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…”
– 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.
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.
When it comes to resisting our warmongering establishment, U.S. presidents are on their own.
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ADDENDUM: TRUMP “VS.” THE NEOCONS (4/17/18)
While Trump has increasingly been cowed, broken in, and co-opted by the neocons (most recently appointing John Bolton, after he’d first tried to make Gen. Michael Flynn his NSA), he’s spent at least as much time as President Obama trying to roll back the neocon agenda.
Upon election, Trump attempted to surround himself with senior-level advisers who vocally opposed the neocon project, like Gen. Michael Flynn (who told Mehdi Hassan that he’d run out of patience with the neocon policy of effectively providing an air force to al Qaeda).
And yes, Flynn sounded like a bigoted ignoramus when he tried to intelligently discuss his feelings on “Islam,” but the ways he tried to moderate his statements were somewhat encouraging, almost nuanced…. something like “The vast majority of Muslims are just great, good, decent people — only Islam is a (wrong/bad) religion… but the Muslim people are just swell…”
(Uhhh, wow. OK, then…)
Nonetheless, Flynn was apparently serious about ending the neocon project in Syria, which is why Trump tried to make him his NSA.
Also, early in his presidency, Trump terminated the CIA program supporting al Qaeda (and some ISIS factions) in Syria. The U.S. ending its support, arms, training, and coordination for Mujaheddin 2.0 was a significant development, and a positive one.
And Trump very recently signaled that his administration would NOT seek regime-change in Syria — and would actually withdraw U.S. troops from the country! That was huge and a very welcome development in the sane world (prompting the latest “gas attack” from the lunatics who wish to keep the neocon agenda going… and who always seem to get their way, seeing as we’re talking about the whole U.S. political-economic-military-media establishment).
Beyond that, Trump keeps trying, naively/fecklessly/hopelessly, to revert back to his campaign position of cooperating with Russia, where possible, to defeat terrorists and stabilize the Middle East (exactly the opposite of what the neocons want, which is why our neocon establishment has been pummeling Trump from Day 1 with all this RussiaGate BS — and carrying out so many false flag ops).
The way the MSM tells it, Trump the “isolationist” (because seeking diplomacy and detente is “isolationism”) is only “presidential” when he’s dropping bombs: https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=1856
But Trump, the person, has been repeatedly making efforts, however feebly, to be the anti-war (anti-neocon) president his base voted him into office to be. He’s just not strong, principled, intelligent, or experienced enough to pull it off… at least not with virtually the entire U.S. establishment pushing him to be more warlike, like his three predecessors, with the blood of millions on their hands.
IMO, they’re playing with fire, since egging him on toward war is just a brilliant way to manipulate a thin-skinned, wild card nitwit like #45.
(Sure, push Mr. Tiny Hands complex, a globally reviled disgrace in the White House, toward WWIII — real smart. Yikes.)