I’m happy to share Vijay Prashad’s excellent article, which provides a useful overview of the current situation, politically, with Syria and its neighbors, as the next horrific battle looms in Idlib — the last stronghold of al Qaeda, ISIS, and affiliated Salafi militant groups armed, financed, coordinated, and given diplomatic cover by Riyadh, Doha, Washington, DC, and Tel Aviv.
But not Ankara, not anymore… which is why Turkey’s Prime Minister, Mr. Erdogan, has lost favor in the West: he stopped supporting our Mujaheddin when the costs of that support, domestically, became too much for his government to bear. The CIA could no longer use Turkish soil to train and funnel terrorists into Syria, a significant turning point in the war.
Prashad’s article is one of the few that deals at all with the Western origins of the conflict in Syria — something more Americans need to comprehend.
I’ve tackled this issue more than once, linking to information directly implicating Washington, DC, in this regime-change campaign (with particular thanks to Seymour Hersh’s “The Redirection,” published in The New Yorker, way back in 2007).
Here are some of my better efforts, for what it’s worth, complete with links to other Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and mainstream news organizations like The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Reuters, etc.:
https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=2443
https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=944
https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=1869
https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=2367
https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=2221
https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=2414
The following is excerpted from the first linked blog of mine, in this list. The rest you can peruse as you will, if you’re interested in what U.S. foreign policy looks like to those on the receiving end: ethnosectarian bloodletting on a massive scale, backed occasionally with Western air support…
A historical reminder: It was Washington that arranged for al Qaeda “to throw bombs… at the Syrians” in the first place.
Keen to start a war…
“Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House… ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians…”
– from Seymour Hersh’s article “The Redirection” ( The New Yorker, 3/5/07)
More than a decade after it was written, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article still sheds an enormous amount of light on how the catastrophe in Syria happened in the first place.
George W. Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar, hell bent on regime-change in Damascus, decided to flood Syria with al Qaeda and other Washington-supported, radical Salafist militants keen to bring ethnosectarian cleansing to a nation at peace:
Mujaheddin 2.0
That’s why Syria’s 2011 “Arab Spring” was marked by so much violence and massive suicide-bombings in the early goings. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Israel, and the United States had joined forces to hijack Syria’s peaceful uprising and trigger a violent response from Damascus — which unfortunately succeeded, after previous Western efforts to stir up ethnosectarian conflict within the country had failed:
https://www.aljazeera.com/…/features/2011/02/20112910312156…
A decade after this morally grotesque policy was hatched, something like half a million Syrians are dead and 10 million refugees have fled their homes. And the U.S. political-military-media establishment continues hammering our post-Bush presidents to betray their best instincts (and break their campaign promises) in order to keep the slaughter going.
Donald Trump, like President Obama before him, has repeatedly tried to turn away from the bloody neocon agenda. But neither Obama nor Trump could count on a lick of support on that war-eschewing front from mainstream Americans or our corporatized media: https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=2781
When it comes to resisting our warmongering establishment, U.S. presidents are on their own.