April 11, 2018

By Stephen Gowans

#1. The fundamental question of whether a chemical weapons (CW) attack took place last Saturday in the Syrian town of Douma has yet to be independently addressed. The Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the one neutral body that is qualified to investigate the use of chemical weapons, has yet to begin its investigation.

#2. While the OPCW can determine whether a chemical attack has occurred, it is beyond its capability to assign responsibility. The allegation that the Syrian government perpetrated a CW attack is not verifiable in principle by a neutral body.

#3. The sole evidence for the claim against the Syrian government consists of allegations from two partisan sources: the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society.

#4. Both groups are allied with jihadists seeking to overthrow the Syrian government and both are funded by Western states which openly call for regime change in Damascus. These outfits are neither neutral nor independent.

#5. As parties to the conflict, both groups have an interest in fabricating atrocity stories to defame their enemy and create a pretext for the continued and even escalated intervention of Western militaries in Syria.

#6. As parties to the conflict, Western states have an interest in legitimating the atrocity stories to defame the government they seek to change and to furnish a pretext for their continued and even escalated intervention in Syria.

#7. While early media reports referred to the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society as the sources of the allegations, explicit references to these partisan sources have now mostly disappeared from media coverage.

#8. Instead, the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society are now referred to by more neutral-sounding terms, such as “medical professionals and human rights groups,” or “relief workers”* disguising their partisan character and creating the illusion that they are independent humanitarian organizations free from a vested interest in the outcome of the conflict.

#9. Following the tenet cui prodest scelus, is fesit (he has committed the crime who has received the profit) suspicion falls more heavily on the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society, as perpetrators of a hoax, than on the Syrian government, as perpetrators of a crime. While it’s easy to attribute a motive to the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society to fabricate a story, no credible motive or benefit has been adduced to explain why the Syrian government would carry out the alleged CW attack. Those explanations that have been advanced fail on either of two grounds: they’re circular, or implausible and free from evidence.

A favored circular explanation holds that Assad ordered an attack because he’s an “animal.” How do we know he’s an animal? Because he ordered an attack.

Another line of argument attributes the alleged attack to a desire on the part of the Syrian government “to terrorize the population.”** Apart from the reality that no evidence for this claim is adduced, it is wholly unsatisfying as an explanation. Populations can be far more effectively terrorized by carpet bombing (also known, fittingly, as terror bombing.) If the Syrian government sought to terrorize the population, why use chemical weapons, when far more effective means are at hand, ones, morever, that don’t cross a red line?

#10. The bottom line is that there is no independent verification that an attack even took place, let alone that the Syrian government is responsible for one. What’s more, the sources of the allegations are wholly untrustworthy, have an interest in perpetrating a hoax, and no credible motivation has been cited to explain why the Syrian government would undertake the alleged CW attack.

The only reasonable conclusion in light of the above is that there’s not a speck of credible evidence that the Syrian government perpetrated a CW attack at Douma last Saturday, and that there are strong grounds to suspect the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society have created a deception.

* See for example “The US presses allies to back military strike on Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2018 or “Russia warns it will shoot down US missiles fired at Syria, target launch sites,” Reuters, April 11, 2018. Two days earlier the Wall Street Journal’s reporting identified the Syrian American Medical Society and the White Helmets as the sources of the allegations, as did The Associated Press and the New York times.

** See for example “Syria gas attack echoes Assad’s gamble that gains outweigh risks,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2018.

April 11, 2018

By Stephen Gowans

Ideologues of US power, notably those ensconced in the editorial offices of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, believe that the United States has an imprescriptible right to exercise an absolutist tyranny over the world, to define the boundary between civilization and barbarism, and that Washington is unbound by international law, but free to wield it as a tool against the barbarians. In the ideology of US despotism, the compass of civilization includes states that submit to “US leadership”, a euphemized version of “US tyranny,” while states which favor an international order based on the UN Charter’s ideal of the sovereignty and equality of states (Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela are among the supporters of this alternative, democratic, order) are relegated to the category of barbarism. Once a state has been located outside of civilization, Western legal traditions—testing accusations against evidence and the assumption of innocence until culpability is credibly demonstrated— no longer apply. The “barbaric” state becomes guilty of all acts of which it is accused, regardless of whether there exists credible evidence to corroborate the accusation.

In a 9 April editorial “In Syria, Trump faces the limits of bluster” The New York Times attributes a global leadership role to the United States, which it urges the Trump administration to exercise by creating “an independent investigation that could lead to prosecution” of the Syrian leadership “in a tribunal like the International Criminal Court,” a court the United States itself rejects and refuses to be bound by.

The New York Times’ editors lay out steps Washington ought to take if “the Syrian regime’s guilt is determined,” but conclude all the same that the Syrian government is guilty on all charges, contrary to the reality that the US State Department, British Foreign Office, and its own reporters, have acknowledged that the chemical attack allegations against the Syrian government are unverified and unconfirmed. What’s more, the sources of the allegations are the White Helmets and Syrian American Medical Society, partisan outfits, funded by Western governments, and allied with anti-government insurgents, who have an interest in fabricating atrocities to defame their enemy and to justify continued and even elevated Western intervention in Syria.

Additionally, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, at a 2 February news conference, admitted that the Pentagon has no evidence that the Syrian military has ever used chemical weapons. This, however, didn’t stop the New York Times’ editors from declaring that Syria has failed to honor its agreement to destroy its chemical weapons under a 2013 pact or that it is responsible “for most of the 85 chemical attacks in the country over the past five years.” A newspaper which proclaims itself to live up to the highest standards of journalism, indeed, to set the gold standard, appears to have no trouble creating facts out of thin air.

The editors lay out steps the Trump administration should take once a legal imprimatur is conferred upon a pre-judgement of guilt. Inevitably, military action is called for. “If a Russian veto prevents Security Council action, then Mr. Trump needs to work with our allies, through NATO or otherwise,” the editors counsel—a call for the US administration to violate international law (again.)

“The use of poison gas,” the newspaper of record observes one paragraph later, “is a war crime under international law,” a curious observation given the editors’ dim view of international law as evidenced by their urging Washington to act without Security Council authorization in order to exercise “America’s traditional leadership role.” It should be recalled that the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan also claimed leadership roles, to say nothing of imperial Britain and imperial France, the latter of which is eager to rehabilitate its colonial tyranny over its former Syrian mandate under the guise of punishing the “barbarian” Assad for outrages against civilization.

The Pentagon has the world’s largest stockpile of weaponized poison gas. The point of having it is to possibly use it, despite its prohibition under the very same international law the New York Times condemns Syria (without evidence) of violating. Thus, the ideologues of US tyranny reveal that international law is a matter of significance only to countries the United States defines as its enemies (the barbarians), and not to the United States itself, which is free to act as it pleases against the barbarians, according to its own laws, as the guarantor of a global moral order. Needless to say, the idea that the United States, the principle source of disorder, suffering and decay in the world, has even a soupcon of moral authority, is risible, if not a sick joke—a truth of which most of the world’s population is only too aware.

