Eric Zuesse

A major U.S.-backed assault to win Syria’s crucial Golan Heights, by jihadist rebels of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Jabhat Al-Nusra (Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda), and Harakat Ahrar Ash-Sham (the largest rebel group in Syria, though it’s ignored by Western news-media), was repelled on Saturday morning, January 30th, by the army of the non-sectarian Syrian government, the Syrian Arab Army, which are the forces of Syria’s non-sectarian Shiite President Bashar al-Assad and his ideologically non-sectarian Ba’ath Party, the only political force in Syria that insists upon separation of church and state. (The Ba’ath Party in Iraq was led by Saddam Hussein, which George W. Bush’s forces eliminated there. American regimes, both Republican and Democratic, are anti-Ba’athist, pro-jihadist.)

All of the anti-Assad — which is to say anti-Ba’ath — forces in Syria are fundamentalist Sunnis, jihadists who are backed by the U.S. and the Arab royal families, the latter of whom are fundamentalist Sunnis themselves. The United States is supporting those royal families, which are trying to seize Syria, because it’s a strategically crucial pipeline route into Europe for Sunni Arabic royal families’ oil and gas. Under Assad, those pipelines are blocked from being built, and the Arabic royals fear that if Assad isn’t overthrown, then Shiite pipelines will instead be carrying oil and gas from Shiite Iran to Shiite-allied Iraq, thence into Syria, and then perhaps into Europe. It’s a commercial war, not just a war between Sunnis and Shiites. The U.S. wants to replace Russian oil and gas into Europe, by the oil and gas of its Arabic friends who finance international jihadism-terrorism, and who dominate the list of nations that buy the most U.S.-made weapons. (Those are weapons-sales that don’t go to the world’s second-largest weapons-producer: Russia.)

The United States sells weapons to the Saud family, which then are transported via Erdogan’s Turkey to al-Nusra, ISIS, Harakat Ahrar Ash-Sham, and other jihadist fighting forces that have been flocking into Syria and backed by the Arab royal families and Erdogan and by the United States government, in order to force a removal from power of the existing non-sectarian Syrian government. One prominent early news-report about this was Seymour Hersh’s “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” which was rejected by U.S. print-media and then published in Britain by the London Review of Books. It was subsequently confirmed by a study that was done by a committee of Turkey’s Parliament.

Hersh had reported that U.S. President Barack Obama’s effort with Erdogan of Turkey and the Sauds of Saudi Arabia, to arrange a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad (who has been demonized in the U.S. press as being the cause of the ongoing civil war in Syria, which is actually between Assad’s non-sectarian Syrian Arab Army versus the foreign Western-supported invading jihadists, fundamentalist Sunnis from all over the world — an invasion of Syria by the U.S.-Saudi-Turkish-UAE-Qatari coalition), was intended to ‘justify’ Obama’s bombing Syria. But Obama needed at least Britain as an ally for that invasion. Britain refused to join it. British intelligence (Hersh found) had confirmed that the sarin attack was a set-up and lies from Washington. David Cameron’s government decided not to do what its predecessor had done — serve as America’s lap-dog (as Tony Blair had done on Iraq). This time around, Britain wouldn’t invade on the basis of an American President’s lies and fake ‘intelligence.’ This time, Britain acted on its own intelligence services, instead of ignored them.

The Golan Heights are strategically important because their altitude provides a great advantage to whichever military force controls there — to shoot down upon and thus provide military advantage over any forces below.

Most of Golan was conquered by Israel in 1967, but all nations except Israel recognize the seizure of that land to be theft and barbaric treatment of its citizens, and to have no legal standing. Even the U.S. recognizes Golan to be part of Syria (because to do otherwise would be too embarrassing internationally).

Wikipedia says, “Israel demolished over one hundred Syrian villages and farms in the Golan Heights.[143][144] After the demolitions, the lands were given to Israeli settlers.[145]” It’s a brutal military occupation. Although Israel is an international pariah-state on account of its apartheid policies and other numerous violations of international law, the Arabic-royal-families-allied U.S. government supports that apartheid nation, so that support of Israel is not even an issue in American elections, because of America’s controlled press. Israel fears Shiite Iran far more than it does the Sunni-controlled nations. The U.S. is allied with Israel and the Sunni-controlled nations, against Russia and its allied nations such as Iran and Syria. Europe is allied with the U.S. as a holdover from Europe’s aristocrats’ ties with the CIA after World War II. George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990 double-crossed the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and set the U.S. on the path of conquering Russia after communism, and this has been continued by all subsequent U.S. Presidents.

