Have you ever wondered about the horrors the U.S. (through its CIA) has caused to the people of Syria? 500,000 dead and 10 million people displaced. Jeffrey Sachs explained this on Morning Joe:
I think we have to step back and not put this in partisan terms. This is a US mistake that started seven years ago, and I remember the day on on your show, when President Obama said, Assad must go. And I looked at you and Joe, and I said, how is he going to do that? Where is the policy for that right? And we know they sent in the CIA to overthrow Assad. The CIA and Saudi Arabia, together in covert operations, tried to overthrow Assad. It was a disaster. Eventually, it brought in both ISIS as a splinter group to the jihadists that went in. It also brought in Russia.
So we have been digging deeper and deeper and deeper. What we should do now is get out and not continue to throw missiles, not have a confrontation with Russia. Seven years has been a disaster under Obama, continuing under Trump. This is what I would call the permanent state. This is the CIA. This is Pentagon wanting to keep Iran and Russia out of Syria, but no way to do that.
And so we have made a proxy war in Syria. It’s killed 500,000 people, displaced 10 million. And I’ll say predictably so, because I predicted it seven years ago, that there was no way to do this and that it would make a complete chaos. So what I would plead to President Trump is get out like his instinct told him, by the way, that was his instinct. But then all the establishment, the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Pentagon, everybody said, no, no, that’s irresponsible, but his instinct is right, get out. We’ve done enough damage seven years, and now we really risk a confrontation with Russia that is extraordinarily dangerous, reckless.
[Supp]
Excerpt:
Hours after the Feb. 3 U.S. military raid in northern Syria that left the leader of ISIS and multiple family members dead, President Biden delivered a triumphant White House address.
The late-night Special Forces operation in Syria’s Idlib province, Biden proclaimed, was a “testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they hide around the world.”
Unmentioned by the president, and virtually all media accounts of the assassination, was the critical role that top members of his administration played during the Obama years in creating the Al Qaeda-controlled hideout where ISIS head Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, as well as his slain predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, found their final refuge.
In waging a multi-billion dollar covert war in support of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, top Obama officials who now serve under Biden made it American policy to enable and arm terrorist groups that attracted jihadi fighters from across the globe. This regime change campaign, undertaken one decade after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, helped a sworn U.S. enemy establish the Idlib safe haven that it still controls today.
A concise articulation came from Jake Sullivan to his then-State Department boss Hillary Clinton in a February 2012 email: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”
Some early history of U.S. meddling in Syria, “Syria: Another Pipeline War.” An excerpt:
To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians’ perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.
During the 1950’s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect.”
The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, 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, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti 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, 14 weeks into his regime.
[Supp Dec 1, 2024]
This from Aaron Mate:
To apologists for the dirty war in Syria, it’s perfectly legitimate for the CIA, Israel, Gulf monarchies, UK, France, Germany, and Turkey to spend tens of billions of dollars arming one of the most powerful insurgencies in history — one dominated by Al Qaeda, and one including thousands of fighters who aren’t even Syrian.
It’s also legitimate for the US military to occupy oil and wheat-rich regions of Syria and impose crippling sanctions that deliberately prevent reconstruction and further devastate the country’s civilian population.
Without this foreign state support, Al Qaeda in Syria — now known as HTS — wouldn’t have captured Idlib in 2015, and wouldn’t have been able to launch its current offensive.
According to this same crowd, the Syrian government has no right to request the help of its allies to prevent Al Qaeda-led, foreign state-backed regime change.
