After
Damascus Falls—–The Carnage Will Be On Senator McCain And His Neocon/R2P
Cohorts
by Robert Parry • April 29, 2015
By Robert Parry at Consortium News
If
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets the same fate as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi
or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, much of Official Washington would rush out to some
chic watering hole to celebrate – one more “bad guy” down, one more “regime
change” notch on the belt. But the day after Damascus falls could mark the
beginning of the end for the American Republic.
As
Syria would descend into even bloodier chaos – with an Al-Qaeda affiliate or
its more violent spin-off, the Islamic State, the only real powers left – the
first instinct of American politicians and pundits would be to cast blame, most
likely at President Barack Obama for not having intervened more aggressively
earlier.
A
favorite myth of Official Washington is that Syrian “moderates” would have
prevailed if only Obama had bombed the Syrian military and provided
sophisticated weapons to the rebels.
Though
no such “moderate” rebel movement ever existed – at least not in any
significant numbers – that reality is ignored by all the “smart people” of
Washington. It is simply too good a talking point to surrender. The truth is
that Obama was right when he told New York
Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in August 2014 that the notion of a
“moderate” rebel force that could achieve much was “always … a fantasy.”
As
much fun as the “who lost Syria” finger-pointing would be, it would soon give
way to the horror of what would likely unfold in Syria with either Al-Qaeda’s
Nusra Front or the spin-off Islamic State in charge – or possibly a coalition
of the two with Al-Qaeda using its new base to plot terror attacks on the West
while the Islamic State engaged in its favorite pastime, those YouTube
decapitations of infidels – Alawites, Shiites, Christians, even some
descendants of the survivors from Turkey’s Armenian genocide a century ago who
fled to Syria for safety.
Such
a spectacle would be hard for the world to watch and there would be demands
on President Obama or his successor to “do something.” But realistic options
would be few, with a shattered and scattered Syrian army no longer a viable
force capable of driving the terrorists from power.
The
remaining option would be to send in the American military, perhaps with some
European allies, to try to dislodge Al-Qaeda and/or the Islamic State. But the
prospects for success would be slim. The goal of conquering Syria – and
possibly re-conquering much of Iraq as well – would be costly, bloody and
almost certainly futile.
The
further diversion of resources and manpower from America’s domestic needs also
would fuel the growing social discontent in major U.S. cities, like what is now
playing out in Baltimore where disaffected African-American communities are
rising up in anger against poverty and the police brutality that goes with it.
A new war in the Middle East would accelerate America’s descent into bankruptcy
and a dystopian police state.
The
last embers of the American Republic would fade. In its place would be endless
war and a single-minded devotion to security. The National Security Agency
already has in place the surveillance capabilities to ensure that any civil
resistance could be thwarted.
Can This Fate Be Avoided?
But
is there a way to avoid this grim fate? Is there a way to wind this scenario
back to some point before this outcome becomes inevitable? Can the U.S.
political/media system – as corrupt and cavalier as it is – find a way to avert
such a devastating foreign policy disaster?
To
do so would require Official Washington to throw off old dependencies, such as
its obeisance to the Israel Lobby, and old habits, such as its reliance on
manipulative PR to control the American people, patterns deeply engrained in
the political process.
At
least since the Reagan administration – with its “kick the Vietnam Syndrome”
fascination via “public diplomacy” and “perception management” – the tendency
has been to designate some foreign leader as the latest new villain and then
whip up public hysteria in support of a “regime change.” [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of Perception Management.”]
In
the 1980s, we saw the use of these “black hat/white hat” exaggerations in
Nicaragua, where President Ronald Reagan deemed President Daniel
Ortega “the dictator in designer glasses” as Reagan’s propagandists depicted
Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua as a “totalitarian dungeon” and the CIA-trained
Contra “freedom fighters” the “moral equal of the Founding Fathers.”
And,
since Ortega and the Sandinistas were surely not the embodiment of all virtue,
it was hard to put Reagan’s black-and-white depiction into the proper shades of
gray. To make the effort opened you to charges of being a “Sandinista
apologist.” Similarly, any negative news about the Contras – such as their
tendencies to rape, murder, torture and smuggle drugs – was sternly suppressed
with offending U.S. journalists targeted for career retaliation.
The
pattern set by Reagan around Nicaragua and other Central American conflicts
became the blueprint for how to carry out these post-Vietnam War propaganda
operations. Afterwards came Panama’s “madman” Manuel Noriega in 1989 and Iraq’s
“worse than Hitler” Saddam Hussein in 1990-91. Each American war was given its
own villainous lead actor.
