Decades after deploying mass violence and rendering citizens grotesquely ignorant of the world, U.S.-led powers appear willing to risk world war, while reinventing a terrorist to lead what was a secular nation until last week.
A faction of jihadists in Syria, 2019. (Halab Today TV/Wikimedia Commons)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
I do not know anyone who was not shocked by the lightning speed with which Damascus fell to expensively armed jihadist militias last weekend.
I know very few people who do not understand that another domino has just fallen in the “seven-front war” Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted this year of waging across West Asia. I know very few people who do not recognize that terrorist Israel is well on the way to establishing itself as a dictatorial hegemon across the region.
I know very few people who do not understand that the longstanding project of the Zionist neoconservatives, who have more or less controlled U.S. foreign policy for decades, i.e., “remaking the Middle East,” is the design behind all that has occurred since the Israelis launched their attack on Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023.
I do not know anyone who has achieved the age of reason who does not recognize the U.S. hand in the stunning sweep through Syria of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham, long-recognized as a terrorist organization. All one needs to grasp this is a little history.
But I know of no corporate or state-funded medium on either side of the Atlantic — the major dailies, the broadcast networks, NPR, PBS, the BBC — where you can read or hear about any of this.
Blinding Us
Mainstream media are doing exactly what they did as the U.S.–led “regime change” operation in Syria began in early 2012 at the latest and probably in the final months of 2011: They are making sure the events now unfolding in Syria are not quite illegible but nearly.
It is again a question of knowing the history. In the case of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham and the other jihadists who knocked over the Assad regime as if it were made of Lego blocks, it is another exercise in dressing up a monster in a suit and tie.
The corporate press and broadcasters are now resolutely recasting the murderous fanatics who have seized control of Syria as legitimate “rebels.” Rebels, rebels, rebels: This is the approved terminology.
I see they have left off describing these Sunni zealots as the “moderate rebels” of yesteryear, that phrase having been hopelessly discredited last time around, but the drift is the same: These are civilized people out there trying to do the right thing.
My favorite in this line appeared in The Daily Telegraph several days before the Assad government collapsed: “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state.” I had to read this one twice, too.
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Nowhere but nowhere in the West’s mass media can you find even a mention of the U.S.–Turkish-and-probably–Israeli support that made possible the swift sweep of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham and its ever-bickering allies from its seat in the Idlib governorate through Hama and other cities to the center of Damascus.
This is, like the earlier years of the Western-backed terrorist attacks on the Assad regime, and like the proxy war in Ukraine, and like the Saudis’ U.S.–supported war against Yemen, and like the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, and like the Israelis’ attacks in Lebanon, sponsored military aggression we are not permitted to see without considerable effort to transcend official representations of reality.
Understanding Who the Americans Are
Mossadegh at his court martial, 1953. (Ebrahim Golestan, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
What happened, what is happening, what will happen: I do not know anyone who is not asking these questions, too.
We must go back and back and back further to understand what has just occurred in Syria and to understand why, and finally to understand who Americans are and who they have been for all the decades since the 1945 victories.
It is logical to begin this pencil-sketch of the past with the famous coups of the 1950s. These occurred in Iran, where the C.I.A., working with MI6, deposed Mohammed Mossadegh as Iran’s prime minister in August 1953, and in Guatemala, where an agency operation forced Jacobo Árbenz from the presidency a year later.
It is striking today to consider a few of the features of these operations. Stimulating various social and economic antagonisms to foment public unrest and an appearance of political disorder was key in both cases. Both coups removed popularly elected leaders and installed repressive puppets.
There was violence in both cases, but by later standards these operations were something close to surgical. Mossadegh withdrew to his farm in the Iranian countryside; Árbenz, a Swiss pharmacist by background, spent his last years wandering dejectedly through Europe.
An appearance of propriety was important back then. Most Americans were unaware that the C.I.A. had engineered the events in Tehran and Guatemala City. And in the Iranian case, something to note: Removing Iran’s first elected prime minister set in motion a wave of blowback that continues to break over U.S.–Iranian relations; in Guatemala it led to a civil war that endured for 36 years.
The C.I.A. considered the coup in Iran a useful model – Guatemala its next application. But in 1965 the agency began to do things very differently when it organized the coup that brought down Sukarno, independent Indonesia’s charismatic founding father and its first president.