In 1970, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2625, which, inter alia, declared that “States have the duty to refrain from propaganda for wars of aggression,” a resolution of apparently no significance to the New York Times, which is only too happy to spread propaganda for wars of aggression in the service of a US tyranny which, far from exercising moral authority, continues to spread its dark wings over the whole world, led by a madman at the top of a system of global oppression and exploitation, from which has sprung a program of neo-colonial warfare and escalating confrontation with China and Russia.

The United States has invaded Syria with a significant military force, is occupying nearly one-third of its territory, has announced plans for an indefinite occupation, and is plundering the country’s petroleum resources. Washington has no authorization under international or even US law to invade and occupy Syria, much less attack Syrian forces, which it has done repeatedly. Nor has it a legal warrant to create new administrative and governance structures in the country to replace the Syrian government, a project it is undertaking through a parallel invasion of US diplomatic personnel. These actions—criminal, plunderous, and an assault on democracy at an international level—amount to a retrograde project of recolonization by an empire bent on extending its supremacy to all the Arab and Muslim worlds, including the few remaining outposts of resistance to foreign tyranny. Moreover, US actions represent an escalation of Washington’s long war on Syria, previously carried out through proxies, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, into a full-scale conventional war with direct US military involvement. Yet, despite the enormity of the project, and the escalation of the war, the US occupation of Syria has largely flown under the radar of public awareness.

March 11, 2018

By Stephen Gowans

Atop multiple indignities and affronts to liberty and democracy visited upon the Arab world by the West, including the plunder of Palestine by European settlers and the political oppression of Arabs by a retinue of military dictators, monarchs, emirs and sultans who rule largely at the pleasure of Washington and on its behalf, now arrives the latest US transgression on the ideals of sovereignty, independence, and the equality of nations: marauders in Washington have pilfered part of the territory of one of the last bastions of Arab independence—Syria. Indeed, Washington now controls “about one-third of the country including most of its oil wealth”, [1] has no intention of returning it to its rightful owners, has planned for an indefinite military occupation of eastern Syria, and is creating a new Israel, which is to say, an new imperialist outpost in the middle of the Arab world, to be governed by Kurdish proxies backed by US firepower. [2] The crime has been carried out openly, and yet has hardly been noticed or remarked upon.

Here are the facts:

In January, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that US “troops will remain in Syria” indefinitely “to ensure that neither Iran nor President Bashar al-Assad of Syria will take over areas” [3] the United States captured from ISIS, even though these areas belong to the Syrian Arab Republic, by law and right, and not to Washington, or to Washington’s Kurdish proxy, the SDF. The SDF, or Syrian Democratic Force, is a US-constructed outfit which, in journalist Robert Fisk’s words, is neither Syrian (it’s dominated by Kurds, including those of Turkish origin) nor democratic (since it imposes Kurdish rule over traditionally Arab areas and dances to a tune called by a foreign master.) Moreover, it’s not much of a force, since, without US airpower, artillery, and Special Operations support, it is militarily inconsequential. [4] “US President Donald Trump’s rollout of an updated Syria policy,” reports Aaron Stein, writing in the unofficial journal of the US State Department, Foreign Affairs, “commits US forces to maintaining a presence” in northeast Syria in order to “hedge against” any attempt by Damascus to assert sovereignty over its own territory. [5]

The Pentagon officially admits to having 2,000 troops in Syria [6] but a top US general put the number higher, 4,000, in an October press briefing. [7] But even this figure is an “artificial construct,” as the Pentagon described a previous low-ball figure. On top of the infantry, artillery, and forward air controllers the Pentagon counts as deployed to Syria, there is an additional number of uncounted Special Operations personnel, as well as untallied troops assigned to classified missions and “an unspecified number of contractors” i.e., mercenaries. Additionally, combat aircrews are not counted, even though US airpower is critical to the occupation. [8] There are, therefore, many more times the officially acknowledged number of US troops in Syria, operating out of 10 bases in the country, including “a sprawling facility with a long runway, hangars, barracks and fuel depots.” [9]

In addition to US military advisers, Army Rangers, artillery, Special Operations forces, satellite-guided rockets and Apache attack helicopters [10], the United States has deployed US diplomats to Syria to create government and administrative structures to supersede the legitimate government of the Syrian Arab Republic. [11] Plus, the United States “is now working to transform Kurdish fighters into a local security force” to handle policing [12] while US diplomats on the ground work to establish local governments to run the occupied territory’s affairs. [13]

“The idea in US policy circles” is to create “a soft partition” of Syria between the United States and Russia along the Euphrates, “as it was among the Elbe [in Germany] at the end of the Second World War.” [14] On top of the 28 percent of Syria the United States occupies, it controls “half of Syria’s energy resources, the Euphrates Dam at Tabqa, as well as much of Syria’s best agricultural land.” [15]

During the war against ISIS, US military planning called for the Kurds to push south along the Euphrates River to seize Syria’s oil-and gas-rich territory. [16] While the Syrian Arab Army and its allies focussed mostly on liberating cities from Islamic State, the Kurds, under US direction, went “after the strategic oil and gas fields”, [17] “robbing Islamic State of key territory,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. The US newspaper correctly designated the seizure of key territory as a robbery, but failed to acknowledge the victim, not Islamic State, which itself robbed the territory, but the Syrian Arab Republic. But this skein of equivocation needs to be further disentangled. It was not the Kurds who robbed ISIS which earlier robbed the Syrians, but the United States which robbed ISIS which robbed Syria. The Kurds, without the backing of the US armed forces, are a military cipher incapable, by their own efforts, of robbing the Arab republic. The Americans are the robbers, the Syrians the victims.

The United States has robbed Syria of “two of the largest oil and gas fields in Deir Ezzour”, including the al-Omar oil field, Syria’s largest. [18] Last September, the United States plundered Syria of “a gas field and plant known in Syria as the Conoco gas plant” (though its affiliation with Conoco is historical; the plant was acquired by the Syrian Gas Company in 2005.) [19] Russia observed that “the real aim” of the US forces’ (incontestably denominated) “illegal” presence in Syria has been “the seizure and retention of economic assets that only belong to the Syrian Arab Republic.” [20] The point is beyond dispute: the United States has stolen resources vital to the republic’s reconstruction (this from a country which proclaims property rights to be humanity’s highest value.)

Joshua Landis, a University of Oklahoma professor who specializes in Syria, has argued that by “controlling half of Syria’s energy resources…the US will be able to keep Syria poor and under-resourced.” [21] Bereft of its petroleum resources, and deprived of its best farmland, Syria will be hard-pressed to recover from the Islamist insurgency—an operation precipitated by Washington as part of its long war on nationalist influence in the Arab world—a war that has left Syria in ruins. The conclusion that “Assad has won” and that the war is over except for mopping up operations is unduly optimistic, even Pollyannaish. There is a long road ahead.

