Netanyahu’s ambition to transform the region through war, which dates back almost three decades, is playing out in front of our eyes, writes Jeffrey Sachs.
Poster of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Damascus, Jan. 14 2012. (VOA News, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Common Dreams
In the famous lines of Tacitus, Roman historian, “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
In our age, it is Israel and the U.S. that make a desert and call it peace.
The story is simple. In stark violation of international law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers claim the right to rule over 7 million Palestinian Arabs.
When Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands leads to militant resistance, Israel labels the resistance “terrorism” and calls on the U.S. to overthrow the Middle East governments that back the “terrorists.”
The U.S., under the sway of the Israel Lobby, goes to war on Israel’s behalf.
The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu’s arrival in office as prime minister. The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when former U.S. President Barack Obama covertly tasked the C.I.A. with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in Operation Timber Sycamore.
That effort finally came to “fruition” this week, after more than 300,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011.
Syria’s fall came swiftly because of more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the burdens of war, the U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil, Russia’s priorities regarding the conflict in Ukraine, and most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, which was the key military backstop to the Syrian government.
No doubt Assad often misplayed his own hand and faced severe internal discontent, but his regime was targeted for collapse for decades by the U.S. and Israel.
Before the U.S.-Israel campaign to overthrow Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a functioning, growing middle-income country. In January 2009, the IMF Executive Board had this to say:
“Executive Directors welcomed Syria’s strong macroeconomic performance in recent years, as manifested in the rapid non-oil GDP growth, comfortable level of foreign reserves, and low and declining government debt. This performance reflected both robust regional demand and the authorities’ reform efforts to shift toward a more market- based economy.”
Since 2011, the Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian people into misery.
U.S. Marines and Jordanian Army soldiers collaborate in Amman, Jordan, during the Timber Sycamore operation against the Assad government in Syria, September 2016. (U.S. Military, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
In the immediate two days following the collapse of the government, Israel conducted about 480 strikes across Syria, and completely destroyed the Syrian fleet in Latakia.
Pursuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Netanyahu illegally claimed control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared that the Golan Heights will be a part of the State of Israel “for eternity.”
Netanyahu’s ambition to transform the region through war, which dates back almost three decades, is playing out in front of our eyes. In a press conference on Dec. 9, the Israeli prime minister boasted of an “absolute victory,” justifying the on-going genocide in Gaza and escalating violence throughout the region:
“I ask you, just think, if we had acceded to those who told us time and again: ‘The war must be stopped’– we would not have entered Rafah, we would not have seized the Philadelphia Corridor, we would not have eliminated Sinwar, we would not have surprised our enemies in Lebanon and the entire world in a daring operation-stratagem, we would not have eliminated Nasrallah, we would not have destroyed Hezbollah’s underground network, and we would not have exposed Iran’s weakness. The operations that we have carried out since the beginning of the war are dismantling the axis brick by brick.”
Netanyahu addressing the U.N. General Assembly in September. (UN Photo/Loey Felipe)
The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian government is not widely understood, yet the documentary record is clear.
Israel’s war on Syria began with U.S. and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who fashioned a “Clean Break” strategy for the Middle East for Netanyahu as he came to office.
The core of the “clean break” strategy called for the Israel (and the U.S.) to reject “land for peace,” the idea that Israel would withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands in return for peace.
Instead, Israel would retain the occupied Palestinian lands, rule over the Palestinian people in an apartheid state, step-by-step ethnically cleanse the state, and enforce so-called “peace for peace” by overthrowing neighboring governments that resisted Israel’s land claims.
Israeli soldiers force Syrian civilians to leave their homes in the Golan Heights, 1967. (Al-Marsad – Arab Human Rights Center in Golan-Heights, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
The Clean Break strategy asserts, “Our claim to the land — to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years — is legitimate and noble,” and goes on to state,
“Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon…”
In his 1996 book Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu set out the new strategy. Israel would not fight the terrorists; it would fight the states that support the terrorists. More accurately, it would get the U.S. to do Israel’s fighting for it. As he elaborated in 2001:
“The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states.… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust.”
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Netanyahu’s strategy was integrated into U.S. foreign policy. Taking out Syria was always a key part of the plan. This was confirmed by General Wesley Clark after 9/11.
He was told, during a visit at the Pentagon, that “we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years — we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”
Former General of the US Army Wesley Clark on the military strategy after 9/11 attacks: "We are going to take out 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing it off with Iran" [2007] pic.twitter.com/eNWOC8p795
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 3, 2024
Iraq would be first, then Syria, and the rest. (Netanyahu’s campaign for the Iraq War is spelled out in detail in Dennis Fritz’s new book, Deadly Betrayal. The role of the Israel Lobby is spelled out in Ilan Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic).
