Authored by David Stockman through InternationalMan.com,
If there was ever a second that laid naked the utter stupidity and futility of Washington’s Empire First coverage it certainly emerged within the smoking ruins of Syria. The latter was the desultory fruits of Washington’s 13-years-long effort to destroy the authentic authorities of Syria on the purported grounds that Assad was a brutal tyrant and plunderer of the nation’s paltry wealth.
The actual fact is, he most likely was simply that. And would possibly properly have been among the many worst of the handfuls of tyrants who as we speak oppress their residents in nations giant and small world wide. However then once more, did God Almighty anoint Washington as some type of planetary Good Shepard charged with bringing simply and sort rule to all of the peoples of the planet?
We predict not. Certainly, upkeep of a sustainable, affluent, free constitutional Republic requires constancy to the other— a regime of small, solvent authorities together with on the Pentagon facet of the Potomac. Accordingly, the only finish of international coverage ought to be safeguarding the safety and liberty of the homeland, not proctoring the governing etiquette of rulers midway approach across the globe that pose no army menace by any means to America’s homeland safety.
But Washington has seen match over the past decade to pump-in upwards of $40 billion of overt and covert army help, financial help and humanitarian help to a plethora of opposition Syrian forces for no discernible purpose of homeland safety. On the contrary, the expenditure of all this treasure and political capital was designed for no function aside from to impact Regime Change in Damascus and to eject the Assad authorities from its management over the what had been the remaining white areas of the Syrian map under as of just some weeks again.
But the colour coded areas throughout what’s now the vacuum of Assad’s fall let you know all you must know concerning the sheer folly of this enterprise and why in reality Washington has mid-wifed yet one more failed state; and has finished so as soon as once more on the pretext of combating terrorism—this time the ragged band of ISIS jihadists who briefly planted their black flags and brutal rule within the dusty cities of the Higher Euphrates centered in Raqqah, as roughly depicted by the purple space of the map.
The reality, nonetheless, is that the white areas together with the Damascus area beforehand managed by the Assad authorities had been the true bulwark in opposition to a resurgence of the ISIS head-choppers, who had emerged in 2013-2014 from the ashes of Washington’s failed regime change intervention in Iraq. So even when the selection was between the lesser of two evils, anybody together with his head-screwed on straight may see that bolstering, or not less than tacitly tolerating, the secularist, pluralist Alawite regime in Damascus was far preferable to the ISIS Caliphate fanatics.
Acknowledged in another way, one failed Regime Change fiasco in Iraq certainly warranted second ideas about continued pursuit of a second try at Regime Change subsequent door in Syria. In spite of everything, the menace of ISIS which had jap Syria was the spawn of Washington’s disastrous intervention in opposition to Saddam Hussein. But like within the case of Assad, Hussein had posed no menace to America’s homeland safety by any means however was however handled to the “shock and awe” of huge army assault and the gallows as a result of he was alleged to be a plundering tyrant who wouldn’t play good with the grasping Emirs who dominated the shared deserts and oilfields subsequent door.
Alas, the Empire First geniuses on the banks of the Potomac didn’t get any of this. Their swell plan was to eliminate each the ISIS jihadists and the Assad regime on the similar time. However in making an attempt to take action they ended up creating two new militarized monsters out of the financial dislocations and tribal clashes that resulted from the very civil warfare they’d unleashed.
To that finish, the earlier ISIS-ruled territory in purple is now managed by the US funded Kurdish SDF militias (Syrian Democratic Forces). The latter, after all, are the mortal enemy of Washington’s ostensible NATO ally subsequent door in Turkey, which had been combating its personal Kurdish insurgents for many years.
Certainly, owing to that menace, Turkey has supported and funded the anti-Kurd SNA (Syrian Nationwide Military), which occupies the border lands depicted in yellow on the map. A number of years in the past, nonetheless, the SNA was known as the FSA (Free Syrian Military), which was a CIA-supported and operated brainchild of the late Senator John McCain, who by no means met a rustic within the center east that he didn’t want to invade and occupy.
In the meantime, with two new US-funded militias competing for army dominance, the third Syrian anti-government drive comprised of the jihadist factions hadn’t been eradicated, both. That latter phantasm, after all, had been triumphally claimed by Trump when Washington bombed Raqqah and surrounding areas to smithereens in 2017, and in addition completed off its terrorist chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in 2019. Just like the SNA, nonetheless, the jihadist contingent had merely shape-shifted. Twice.