Needless to say, Damascus aspires to recover its lost territory, and “on February 7 sent a battalion-sized column to [recuperate] a critical gas plant near Deir Ezzour.” [22] This legitimate exercise of sovereignty was repulsed by an airstrike by US invaders, which left an estimated 100 Syrian Arab Army troops and their allies dead. [23] The significance of this event has been under-appreciated, and perhaps because press coverage of what transpired disguised its enormity. An emblematic Wall Street Journal report, for example, asserted that the US airstrike was a defensive response to an unprovoked attack by Syrian forces, as if the Syrians, on their own soil, were aggressors, and the invading Americans, victims. [24] We might inquire into the soundness of describing an aggression by invaders on a domestic military force operating within its own territory as a defensive response to an unprovoked attack. Likewise, we can inquire into the cogency of Washington’s insistence that it does not intend to wage war on the Syrian Arab Army. That this statement can be accepted as reasonable suggests the operation of what Charles Mills calls an epistemology of ignorance—a resistance to understanding the obvious. It should be evident—indeed, it’s axiomatic—that the unprovoked invasion and occupation of a country constitutes an aggression, but apparently this is not the case in the specially constructed reality of the Western media. Could Russia invade the United States west of the Colorado River, control the territory’s airspace, plunder its resources, establish new government and administrative structures to supplant local, state, and federal authority, and then credibly declare that it does not seek war with the United States and its armed services? Invasion and occupation are aggressive acts, a statement that shouldn’t need to be made.

Washington’s February 7 attack on Syrian forces was not the first. “American troops carried out strikes against forces loyal to President Bashar Assad of Syria several times in 2017,” reported the New York Times. [25] In other words, the United States has invaded Syria, is occupying nearly a third of its territory, and has carried out attacks on the Syrian military, and this aggression is supposed to be understood as a defensive response to Syrian provocations.

It is incontestable that US control of the airspace of eastern Syria, the invasion of the country by untold thousands of US military and diplomatic personnel, the plunder of the Levantine nation’s resources, and attacks on its military forces, are flagrant violations of international law. No country has more contempt for the rule of law than the United States, yet, in emetic fashion, its government incessantly invokes the very rule of law it spurns to justify its outrages against it. But what of US law? If, to Washington, international law is merely an impediment to be overcome on its way to expanding its empire, are the US invasion and occupation of Syria, and attacks on Syrian forces, in harmony with the laws of the United States? If you ask the White House and Pentagon the answer is yes, but that is tantamount to asking a thief to rule on his or her theft. The question is, does the US executive’s claim that its actions in Syria comport with US law stand up to scrutiny? Not only does it not, the claim is risible. “Under both Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump,” explains the New York Times’ Charlie Savage, “the executive branch has argued that the war against Islamic State is covered by a 2001 law authorizing the use of military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks [my emphasis] and a 2002 law authorizing the invasion of Iraq.” However, while “ISIS grew out an offshoot of Al Qaeda, the two groups by 2014 had split and became warring rivals,” and ISIS did not perpetrate the 9/11 attacks. What’s more, before the rise of ISIS, the Obama administration had deemed the Iraq war over. [26]

Washington’s argument has other problems, as well. While the 2001 law does not authorize the use of military force against ISIS, it does authorize military action against Al Qaeda. Yet from 2011 to today, the United States has not only failed to use force against the Syrian-based Jabhat al-Nusra, Al Qaeda’s largest branch, it has trained and equipped Islamist fighters who are intermingled with, cooperate on the battle field with, share weapons with, and operate under licence to, the group, as I showed in my book Washington’s Long War on Syria, citing the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post, which have extensively reported on the interconnections between US trained and armed fighters and the organization founded by Osama bin Laden. [27]

Finally, by implication, since the law does not authorize the use of force against ISIS, it does not authorize the presence of US aircrews in Syrian airspace or US military and diplomatic personnel on Syrian soil. In addition, it certainly does not authorize the use of force against a Syrian military operating within its own borders.

Let’s look again at Washington’s stated reasons for its planned indefinite occupation of Syria: to prevent the return of ISIS; to stop the Syrian Arab Republic from exercising sovereignty over all of its territory; and to eclipse Iranian influence in Syria. For only one of these reasons, the first, does Washington offer any sort of legal justification. The latter two objectives are so totally devoid of legal warrant that Washington has not even tried to mount a legal defense of them. Yet, these are the authentic reasons for the US invasion and occupation of Syria. As to the first reason, if Washington were seriously motivated to use military force to crush Al Qaeda, it would not have armed, trained and directed the group’s auxiliaries in its war against Arab nationalist power in Damascus.

Regarding Washington’s stated aim of eclipsing Iranian influence in Syria, we may remind ourselves of the contents of a leaked 2012 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report. That report revealed that the insurgency in Syria was sectarian and led by the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner of Islamic State. The report also disclosed that the United States, Arab Gulf oil monarchies and Turkey supported the insurgents. The analysis correctly predicted the establishment of a “Salafist principality,” an Islamic state, in eastern Syria, noting that this was desired by the insurgency’s foreign backers, which wanted to see the secular Arab nationalists isolated and cut-off from Iran. [28] The United States has since decided to take on the role that it had once planned for a Salafist principality. A planned Saudi-style state dividing Damascus from Tehran has become an indefinite US occupation, from whose womb US planners hope to midwife the birth of a Kurd mini-state as a new Israel.

The reality that the US operation in Syria is illegal may account for why, with Washington’s misdirection and the press’s collusion, it has largely flown under the radar of public awareness. Misdirection is accomplished by disguising the US occupation of eastern Syria as a Kurd-, or SDF-effort, which the United States is merely assisting, rather than directing. The misdirection appears to be successful, because the narrative has been widely mentally imbibed, including by otherwise critical people. There are parallels. The United States is prosecuting a war of aggression in Yemen, against a movement that threatens US hegemony in the Middle East, as the Syrian Arab Republic, Iran and Hezbollah do. The aggression against Yemen is as lacking in legal warrant as is the US war on Syria. It flagrantly violates international law; the Houthis did not attack Saudi Arabia, let alone the United States, and therefore there is no justification for military action on international legal grounds against them. What’s more, the Pentagon can’t even point to authorization for the use of force against Yemen’s rebels under US domestic law since they are not Al Qaeda and have no connection to the 9/11 attacks. To side step the difficulty of deploying military force without a legal warrant, the war, then, is presented as “Saudi-led”, with the involvement of the United States relegated in the hermeneutics to the periphery. Yet Washington is directing the war. The United States flies its own drones and reconnaissance aircraft over Yemen to gather intelligence to select targets for Saudi pilots. [29] It refuels Saudi bombers in flight. Its warships enforce a naval blockade. And significantly, it runs an operations center to coordinate the bombing campaign among the US satellites who participate in it. In the language of the military, the United States has command and control of the aggression against Yemen. The only US absence is in the provision of pilots to drop the bombs, this role having been farmed out to Arab allies. [30] And that is the key to the misdirection. Because Saudi pilots handle one visible aspect of the multi-dimensional war, (whose various other dimensions are run by the Americans), it can be passed off to the public as a Saudi affair, while those who find the Saudi monarchy abhorrent (which it is) can vent their spleen on a scapegoat. We do the same to the Kurds, hurling rhetorical thunderbolts at them, when they are merely pawns of the US government pursuing a project of empire-building. Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour Party leader, has seen through the misdirection, declaring that it is the West, not the Saudis, who are ‘directing the war’ in Yemen. [31]