On 13 December 2006, the U.S. Ambassador in Syria sent to Washington a cable itemizing the ways in which Assad could be overthrown, and one was “Play on Sunni fears of Iranian influence.” A 20 July 2015 article by Jonathan Marshall summarized “The US Hand in the Syrian Mess,” and reported that from 2001 on, the U.S. government was aiming for “regime change” in Damascus, despite the fact that, “Not only did the regime provide life-saving intelligence on planned al-Qaeda attacks, it did the CIA’s dirty work of interrogating terrorism suspects ‘rendered’ by the United States from Afghanistan and other theaters.” Assad started peace talks with Israel and “offered a far reaching and equitable peace treaty that would provide for Israel’s security and is comprehensive — and [would] divorce Syria from Iran and even create a crucial distance between it and Hezbollah and Hamas,” “But the Bush administration nixed them,” and, “The Bush Administration’s role in scuttling any peace accord was decisive.”

The GWB Administration wanted more war; they blocked peace. On 5 March 2007, the New Yorker, not yet under such lockdown mode as to reject Seymour Hersh’s great submitted articles (as they do now), headlined “The Redirection,” and Hersh wrote: “The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat.” However, since Assad was willing to “divorce Syria from Iran,” that excuse for America’s overthrow-Assad bent was merely a con. Bush demanded Assad’s ouster, not his agreement; and Bush’s successor Obama continued Bush’s policy there. From the very moment when Obama entered the White House, he was a hawkeye looking for an opportunity to invade Syria to overthrow Assad, not to help him to achieve peace with either the U.S. or Israel.

The only way that Americans now can learn the truth regarding international matters is via a few small sites on the Web, which are allowed in the U.S. because America’s aristocracy control all of the major media, both mainstream and alt-news. The audience for the few honest media is too small to matter. The aristocracy control the public’s mind-set about political matters — the principle here is: get the eyes and ears, and you get the brain and then the body; the public then become mere dupes — especially concerning international affairs. And very few Americans even know about the few, small, honest news-media. Those media are inconsequential, except for their integrity.

Because this failure of U.S.-allied forces in Syria concerns too many sub-narratives that contradict what U.S. media issue, it will be ignored in America. But Syria’s military victory on the Golan is, in fact, a significant defeat for the U.S.-Saudi side, and a victory for the country that the U.S-Saudi proxies are invading — and a victory too for the Syrian people’s Russian and Iranian defenders. Whereas the Syrian public overwhelmingly support Assad and overwhelmingly oppose ISIS and the other invaders, the Saudi public have been so brainwashed that they 92% favor ISIS.

But America is supporting the Saudis, and bombing the Syrians. And the political ‘debate’ in America is about how hard to bomb them. Even famous investigative reporters such as Seymour Hersh are having their best news stories rejected by all of the publishers in America that have significantly large or influential audiences.

Each nation has a market for great journalism, but in a dictatorship there are substantially no publishers or broadcasters for it. The press, even in a ‘free market,’ can become merely a different branch of the same aristocracy that controls the government. It’s called “fascism.” Mussolini used that term for it, but also “corporationism.” In a speech in November 1933, translated in George Seldes's 1935 Sawdust Caesar, p. 426, Mussolini said: “Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created. It is a symptomatic fact that the decadence of capitalism coincides with the decadence of socialism. ... Corporative solutions can be applied anywhere.” Aristocrats control the corporations, which control us. That’s the situation.

Here is the best news-source on the Syrian war, Almasdar News, showing a video interview of a Saudi cleric who says that ISIS (called “Daesh”) and the Saudi people agree. That polled 92% Saudi figure confirms his view. However, in Syria, 78% of the public disapprove of ISIS, and 82% blame the U.S. and its allies for ISIS.

How come only an inconsequential few Americans know any of these things? How can ‘democracy’ even function in such a misinformed country? Of course, it doesn’t. It can’t.

This report constitutes American samizdat. It’s not ‘major media’ news-reporting, and it’s not even ‘alternative news’ reporting. It is, instead, news-reporting that provides an honest context. This is the reason why it’s samizdat. You are reading what — in the West, at least — is forbidden to know. We had all better watch out, now. Agents for the corporate state might be disturbed at the publication of too much truth, even if it’s only in a small news-medium such as this. They’re watching us, constantly. It’s like “Big Brother.” Except: this one’s real.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity  Permalink