What’s as we speak HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham), which is ostensibly in charge of the red-colored hall from Aleppo right down to Damascus, was beforehand generally known as the Nusra Entrance. That’s again when its present chief, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was a strict jihadist.
In 2011 he had been despatched to jap Syria to foment an rebellion by his mentor and terrorist, the aforementioned al-Baghdadi. Each had been graduates of what amounted to the large prison-based coaching college for Sunni jihadists at Camp Bucca in Iraq, later dubbed as “America’s Jihadi College”. The latter 20,000-prisoner monstrosity had been stood up by the clueless proconsuls Washington had despatched to Iraq after Saddam’s demise and who quickly wanted an enormous human storage facility for the fruits of their misbegotten de-bathification marketing campaign.
Because it occurred, by the tip of the last decade Washington had soured on its Iraq liberation enterprise and was making an attempt to extricate itself from its failed multi-trillion misadventure. Along side this wind-down it undertook to considerably empty this bulging jail in what turned generally known as the “Nice Jail Launch of 2009,” releasing 5,700 high-security detainees from Bucca Jail. Amongst these was Baghdadi and Julani.
Whereas the previous organized and led the Sunni rebellion in Mosul and Anbar province of Western Iraq, the Nusra Entrance was established as a separate entity in Syria by al-Julani. Initially, it was an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, however in April 2013 al-Baghdadi introduced that the Nusra Entrance had merged with ISIS to type the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Nonetheless, al-Julani and the Nusra Entrance rejected this merger and went their separate approach, taking up a task as an impartial jihadist drive based mostly in western Syria with strongholds in Idlib and Aleppo. Thereafter his Nusra Entrance spearheaded the 2015 conquest of this area beneath the banner of Jaish al-Fatah (the Military of Conquest). The latter was, in flip, described on the time by Overseas Coverage journal as an exquisite “synergy” of jihadists and western arms.
Years later, US official Brett McGurk didn’t hesitate to label al-Julani’s Idlib base as “the biggest Al-Qaeda secure haven since 9/11.” After all, the essential function of US weapons and strategic help in fostering this jihadist success went unmentioned.
So why did the US present what one analyst known as a “cataract of weaponry” to Nusra Entrance, simply the identical? An August 2012 Protection Intelligence Company (DIA) report, infamously written beneath the auspices of Basic Michael Flynn, let the cat out of the bag fairly dramatically. It revealed, actually, that the Washington neocons and hegemonists had decided to help the institution of a “Salafist principality” in jap Syria and western Iraq as a part of the trouble to depose president Bashar al-Assad and divide the nation.
The DIA report stated a radical spiritual mini-state precisely of the kind later established by ISIS as its “caliphate” was the US aim, even whereas admitting that the so-called Syrian revolution searching for to topple Assad’s authorities was being pushed by “Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda.”
Certainly, as indicated above, the seeds of this Salafist principality had been planted when the then ISIS chief, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had dispatched Julani to Syria in August 2011. Outstanding Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada, who was embedded with Al-Qaeda fighters from Lebanon in Syria, met Julani within the central Syrian metropolis of Homs right now. Mortada knowledgeable his readers that Julani was being hosted by the Farouq Brigades, an FSA faction based mostly within the metropolis, which was a sectarian Salafist group that included fighters who had fought for Zarqawi’s brutal Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) after the US invasion.
That’s proper. The present liberators of Syria had been legatees of the brutes who had been flushed out of the woodwork by Washington’s silly “Shock and Awe” marketing campaign in Iraq approach again in 2003. And true to type, just a few months after receiving his project from al-Baghdadi, Julani and his fighters entered the warfare in opposition to the Syrian authorities by finishing up a number of terror assaults. In Damascus throughout December 2011 Julani despatched suicide bombers to focus on the Syrian authorities’s Basic Safety Directorate, killing 44, together with civilians and safety personnel. Two weeks later, in January 2012, Julani despatched one other suicide bomber to detonate explosives close to a bus within the Midan district of Damascus, killing some 26 folks.
These bloody doings coincident with the institution of the “Help Entrance for the Folks of the Levant,” or the Nusra Entrance, was revealed after a videotape was offered to journalist Mortada displaying Julani and different masked males saying the group’s existence and claiming accountability for the assaults. Thus, such is the lineage of the chief and group which purportedly “liberated” Syria from the clutches of the Assad household.