It would profit us to heed the words of Ibrahim Al-Amin, who, on the occasion of the White House recognizing Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as the capital of Israel, asked Arabs whether it wasn’t time to realize that the United States is the origin of all that plagues them. Let us leave ‘Israel’ aside, he counseled. “Whatever is said about its power, superiority and preparation, it is but an America-British colony that cannot live a day without the protection, care and blind support of the West.” [32] The same can be said of the Saudi monarchy and the SDF.

I leave the last word to the Syrian government, whose voice is hardly ever heard above the din of Western war propaganda. The invasion and occupation of eastern Syria is “a blatant interference, a flagrant violation of [the] UN Charter’s principles…an unjustified aggression on the sovereignty and independence of Syria.” [33] None of this is controversial. For his part, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has pointed out incontestably that foreign troops in Syria “without our invitation or consultation or permission…are invaders.” It is time the US invasion and occupation of Syria—illegal, anti-democratic, plunderous, and a project of recolonization—was recognized, opposed, and ended. There is far more to Washington’s long war on Syria than Al Qaeda, the White Helmets and the Kurds. As significant as these forces are, the threat they pose to the Syrian center of opposition to foreign tyranny has been surpassed by a more formidable challenge—the war’s escalation into a US military and diplomatic occupation accompanied by direct US military confrontation with the Syrian Arab Army and its allies.

1. Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Russia’s greatest problem in Syria: It’s ally president Assad,’ The New York Times, March 8, 2018.
2. Anne Barnard, “US-backed force could cement a Kurdish enclave in Syria,” The New York Times, January 16, 2018; Domenico Losurdo, “Crisis in the Imperialist World Order,” Revista Opera, March 2, 2018.
3. Gardiner Harris, “Tillerson says US troops to stay in Syria beyond battle with ISIS, The New York Times, January 17, 2018.
4. Robert Fisk, “The next Kurdish war is on the horizon—Turkey and Syria will never allow it to create a mini-state,” The Independent, January 18, 2018.
5. Aaron Stein, “Turkey’s Afrin offensive and America’s future in Syria: Why Washington should be eying the exit,” Foreign Affairs, January 23, 2018.
6. Nancy A. Yousef, “US to remain in Syria indefinitely, Pentagon officials say, The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2017.
7. Andrew deGrandpre, “A top US general just said 4,000 American troops are in Syria. The Pentagon says there are only 500,” The Washington Post, October 31, 2017.
8. John Ismay, “US says 2,000 troops are in Syria, a fourfold increase,” The New York Times, December 6, 2017; Nancy A. Yousef, “US to remain in Syria indefinitely, Pentagon officials say,” The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2017.
9. Dion Nissenbaum, “Map said to show locations of US forces in Syria published in Turkey,” The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2017.
10. Michael R. Gordon, “In a desperate Syrian city, a test of Trump’s policies,” The New York Times, July 1, 2017.
11. Nancy A. Yousef, “US to send more diplomats and personnel to Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2017.
12. Dion Nissenbaum, “US moves to halt Turkey’s drift toward Iran and Russia,” the Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2018.
13. Nancy A. Yousef, “Some US-backed Syrian fighters leave ISIS battle to counter Turkey,” The Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2018.
14. Yaroslav Trofimov, “In Syria, new conflict looms as ISIS loses ground,” The Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2017.
15. Gregory Shupak, “Media erase US role in Syria’s misery, call for US to inflict more misery,” FAIR.org, March 7, 2018.
16. Trofimov, September 7, 2017.
17. Raj Abdulrahim and Ghassan Adnan, “Syria and Iraq rob Islamic State of key territory,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2018.
18. Raj Abdulrahim and Ghassan Adnan, “Syria and Iraq rob Islamic State of key territory,” The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2018.
19. Abdulrahim and Adnan, November 3, 2018.
20. Raja Abdulrahim and Thomas Grove, “Syria condemns US airstrike as tension rise,” the Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2018.
21. Joshua Landis, “US policy toward the Levant, Kurds and Turkey,” Syria Comment, January 15, 2018.
22. Yaroslav Trofimov, “As alliances shift, Syria’s tangle of war grows more dangerous,” The Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2018.
23. Raja Abdulralhim and Thomas Grove, “Syria condemns US airstrike as tensions rise,” The Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2018; Nancy A. Yousef and Thomas Grove, “Russians among those killed in US airstrike is eastern Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2018.
24. Yousef and Grove, February 13, 2018.
25. Charlie Savage, “US says troops can stay in Syria without new authorization,” The New York Times, February 22, 2018.
26. Savage, February 22, 2018.
27. Stephen Gowans. Washington’s Long War on Syria. Baraka Books. 20017. Pp. 149-150.
28. DIA document leaked to Judicial Watch, Inc., a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law.

Click to access Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf

29. Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, “Quiet support for Saudis entangles U.S. in Yemen,” The New York Times, March 13, 2016.
30. Stephen Gowans, “The US-Led War on Yemen, what’s left, November 6, 2017.
31. William James, “May defends Saudi ties as Crown Prince gets royal welcome in London,” Reuters, March 7, 2018.
32. Ibrahim Al-Amin, “Either America or Al-Quds,” Alahednews, December 8, 2017.
33. Syria condemns presence of French and German special forces in Ain al-Arab and Manbij as overt unjustified aggression on Syria’s sovereignty and independence, SANA, June 15, 2016.

April 8, 2017

By Stephen Gowans

Washington has added a new dimension to its long war on Syria: direct military intervention.

Since the mid 1950s, the United States has tried to purge Damascus of an Arab nationalist leadership which has zealously guarded Syria’s freedom from US domination and follows an Arab socialist development path which is at odds with the global free enterprise project advanced by Washington on behalf of its Wall Street patron.

