THE TWENTY-YEAR REGIME CHANGE OPERATION TO OVERTHROW ASSAD
We have seen the same scenes before. Images of mass celebration, statues being toppled, presidential palaces looted. We have seen them replayed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now it is the turn of Syria. The overthrow of Assad has been portrayed as a moment of national liberation from a dynasty stretching back fifty years. The Assad family, as with the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, ruled with an iron fist and crushed dissent. Political opponents were tortured and imprisoned. Poverty and hunger were widespread.
However, global elites from western policy-makers and Israel’s Netanyahu government to the Gulf Petro-states are not interested in sentimental perspectives. After all, dictators are legion. Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian kingdom with extensive human rights abuses is never seriously critiqued in the same vein.
Assad’s Syria was part of a Shia sphere (extending from regional power Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinians) countervailing the US-Israel-Saudi/Gulf axis. Much of what has been happening in the Middle East over the course of the 21st century is a proxy war entrenched along these lines.
President George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives envisaged that this Shia sphere would need to be neutralised. And that the best way to go about this was to create a new Sykes Picot for the 21st century in which the self-styled revolutionary republics of Iraq, Syria and ultimately Iran would be regime changed. In fact, US neo-conservatives, amongst them VP Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, had long desired sectarian fracturing. According to US private intelligence firm Stratfor, both men had co-authored a scheme for the ethno-sectarian partition of Iraq into three regions broadly corresponding to the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish areas. The Stratfor report mused that elimination of Iraq as a sovereign state would neutralise its resistance to US power. There would be other benefits to this arrangement. As Stratfor pointed out, “Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection — and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies”. This was the classic strategy of divide et impera as old as the Romans and wielded by the British empire to great effect.
Bashar Al Assad was a gawky, pin-head ophthalmologist working in London married to Asma, who had grown up in west London. After the death of his elder brother in a car crash, Bashar found himself inheriting the mantle following the death of father Hafez Al Assad. I still remember Assad’s lecturing of Tony Blair in the post 9/11 autumn of 2001. Assad delivered this stern lecture of admonishment to Blair on his tour of the Middle East unwisely haranguing him on the hypocrisy of western foreign policy. He described Hezbollah and Hamas as freedom fighters not terrorists comparing them to De Gaulle and the French resistance. He emphasised that there was no roadmap for the Middle East without an end to the Israeli occupation.
This stance of defiant independence would undoubtedly have played badly in the corridors of power in London and Washington. It is likely that Assad was never forgiven for this lecture by power brokers much in the same way that Saddam Hussein mistakenly challenged US supremacy in the region.
In 2003, denials had to be issued by the Bush White House that they planned to extend their overthrow of Saddam Hussein with war in Syria whilst they had the impetus. Years later, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO General Wesley Clark — something of an unpredictable loose cannon — revealed in an interview that the planning for regime change in seven countries was being carried out in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 whilst the ruins of the twin towers were still smouldering. He recalled coming across a hastily set up war room in the bowels of the Pentagon. A confidential memo outlined toppling the regimes of seven countries in five years namely Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Iran.
Assad’s 2001 humiliating lecture to Blair translated into concrete action with the support of Hezbollah in Lebanon aligned against Israel and, in the wake of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, a solution was sought. US strategy appeared to favour the overthrow of Assad with a 2006 cable from the US ambassador explicitly discussing methods of subversion. A WikiLeaks expose revealed Ambassador William Roebuck analysing how the psychological weaknesses of Assad could be exploited to guarantee an overreaction.
French minister Roland Dumas later related that he had been approached two years before Syria’s destabilisation by British counterparts about a plan to infiltrate armed groups into Syria. Dumas described on French TV, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business….I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria”.
Eventually the plan materialised. But it was not an overt war in the wake of the over-reaching into Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, it was a covert operation. The Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya provided the perfect pretext to finally remove the Assad dynasty. A genuine liberation movement was hijacked by radical Islamist groups backed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey supervised by the CIA and MI6. As Seymour Hersh documented, the CIA was running front companies to funnel arms and weapons from Libya into Syria.
Hersh argued that the grand strategy was to topple Iran and its main ally Syria — the only two remaining ‘rogue’ states in the Middle East, who had not acquiesced to US hegemony. The purpose of shattering the Shia sphere was to break the pivotal link with Hezbollah in Lebanon albeit with the byproduct of the creation of ISIS and overspill leading to terrorist atrocities on European soil.
John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, summarised US objectives in the region as follows: — “economic and political measures that weaken the Iranian mullahs; undermine the Assad regime; support a successful transition in Egypt; facilitate Gaddafi’s departure; reintegrate Iraq into the Arab fold; and encourage a negotiated solution in Yemen”.
President Obama authorised the CIA’s operation Timber Sycamore to arm selected rebel groups. The US and Gulf proxies ran a programme of weapons delivery to CIA vetted groups including supplying American-made TOW anti-tank missiles separate from and significantly larger to the Pentagon $500 million plan to train fighters. The initial US programme delivered nonlethal aid but this was subsequently amended to enable lethal assistance.
Weaponry flooded the country. Whilst the Americans and British claimed these were moderate groups, the reality on the ground was Islamist extremists including Al Qaeda, Nusra and eventually ISIS whose caliphate at one point extended into one-third of Iraq and Syria. More importantly, a key Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document exposed that the US knew that the main opposition were Jihadists. The DIA report highlighted that the main Syrian opposition was made up of extremists not moderates — “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” and even went so far as to predict the rise of ISIS: “ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria”. Aide Jake Sullivan incredibly emailed Hillary Clinton to declare that Al Qaeda were America’s allies in the Syrian war.
