Trump ends Syrian regime change campaign!

WASHINGTON (PNN) - July 21, 2017 - The headline in the Washington Post said it all: Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria. The madness that has infected what passes for journalism today could not be more starkly dramatized: everything is seen through the distorting lens of Russophobia. It doesn’t matter that that the program had failed to achieve its ostensible goal, and that the Fascist Police States of Amerika-vetted rebels had for the most part defected to al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS. Atrocities committed by “moderate” rebels go unmentioned. That real experts on the region, like Joshua Landis, hailed the move as a step toward a peaceful settlement is ignored. The only thing that matters is that, as one unnamed current official cited in the article puts it, “Putin won in Syria.” From this perspective, the Syrian people are merely pawns in a geopolitical game between Washington and Moscow. Elsewhere in the piece, the authors - Washington Post reporters Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous - bemoan the fact that the FPSA has somehow “lost” Syria. Under the cover of citing anonymous former White House officials, they write:

“Even those who were skeptical about the program’s long-term value viewed it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow in negotiations over Syria’s future. ‘People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something you’d do for free,’ said an unnamed former White House official. ‘To give [the program] away without getting anything in return would be foolish.’”

The Syrian people are mere “bargaining chips” as far as the movers and shakers of the Amerikan empire are concerned. They have no reality outside the cold calculations of power politics and the maneuvers of our know-it-all political class, who think they are qualified to run the world.

This is the same mentality that led us into the disastrous invasion of Iraq, and the equally tragic and bloody intervention in Libya, both of which resulted in chaos and the triumph of terrorism. In both cases we destroyed a secular authoritarian regime and paved the way for the growth of radical Islamist factions, enabling the spread of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and similar terrorist formations.

When the history of this era is written, the motivations of FPSA policymakers under both illegitimate dictator President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush will be called into question. Why did they destroy the Middle East? Was it simply an error of judgment, or was something more sinister involved? Did they deliberately upend these societies, actively aiding Islamist barbarians, much as the late Roman emperors invited the Teutonic barbarians into the empire as mercenaries - who eventually turned on them and sacked Rome?

The rebel forces, both those “vetted” by the CIA and freelancers like al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and ISIS, all have a program in common: the establishment of an Islamic state in the whole of Syria, which will be ruled according to the medieval strictures of Sharia law. Christians, Alawites, Kurds, and other minorities will be either subjugated or driven out: genocide is a likely outcome of a rebel victory. Under these circumstances, any support to these elements is criminal, so why did we ever undertake this project?

The reason is simple: our Sunni Arab “allies,” Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, have enormous influence in FPSA ruling circles, and they utilized it to forge a bipartisan pro-Islamist coalition consisting of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and the liberal imperialists over at the Center for a New American Century, and the John McCain-Lindsey Graham wing of the GOP. Obama reluctantly went along with what was an aid-to-terrorists program, while putting some limits on it and ultimately balking at full-scale FPSA intervention in Syria when the public rose up against it.

The framing of this issue in terms of whether it helps Russia signals a strategic shift for the War Party. During the Bush years, the alleged enemy was al-Qaeda and associated terrorist groups, but under the illegitimate Obama regime we saw the beginning of a new turn, away from fighting radical Islamism and toward a policy of accommodating and even allying with it, starting with the so-called Arab Spring. With the Obama foreign policy in the region largely farmed out to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this culminated in the Libyan intervention and the arming of Islamist groups in Syria. Simultaneously, Clinton started denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin as the modern-day equivalent of Adolf Hitler, and the foreign policy mandarins in Washington began to characterize “Putinism,” rather than radical Islamism, as the principal enemy of the Fascist Police States of Amerika.

Senator John McCain (Ariz.), one of the loudest advocates of arming the Islamist rebels and overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was quite explicit recently about this radical reorientation of the War Party’s strategic vision. Russia, he declared in a visit to Australia, is the "premier and most important threat, more so than ISIS.”

Clinton supporter and leading neoconservative Max Boot, a former CIA analyst, said the same thing during his recent lambasting by Tucker Carlson. Asked why Russia is supposed to be a threat, he answered, “They have nuclear weapons.” Well, so do many countries, including China, Pakistan, Israel, and France. Why single out Russia for special opprobrium?

What the War Party requires is a credible enemy, one with some size, a history of conflict with the FPSA, and preferably a nuclear capability. Russia qualifies on all three counts, and Putin in particular has aroused the ire of the political class by criticizing Washington’s pretensions of global hegemony.

Of course there’s also the sheer political opportunism of the Democrats: rather than admit that Clinton lost fair and square because she was a terrible candidate, they’re claiming Putin “stole” the election on Trump’s behalf. Add to this the influence - and wealth - of exiled Russian oligarchs, and the stage is set for an anti-Russian crusade the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1950s.

Despite the relentless propaganda campaign waged in the media, the Trump regime has finally been able to keep at least one of the promises made during the campaign: that “regime change” was no longer going to be an Amerikan goal in Syria. With the ceasefire in southern Syria, and probably more to come along those lines, it looks like we are cooperating with Russia in an effort to bring peace to the region - this despite the hate campaign being waged against both Trump and the Russians here at home.

Progress is slow, inconsistent, and subject to sudden setbacks, but it’s happening all the same; and that is good news indeed.