Syria: Why are we there?
Christopher Bollyn
The war in Syria is in the spotlight once again after yet another alleged chemical gas attack. The 7-year-old war seems to be at a turning point with President Trump saying on one hand that he wants to get U.S. troops out of the country “very soon” while threatening that a “big price” will be paid by the government of Syria, which stands accused of having used chemical weapons in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, during the night of April 7-8.
The Israeli government is pushing hard for the U.S. to attack the government of Syria and reportedly fired missiles at a Syrian airbase near Homs overnight.
See: U.S. denies missile strike in Syria, Russia says Israel did it, CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/…/syria-air-strikes-no-us-involvem…/
Although there are hundreds of articles about the latest chemical atrocity and what Trump will or won’t do as a response, there is no discussion in the media about why U.S. forces are involved in Syria in the first place. What is the U.S. strategy behind our military engagement in Syria? Why is this not discussed in the media?
The reason why U.S. strategy in Syria is not talked about is because the American people are not supposed to know what we are doing in Syria – or why. If the strategy were legal and justified it would be discussed, but it is neither legal nor just so it is not. We are simply told that we are fighting ISIS in Syria, which is supposedly authorized by the War on Terror authorization (AUMF, Sept. 14, 2001). But if we are really just fighting the ISIS terrorist group, why have we not joined forces with the government of Syria and the Russians to fight ISIS and been done with it a long time ago?
Now that ISIS is defeated, why are we still in Syria and threatening to wage war against the Assad government, which was elected in 2014? Why are we occupying the eastern third of Syria? Why do we have a base in Syria on the Jordanian border? None of this is legal or justifiable under international law, so why are we doing it?
None of this makes any sense unless we grasp that the real reason U.S. forces are in Syria is to support the Israeli strategy (i.e. Yinon Plan, 1982) to destroy the Syrian military and break the country into ethnic enclaves as was done to Yugoslavia in the 1990s and has been done to Iraq since 2003.
In the Western media the conflict is made ridiculously simple: we are told that Russia and Syria are bad actors, and because they are bad they do bad things. Therefore we are asked to believe without evidence that they are behind all the suffering and atrocities we hear about in Syria.
But Syria is fighting a war to defend the nation from gangs of foreign-funded and trained terrorists. Russia has been asked by the government of Syria to help in this effort to defend the nation in accordance with international law. Why are they portrayed as bad actors if they are fighting the good fight to defend Syria?
The U.S. on the other hand is working with those foreign-funded and trained terrorists to illegally overthrow the government of Syria and break the nation into pieces. There is nothing good about that. Why are we doing it?
It’s very simple: As Secretary of State Clinton wrote in an email in 2012: The best way to “help Israel” is to use force to overthrow the Assad government in Damascus. President Obama authorized $1 billion per year to the CIA to assist in the effort to overthrow the Assad government in order to “help Israel.”
So, we are really waging war in Syria and taking the world to the brink of war with Russia in order to help Israel? How utterly reckless can a nation be?
Making sense of the fraudulent War on Terror is the subject of my latest book, The War on Terror: The Plot to Rule the Middle East. It is a small and easily-read book that urgently needs to be read by the people and the policy makers because it explains how we have been tricked into the War on Terror, which was launched in the aftermath of 9-11 and is now America’s longest and most expensive war. Under the pretext of fighting terrorism we are waging illegal wars to advance an Israeli agenda to dominate the Middle East.
To obtain a copy of The War on Terror: The Plot to Rule the Middle East, send $20 by PayPal to bollyn@bollynbooks.com or by clicking on http://bollyn.com/donate
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