Wesley Clark, a former US Army general, recounted a visit to the Pentagon a few weeks after 9/11, where he was shown a classified document that set out how the US was going to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran”.

Now that Syria has fallen, six of the seven countries mentioned in that famous memo have by now been thrown into chaos or destroyed. The U.S. has led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA’s Timber Sycamore, during 2010’s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006).

As soon as the bogus ceasefire in Lebanon was signed Turkey, along with the US and Israel, unleashed their jihadist Syrian rebels, al-Qaeda spinoff Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), many of them foreigners, against Syria. These were exceptionally well armed and trained. They have night vision equipment, drones, artillery, Starlink communication and a capable, professional command.

It’s almost certain that the jihadists were aided by Western special forces–British SAS, SBS and US SEALS, Green Berets, Delta Force, etc. There is no organic Syrian revolution. There is the CIA-run counterrevolution. They sound the same, but are complete opposites. These hard men with guns are not, as CNN describes them, “freedom loving rebels”, but Sunni terrorists, similar to the Mujahideen that the US deployed in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Apparently there are “good” jihadists and “bad” jihadists. The former are those who do the bidding of the US and Israel to attack Muslim countries that resist the empire. The latter are those that apparently do not.

Moreover it will be interesting to see how the United States will reconcile the contradictions and pronounce a certified international terrorist organization (HTS) a legitimate government. HTS is a descendant of al Qaeda and ISIS, two terrorist organizations that Republican and Democrat administrations vowed to defeat in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). The US corporate media, following the messaging of the CIA / MI6, is frantically trying to paint HTS as a group of moderates who are tolerant of all ethnic groups and religious communities, the reality is otherwise, where this is the group which has transformed itself overnight from head-chopping jihadism into a moderate, “diversity-friendly” Syrian national resistance movement.

Meanwhile “liberals” are celebrating the end of the government of Bashar Assad after the stunning defeat by HTS, their zeal the result of years of war propaganda. (By the way, liberals are targeted more intensely with the expectation that “conservatives ” are already down with empire). The fact that HTS is essentially rebranded al Qaeda is one of the jarring cognitive dissonances that performative “liberals” celebrating the fall of Assad will probably skip over. Instead of the era of peace and stability now that the hated “dictator” is gone, the opposite will be the reality. Just ask the people in Libya who were liberated by the US and NATO.

Here, it’s worth reminding readers that in 2017, a leaked State Department memo explained in plain language that it’s standing US policy to overlook the abuses of US allies while denouncing the abuses of US enemies in order to undermine enemies. The memo showed neocon State Department official Brian Hook schooling a incoming Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, that “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. Thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks we get a peak into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook informed Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.

There will be much pious editorializing among our political and corporate media class about how Assad was a horrible dictator ( which is true ) and how the US supports and nurtures democracy, but it’s convenient how all of these countries on General Clark’s list have massive amounts of petroleum and gas, or are strategically situated for transport of said hydrocarbons.

The US has been meddling in Syria since 1949, because of petroleum. Most people are unaware of how pipeline politics have shaped events in Syria making the country a target for US aggression. But from 1949 until today, US intelligence services have tried repeatedly to topple the leader of the Syrian government in order to oversee and control a Trans-Arabian Pipeline “intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria.

In March 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered a coup replacing al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, four and a half months into his regime.

The crucial thing to understand is that Washington is fully committed to controlling critical resources in the Middle East as a way to contain China and maintain its increasingly tenuous grip on global power. 

The US corporate media will mention none of this. It wasn’t a US/Israel regime change op utilizing jihadists but an organic uprising by Syrians desiring “freedom”. Meanwhile, its wild watching all the Western journalists and politicians celebrating an end to secularism in Syria. And the installation of an al Qaeda linked regime.

Of all the mainstream articles on the fall of the Syrian government, not one bothered to mention the fact that the Sunni militia that toppled Bashar al-Assad is currently on the US State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. Nor did they mention that the same jihadist group is on the United Nations list of terrorist organizations. Nor did they mention that the leader of the group—Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—has a $10 million bounty on his head offered by the US government. None of this information was reported to the public because the media does not want the American people to know that Washington just helped install a terrorist regime at the center of the Middle East. Instead CNN disingenuously reported, “How Syria’s rebel leader went from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing revolutionary.”

How are we to believe that the same ideological groups who are head-chopping, women-abusing, minority-oppressing terrorists when they operate in US-occupied Iraq, are now “moderate”, “diversity-friendly rebels” when they operate next door in Syria?

While a succession of U.S. presidents have been committed to regime change in Syria, that long-held goal has been achieved in part through a sustained campaign of war propaganda aimed at “liberals”. A campaign that depicts the US as committed to promoting a liberal democratic order. That is why HTS is repackaging itself, ably assisted by the corporate media, as newly pragmatic and moderate. Truth is always the first casualty in war, or something, but the reality is that Syria was the victim of a U.S. regime change plot that began in 2011 and it was carried out by successive administrations with the help of collusion with the media. The U.S. had buy-in for whatever acts it wanted to carry out against Syria because of a sustained war propaganda effort. Remember the White Helmets? Or that time CNN Staged A Fake Interview With A Syrian Child For War Propaganda? The propaganda included newly created terms such as “barrel bombs” and a new epithet against anyone who spoke against their regime change project, who were labeled as “Assadists.”

I’m so old that I blogged about all of this in real time, but such is the united states of amnesia.

Of course, Israel is the clear beneficiary of the destruction of Syria, poised to starve and murder the remainder of the Palestinians trapped in Gaza while plotting the same for the residents of the West Bank. The 2001 Pentagon memo shown to Clark was, in fact, a reworking of a military blueprint for the Middle East that had been circulating in Washington for even longer – and had nothing to do with responding to 9/11 or terrorism. It was all about securing Israel’s place as a forward base for US interests in the oil-rich region. The champions of this idea were an increasingly influential group called the neoconservatives – or neocons for short.

By 1996, they had formalised their plan for “remaking” the Middle East into a document called A Clean Break. It proposed that Israel should tear up the Oslo Accords and any moves towards peacemaking with the Palestinians – the title’s “clean break” – and instead go on the offensive against its regional foes, with US backing.

As I’ve written before: it’s hard to tell if US foreign policy utilizes Israel or the Israeli Lobby controls the US, but Israel has certainly been taking full advantage of the destruction of Syria. HTS has been for years completely supported covertly, by Israel, which was outed for paying salaries to the extremists during the Syrian war, and famously helped rehabilitate Al-Qaeda fighters injured in battle.

Both Israel and the US utilize terrorist proxies. Jake Sullivan, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser, was clear who our allies were. In an email in late 2012, as Timber Sycamore was being put together, he wrote to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to avoid any confusion: “AQ [al-Qaeda] are on our side in Syria.”

An email sent to Clinton earlier, in spring 2012, had laid out the emerging thinking in the State Department. “US diplomats and Pentagon can start strengthening the opposition. It will take time,” the email asserted. “The payoff will be substantial…Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East… Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsors since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles.” The chief beneficiary was made clear: “America can and should help them [Syrian rebels] – and by doing so help Israel.”

All of this is a reminder that the US empire and its proxies remain the greatest threat to world peace and development–a potent danger that should not be underestimated. For those in Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing and across all other capitals outside the West who lie to themselves about the nature of this war to avoid the discomfort of facing it – Syria is your ultimate future. There is no place for you at their table. You cannot compromise. You cannot infinitely buy time. You either successfully defend your nation together with your allies or you will be destroyed.

The Roman historian Tacitus was prescient: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”