Until now, Washington has refrained from directly attacking Syrian forces, though it has intervened manu militari in Syria to hold the Islamic State in check so that the militant group remains strong enough to weaken Syrian forces but not so strong that it captures the Syrian state. [1]

This limited Islamic State-directed US intervention in Syria has involved both airstrikes and an estimated 1,000 boots on the ground. [2] However, the principal modus operandi of Washington’s long war on Syria has been war waged through proxies, both Israel, which annexed Syria’s Golan Heights and has carried out innumerable small-scale attacks since, and Islamist guerrillas, who, from the 1960s, have waged a jihad against what they view as Syria’s heretical government. [3]

The United States contemplated direct military intervention in Syria in 2003, as a follow-up to its invasion of neighbouring Iraq, but found that its resources were strained by efforts to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq and that other means of regime change would have to be pursued. [4]

In place of a muscular boots on the ground strategy, Washington imposed an economic blockade in 2003, which, by 2012, had caused Syria’s economy to buckle, according to the New York Times. [5]

By the spring of 2012, sanctions-induced financial haemorrhaging had “forced Syrian officials to stop providing education, health care and other essential services in some parts of the country.” [6]

By 2016, “US and EU economic sanctions on Syria” were “causing huge suffering among ordinary Syrians and preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid, according to a leaked UN internal report.” [7] The report revealed that aid agencies were unable to obtain drugs and equipment for hospitals because sanctions prevented foreign firms from conducting commerce with Syria.

Veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote that “the US and EU sanctions” resembled the Iraqi sanctions regime, and were “an economic siege on Syria”—a siege it might be recalled that led to the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children, according to the UN, a death toll greater than that produced by all the weapons of mass destruction in history. [8] Cockburn surmised that the Syrian siege was killing numberless people through illness and malnutrition. [9]

On top of its merciless campaign of economic warfare, Washington enlisted the Arab nationalists’ longstanding foe, the Muslim Brotherhood, to provoke a civil revolt in Syria. The revolt, inaugurated by Islamist-instigated riots in Daraa in mid-March 2011, soon mushroomed into an all-out campaign of guerrilla warfare, fueled by Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, Jordanian and US money. U.S. and Western intelligence services trained thousands of guerrillas in Jordan and Qatar. [10]

In 2012, the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported that the insurgency was Islamist, led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Islamic State’s forerunner, and that Western powers and the kings, emirs and sultans who preside tyrannically over Gulf oil states, were the backers. According to the intelligence agency, Turkey’s Reccep Tayyip Erdogan, a man infatuated with dreams of becoming a neo-Ottoman sultan, and himself an Islamist, was also a major backer. [11]

But until Washington ordered cruise missiles to rain down on Shayrat Airfield near Homs on April 6, the United States had relied on proxies and siege to bring about regime change in a country which Moshe Ma’oz had termed “a focus of Arab nationalistic struggle against an American regional presence and interests.” [12]

The Shayrat Airfield attack was presented for world opinion as a response to Syrian forces allegedly gassing civilians at Khan Shaykum on 4 April. The allegations were levelled by blatantly partisan sources.

One source was the White Helmets, which bills itself as a neutral civil defense outfit, but is in reality funded by governments entangled with Washington in its long war on Syria. It is enmeshed, too, or at the very least, cooperates with, al-Qaeda. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a one-person outfit based in the UK which overtly supports the guerrillas, was another source.

Significantly, no one even remotely impartial has investigated the allegations to determine whether (a) chemical agents were indeed used, (b) whether they were used deliberately, and (c) who used them? The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons refuses to weigh in on any of these questions until an investigation has been completed, the only sound course of action.

All the same, Washington and its lickspittle allies, exuding colonial arrogance, immediately pronounced in Olympian fashion that the accusations were beyond dispute, an outcome which was hardly surprising given that the Western champions of neo-colonialism share with the White Helmets and Syrian Observatory for Human Rights a common goal of overthrowing Syria’s Arab nationalist government. Washington can always be counted on to publicize any calumny against its Syrian enemy, no matter how untenable.

Despite assurances that a gas attack had been undertaken at Khan Shaykum on 4 April, and that Syrian forces were responsible, the United States, France and Britain, if they, were not themselves implicated, could have had no certain knowledge of this, since these matters take weeks of on the ground investigation to offer sound judgment, and even then the question of attribution—that is, who did it?—is often unanswerable. The reality, of course, is that Western powers have no idea whether the accusation is valid but seized the opportunity to claim it was to establish a pretext for military action in furtherance of the United States’ long war on Syria.

Mainstream journalists also rushed to judgement in advance of even the barest resemblance of an impartial investigation, their assessments aligning with the assessments, sans evidence, of their own governments.

On top of being predicated on an untested allegation by unquestionably partial sources, the US attack was illegal—and on two levels: internationally, because it was undertaken without UN Security Council assent, and domestically, because it represented an unauthorized act of war. The act of war was ordered unilaterally by the White House, notwithstanding the fact that declarations of war are the exclusive remit of Congress, which did not confer—indeed, was not asked for—its authorization.

But the point is academic.

The United Sates has already amassed a sizable record of crimes in Syria, and an even more sizeable record in the larger Arab world, not the least of which crimes is the intrusion of US military personnel on Syrian soil, an act of war itself.

As a military colossus, the United States is at liberty to violate international law with impunity, since there exists no higher authority capable of enforcing international law through the threat of a force greater than that which the Pentagon itself can wield. Expecting the United States to yield to international law is naïve and therefore any discussion of whether this or that act of the United States violates international law is a discussion of no consequence.

The White House is able to violate US law without punishment by eliciting at least the passive acceptance of the US public and its representatives for its wars of aggression; accordingly, with the Congress and the US public on side, there’s no one to hold the White House to account before the US constitution.

White House efforts to secure the acquiescence of the public, if not its jingoistic support, are facilitated by the measures the Pentagon takes to limit US troop casualties, so that no matter how devastating US military operations are for the victims, the US public is not inconvenienced or traumatized psychologically by an accumulation of US combat casualties.

Equally helpful from the point of view of mobilizing support for war in violation of US law is the demonization of Washington’s targets, an activity in which the news media, which accept the pronouncements of US officials on foreign policy at face value, engage with enthusiasm. Witness how easily the Bush administration and Blair government were able to dupe the Western mainstream media into believing (or if they weren’t duped, to ardently propagate) fairy tales about Arab nationalist Iraq concealing chemical and biological weapons.

Moreover, witness how easily Washington shapes the intellectual environment. It has persuaded the world that chemical and biological weapons (which can kill tens or at most hundreds of people under ideal conditions, and many fewer under typical ones) belong to the same class of weapons as nuclear arms (which can kill tens or hundreds of thousands.) This false conflation of minor weapons with authentic weapons of mass destruction has proved useful in portraying such military non-threats as Arab nationalist Iraq under Saddam as signal threats whose elimination is imperative for the safety of the world.