Meanwhile, proxy allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar with further support from NATO ally Turkey funded and armed Islamist groups to the tune of billions. And it was the infamous figure of Bandar Bin Sultan — a veteran of covert ops and confidante of the Bush family who had tutored Bush Jr on foreign policy — who popped up and suggested to the Americans that Islamists could be harnessed to achieve the objective of regime change as revealed by ex MI6 operative Alastair Crooke. Crooke disclosed how Bandar –former Saudi ambassador to the US — acted as the go-between to harness radical Islamists against Assad.
As the New York Times documented, “the flamboyant Prince Bandar bin Sultan, at the time the intelligence chief,….directed Saudi spies to buy thousands of AK-47s and millions of rounds of ammunition in Eastern Europe for the Syrian rebels. The C.I.A. helped arrange some of the arms purchases for the Saudis, including a large deal in Croatia in 2012” (Mazzetti, 2016).
There had been a split at the upper echelons of the US administration over Syria policy. Obama-Clinton and the CIA favoured the use of Islamists to destabilise Assad whilst the defence department and DIA foresaw that a power vacuum would lead to something far worse. Defence department documents revealed that the US monitored the transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria: — “The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles”.
President Obama unusually announced a red line that the use of chemical attacks by Assad would change his political calculus. Lo and behold, the chemical attacks took place. The notion that Assad would be foolish enough to do the one thing guaranteeing war with the world’s only superpower beggared belief. Doyen investigative journalist Seymour Hersh scooped that the chemical attack was a false flag to pave the way for war with Syria.
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During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the October surprise courtesy of Wikileaks included the Podesta (Clinton campaign chief John Podesta) emails exposing Hillary Clinton in the most unflattering light possible. The Libya section unmistakeably presented her as a liberal war hawk flying in the face of the caution of Obama and even the advice of the Pentagon. She proceeded full-steam ahead towards what would become a catastrophic war.
These emails include the ‘Tick-Tock’ email (a countdown to war), colloquially referring to an internal brag-sheet in which she was tallying up her achievements as the architect of the war. The same vulgarity could be seen when she celebrated Gaddafi’s death live on air with a whooping, “We came, we saw, he died”. Never mind that a head of state was captured, tortured by sodomy with a bayonet and murdered by a baying mob. In other words, Libya was her war as Secretary of State; a scalp that would be harnessed in her run for the White House. It would act as proof of tough credentials in her bid to become Commander in Chief.
Yet the Libyan war became her hubristic moment presaging a precipitous decline and fall. A disastrous intervention directly led to civil war as the previously stable dictatorship was torn apart by jihadists and Islamic State. The overflow of arms destabilised other African countries. The uncorking of the country fuelled the migrant crisis into Europe. As I wrote at the time, paraphrasing Julian Assange, Clinton would forever be frozen in time as a crucial cog in the global power structure at the heart of the toxic US-Saudi axis “guaranteeing the geopolitical hegemony responsible for much of the current instability and chaos in the region”
Just when it seemed as if it could not get any worse, more emails revealed her awareness that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding and arming ISIS. Yet the State department, under her aegis, negotiated one of the largest arms deal in US history with Saudi Arabia — with the Saudis as generous donors to the Clinton foundation.
In 2013, it looked like the West was going to war in Syria again following the NATO war in Libya. However, war was unintentionally averted when David Cameron unexpectedly lost the vote in the British parliament, whose memories of the disastrous fiasco in Iraq were still painfully fresh. This took the wind out of the sails of Obama’s plans with the US isolated on the world stage in its desire for all-out war.
Yet the rise of ISIS and the establishment of an Islamic State saw the US coordinating with Russia and Assad against ISIS. Firing up the Salafist-Jihadi network served a dual purpose. The Arab Spring populist movements represented a potential resurgence of Arab nationalism and a threat to Gulf monarchism. These movements therefore endangered the aligned interests of the US and its Gulf allies and needed to be defanged.
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After years of a brutal civil-cum-proxy war, Assad with the support of Hezbollah, the backing of Iran and ultimately Russian aerial superiority survived. It was a humiliation for the Americans, who had to acquiesce to the new political reality. The Gulf states were even prepared to accommodate Assad back into the fold.
Then the Ukraine war and war in Gaza provided the opportunity to overthrow an isolated Assad with his main backers committed elsewhere. The current leader of the group Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) Mohammed al Jolani grew up in a Syrian exile family in Saudi Arabia. He joined the Al Qaeda insurgency to resist the US occupation in Iraq. He then intriguingly spent several years in US prisons in Iraq before eventually helping to co-found the Jihadist group Al-Nusra front during the Syrian civil war. He continues to have a $10 million bounty on his head.
The media has replayed the scenes of jubilation in the aftermath of the collapse of the Assad regime. But with Syria’s many ethnic groups including Shia and Sunni Muslims, Alawites and Christians, it is likely to follow the same path as Libya descending into anarchy and chaos. With external power-brokers Turkey, Israel, The Gulf, Iran, Russia and The West all involved, years of conflict lie ahead. Israel has already occupied a large buffer zone beyond the demilitarised zone of the Golan heights and launched hundreds of air strikes to destroy the Syrian air force and air defences. Meanwhile Turkey launched air strikes against Kurdish armed groups in its efforts to create a sphere of influence in northern Syria.
None of this turmoil matters as far as national security elites are concerned. For the raison d’être of the decades long covert operation to remove Assad has been achieved. The Shia sphere has been smashed. Assad is the latest domino to topple in the post 9/11 vision to reshape the Middle East. Hezbollah and Hamas are on their knees after the war in Gaza. Now their main supply lines have been cut for good. Russia and Iran’s regional influence has been weakened as they withdraw and rethink their military presence. Until recently, it looked like the aims of the US war on terror were in disarray. The events of the past few weeks have upended such assumptions.