Now that Europe’s worsening refugee crisis and Russia’s stepped up support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad have (finally) focused the world’s attention on Syria’s four-year, bloody civil war, inquiring minds want to know: how did it happen that the country, which is now at risk of becoming a failed state, descend into chaos?
Of course when we speak of “inquiring minds” we mean those of the general public which, to this point, has remained largely ignorant of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying in a place that shares a border with the country the US supposedly just got done “liberating.”
Generally speaking, the line you’ll get from the mainstream media is that Syria is just one more example of a Mid-East country where the populace finally reached its breaking point with the injustices created by the brutal regime of an evil autocrat. The resultant chaos, the narrative continues, created a breeding ground for terror which explains why Raqqa has become the de facto capital for ISIS, the Western media’s boogeyman par excellence.
Not to put too fine a point on it - and this won’t surprise anyone who frequents these pages - but that narrative is pure, unadulterated garbage. The real story (again, generally speaking), is that Syria is pivotal for the existing balance of power - and not only the regional balance of power, but the global balance of power as well. The alliance between Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Moscow, Tehran, and Hezbollah serves as a kind of counterbalance to cooperation among the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey (among others). Should the Assad regime be allowed to fall and the West allowed to influence the post-regime political outcome, the scales would tip, Russia would lose its naval base at Tartus, and Iran’s access to Hezbollah, not to mention the scope of its regional influence would be severely constrained. Assad’s move to support the Islamic Pipeline while rejecting the Qatar-Turkey pipeline was a manifestation of the situation described above.
But even as the world begins gradually to come around to the idea that the US and the West might well have had a role in supporting many of the rebel groups that are currently fighting for control of Syria, the notion that Washington might have intentionally started the Syrian civil war by provoking Sunni extremists (among other tactics) is still seen by many as too horrific a possibility to take seriously. Unfortunately - as a declassified secret US government document obtained by the public interest law firm Judicial Watch (profiled here) suggested earlier this year - it's highly likely that the US intentionally destabilized the Assad regime in pursuit of Washington’s geopolitical interests. That deliberate destabilization has now led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and untold human suffering.
As it turns out, there’s still more evidence available to support the notion that Syria’s civil war was engineered by the Pentagon. In his new book, Julian Assange highlights a cable from acting Deputy Chief of Mission in Syria William Roebuck who was stationed in Damascus from 2004-2006. It’s available in full from Wikileaks and below are what we believe to be the most notable excerpts, presented without further comment.
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