The Jakarta Model
Vincent Bevins, a seasoned foreign correspondent, got this down better than anyone in The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020). With the Cold War approaching its worst years, the Indonesian coup was the first, as Blevins’s subtitle indicates, to submerge an entire nation in prolonged violence.
There are various figures for the number of deaths that resulted as the agency installed the dictatorial, bottomlessly corrupt Suharto in the presidential palace in 1967. Blevins puts it at a million or more. Along with the deaths, the nation’s previously lively political culture was extinguished until Suharto fell 32 years later.
The Jakarta Method was subsequently applied in various other circumstances, notably but not only in the 1973 coup that deposed Salvador Allende in Chile and installed Augusto Pinochet, a vicious dictator in the Suharto mold. Nine years later Zbigniew Brzezinski put a modified version to use in Afghanistan.
Blind to US Support for Jihadism
Brzezinski at the chess board, 1978. (White House)
As Jimmy Carter’s relentlessly anti–Soviet national security adviser, Brzezinski persuaded Carter to back the mujahideen then fighting the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul. The result was the well-armed, well-financed force named al–Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden.
And so we come, via the campaigns of mass violence in Iraq and Libya and the proxy war in Ukraine, to the Syrian operation. People who rely on mainstream media still have a hard time accepting that the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic allies backed al–Qaeda’s Syrian forces, the Islamic State, and their heinous offshoots in their war against the Assad regime.
There are no grounds whatsoever for this disbelief. The U.S. operation in Syria is a straight readout of Brzezinski’s Afghanistan strategy. Sharmine Narwani, the tenacious Beirut-based correspondent and the founding editor of The Cradle, reported the American op first-hand as it unfolded. She recounted what she saw in an impressively detailed interview I published in 2019. It is here and here in two parts.
It Wasn’t Over
By 2018–19, it was obvious that the C.I.A.’s Syrian operation, in my judgment its largest since the Cold War’s end, had failed after several years of Russia’s bombing campaign against the Islamic State. Everyone making this judgment, myself included, forgot to add four essential words: It had failed for the time being.
Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham was founded at the start of the covert U.S. intervention, in 2011–12. Its name translates as Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.
Liberating the Levant is a very good idea, but HTS does not mean this the way anyone opposed to the Western powers’ long and violent domination of West Asia would mean it. HTS shared with the Islamic State an ambition to establish a caliphate ruled by radical interpretations of Islamic law.
In May 2018 the State Department added HTS to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, FTOs in the parlance of the apparatchiks. It is a direct descendent of Jabhat al–Nusra, which was the worst of the worst among al–Qaeda’s shape-shifting affiliates operating in Syria.
By the time HTS made the list, Jabhat al–Nusra was already on it. They both remain on it as we speak.
HTS was founded by Abu Mohammad al–Jolani, a nom de guerre now all over the news: He has long led HTS and appears now to have plans to make himself Syria’s next president. When he spoke at a celebrated mosque in Damascus last week, he shed the public alias in favor of his real name, Ahmed al–Shara.
Jolani’s background is not to be missed. He was once an Islamic State commander who went on to found Jabhat al–Nusra and, after a violent split, HTS.
As the HTS leader, he was implicated in numerous cases of torture, violence, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests, disappearances, and so on. Reflecting his singular malignity, the State Department had declared Jolani a “specially designated global terrorist” as far back as 2013.
That designation still stood in 2021. Then something odd, and in hindsight very revealing, occurred.
Rehabilitating Jolani
Abu Mohammad al-Julani, commander-in-chief of Tahrir al-Sham; he was emir of its predecessor al-Nusra Front, Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. (U.S. State Dept.)
In April of that year PBS broadcast the first interview with Jolani ever to appear in any Western medium. It was conducted by Martin Smith, a longtime broadcast correspondent with a good reputation.
And there on camera was the specially designated terrorist in a blue blazer and a buttoned-down shirt, telling Smith he planned to build a “salvation government” in Syria.
Smith was not shy, to his credit, in his review of Jolani’s horrific record. But he gave his interview subject ample airtime to make his that-was-then-this-is-now argument.
There was no talk of a caliphate, despite how HTS still named itself. It was about sound local governance. Yes, this would be according to Sharia law, but it would be a kind-and-gentle Sharia law.