Demonizing targets—often by accusing them of having, using, or intending to use either falsely classified or genuine weapons of mass destruction—creates, from the vantage point of the public, a moral obligation for the United States to act. The Leftists who have an insatiable appetite for moral lapidation and florid language about “murderous regimes,” brutal dictators,” and “moral disgrace,” in connection with the leaders of former colonies which the United States is endeavouring to re-colonize, contribute to the mobilization of consent for war and to an international class struggle from above.

Left collaborators see only the completely powerless as occupying morally tenable ground. Any state which pursues emancipatory goals is denounced as brutal, murderous, or a moral disgrace and arguments are mounted that the state’s emancipatory goals are a sham. Only people without formal power, by this way of thinking, engage in class struggle against oppression and exploitation, while those who exercise formal authority are viewed as agents of oppression by definition.

This view is too simple.

The Italian philosopher Domenic Losurdo argues for a tripartite model of class struggle linked to the division of labour on (1) an international level, (2) a national level and (3) within the household. [13]

Class struggle on an international level corresponds to the exploitation of the people of one nation by another nation; for example, by the relegation of one country by another to a subordinate role in the international division of labour.

Class struggle on a national level corresponds to the exploitation of labour by the owners of capital within a country, while class struggle within the household pertains to the exploitation of female domestic labour by males.

Class struggle so conceived can be coterminous as when, for example, the people in one country are exploited en masse as a source of labour by the owners of capital of a second.

Washington’s long—and now expanded—war on Syria, is a class struggle on an international level. It is a class struggle in which the United States, as champion of the profit-making interests of corporate America and the class of billionaires who lead it, seeks to permanently relegate Syrians to a subordinate role in the international division of labour, one in which they will be limited to low wage jobs in extractive and basic manufacturing industries, if not subsistence farming.

Washington aspires to sweep away the Arab socialist impediments to the free enterprise, free trade, and free market capitalist nirvana it seeks to establish on a global scale, where US corporations have space to dominate the commanding heights of every country’s economy, and local labour is relegated to low-wage roles, and permanent penury.

Former chief economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz put it this way:

Colonialism left a mixed legacy in the developing world—but one clear result was the view among people there that they had been cruelly exploited…the political independence that came to scores of colonies after World War II did not put an end to economic colonialism. In some regions…the exploitation—the extraction of natural resources and the rape of the environment all in return for a pittance—was obvious. Elsewhere it was more subtle. In many parts of the world, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism…a notion idealized by Americans as ‘free and unfettered market.’ … Free-market ideology turned out to be an excuse for new forms of exploitation. [14]

Arab nationalists in Iraq and Libya waged a class war on an international scale, aiming to free the people of their countries from the disadvantages that colonialism had visited upon them and to end their continued economic exploitation by the West. Their struggle, while successful for a time, ultimately ended in failure, as the United States and its allies, through demonization, siege and warfare, overcame these struggles from below. These victories by Washington were victories in favor of exploitation.

The class struggle fought by Arab nationalists in Syria continues, despite the concerted efforts of Washington, its neo-colonial allies, its Arab satraps, apartheid Israel, and Leftist collaborators, to crush it. Concurrently, the Islamic Republic of Iran is conducting its own class struggle against Western efforts of re-colonization, though on a grander scale, with the larger Islamic world as the object of liberation.

The struggle between Iran and the United States is a class struggle on a colossal scale, with Washington seeking to open Iran while keeping the remainder of the Muslim world open to continued exploitation by US financial, industrial, commercial and petrochemical concerns, and Tehran leading a project to build “resistance” economies that prioritize the uplift of the people who live and work in the Muslim world over shareholders of US corporations. This struggle is intertwined with the class struggle at which Syria is the center.

Washington’s expanded war on Syria is, then, an expanded class war from above against an emancipatory struggle from below. Washington’s war-making relies on multiple weapons, from siege, to proxy war, to direct military intervention, and no less to information warfare aimed at demonizing Syria’s Arab nationalists.

1. See my Washington’s Long War on Syria. Baraka Books. 2017, chapter 4.
2. Thomas Walkom, “Putting Donald Trump’s strike against Syria in context,” The Toronto Star, April 7, 2017.
3. Washington’s Long War, chapter 2.
4. Ibid.
5. Nada Bakri, “Sanctions pose growing threat to Syria’s Assad”, The York Times, October 10, 2011.
6. Joby Warrick and Alice Fordham, “Syria running out of cash as sanctions take toll, but Assad avoids economic pain,” The Washington Post, April 24, 2012.
7. Patrick Cockburn, “US and EU sanctions are ruining ordinary Syrians’ lives, yet Bashar al-Assad hangs on to power,” The Independent, October 7, 2016.
8. John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999.
9. 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996; Patrick Cockburn, “US and EU sanctions are ruining ordinary Syrians’ lives, yet Bashar al-Assad hangs on to power,” The Independent, October 7, 2016.
10. Washington’s Long War, chapters 2, 3 and 4.
11. http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf
12. Moshe Ma’oz, Bruce Cumings, Ervand Abrahamian and Moshe Ma’oz, Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth about North Korea, Iran, and Syria, The New Press, 2004, p .207.
13. Domenico Losurdo. Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History. Palgrave MacMillan. 2006.
14. Quoted in Graham E. Fuller. A World without Islam. Back Bay Books. 2010. p. 262.

Publication date April 17.

Now available for order.

“Stephen Gowans paints a very clear portrait of the Syrian Arab Republic, and documents the extensive efforts from the Pentagon to bring it down. With the mainstream media spewing regime change propaganda 24-hours a day, Gowans’ book is a must-read. It tells the true story of the Syrian people and their struggles for independence and development, a story that desperately needs to be heard. This book would make even the most ardent interventionist question Washington’s policies. Gowans tells truths that are so deeply hidden in western countries, but yet are so vital in understanding world events.” – Caleb Maupin

When in the summer of 2011 US President Barack Obama demanded that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down, it was not the first time Washington had sought regime change in Damascus. The United States had waged a long war against Syria from the very moment the country’s fiercely independent Arab nationalist movement came to power in 1963. Assad, and his father Hafez al-Assad, an “Arab communist” in the view of hardliners in Washington, were committed to independence, both for Syria and the larger Arab world.

Washington sought to purge Arab nationalist influence from the Syrian state and the Arab world more broadly. It was a threat to Washington’s agenda of establishing global primacy and promoting business-friendly investment climates for US banks, investors and corporations. Arab nationalists aspired to unify the world’s 400 million Arabs into a single super-state, strong enough, wealthy enough, and large enough to allow Arabs to chart their own course, in politics, economics, and diplomacy, free from the interference of foreign powers.

Washington had also waged long wars on the other leaders of the Arab nationalist movement, including Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, often allying, as in its war on Syria, with political Islam. By 2012, only one pan-Arabist state remained in the region—the self-proclaimed Den of Arabism, Syria.