In
2002-03, Hussein was brought back to reprise his “worse-than-Hitler” role in
a post-9/11 sequel. His new evil-doing involved sharing nuclear weapons
and other WMD with Al-Qaeda so the terror group could inflict even worse havoc
on the innocent United States. Anyone who questioned Official Washington’s WMD
“group think” was dismissed as a “Saddam apologist.”
Amid
this enforced consensus, there was great joy when the U.S.-led invasion
overthrew Hussein’s government and captured him. “We got him,” U.S. proconsul
Paul Bremer exulted when Hussein was pulled from a “spider hole” and was soon
heading to the gallows.
However,
some of the triumphal excitement wore off when the U.S. occupation forces
failed to discover the promised caches of WMD. Hussein’s ouster also didn’t
produce the sunny new day that America’s neocons had promised for Iraq and the
Middle East. Instead, Al-Qaeda, which had not existed under Hussein’s secular
regime, found fertile soil to plant its “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” a radical Sunni
movement which pioneered a particularly graphic form of terrorist violence.
That
brutality, often directed at Shiites, was met with brutality in kind from
Iraq’s new Shiite leadership, touching off a sectarian civil war. Meanwhile,
the war against the U.S. occupation turned into a messy struggle between
America’s high-tech military and Iraq’s low-tech resistance.
Lessons Unlearned
What
Americans should have learned from Iraq was that just because the neocons and
their liberal-interventionist friends identify a foreign “bad guy” – and then
exaggerate his faults – doesn’t mean that his violent removal is the best idea.
It might actually lead to something worse. There is wisdom in the doctor’s oath,
“first, do no harm,” and there’s truth in the old warning that before you tear
down a wall, you should ask why someone built it in the first place.
However,
in the propaganda world of Official Washington, a different lesson was learned:
that it is easy to create designated villains and no one of importance will
dare challenge the wisdom of removing that villain through another “regime
change.”
Instead
of the neocons and their liberal helpers being held accountable and removed
from the corridors of power, they entrenched themselves more deeply inside the
U.S. government, mainstream media and big-name think tanks. They also found new
allies among the self-righteous “human rights” community espousing the theory
of “responsibility to protect” or “R2P.”
Despite
President Obama’s election – partly driven by the American people’s revulsion
over the neocon excesses during President George W. Bush’s administration –
there was no real purge of the neocons and their accomplices. Indeed, Obama
kept in place Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the neocons’ beloved
Gen. David Petraeus while installing neocon-lite Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. Around Obama at the White House were prominent R2Pers such as Samantha
Power.
So,
although Obama may have personally favored a more realist-driven foreign policy
that would deal with the world as it is, not as one might dream it to be, he
never took control of his own administration, passively accepting the rise of a
new generation of interventionists who continued depicting designated foreign
villains as evil and rejecting any discouraging word that “regime change” might
actually unleash even worse evil.
In
2011, the R2Pers, as the neocons’ junior partners, largely initiated the
U.S.-orchestrated “regime change” in Libya, which starred Muammar Gaddafi in a
returning role as “the world’s most dangerous man.” All the old terror charges
against him were resurrected, including some like the Pam Am 103 bombing over
Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 that he very likely didn’t do. But, again, no one
wanted to quibble because that would make you a “Gaddafi apologist.”
So,
to the gleeful delight of Secretary of State Clinton, Gaddafi was overthrown,
captured, beaten, sodomized with a knife, and then murdered. Clinton made no
effort to conceal her glee. “We came, we saw, he died,” shejoked at
the news of his murder (although it was not clear that she knew all the grisly
details at the time).
But
Gaddafi’s demise did not bring Nirvana to Libya. Indeed, Gaddafi’s warning
about the need to attack Islamic terrorists operating in eastern Libya – his
military offensive that led to the R2P demand that Obama intervene militarily
to stop Gaddafi – proved to be prophetic.
Extremists
grabbed control of much of Libya. They overran the U.S. consulate in Benghazi,
killing the U.S. ambassador and three other U.S. diplomatic personnel. A civil
war has now spread anarchy and mayhem across Libya and nearby countries.
Libya
also now has its own branch of the Islamic State, which videotaped its
beheadings of Coptic Christians along a beach on the Mediterranean Sea, a
sickening sign of what could be expected after a possible Syrian “regime
change” next. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The US Hand in Libya’s Tragedy.”]
On to Ukraine
While
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and other R2Pers took the
lead in provoking the Libyan fiasco, neocon holdovers demonstrated their own
“regime change” skills by turning a pedestrian political dispute in Ukraine –
about how fast to build new economic ties to Europe while maintaining old ones
with Russia – into not only a civil war in Ukraine but a revival of the Cold
War between the United States and Russia.
