Where to start with the enormous subject of Western disinformation about Syria? It can be summarized by saying that in recent years, we have been subjected to maybe the largest and most complex propaganda campaign in history.
Plans for regime change
The current chapter in the U.S.’ decades-long interference in Syrian affairs was hinted at in 2007, when Israel and the Bush administration made a false WMD charge against the Assad government. Their claim that Syria had built a nuclear weapons facility, disingenuously supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency, was found by the IAEA’s own foremost scientist Yousry Abushady to have been false. Aerial photographs of the Syria facility, Abushady pointed out, showed that the building did not have the cooling tower that was needed to produce nuclear energy, and that it didn’t have the height or supporting structures that were necessary for such a purpose.
Israel’s using this hoax to bomb the Syria facility in September 2007 correlated with a plan by the U.S. military, as revealed by General Wesley Clark, to overthrow Assad. As Clark famously said in a March 2007 Democracy Now interview, “we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” Clark said this line while quoting a conversation he’d had with one of his Pentagon colleagues in September 2002, wherein it had been revealed to him that military leaders were secretly planning such a series of invasions.
Everything we’ve seen in recent years hints that most of these countries are still targets for regime change, despite the original plan’s unrealistic timeline. The breakout of the Syrian war in 2011 was instigated by the United States, which had been financing and training anti-government forces in Syria since 2005 to prepare for an eventual assault on Assad’s forces. The unprecedented global refugee crisis that America’s destabilization of Syria has created, and the fact that the U.S.-backed rebels consist of jihadist terror groups, has been distracted from through the West’s vast attempts to demonize and slander Assad.
Hoaxes and theatrics
The false flag chemical attacks that America has managed to blame on Assad are numerous. The U.S. government has publicly confirmed that anti-Assad forces have used chemical weapons, and as Seymour Hersh has reported, Hillary Clinton helped provide chemical weapons to the rebels while Clinton was Secretary of State. The automatic blame that Assad has been assigned for all of the chemical attacks in Syria has served to increase support for the war against his government, while the rebels themselves have been portrayed as heroes. And Hersh describes that Clinton was involved with a Libya/U.S. consulate which had the goal of sending weapons into Syria for a false flag sarin gas attack. This set things up for the series of epic Syria deceptions we’ve seen in the last several years.
In August 2013, a sarin gas attack in Ghouta was blamed on Assad by many supposedly reliable institutions such as Human Rights Watch. Yet in the following year, the weapons experts Theodore A. Postol and Richard M. Lloyd analysed the site of the attack, and found that the missile that launched the sarin had a very short firing range which could therefore only have been delivered from rebel territory. To further collapse the charges against Assad, Seymour Hersh found that Turkish intelligence officials working with Jihadist rebels were the likely providers of the sarin.
In April 2014, another hoax was made. After media reports that month of a supposed Assad chemical attack in the town of Al-Tamanah, United Nations investigators interviewed witnesses in the town and found, to directly quote their report, that “in fact no incidents with chemicals took place.” Continued their account, “While people sought safety after the warnings, their homes were looted and rumours spread that the events were being staged. … [T]hey [these witnesses] had come forward to contest the wide-spread false media reports.” The few witnesses who claimed that a chemical attack had happened gave accounts that wereinconsistent, and suspiciously dependent on an apparent jihadist operation to fabricate video evidence for the attack.
As Assad has won the war and hopes for regime change have diminished, the empire has seemed to be desperately increasing its efforts. There is abundant evidence that the government’s propaganda arm (which has a long history of staging elaborate hoaxes) has used the eight-year-old Syrian refugee girl Bana Alabad to create support for attacking Syria. The implausibly sophisticated pro-war tweets from Alabad’s Twitter account-which were suspiciously deleted leading up to the release of Alabad’s book last year-are one sign that such tactics have been involved in Alabad’s story.
Then there are the White Helmets. It’s notable that the Western media’s attempts to defend this group have rarely tried to dispute their critics’ central claims, instead choosing to try to attack these critics as “Russian propagandists.” At the very least, we know that the White Helmets are being run with the goal of helping Western anti-Assad propaganda; interviewed witnesses from the sites of the White Helmets’ projects have described that the White Helmets only attend to crisis victims when they need to record one of their dramatically publicized videos, while ignoring the others. Says one of these interviewees, “they don’t care about us.”
This perception of the White Helmets is supported by reports from the journalist Eva Bartlett, who’s stated that they “purport to be rescuing civilians in eastern Aleppo and Idlib [but] …no one in eastern Aleppo has heard of them.” When a group with heavy backing from the U.S. state department and widespread positive promotion from Western media is exaggerating and strategically staging its activities, we have a right to question the official narrative about it.
This saga of deceptions has been made believable in most people’s minds through the two most recent Syria false flags, which have appropriately happened almost exactly a year apart from each other. The one from April 2017 was awkwardly dropped from mainstream discussions about Syria when James Mattis stated in February that the U.S. has no evidence for Assad’s involvement in it.
There’s also strong evidence that Assad was not behind it: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity has done a private investigation into the incident, and their finding matches the claim from the Russian and Syrian governments that the chemical disaster was in fact an accident. And last November’s U.N. report about the incident said that the 100 victims of sarin poisoning were taken to surrounding hospitals before Syrian warplanes were supposed to have attacked.
The investigation into this year’s alleged chemical attack from Assad has developed similarly: the State Department concluded Assad was behind the incident immediately after it happened; U.S. officials told Reuters in the days after the incident that they “had not yet conclusively determined” Assad’s guilt; videos from Douma have shown opposition groups moving victims’ bodies; the White Helmets handled supposed gas attack victims without the necessary protective gear; a boy from the site of the disaster has said in an interview that he wasn’t injured in any way, and that he had been forcibly taken to the hospital by adults for unknown reasons; seventeen witnesses to the event have since testified at an OPCW meeting that they were not attacked by gas. We can take what we like from these facts.
The end goal
Supposedly, the U.S. has given up on regime change in Syria. Yet right now there’s a push within the CIA and the Trump administration to overthrow the Iranian government, a regime change war that would have to be tied in with a regime change war in Syria. And WikiLeaks has revealed that Saudi Arabia's long term strategy is to force regime change in Syria “by all means available.” Perhaps because of this, it looks like the U.S. is about to make yet another attempt at redrawing-and destroying-the rest of the Middle East.
The empire’s exact goal with Syria is unclear. But amid a growing collapse of U.S. global power, the empire’s hope is to regain dominance through grand invasions and endless investments in the military. So it’s spreading its resources thin around the globe, amping up war aggressions with multiple countries, and doing so with seemingly no coherent strategy.
Our only hope for averting world war is to stop this rogue military state from doing too much damage. To do this, we’ll need to reject the empire’s next barrage of Syria war propaganda. According to intelligence reports this week from the Russian and Syrian governments, this will come in the form of another false flag provocation, followed by an attack on Syria whose scale we can only guess. It all depends on what we do next.
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