The insurgency that hit U.S. troops in Iraq set back the five-year timeline, but did not change the basic strategy.
The U.S. has by now led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (C.I.A. operation during 2010s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006).
A prospective U.S. war with Iran, ardently sought by Israel, is still pending.
Strange as it might seem, the C.I.A. has repeatedly backed Islamist Jihadists to fight these wars, and jihadists have just toppled the Syrian regime. The C.I.A., after all, helped to create Al-Qaeda in the first place by training, arming, and financing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan from the late 1970s onward.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan meeting with leaders of the Afghan Mujahideen in the White House in 1983. (Michael Evans, U.S. National Archives, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Yes, Osama bin Laden later turned on the U.S., but his movement was a U.S. creation all the same. Ironically, as Seymour Hersh confirms, it was Assad’s intelligence that “tipped off the U.S. to an impending Al Qaeda bombing attack on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.”
Operation Timber Sycamore was a billion-dollar C.I.A. covert program launched by Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The C.I.A. funded, trained and provided intelligence to radical and extreme Islamist groups.
The C.I.A. effort also involved a “rat line” to run weapons from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to the jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his piece “The Red Line and the Rat Line”:
“A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the C.I.A., with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”
Soon after the launch of Timber Sycamore, in March 2013, at a joint conference by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Obama said:
“With respect to Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends and the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of Assad’s rule.”
To the U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken as a sign of weakness of the adversary. Those who call for negotiations on the other side typically end up dead —murdered by Israel or U.S. assets.
We’ve seen this play out recently in Lebanon. The Lebanese foreign minister confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, former secretary-general of Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel days before his assassination.
Hezbollah’s willingness to accept a peace agreement according to the Arab-Islamic world’s wishes of a two-state solution is long-standing. Similarly, instead of negotiating to end the war in Gaza, Israel assassinated Hamas’ political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
Similarly in Syria, instead of allowing for a political solution to emerge, the U.S. opposed the peace process multiple times.
In 2012, the U.N. had negotiated a peace agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Americans, who demanded that Assad must go on the first day of the peace agreement. The U.S. wanted regime change, not peace.
In September, Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly with a map of the Middle East divided between “Blessing” and “Curse,” with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as part of Netanyahu’s curse.
The real curse is Israel’s path of mayhem and war, which has now engulfed Lebanon and Syria, with Netayahu’s fervent hope to draw the U.S. into war with Iran as well.
The U.S. and Israel are high-fiving that they have successfully wrecked yet another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Netanyahu claiming “credit for starting the historic process.”
Most likely Syria will now succumb to continued war among the many armed protagonists, as has happened in the previous U.S.-Israeli regime-change operations.
In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality.
All this is in the service of a profoundly unjust cause: to deny Palestinians their political rights in the service of Zionist extremism based on the 7th century BCE Book of Joshua.
Remarkably, according to that text — one relied on by Israel’s own religious zealots — the Israelites were not even the original inhabitants of the land. Rather, according the text, God instructs Joshua and his warriors to commit multiple genocides to conquer the land.
Against this backdrop, the Arab-Islamic nations and indeed almost all of the world have repeatedly united in the call for a two-state solution and peace between Israel and Palestine.
Instead of the two-state solution, Israel and the U.S. have made a desert and called it peace.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Too bad the author slipped up at the end of his article by abandoning the political terrain to wallow in a fantasy of the metaphysical or religious type “the Book of Joshua of the 7th century BC.”
Starting from there, he could only end up taking up the aberration of the “two-state solution”, instead of sticking to a binational state, a democratic republic where Jews and Arabs would live together with equal rights.
Clearly, whatever happens, there are some who will not learn any lessons to correct their flawed analysis guided by ideological interests that have nothing to do with those of these peoples, but more to do with those of their torturers.
Lessons learned from the ‘sudden’ collapse of Syria.
Reasons for the collapse:
1. By 2017 the Syrian government had apparently triumphed against the US / Israel / Gulf State / Turkish sponsored Jihadi headchoppers, with help from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. Unfortunately events in subsequent years served to incrementally weaken the Syrian government to the extent that a feather could have knocked it over.
2.Most important was severe curtailment of food, oil and important resources, even drinking water: US occupation of the Eastern third of Syria where the oil and grain production were situated and brutal economic sanctions by the US, made even more brutal after a severe earthquake.
