The Russian president has said Russia actually won in Syria because the jihadist threat is apparently ended, which was Moscow’s goal all along. But he ignored what he’d previously said was the West’s role in that conflict, writes Joe Lauria.
As Western media and politicians embrace Jolani and HTS, Alan McLeod sees the U.S. reverting to its pre-9/11 close relationship with al-Qaeda.
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.
There are parallels between their roles in Syria and Ukraine. But can Abu Mohammad Jolani be as easily controlled by the U.S., Israel and Turkey (who may have conflicting interests) as Volodymyr Zelensky?
What this potentially amounts to is the end of pluralism in the Levant and its replacement by supremacism: An ethno-supremacist Greater Israel and a religio-supremacist Salafist Greater Syria.
Three years before it intervened in Syria, Russia feared an Islamist takeover in Damascus would lead to widespread chaos in the region, like a new Afghanistan in the Levant, reported Joe Lauria in 2012.
The Assad family regime, sustained by force, was destined to collapse and the infighting between the various armed militias now may produce a situation not unlike Afghanistan.
Maybe you would prefer to believe a plucky band of heroic freedom fighters bravely overthrew an evil supervillain dictator all on their own like some Hollywood movie, says Caitlin Johnstone.
John Wight says the common denominator behind the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s and Salafi-jihadism in our time, is Western foreign policy.
We need someone in the post willing to rein in the neocon intelligence and foreign policy establishments when they urge the president to double down on military action based on phony or incomplete intelligence.