In
the Ukraine case, the neocons made elected President Viktor Yanukovych wear the
black hat with Russian President Vladimir Putin fitted for even a bigger black
hat. So, as Yanukovych and Putin were scripted as the new “bad guys,” the
anti-Yanukovych protesters and rioters at the Maidan square were made into the
white-hatted “good guys.”
Much
as with the Sandinistas and the Contras in the 1980s, this dichotomy required
assigning all evil to Yanukovych and Putin while absolving the Maidan crowd of
all sins, including the key role played by neo-Nazi militias in both the Feb.
22, 2014 coup and the subsequent civil war. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine.”]
As
the Ukraine crisis has played out, Official Washington and the mainstream U.S.
news media have consistently placed all blame for the violence on Yanukovych –
lodging the dubious charge that he had snipers kill both police and protesters
on Feb. 20, 2014 – or on Putin – fingering him for the still-unsolved case of
the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down on July 17, 2014.
Evidence
that suggests that right-wing Ukrainian elements were responsible for those
pivotal events is sloughed off with anyone daring to dispute the conventional wisdom
deemed a “Putin apologist.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust.”]
Meanwhile,
starting in 2011, the neocons and the R2Pers were both active in pushing for
the overthrow of Syria’s President Assad, who – like all the other “bad guys” –
has been made into a one-dimensional villain brutalizing innocent “moderates”
who stand for all that is good and right in the world.
The
fact that the anti-Assad opposition has always included Sunni extremists and
terrorists drawing support from Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian Sunni
Persian Gulf states is another inconvenient truth that usually gets kept out of
the mainstream narrative.
Though
it’s surely true that both sides in the Syrian civil war have engaged in
atrocities, the neocon-R2P storyline – for much of the civil war – was to
consistently blame Assad and to conveniently absolve the rebels. Thus, on Aug.
21, 2013, when a mysterious sarin gas attack killed several hundred people in a
Damascus suburb, the rush to judgment blamed Assad’s forces, despite logic and
evidence that it was more likely a provocation by rebel extremists. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “A Fact-Resistant ‘Group Think’ on Syria.”]
Though
it was less clear in August 2013, it soon became obvious that the most
effective rebel fighters were Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State,
which had evolved from the hyper-violent “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” into the “Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria” before adopting the name, “Islamic State.” By
September 2013, many of the U.S.-armed and CIA-trained fighters of the Free
Syrian Army had thrown in their lot with either Nusra Front or Islamic State.
[See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda.”]
No Self-Criticism
But
the opinion leaders of Official Washington are not exactly self-critical when
they misread a foreign crisis. To explain why the beloved Syrian “moderates”
joined forces with Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, the neocons and the R2Pers
blamed Obama for not intervening militarily earlier to achieve “regime change”
against Assad.
In
other words, no lessons were learned from the experiences in Iraq and Libya –
that “regime change” is a dangerous strategy that fails to take into account
the complexities of the countries where the United States decides to overthrow
governments.
The
same unlearned lesson should have applied to Ukraine, a strategically important
nation to Russia and one in which much of the population is ethnic Russian. But
there neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland
brushed aside the possibility of a costly showdown with Russia – a conflict
that could potentially evolve into a nuclear conflagration – in order to pursue
the “regime change” model.
While
Ukraine today remains engulfed in chaos – the same as “regime change”
experiments Iraq and Libya – the most potentially catastrophic “regime change”
could come in Syria. The neocons and the R2Pers – as well as the mainstream
U.S. media – remain set on ousting Assad, a goal also shared by Israel, Saudi
Arabia and other hard-line Sunni states.
For
his part, President Obama seems incapable of making the tough decisions that
would avert a Syrian victory by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. That’s because
to help salvage the Assad regime – as the preferable alternative to
transforming Syria into the bedlam of “terror central” – would require
cooperating with Iran and Russia, Assad’s two most important backers.
That,
in turn, would infuriate the neocons, the R2Pers and the mainstream media.
Obama would face a rebellion across Official Washington, where the debating
points regarding “who lost Syria” are more valuable than taking realistic
actions to protect vital American interests.
Obama
would also have to face down both Saudi Arabia and Israel, something he does
not seem capable of doing, especially as he tries to salvage an international
agreement to restrict Iran’s nuclear program to peaceful purposes only – when
Saudi Arabia and Israel want to enlist the U.S. military in another “regime
change” war in Iran.