3. 90% of the population became impoverished and military salaries could not be paid resulting in collapse of morale and rampant corruption / easy bribability of officers by foreign agents (Turks, Israelis etc) to betray Syrian interests.
4.The residual pathogenic collection of headchoppers in Idlib, protected by the Turkish army, remained a pus filled abscess that could flare up anytime again and spread out to cause a fatal infection.
5.The Astana agreement guaranteed by Turkey promised that the Idlib headchoppers would be contained and was stupidly believed by Assad.
6.Seductive acceptance of Syria back into the fold of the League of Arab nations by the Gulf States, with fake assurances they could get the US to ease sanctions if Assad distanced himself from Iran and Russia, were stupidly believed by Assad.
7.Hence even when warned months in advance of what the headchoppers were planning, Assad chose to refuse offers of military help from Russia and Iran.
8.Syria had no effective military means to retaliate against the saboteur countries of Turkey and Israel, who are right now grabbing huge swathes of land from the former Syria.
Lessons learned from Syria collapse:
1. Domestic integrity of necessities of life (water, food, sewage infrastructure and energy etc) and a basic economy are essential. The US and Israel had, by repeated bombing of Syria, and seizure of their oil/grain areas and relentless sanctions, basically destroyed Syria as a country even before its formal collapse. This could have been prevented if Russia had provided Syria with adequate air defences (as they have now to Iran) and if BRICS countries had ignored US sanctions and supplied Syria accordingly, as they are now doing for Iran.
2.Agreements, whether verbal or written, with Turkey or the Gulf States, are worth nothing. They are designed to lull you into complacency before stabbing you in the back.
3.Effective retaliatory weaponry are the only thing that deter the genocidal lying USA and Israel and Gulf State and Turkish regimes and their proxies the Jihadist headchoppers. North Korea has kept safe because they developed nuclear weapons
4.Iran must now develop nuclear weapons and perpetually ignore fake assurances from the liars and their proxies. Anything less will be stupid in the extreme.
5.Russia, once they conquer Ukraine, must extend far West of the Dnieper. If a residual UkroNazi rump state around Lvov remains, it must be demilitarised and constantly surveilled such that any hint of armed movement of personnel East of that rump state is immediately bombed to smithereens.
6.Dedollarisation must now proceed apace to neutralise the possibility of future illegal US sanctions AKA economic warfare against other countries. This has a long history and must stop. Remember the interview decades ago with Madeline Albright who said that the starvation deaths of half a million Iraqi children BEFORE the Gulf War even started, was “worth it”.
USA = regime of mass murderers of children, a nation founded on genocide and slavery and still perpetrating perpetual wars everywhere.
The collapse of Syria was a tragedy, a setback for secularism, non-sectarianism and stability. Wholesale terrorism, arbitrary torture and murder of Christians, Alawites, Druze, Shiites and even secular Sunnis is now taking place.
However the lessons learned by Russia and Iran will strengthen their defences against the Satanic empire of AngloEuroZionist genocide, terrorism, deceit and hypocrisy.
Iran needs to go nuclear asap or it will fall like Syria.
The US-Zio-Empire will never ever stop, it will pursue what’s written in that book of fairy tails and damn anyone who gets in it way.
Only a thermonuclear exchange will stop these monsters – diplomacy and treaties are a waste of time with these monsters
Ah yes, good old Joshua. The good old “holy” book. The good old “inspired Word of God”.
That is one of THE VERY MAJOR PROBLEMS with regarding any alleged revelation from God, such as the Bible or the Koran, or the Torah, as actually being such.
I am an ex-Christian, and am glad to no longer be one. I consider myself to be a Deist. A Deist believes in God or a Higher Intelligence, based on the use of reason and on the designs/laws found throughout Nature, but does not accept any alleged revelation from God as actually being such.
For myself I consider myself to be between 2 and 3 on Richard Dawkins’ scale of belief, where 1 = strong theist, and 7 = strong atheist. I very strongly lean toward believing in God but accept lack of total certainty.
I had some personal reasons which led me to be unhappy with Christianity; I detail these in my write-up linked to by my screen handle.
Here is the web site of the World Union of Deists, which has a lot of articles and information about Deism.
hxxps://www.deism.com/
I like their saying:
God gave us reason, not religion.
Sachs is a light in the tunnel. I just wish that the light was brighter, and the tunnel not so long. Same with pace of becoming a multi polar world. With people like Netanyahu, Biden, Starmer, Macron, and Scholtz hanging around, there is a chance that they will blow up the world before we reach multipolarity.
