The successful Russian intervention in Syria’s civil war is causing a great hue and cry within US media and think-tanks.
The latest outburst is, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency, by Charles Lister, a visiting Fellow at the Brookings Doha Centre. Lister argues that the rise of ISIS is all the fault of “brutal dictator” Bashar al Assad, and that Russia is bombing the “democratic rebels,” who are heroically resisting, with insufficient US support.
The problem with this analysis, aside from the projection, is that the author ignores the US empire’s longstanding goals of regime change in Syria, using Sunni-terrorists. The civil war that the US fomented is blamed on the Russian and Syrian governments. And now that America’s jihadists proxies are losing there is concern expressed for the Syrian people who wouldn’t be suffering at all absent the regime change plot.
Through it all, Lister trots out the same tired neoconservative party line, as if all evidence to the contrary has gone down the memory hole. Unsurprisingly, Lister is from the Doha-Qatar outpost of Brookings, where the government of Qatar foots the bill for their propaganda.
Did I mention that Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia, is one of the primary funders of the Sunni-terrorists who are attacking Syria? And furthermore, the US and Qatar were pushing for a pipeline to supply dollar-denominated energy from Qatar through Syria and on into Europe, before the civil war erupted. The plan was to remove Assad who is regarded as a barrier to this project, a US-backed war and destabilization that has resulted in 250,000 Syrians being killed.
The proximate cause of the Syrian civil war is, of course, the invasion of Iraq, which Lister is at pains to not discuss. The real problem for Lister, and Brookings, and the other neocon think tanks, is that they all fervently supported the invasion of Iraq that empowered Iran and by extension, Syria. The neocon genius’s, and their media cheerleading squad, who advocated the overthrow of Saddam’s regime were so triumphant and puffed up with dreams of American empire that they failed to understand that the real beneficiary of their cunning plan to privatize Iraq would be Iran, and the Shia Crescent which includes Syria.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the neocons really believed their own New American Century–BS, where they were going to remake the Middle-East, and that Iraq was just the first target, with Syria and Iran close behind. Unfortunately, they also believed their own free market and free enterprise-BS, disbanding the Iraqi military and privatizing state run companies, immediately un-employing millions of Iraq citizens and soldiers and fueling resistance to the American invasion.
Plans to invade the rest of the nations on their list were put on the shelf, to be dusted off in the future. While unknowledgeable, the neocons are indefatigable, and have never given up hope of overthrowing the nations on their list, including Syria.
Russian actions are also shredding Responsible to Protect arguments by demonstrating how opportunistic western concern for victims really is.
So we get a plaintive cry. How dare these evil Russians bomb hospitals, when everyone knows that the US is the indispensable nation that bombs hospitals.
Update: Michael Hudson, economist and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, explains the neocons utilization of Sunni-terror.
“ISIS and Al Nusra are acting as America’s Foreign Legion. When Hillary Clinton overthrew the Libyan government, the arms and military stockpiles were turned over to ISIS. Libya’s central bank resources were robbed and also turned over to ISIS. When America marched into Iraq, it turned the Sunni army and all those billions of dollars of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills over ultimately to ISIS. So although America opposes ISIS when they kill Americans, ISIS is basically America’s way of breaking up countries that may threaten not to be part of the global dollar standard.”
camelotkidd 