In any occasion, when the Raqqah-based epicenter of ISIL was demolished after 2017, the Nusra Entrance held on, altering its title to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in October 2017. This rebranding was a part of an effort to distance itself from al-Qaeda and to restructure the group by merging with a number of different jihadist factions.
For a number of years HTS remained contained in its slim Idlib territorial base, even because it was assaulted by fixed assaults from the forces of Assad and his Russian allies within the space. In impact, they had been doing god’s work taking up the actual enemy of civilization.
Nonetheless, al-Julani persevered, not too long ago reinventing himself as Ahmed al-Sharaa—which is his actual title. He now wears a fair shorter beard than within the second image under and typically even dons a tie, whereas claiming to be a “variety pleasant” pluralist good friend of all Syrians—Christians, Alawites, Druze and so on. That’s, the very former infidel enemies of the Caliphate who al-Julani had beforehand decreed had been to be put to loss of life on the traditional orders of the Prophet himself.
In brief, Syria is now destined to change into even a worse mess than Libya turned after it was liberated by Hilary Clinton in 2011. As is clear from the above, you really want a roster-sheet to even start to know the insanity now unfolding there, however the at all times astute Moon of Alabama has summarized the state of play in addition to could be finished:
It’s now extremely possible that the nation will collapse. Inside and outside actors will attempt to seize and/or management as many elements of the cadaver as every of them can.
Years of chaos and strife will comply with from that.
Israel is grabbing one other great amount of Syrian land. It has taken management of the Syrian metropolis of Quneitra, together with the cities of Al-Qahtaniyah and Al-Hamidiyah within the Quneitra area. It has additionally superior into the Syrian Mount Hermon and is now positioned simply 30 kilometers from (and above) the Syrian capital.
Additionally it is additional demilitarizing Syria by bombing each Syria army storage website in its attain. Air protection positions and heave tools are its main targets. For years to return Syria, or no matter might evolve from it, shall be fully defenseless in opposition to outdoors assaults.
Israel is for now the massive winner in Syria. However with stressed Jihadists now proper on its border it stays to be seen for a way lengthy that may maintain.
The U.S. is bombing the central desert of Syria. It claims to strike ISIS however the actual goal is any native (Arab) resistance which may stop a connection between the U.S. managed east of Syria with the Israel managed south-west. There might be plans to additional construct this connection into an Eretz Israel, a Zionist managed state “from the river to the ocean”.
Turkey has had and has an enormous function within the assault on Syria. It’s financing and controlling the ‘Syrian Nationwide Military’ (beforehand the Free Syrian Military), which it’s primarily utilizing to combat Kurdish separatists in Syria.
There are some 3 to five million Syrian refugees in Turkey which the wannabe-Sultan Erdogan needs, for home political causes, to return to Syria. The evolving chaos is not going to allow that.
Turkey had nurtured and pushed the al-Qaeda derived Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to take Aleppo. It didn’t anticipate it to go any additional. The autumn of Syria is now changing into an issue for Turkey because the U.S. is taking management of it. Washington will attempt to use HTS for its personal pursuits that are, stated mildly, not essential appropriate with no matter Turkey might need to do.
A main goal for Turkey are the Kurdish insurgents inside Turkey and their help from the Kurds in Syria. Organized because the Syrian Democratic Forces the Kurds are sponsored and managed by the US. The SDF are already combating Erdogan’s SNA and any additional Turkish intrusion into Syria shall be confronted by them.
The SDF, supported by the U.S. occupation of east-Syria, is in charge of the main oil, gasoline and wheat fields within the east of the nation. Anybody who needs to rule in Damascus will want entry to these assets to have the ability to finance the state.
Regardless of having a $10 million award on its head HTS chief Abu Mohammad al-Golani is at present performed up by western media because the unifying and tolerant new chief of Syria. However his HTS is itself a coalition of hard-line Jihadists from numerous nations. There’s little left to loot in Syria and as quickly as these assets run out the combating inside HTS will start. Will al-Golani have the ability to management the sectarian urges of the comrades when these begin to plunder the Shia and Christian shrines of Damascus?
Over the past years Russia was much less invested within the Assad authorities than it appeared. It knew that Assad had change into a largely ineffective companion. The Russia Mediterranean base in Khmeimim in Latakia province is its springboard into Africa. There shall be U.S. stress on any new management in Syria to kick the Russians out. Nonetheless any new management in Syria, whether it is sensible, will need to maintain the Russians in. It’s by no means unhealthy to have another choice ought to one finally want one. Russia might properly keep in Latakia for years to return.
