t care about Assad, or Isis. They care only
about the maintenance and expansion of American
power – and the personal wealth and influence it
continues to bestow on them.