I learned lately that Syria’s economic difficulties had some cause with its turn towards neoliberalism, “the authorities’ reform efforts to shift toward a more market- based economy.” In all the world, those nations which adopt neoliberal policies seem to have a growth spurt, then a long decline. This is not a sustainable ideology, although it does provide opportunities for a few to accumulate great wealth.
Just before the huge anti-WTO actions of Nov. 1999 in my hometown I’m proud to say became known as The Battle of Seattle, there was a teach-in at the U. of WA. It engaged many participants–panel discussions, lectures, presentations on all sorts of subjects that would be affected by WTO regulations. Best summed up by a sign held during the actual demonstrations: {“Turtles and Teamsters. Together at Last!”}
Anyway, one of the lectures was by a prof of biz econ. Who claimed that The Market (their de facto deity) would solve all problems. One of his examples was water scarcity; in a desert, water is more valuable than diamonds. Therefore The Market would determine the appropriate high price and water would be conserved. At the Q & A afterward, I asked if that didn’t require conditions deteriorate to those of a desert before the paradigm would work. He turned bright red and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.
It seems this econopathic reasoning has metastasized into international political thinking as well. First, reduce everything to desert…
You absolutely must support the dying veterans who have such a sorry to tell that may aid us in changing our world. Listen to this interview of a real hero that survived the planned sinking of the USS Liberty, an unsuccessful try at blaming Egypt for the attack and who denied our soldiers in time of need and why and so much more. We got hero’s and traitors and we got the irony of the name of that ship and the soldiers who peopled it and lost their lives. Please hear this story.
CANDICE OWENS INTERVIEW WITH USS LIBERTY SURVIVOR, PHILLIP TOURNEY
Listen to this as the most important thing you ever heard, cause it it is, and share widely
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD5gtM1A990
OH YES nnd this is what they call peace in video real time. hxxps://www.rt.com/news/609310-blinded-by-propaganda-syria/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Email
It may be said that Project Sycamore could not be sicker!
In addition the ideas of organized human civilization is really an example of becoming less civilized as an obvious contradiction of terms in human conduct. We are ruled by weapons not rules.
We will be quite lucky if this mess in the Middle East doesn’t spiral into WW III. These maniacs seem to learn nothing from history, especially the histories they have themselves created. Their stupidity is exceeded only by their arrogance.
Jefferey Sachs know the history very well and is brave enough to state it as it took place .Few would equal his stature IMHO.
I can’t believe that international criminal activities ,as we are seeing right now in the Middle East and Levant will win the day .
The NATO circus of political clowns and its ring master Israel must be dismantled pronto if life on this fragile planet are to have a chance to survive. This madness has gone on for far too long.
Jeff Sacks speaks out and timing is everything. I have come from being critical of Mr. Sachs to being a big fan.
His observations here are prescient. I may be a little off the mark here but not much!
To wit: hXXps://disasterphilanthropy.org/disasster/2023-turkey-syria-earthquake/
Here is the issue I have, go to the site. Now stop and go to hXXps://www.cdp.net/en/info/about-us
The following comes directly from the google prompt following the above given address, , “non-for profit charity running the global disclosure system for companies, investors, cities, states, and regions to manage their environmental . . .
Yea all paying attention? Is it just me or is this an invitation for all contractors with ‘political juice’ to get lined up at the overflowing troughs , troughs of money available in D.C.. Sure has a USAID style to it. Last updated April 25, 2024.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Thanks CN
There will be peace when all are dead.
When, if ever, will the U.S. and Israel be brought to justice? I am beginning to believe that justice does not exist. Only “injustice” especially where these two entities are concerned.
In his first term Trump seized Syrian oil fields and took control of the major part of Syria’s wheat growing region. This severely financially throttled the then Syrian government and critically hampered the country’s ability to feed itself. Biden maintained that situation before acting in the last few days to also maintain the title of US hegemony: Empire of Chaos, Piracy and Joyous Mass Murder.
These two walking-breathing, profound insults to the essence of what America claims to be should be indicted for war crimes at the ICC. (I know, I know … “nothing will come of it.” That doesn’t diminish the crimes so let’s just get it on the record. Also the US physically attacking the ICC in the Hague would certainly generate a lot of new BRICS applicants.)
“The U.S., under the sway of the Israel Lobby, goes to war on Israel’s behalf.”
So nice to see this truism finally making it on to CommonDreams. I used to say something to this effect about eight years ago quite often on CD only to get mocked and ridiculed and finally kicked off its comments section.
In his haste Netanyahu may occupy too much land too quickly before it can be secured and his Greater Israel may become much too big to hold. If his Israel Mk II should fail it could bring down with it Israel Mk I.