The reason put forward by the Obama administration for the war against the
Bashar al-Assad regime – saving the Syrian people from suffering and death
at the hands of Assad – has no credibility with anyone familiar with the record
of US interventions for regime change around the world.
As has been the case with all the other wars the US has fought over the decades,
opponents of the US war state have had to come up with their own explanations
for the sponsorship of a sectarian bloodbath in Syria. The explanation that
is rapidly gaining popularity is that the war in Syria is a “pipeline war,”
fought to ensure that the natural gas from Qatar would go to Europe through
Syria and would weaken Europe’s dependence on Russia for its energy.
That argument has been made in a number of places over the last few years,
but the most widely republished version is an essay
by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Politico, arguing that the Obama administration
began to lay the groundwork for overthrowing the Assad regime in 2009 after
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rejected a pipeline proposed by Qatar. That
planned pipeline agreed to by Qatar and Turkey, Kennedy argues, would have linked
Qatar’s natural gas to European markets through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria
and Turkey, so it would have deprived Russia of Europe’s dependence on its natural
gas.
But Assad not only prevented the realization of the Qatari plan but signed
up with Iran for an alternative pipeline that would make Iran, not Qatar, the
principal Middle East supplier of natural gas to European energy markets, according
to the “pipeline war” account, so the Obama administration decided that Assad
had to be removed from power.
It’s easy to understand why that explanation would be accepted by many antiwar
activists: it is in line with the widely accepted theory that all the US wars
in the Middle East have been “oil wars” – about getting control of the
petroleum resources of the region and denying them to America’s enemies.
But the “pipeline war” theory is based on false history and it represents a
distraction from the real problem of US policy in the Middle East – the US
war state’s determination to hold onto its military posture in the region.
It is true that Qatar had proposed a pipeline to carry its natural gas to Turkey.
But nearly everything else about the story turns out, upon investigation, to
be untrue. There is no contemporaneous report of any such rejection by the Syrian
government. It was only four years later, in August 2013 that an Agence France-Presse
article recounting what happened in a meeting between President Vladimir Putin
and Saudi intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, claimed
in passing, “In 2009, Assad refused to sign an agreement with Qatar for
an overland pipeline running from the…