With the autumn of Syria Iran has misplaced the main hyperlink in its axis of resistance in opposition to Israel. Its ahead defenses, offered by Hizbullah in Lebanon, are actually in ruins.
Then once more, the query recurs. What precisely was the purpose of wrecking one other tiny, largely land-locked nation within the center east with a inhabitants of simply 20 million folks, a GDP of solely $40 billion, a per capita revenue of barely $2,000, no vital pure assets past a 2.5 billion barrel pittance of oil reserves (equal to about 30 days of world oil manufacturing), no vital metal or different industrial capability, no tech sector, no functionality to venture any army energy by any means past its personal borders and a shopper sector so devastated by the Washington-instigated civil wars that whole auto gross sales in 2022 had been 478 items?
That’s proper. No zeros lacking!
On the finish of the day, not even Washington is silly sufficient to waste $40 billion on that. What has actually been occurring, subsequently, is that by the lights of the Empire Firsters Assad needed to be eliminated as a result of he had the fallacious allies and the fallacious neighbors. The demonization about his tyranny and plunder was only a cowl story for the actual goal, which was undermining his Iranian ally.
As a minority Alawite, which is a department of Shiite Islam, Assad had aligned together with his Shiite kin in Tehran and permitted Syrian territory for use by the latter to move arms and materiale to Iran’s Hezbollah allies in southern Lebanon. In flip, that was totally inside Syria’s sovereign rights—particularly since Hezbollah performed a number one function within the coalition authorities of Lebanon. So destroying this Shiite nexus was the actual purpose for the relentless Washington warfare on Assad, and its incessant embrace and financing of the entire unsavory flotsam and jetsam which percolated up from Syria’s devastating civil warfare.
Nonetheless once more, nonetheless, there isn’t a approach that the homeland safety of America was imperiled both by the Shiite-based Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance or the truth that one sovereign state member of that alliance (Syria) permitted its territory to used to move weaponry and materiale. The one attainable purpose for Washington’s two decade folly in Syria, subsequently, is the proposition that Iran is an existential menace to the freedom and safety of the American homeland—approach over right here 6,400 miles from Tehran.
That’s a ridiculous joke, to say the least. Iran’s GDP of $400 billion is the same as simply 1.5% or 5 days value of US GDP. Likewise, its $25 billion army finances is simply 2.5% of the $1 trillion monster domiciled within the Pentagon.
Much more to the purpose, Iran’s tiny Navy consists of 67 largely coastal patrol boats and quick assault crafts, none of which might function a lot outdoors of the Persian Gulf. Additionally, it has no long-range plane and its longest vary missile, the Soumar cruise missile, is non-nuclear and has a most vary of 1850 miles. That’s to say, it could actually barely attain the European elements of the Mediterranean basin, and might’t hit in any respect cities like Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Stockholm or Oslo—-to say nothing of even remotely touchdown on our facet of the Atlantic moat.
Lastly, Iran is just not a rogue nuclear energy or wanna be nuclear menace—even in keeping with the 17 Deep State intelligence companies which write the so-called NIEs or Nationwide Intelligence Estimates. These NIEs have stated again and again that Iran deserted even its nuclear analysis program in 2003, abided by the Obama nuke deal to the letter previous to Trump’s unilaterally shit-canning it in 2018, and even now could be solely enriching modest quantities of uranium to authorized ranges as is its prerogative as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
In brief, Iran is Bibi Netanyahu’s political pinata, not an enemy of America’s liberty and safety.
If Washington weren’t within the Empire First enterprise and, most particularly, not within the entangling alliance enterprise wherein allies and purchasers drag America into conflicts that don’t have any direct bearing on its homeland safety, Washington would have all alongside been following Thomas Jefferson’s recommendation: That’s, it could have pursued peaceable commerce with Iran and Syria, not punished them with crippling sanctions and countless assaults on their very own sovereignty and proper to pursue international coverage preparations by their very own finest lights.
Lastly, what would a authentic America First international coverage now do?
Easy.
It will shut the center east bases, ship the Fifth Fleet again to homeport in America, carry the sanctions on Iran and Syria and resume peaceable commerce with every body prepared nations within the area.
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