The Martin Smith interview, it is now evident, was highly significant for its timing and its implications for U.S. policy. It is almost certain that it signaled an already-in-train revival of the Syrian operation; certainly it marked the start of the preposterous reinvention of Jolani that is now ubiquitous in Western media.
It is a long way from those first postwar coups — large in ambition and implications but small in scale as they look to us now. Since the Jakarta Method was devised in the mid–1960s, mass murder programs have shaped our world just as Vincent Blevins insightfully put it.
Committed to Mass Violence
The questions noted at the start of this commentary remain those we must ask: What happened, what is happening, what will happen. Clarity on these matters arrives by degrees — not by way of official accounts or the corporate press, but in independent media. For now, two conclusions.
One, the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic allies are now thoroughly committed to mass violence. This means it is difficult to avoid concluding that the Western powers and Israel will turn to Iran once Syria as a functioning polity has been thoroughly disabled.
What has prompted the U.S. and Israel to exercise caution to date has been the risk of what would without doubt be a cataclysmic conflict that could tip into another world war.
With a six-decade history of mass violence behind them, these powers now appear willing to take this risk. There is little ground left to continue questioning this.
Two, we now witness the reinvention of a viciously intolerant terrorist given to waging holy wars as an acceptable presence at the head of what was a secular nation until earlier this month.
We must read this as the outcome — the successful outcome — of an eight-decade campaign to render the citizens of the Western powers grotesquely ignorant of the world in which they live.
The New York Times and other major dailies continue to lie by omission about U.S. support for Jolani and the organization he leads, even as both are officially designated terrorists. But something worth considering here: These media ran interesting photographs with their initial stories on the militias’ sudden offensive, showing rocket launchers and armored personnel carriers of obvious Western manufacture. Here is one such picture and here is another.
I see these pictures and the accompanying stories as mirrors. They show us exactly who we are, what we have become — and also the extent to which we are encouraged not to see either.
There are no true surprises in what we witness now in Syria. It is an old story. We have been blinded to it, along with many other things to which we have been blinded. Most fundamentally we have been rendered blind to ourselves.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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[…But something worth considering here: These media ran interesting photographs with their initial stories on the militias’ sudden offensive, showing rocket launchers and armored personnel carriers of obvious Western manufacture. Here is one such picture and here is another.
I see these pictures and the accompanying stories as mirrors. They show us exactly who we are, what we have become — and also the extent to which we are encouraged not to see either.
There are no true surprises in what we witness now in Syria. It is an old story. We have been blinded to it, along with many other things to which we have been blinded. Most fundamentally we have been rendered blind to ourselves.]
*
One is reminded of the late great British playwright Harold Pinter’s lecture after he was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature:
“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”
The photographs (undeniable evidence) Mr. Lawrence references as weaponry of Western manufacture proves “It did happen.”… It remains to be seen if the International Criminal Court judges will act upon the evidence, or, in other words, – do the right thing.
Sept. 2005, Did US taxpayers get to vote on whether they wanted their earnings diverted to “transforming Middle East societies?” 9/30/2005, At Princeton, “[Condoleezza] Rice affirms vision for peaceful, democratic Middle East:” ““We have set out to help the people of the Middle East transform their societies. Now is not the time to falter or fade,” she said. “Only four years ago [2001], the democrats of the Arab world were hiding in silence, or languishing in prison, or fearing for their very lives. Now, from Cairo and Ramallah to Beirut and Baghdad, men and women are finding new spaces of freedom to assemble and debate and build a better world for themselves and for their children….
“It is possible to envision a future Middle East where democracy is thriving, where human rights are secure, and where hope and opportunity are within the reach of these people.”…
Rice emphasized the lessons she learned from the work of U.S. statesmen such as George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Arthur Vandenberg. “If we think back on those days, we recognize that extraordinary times are turbulent and they are hard. And it is very often hard to see a clear path,” she said. “But if you are — as those great architects of the post-Cold War victory were — … true to your values, if you are certain of your values, and if you act upon them with confidence and with strength, it is possible to have
an outcome where democracy spreads and peace and liberty reign.
“Because of the work that they did, it is hard to imagine war in Europe again. So it shall be also for the Middle East,” she said.”…hxxps://www.princeton.edu/news/2005/09/30/rice-affirms-vision-peaceful-democratic-middle-east
Thank you for this accurate, detailed, and concise summary of America’s War on Sovereign Democracy during the past 80 years. Which has been successfully branded as America’s Crusade for Liberal Democracy. Which shows it as a masterwork of applied propaganda science. I am archiving this and will share it with my family and friends.