In Washington’s Long War on Syria, Stephen Gowans examines the decades-long struggle of Ba’ath Arab Socialists, political Islamists, and US imperialists for control of Syria, the last redoubt of secular Arab nationalism.

“Gowans’ book is a timely and indispensable resource for those seeking to understand recent events in Syria.” Eva Bartlett

“The war over Syria has been, in truth, a fight for control over the global economic and political order—a last, failing stand for a declining American empire to forestall the current shift toward a new global balance of power. Unlike so many hastily-written books on Syria that miss this point, Stephen Gowans’ work will prove to be an essential primer on the Syrian conflict for years to come. A must read.” —Sharmine Narwani

“Gowans is a thorough researcher and top-notch writer with a deep knowledge of the Syrian situation and that of the broader Middle East.” – Dan Lazare

December 19, 2016

By Stephen Gowans

“A substantial body of research conducted over many decades highlights the proximity between western news media and their respective governments, especially in the realm of foreign affairs,” writes Piers Robinson, Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of Sheffield. “For reasons that include overreliance on government officials as news sources, economic constraints, the imperatives of big business and good old-fashioned patriotism, mainstream western media frequently fail to meet democratic expectations regarding independence.” Robinson’s study of news coverage of the 2003 US-UK war on Arab nationalist Iraq found that mainstream media reinforced official views rather than challenged them. [1]

One of the ways in which the mainstream media reinforce official views is by characterizing foreign governments which reject the United States’ self-proclaimed role as leader of the global order as violating Western democratic norms, regardless of whether they do or do not. At the same time, foreign governments which categorically reject Western democratic norms, but which agree that the United States “can and must lead the global economy” (as the 2015 National Security Strategy of the United States insists) are treated deferentially by the Western press. “We give a free pass to governments which cooperate and ream the others as best as we can,” a U.S. official explained, [2] a statement of modus operandi which applies as much to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and other Western news media, as it does to the US government.

That there exists a glaring double-standard on democratic norms, under which lies a consistent standard of demonizing governments which reject US primacy while refusing to demonize governments that do not, is exemplified in a recent juxtaposition.

On December 18, US secretary of state John Kerry was in Riyadh, rhapsodizing about “His Majesty King Salman,” the head of an absolutist state which is the very antithesis of Western democratic norms. It “is good to have solid friends” in the Saudi monarchy, said the United States’ top diplomat. The “United States partnership with Saudi Arabia is, frankly, so valuable,” added Kerry. The “relationship between our countries remains strong in every dimension. It is a relationship that’s been a priority for President Obama and myself. We’re partners, but we’re also friends.” [3]

The US government’s friend and partner is a tyranny which crushed a 2011 Arab Spring uprising for democracy that erupted on the Arabian Peninsula, while sending tanks into Bahrain to crush a related uprising there. Saudi authorities suppressed a movement for democratic rule by executing the uprising’s leadership, relying on decapitation as the favored method of liquidating democratic trouble-makers. The regime practices an official misogyny that goes so far as to deny women the right to drive automobiles. Saudi clerics propagate worldwide an austere, hate-filled, anti-Shia strain of Islam that, along with Muslim Brotherhood ideology, inspires Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Jabhat al Nusra. And the House of Saud, the family dictatorship which tyrannizes the Arabian Peninsula, has not, for one second, tolerated the slightest democratic challenge to its autocratic and sectarian rule.

In short, Salman—good friend and partner of US presidents and secretaries of state, to say nothing of US arms dealers, the CIA, US oil companies, and New York investment bankers—is a dictator and a strongman who uses Western-supplied tanks to crush calls for democracy and leads a regime that is aptly characterized as a dictatorship. If ever these terms have been used by the mainstream media and US government officials to refer to the head of the Saudi state and the government he leads, I’m not aware of them. Yet these terms fit to a tee.

On the very same day Kerry was paying tribute to the anti-democratic strongman in Riyadh and celebrating the bonds of friendship between the United States and the despot in Riyadh, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal, titled “The Dictator Who Stole Christmas.” [4] Therein Wall Street Journal editor Mary Anastasia O’Grady, a practitioner of journalism for the world’s “freest press,” labelled the subject of her article a “strongman” at the head of a government she called a “regime” and a “dictatorship.” O’Grady’s broadside was not targeted at an absolute monarch but at the president of a republic. It concerned not a leader who had assumed his role as head of state through hereditary succession, but through an election no one of an unbiased mind thought was coerced or unfair. Astonishingly, the alleged dictator O’Grady was writing about was Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, who was elected on April 14, 2013, defeating opposition candidate Henrique Capriles (much beloved by the Wall Street Journal and other Wall Street-types) in a free and fair election. The democratically-elected Maduro, according to O’Grady, contrary to what you and the Venezuelans who elected him may think, is a dictator and strongman who leads a regime.

That O’Grady can so easily label Maduro as an aberration from Western democratic norms in egregious contradiction of the facts only underscores “the proximity between western news media and their respective governments,” as Robinson put it, or the propaganda role played by the mainstream media on behalf of US foreign policy. This should remind us that other leaders of governments, who, like Maduro, govern with the consent of their people, but who refuse to kowtow to the international dictatorship of the United States, have also been demonized in the same manner, namely as dictators and strongmen at the head of regimes, not governments. The most salient current example of this style of propaganda is the depiction of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad along the same lines.

The depiction is completely undeserved, and is a reflection of US distaste for governments which insist on self-determination and sovereignty, instead of submission to its international dictatorship (which the mainstream media euphemize as the “Washington-led global order,” and Washington as “American global leadership.”)

Washington’s hostility to the Assad government is ideological, and is unrelated to the Syrian government’s response to the Islamist insurrection which broke out (afresh, given that similar insurrections have plagued Syria since the 1960s) in March, 2011, in no small measure helped along by the United States. Washington has conspired to oust the government of Bashar al-Assad since at least 2003, when it launched a vicious campaign of economic warfare against the country with the intention of undermining popular support for the government by making life miserable for ordinary Syrians. Soon after Washington began to conspire with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, historically the main internal opposition to the secular Arab nationalist governments of Bashar al-Assad, and his predecessor, Hafaz al-Assad, to resume jihad against secularism in Damascus. [5]

The Muslim Brothers, and their ideological descendants, the Islamic State, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, Ahrar al-Sham, and the other Al Qaeda spinoffs, allies and auxiliaries which make up the main armed Syrian opposition, hate the Assad government because it is secular and non-sectarian, and because it rejects the Brotherhood tenet that the Quran and Sunna, the latter the record of the Prophet Muhammad’s actions and sayings, are a sufficient (and coming from God, perfect) legal foundation for Syrian society, jurisprudence and politics.