Indeed,
the recent decision by the Saudi-Israeli alliance to go on the offensive
against what it deems Iranian “proxies” is possibly the major reason why the
United States is incapable of taking action to avert what may be an impending
Al-Qaeda/Islamic State victory in Syria. Between Saudi Arabia’s power over
finance and energy and Israel’s political and media clout, these
“strange-bedfellow” allies wield enormous influence over Official Washington.
[See Consortiumnews.com’s “Did Money Seal Israeli-Saudi Alliance?”]
This
alliance is now entangling the United States in ancient Sunni-Shiite rivalries
dating back to the Seventh Century. Saudi Arabia, Israel and their many U.S. backers
are gluing black hats on Shiite-ruled Iran and its allies while adjusting white
hats on the Saudi royals and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who
has unleashed the potent Israel Lobby to get Official Washington in line.
Israel
also has intensified its airstrikes inside Syria, bombing targets associated
with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia which is supporting the Assad regime. Israel
rationalizes these attacks as designed to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining
sophisticated weaponry but the practical effect is to weaken the forces
battling Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State.
Meanwhile,
Saudi Arabia, along with Turkey and some Persian Gulf states, has stepped up
support for the Sunni Islamists battling Assad’s army, thus explaining the recent
surge of new recruits and improved fighting capabilities of the rebels.
Yemen’s Suffering
In
another front in this Sunni-Shiite regional war, Saudi Arabia – deploying
sophisticated American warplanes – continues to pummel neighboring Yemen where
Houthi rebels, belonging to a Shiite offshoot, have gained control of the
capital Sanaa and other major cities.
On
Tuesday, Saudi jets bombed Sanaa’s
airport to prevent an Iranian humanitarian aid flight from landing, but the
destruction also made the runway unusable for other supplies desperately needed
by the Yemeni people. While the Saudis prevented this aid from the air, the
U.S. Navy has mounted what amounts to a blockade at sea, turning back nine
Iranian ships last weekend because of unconfirmed suspicions that weapons might
be hidden in the food and medicine.
The
combination of these interdictions is creating a humanitarian crisis in Yemen,
the poorest nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Navy, which likes to call
itself “a global force for good,” has, in effect, been drawn into a strategy of
starving the Yemeni people into submission as just more collateral damage in
the Saudi war against Iranian influence.
Another
consequence of the Saudi air campaign has been to boost “Al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula” which has exploited the Saudi targeting of Houthi forces to
seize more territory in Yemen’s east.
Yet,
as tragic as the Yemeni situation is becoming, the more consequential crisis is
emerging in Syria, where some analysts are seeing signs of a
possible collapse of the Assad regime, a chief goal of the Saudi-Israeli
alliance. Senior Israelis have been saying since 2013 that they would prefer a
victory by Al-Qaeda over a victory by Assad.
For
instance, in September 2013, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael
Oren, then a close adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post
in an interview: “The greatest
danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus
to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. … We always
wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed
by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the
case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.
In
June 2014, Oren expanded on this thinking at an Aspen Institute conference,
extending Israel’s preference to include even the hyper-brutal Islamic State.
“From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail,
let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.
During
Netanyahu’s March 3, 2015 speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, he
also downplayed the danger from the Islamic State – with its “butcher knives,
captured weapons and YouTube” – compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling
up the nations” of the Middle East. However, Iran has not gobbled up any
nations in the Middle East. It has not invaded any country for centuries. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Inventing a Record of Iranian Aggression.”]
Yet,
while the Saudi-Israeli alarums about Iran may border on the hysterical, the
alliance’s combined influence over Official Washington cannot be overstated.
Thus, as absurd and outrageous as many of the claims are, they are not only
taken seriously, they are treated as gospel. Anyone who points to the reality
immediately becomes an “Iranian apologist.”
But
the power of the Saudi-Israeli alliance is not simply a political curiosity or
an obstacle to sensible policies. As it creates the conditions for an
Al-Qaeda/Islamic State victory in Syria – and the possible reintroduction of
the U.S. military into the middle of the Middle East – the Saudi-Israeli
alliance has become an existential threat to the survival of the American
Republic.
As
the nation’s first presidents wisely recognized, there are grave dangers to a
republic when it entangles itself in foreign conflicts. It’s almost always
wiser to seek out realistic albeit imperfect political solutions or at least to
evaluate what the negative ramifications of the military option might be before
undertaking it. Otherwise, as the early presidents realized, if the country
plunges into one costly conflict after another, it becomes a martial state, not
a democratic republic.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the
Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can
buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either
in print here or as an e-book (fromAmazon andbarnesandnoble.
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