by Jonathan Cook, The Unz Review:
When westerners see ‘enemy’ governments fall, or civil wars erupt, they are led to think they are the geopolitical equivalent of a natural event. Nothing could be further from the truth
The long-harboured aspirations of the US, Turkey and Israel to topple the Syrian government, mainly through their rebranded al-Qaeda allies, succeeded at lightning speed.
Damascus fell days after Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces under Abu Mohammad al-Jolani surprised observers by breaking out of their small north-western enclave in Syria and seizing the country’s second city, Aleppo.
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Bashar al-Assad’s government and his army, it turned out, were paper tigers. Or they were, once their chief allies – Russia, Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon – had been forced onto the back foot. Preoccupied with troubles closer to home, they could no longer offer the military support Assad depended on.
Israel’s rampage across Lebanon and its military intimidation of Iran – as well as Nato’s increasing efforts to pin Russia down in Ukraine – unfroze the main battle lines in Syria, arrived at several years ago between Assad’s army, al-Qaeda’s franchise in Syria and Kurdish forces in the north-east.
Backed by Turkey, a member of Nato – and more covertly by the CIA and MI6 – HTS and the so-called Syrian National Army (SNA) were able to drive south unhindered.
HTS is proscribed as a terrorist group by both the US and Britain. The CIA has placed a $10m bounty on Jolani’s head.
Strangely, amid the excitement, the BBC and the rest of the western media forgot to mention HTS’s status as a proscribed organisation – as they do in kneejerk fashion every time the Palestinian resistance group Hamas is referred to.
Notably, the very western politicians and media now celebrating the “liberation” of Syria by HTS are the same ones insisting that the eradication of the “terrorists” of Hamas in Gaza is so important it justifies the bombing and starvation of the enclave’s two million-plus Palestinian population.
There are difficult questions that any rational observer ought to be pondering right now.
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?
How are opponents of western complicity in Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza, as the World Court describes it, supposed to feel about the West helping to shatter the “axis of resistance”, which stood alone in offering material support to try to stop it?
Is HTS pursuing a nationalist agenda that is truly about liberating Syrians from western imperialism, or is western imperialism – wielding both the stick of an Israeli attack dog and the carrot of the rich Gulf lapdogs – once again in the driving seat in Syria?
How much of what we see is the reality of the situation and how much perception management?
Iran in cross-hairs
There are plenty of clues to help us answer these questions if we go looking for them.
Wesley Clark, a former US Army general, recalled a moment weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 when he visited the Pentagon.