Lo and behold, the US of A is the original, the one and only terror state on our raped planet and the creator and enabler of all terrorist groups and enterprises to maintain and ascertain colonial hegemony at least since 1945! No means is too nasty or illegal or immoral for the makers of rules any which way are suited to the US deluded empire the makers of reality any way they please. Only comfort no empire has lasted forever and the end of history has not been reached yet, so far!?
I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, during the Cold War. Communism and its spread were considered the supreme threats to freedom, which our nation ostensibly championed. The big bad Soviet Union was regarded as being in the business of subverting and overthrowing democracies, most notably by their suppression of democratic movements in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and building the Berlin Wall in Germany, and by espionage by the KGB in the United States and other western countries. (There were a number of articles about the KGB in the Reader’s Digest during the Cold War period.). America was supposedly all about protecting and advancing freedom and democracy.
So the Russians were not the only bad guys during the Cold War. For me as an American who grew up and came of age during the Cold War it is painful to realize that our actions abroad were not at all really about protecting and advancing freedom and democracy, but, for instance, protecting interests of corporations, such as United Fruit Company in Guatemala. And many people realized that in Vietnam we were not really on the side of freedom and self-determination for the Vietnamese.
“… protecting interests of corporations, such as United Fruit Company in Guatemala.”
And the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (renamed the British Petroleum Company in 1954, the year following the coup) in Iran.
The picture of Mossadegh at his court martial speaks volumes. And I never knew that Arbenz was Swiss. I am glad that he got to have later years in Europe, however sad. This article is multi-layered and bears pondering. It does seem clear that Winken Blinken and Nod are intent on expanding the war as long as they can. It seems that recently impeached President Yoon of South Korea was in a similar position al-Jolani in that he was being used for a coup the aim of which was a war with North Korea, ultimately drawing in China and everyone else. West Asia, East Asia and the borderland of Eurasia all at the same time while our planet burns. Thanks Patrick!
Very dangerous times. The panic of the Deep State minions is palpable … can you believe we are waiting and holding our breath for Trump to come in and bring back a small measure of sanity to the WH??
I have no quarrel with the substance of Patrick Lawrence’s diatribe, only with its rhetoric. The “I do not know anyone” approach draws a tight circle around Lawrence and his circle of friends and associates, those who are in the know about secrets hidden from the rest of the world, including readers such as me. I know a little about the overthrow of Mossadegh, Árbenz, and Sukarno, but nothing about what has gone on in Syria recently, or of other CIA activities generally ignored by the U.S. press.
If Lawrence does not know anyone ignorant of what he’s reporting here, then he is in a tight echo chamber that excludes all but a few like-minded people. Even if he sees the whole picture truly, he is implicitly shaming or ridiculing the rest of us as ignoramuses – a poor rhetorical strategy for persuading us to become informed. I’m left with little motivation to do anything – even to read a book like Vincent Blevins’s, or to listen to interviews that he links to, because he has made clear that he disdains readers like me who lack prior knowledge such as he possesses about America’s project of world-domination.
In short, he should stop blaming his readers for our ignorance, and assume that all we need in order to become enlightened is to learn the truths that he can give us.
The media/government cabal is piling the layers of crap so thick that the average citizen will never be able to dig through it. Not that most people even have the desire to
do so…..
Yes, well, that’s the idea, isn’t it.
The Zionist supremacists are quickly going to work obliterating and pulverizing every last bit of military weapons and military infrastructure the Assad administration was able to acquire over the past few decades. And the Zionist supremacists are of course gobbling up more Syrian land well past the Golan Heights to occupy forever.
This wasn’t primarily about pipelines or MIC profits, no. The destruction of Syria was by far primarily about Zionist paranoia, hegemonic ambitions and more illegal land-grabs. “Greater Israel” is the goal.
We now await Miriam’s Cabinet and the dividends her billions of dollars will reap with an impending attack on Iran. Also, every Palestinian in the West Bank now is in the crosshairs.
Either the pro-Israel zealots are stopped by any means necessary or we’re going to witness more sickening bloodshed committed by an arrogant creepy sadistic psychopathological cult.