For its part, Washington hates the Syrian government for three reasons, which can be summed up in the three major goals of the Ba’ath Arab Socialist Party, the party Assad leads: unity of the Arab nation, which threatens US domination of the petroleum-rich Middle East and North Africa; freedom from foreign domination, a position that is inimical to the principle, expressed in multiple US strategy documents that “American leadership” is “indispensable,” [6] “U.S. leadership is essential,” [7] and that the United States “will lead the world” [8]; and socialism, a form of economic organization Washington abhors, to the point that it has been willing to carry out economic warfare against its practitioners with the explicit intention of coercing its abandonment.

For example, US president Eisenhower approved economic sanctions against Cuba, anticipating “that, as the situation unfolds, we shall be obliged to take further economic measures which will have the effect of impressing on the Cuban people the cost of this Communist orientation.” [9] Similarly, the reason some US sanctions have been imposed on North Korea is listed as either “communism”, “non-market economy” or “communism and market disruption,” according to the United States Congressional Research Service. [10] In other words, the US government believes it has a right to dictate to the people of other countries how they can organize their own economic affairs and to punish them by carrying out campaigns of economic warfare—and sometimes worse—if they fail to comply.

In short, Washington is hostile to the Syrian government because Damascus safeguards its sovereignty, insists on self-determination, and in its Arab nationalist aspirations, challenges US hegemony over the Arab world. “Syria,” Assad told an Argentine journalist, “is an independent state working for the interests of its people, rather than making the Syrian people work for the interests of the West.” [11] Washington abhors independent states.

Prior to 2012, Assad governed with the consent of the people obtained in a presidential referendum. While this fell short of the multi-candidate presidential elections favored in the West, it was far more democratic than the hereditary succession that brought the king of Saudi Arabia and emir of Qatar, key U.S. allies in the war against Syria, to power in their countries. In 2012, Assad led efforts to move Syria closer to Western-style representative democracy, amending the country’s constitution to transform presidential elections into multi-candidate contests. Assad stood for election against other candidates and won handily. This was not unexpected, since he is popular.

On the eve of the Islamist insurrection’s most recent outbreak, in March 2011, Time magazine reported that even “critics concede that Assad is popular” and that he had endeared himself, “personally, to the public.” [12] A week after the eruption of violence in Daraa, Time’s Rania Abouzeid would report that “there do not appear to be widespread calls for the fall of the regime or the removal of the relatively popular President.” [13] Moreover, the demands issued by the protesters and clerics did not include calls for Assad to step down. And the protests never reached a critical mass. On the contrary, the government continued to enjoy “the loyalty” of “a large part of the population,” reported Time. [14] Over a month after the outbreak of violence in Daraa, the New York Times’ Anthony Shadid would report that the protests fell “short of the popular upheaval of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.” [15]

That the government commanded popular support was affirmed when the British survey firm YouGov conducted a poll in late 2011 showing that 55 percent of Syrians wanted Assad to stay. The poll received almost no mention in the Western media, prompting the British journalist Jonathan Steele to ask: “Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that most Syrians are in favor of Bashar al-Assad remaining as president, would that not be major news?” Steele described the poll findings as “inconvenient facts” which were suppressed because Western media coverage of the events in Syria had ceased “to be fair” and had turned into “a propaganda weapon.” [16]

Hence, in 2011 Syria was closer to the Western model of democracy than virtually any other Arab country, and was certainly closer to Western-style democracy than were Washington’s principal Arab allies, which were all monarchical or military dictatorships.

Nevertheless, just days before flying to Riyadh to praise the Saudi dictatorship and wax rhapsodic about the strong bonds between King Salman’s regime and the United States, John Kerry offered remarks on Syria in which he referred repeatedly to the Syrian government as a regime. [17] Descriptions of Assad in the mainstream media as a dictator and strongman are commonplace.

The Syrian government is not a regime. Syria is a multi-party representative democracy headed by an elected president. Its leader is neither a strongman nor a dictator, anymore than is Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro. While the US government may not like the Arab nationalist orientation of the Syrian government as a repudiation of Washington’s self-appointed role as leader of a global order, this does not make the Assad government a dictatorship headed by a strongman. Syria, on the contrary, is closer to Western democratic norms than virtually any other Arab country, and is far closer to those norms than are the monarchies, sultanates, emirates, military dictatorships and settler colonial religious tyrannies which constitute Washington’s principal Middle Eastern allies.

If the Western mainstream media need to denounce heads of state as dictators and strongmen and foreign governments as dictatorships and regimes, they will find the list of their own governments’ strong allies and partners teeming with suitable candidates. Of course, asking them to draw from this list is to expect too much. They won’t. As Robinson notes, mainstream media are “overly deferential to the political and economic order.” [18] The reason why is that as large businesses themselves, owned by wealthy investors, news media are integral parts of the very same political and economic order they profess to police, but which they, in reality, defend, justify and promote. Labelling democrats dictators, and ignoring the dictatorships of allies, is simply part of the ideological role Western news media play to defend and promote the foreign policy interests of the interlocked US political and economic elite.

1. Piers Robinson, “Russian news may be biased—but so is much western media,” The Guardian, August 2, 2016

2. Craig Whitlock, “Niger rapidly emerging as a key U.S. partner,” The Washington Post, April 14, 2013

3. Joint Press Availability with Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir; Secretary of State John Kerry; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, December 18, 2016 , http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2016/12/265750.htm

4. Mary Anastasia O’Grady, “The Dictator Who Stole Christmas,” The Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2016

5. See my “The Revolutionary Distemper in Syria That Wasn’t,” what’s left, October 22, 2016

6. Remarks of President Barack Obama-State of the Union Address as Delivered,” January 13, 2016, whitehouse.gov/SOTU.

7. Mission Statement, FY 2004-2009 Department of State and USAID Strategic Plan.

8. National Security Strategy, February 2015.

9. Louis A Perez Jr., “Fear and loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of US policy toward Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 34, 2002, 237-254.

10. Dianne E. Rennack, “North Korea: Economic Sanctions,” Congressional Research Service, October 17, 2006. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl31696.pdf

11. President al-Assad: Basis for any political solution for crisis in Syria is what the Syrian people want,” http://www.syriaonline.sy/?f=Details&catid=12&pageid=5835

12. Rania Abouzeid, “Sitting pretty in Syria: Why few go backing Bashar,” Time, March 6, 2011.

13. Rania Abouzeid, “Syria’s Friday of dignity becomes a day of death,” Time, March 25, 2011

14. Nicholas Blanford, “Can the Syrian regime divide and conquer its opposition?” Time, April 9, 2011

15. Anthony Shadid, “Security forces kill dozens in uprisings around Syria”, The New York Times, April 22, 2011

16. Jonathan Steele, “Most Syrians back President Assad, but you’d never know from western media,” The Guardian, January 17, 2012

17. Remarks on Syria; Secretary of State John Kerry; Washington, DC, December 15, 2016, http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2016/12/265696.htm

18. Robinson