Democracy presupposes the ability to hold honest public debates. Therefore, propaganda would be the prerogative of non-democratic regimes. Yet history teaches us that modern propaganda was conceived in the United Kingdom and the United States during the First World War, and that the USSR and Nazi Germany were pale copycats.

During the war against Syria, we have often explained that the reality on the ground did not correspond in any way to the image that Westerners had of it. We denounced the fabrication of evidence by the US, British, French and Turkish secret services to conceal Western aggression and to incite a revolution against a dictatorship.

While the United Kingdom has not been present on the ground since 2018, journalist Ian Cobain has just published official British documents in the Middle East Eye that shed light on how London massively intoxicated bona fide journalists and then withdrew (1) He had already published in the Guardian, in 2016, revelations on the organisation of MI6 in this matter (2).

Above all, it is important to remember that the British were not pursuing the same objective at all as their US ally. London hoped to regain its influence from the colonial era (as did Paris). The United Kingdom did not believe that the United States intended to destroy the state structures of the broader Middle East as a whole (Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy). That is why it had conceived the "Arab Spring" operation on the model of Lawrence of Arabia’s "Great Arab Revolt" (the Muslim Brotherhood now playing the role of the Wahhabi of World War I). Their propaganda was therefore designed to create New Syria around this Brotherhood and not to divide it as the CIA wanted and still wants.

Westerners had already been convinced of revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. It was therefore easier to sell them a fourth field of operations.