Everything we do is about business … among the most important, MIC profits. That other elements use and free ride on the primary point of the USGOV (“the business of America is business”) is important and understandable. But that corporate profits always come first is the ever-present first mover.
Not the case in this situation. It’s not the primary determinant in Washington (Israel) policy in the Middle East.
Arguably the most powerful and lucrative business involved in the Middle East is “big oil.” Big oil didn’t want anything to do with Bush Jr’s war on Iraq. Virtually none of big oil’s industry publications have ever advocated for an attack on Iran.
You know whose propaganda rags constantly advocate for the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Syria and war on Iran? — Zionist organizations like the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and AIPAC propagandists.
But note that despite the decades of vociferous demands by the Iz brigades (since the mid-90’s in earnest) who supposedly rule the roost in the US, there has not actually been a hot war between the US and Iran, has there?
It’s almost as if the existence of the boogieman on each side (the US/Iz for Iran, Iran for the US/Iz) is the point rather than the actuality of the war. It’s almost as if scaring hell out of the three populations to the greater benefits of the power/$$$ people in each nation is the point and the rhetoric and actions the tools.
Thank you Patrick. What little optimism I have that the world will become more peaceful springs from the old adage that “If something has to end, it will”. That may not be exact, but nevertheless, western government hegemony, led by Washington D.C., is so destructive to do many Global South governments that the hegemony will eventually fall from its own weight and cruelty. When, and in what manner, is unknown, but it will end. It has to end.
I do not understand how people are surprised that this happened when it was announced months ago.
Perhaps this slipped through for some but it shouldn’t have slipped for real journalists.
Asssad declared his forfeiting months ago, this happened after being refused by Russia, not just to be defended from the israeli jets hitting Damascus, but also forbidden to use Russian weapons and technology for defending itself from israeli drones and jets.
Soon after, Assad decided to dismantle his army bases protecting Alepo, Hama and Homs, sending back home the experienced soldiers and turning the bases into military schools for fresh recruits.
I remember of an interview in which he stated that he wouldn’t have participated in a new war in which countless lives would be lost, and he would end up being blamed for trying to defend his own country.
This is something which you can look up, because it really happened. Also I remember watching a discussions regarding the faith of the Golan, which after his stepping down should have accordingly remained under Syria.
One more thing which is absolutely worth mention is the fact that we have not yet seen any actual photos or interviews which confirm that Assad is alive today.
Anyhow thank you for sharing
“Assad breaks silence one week after fall of Damascus: ‘I never betrayed Syria’” — The Cradle
thecradle(dot)co/articles/assad-breaks-silence-one-week-after-fall-of-damascus-i-never-betrayed-syria
Sure, have you actually seen him delivering his message or you are just believing a telegram message not backed up by any actual evidences?
“As Jimmy Carter’s relentlessly anti–Soviet national security adviser, Brzezinski persuaded Carter to back the mujahideen then fighting the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul. The result was the well-armed, well-financed force named al–Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden.”
Just to clarify, the US support for the opposition forces in Afghanistan started before the Soviet invasion of that country and was intended to bring about the said invasion.
Brzezinski boasted of this in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur magazine but, strangely enough, the edition that appeared in the US did not include the interview.
The interview was translated by US foreign policy dissident William Blum and, when I saw the original version in French, I was able to confirm its accuracy.
Here is an extract:
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Why on earth did President Carter agree to such a morally bankrupt and highly dangerous proposal?
What would you have expected from a peanut farmer / southern governor? He had no knowledge of international affairs, no sophistication, and these are the preferred qualities of a “president” by a ruling, albeit faceless, faction. As a friend’s mother said, “Hell, no, I ain’t voting for no Georgia peanut farmer.”
He was also a nuclear engineer and served in both the Atlantic and the Pacific in the Navy.
There will come a time when this attempt to control the world will come to an end, and probably one we don’t want to see. Thanks to Lawrence for exposing how the public has been kept in the dark.
America has got a nerve with its talk of moderates and rebels. George W Bush was emphatic when he said you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists. He said nothing about you can be moderately with or against us, or you can be with or against moderate terrorists. It was black or white, in or out, up or down. No in-between, no grey area whatsoever.
For America to call cut-throat terrorists moderates and rebels whenever it suits their purposes spits in the face of the world.