{"id":198748,"date":"2015-11-09T22:46:28","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T22:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=198748"},"modified":"2016-08-26T02:41:08","modified_gmt":"2016-08-26T02:41:08","slug":"the-uprising-against-assad-was-engineered-in-washington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-uprising-against-assad-was-engineered-in-washington\/","title":{"rendered":"The Uprising Against Assad Was Engineered in Washington"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A terrific news report by Jonathan Marshall at Consortium News provides the first-ever presentation in the West of the event that sparked the demonstrations that sparked the Syrian civil war, and of the entire origin of that war.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike so many online \u2018news\u2019 reports that are merely authoritarian trash because they don\u2019t link to any of their sources (they rely instead upon dumb readers\u2019 faith or trust in the \u2018reporter\u2019 or in the publisher, such as The New York Times or Fox News), this one from Marshall is top-notch: not only does it provide intelligently skeptical readers with instantaneous access to documentation for each one of its key points, but those sources are credible ones. Taken all together, the sources, and Marshall\u2019s presentation of them, constitute a solid historical account of how the war to bring down Syria\u2019s leader, Bashar al-Assad, actually started. It didn\u2019t start by Assad\u2019s dumping (as U.S. President Barack Obama loves to claim) \u201cbarrel bombs,\u201d upon merely peaceful protesters in Syria. It started actually in Washington, years before that. The Obama Administration itself was taking advantage of not only the \u201cArab Spring\u201d protests throughout much of the Arab world, but, specifically, of an ongoing economic catastrophe in Syria that had started five years before the anti-Assad demonstrations did: an extended drought. Here is how the source that Marshall linked to<\/span><\/a> describes it, two years before the \u201cArab Spring\u201d even began:<\/span><\/p>\n

In the past three years, 160 Syrian\u00a0farming villages have been abandoned\u00a0near Aleppo as crop failures have forced\u00a0over 200,000 rural Syrians to leave for\u00a0the cities. This news is distressing enough,\u00a0but when put into a long-term\u00a0perspective, its implications are\u00a0staggering: many of these villages have\u00a0been continuously farmed for 8000 years.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

That source had been published on 16 January 2010. The drought continued on; the situation only\u00a0got even worse right into 2011 and up through the public demonstrations in Aleppo that started the war. There were no \u201cbarrel bombs\u201d then. There was instead surging economic dislocation.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Obama merely took advantage of it. He knew that it was coming, and he planned so as to exploit it.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact,\u00a0a wikileaked confidential 25 November 2008 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to the CIA and other associated agencies<\/span><\/a>\u00a0referred to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization by saying:<\/span><\/p>\n

UNFAO Syria Representative Abdullah bin Yehia\u00a0briefed\u00a0econoff and USDA Regional Minister-Counselor for\u00a0Agriculture\u00a0on what he terms the “perfect storm,” a\u00a0confluence of drought\u00a0conditions with other economic and\u00a0social pressures that Yehia\u00a0believes could undermine\u00a0stability in Syria.\u00a0Because he is\u00a0working with such limited\u00a0resources, Yehia plans to target FAO\u00a0assistance to\u00a0small-holding farmers in the hardest-hit province\u00a0of\u00a0northeast Syria, Al Hasakah.\u00a0(Note:\u00a0This province shares a\u00a0northern border with Turkey and a southern border with Iraq.\u00a0Mosul is approximately 100km from Al Hasakah province.)\u00a0Because the UN appeal has, thus far, not been entirely\u00a0successful, Yehia has had to prioritize aid recipients.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

That was institutional U.S. federal government knowledge three months prior to Obama\u2019s becoming President. Obama as the President-elect at the time was privy to such information. Once he got into the White House, he needed to understand what was going on in Syria. Was it dumb of Yehia to trust the U.S. government with this information? Was he naive about the type of people who sit in America\u2019s Oval Office nowadays? Is a deer in the forest naive to move when a hunter is stalking it? Is the deer supposed to just stand still, instead? Barack Obama during his electoral campaign had provided the public with no reason to suspect that he might have been harboring aggressive designs against the Syrian government, nor even against the Russian government that has been supporting it. Yehia was just seeking help, like the deer in fear. <\/span><\/p>\n

Obama knew what was going on. He knew that the Syrian situation wasn\u2019t just \u201cbarrel bombs\u201d showing up suddenly out of nowhere, from no cause, and for no reason. He knew more than was published to the public in the American press. His repeated references to \u201cbarrel bombs\u201d after the situation in Syria blew up, suggests that he takes advantage of the fact that the American public isn\u2019t aware of such facts. It suggests that he\u2019s playing the American public as trusting gulls, rather than as citizens.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, America\u2019s own National Academy of Sciences recently published a study (17 March 2015), \u201cClimate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought,\u201d<\/span><\/a> which opens (though propagandistically blaming Assad as having contributed to the drought): \u201cBefore the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest.\u201d (Of course, Obama doesn\u2019t claim to be bombing Assad\u2019s forces because Assad had \u2018unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies.\u2019) In the section of that report \u201cSignificance,\u201d the investigators-propagandists close: \u201cWe conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.\u201d So, since the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in this recent study, is arguing, in effect, that Syria should have had a different government in order to avoid the alleged \u201cpoor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies\u201d that are alleged to have contributed to causing the anti-Assad demonstrations, encouragement is being provided here for regime-change in Syria. Perhaps the failed state that Obama insists upon producing there would be the \u2018solution\u2019? To what extent is the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (its PNAS)<\/i> now itself<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>politicized, nationalistic, propagandistic \u2014 that they are retrospectively publishing something like this, which fails to criticize the U.S. Government itself for having turned down the Syrian Government\u2019s years-long pleadings for assistance on the matter? The PNAS<\/i> study ignores this. Instead, it argues only that, \u201cThe rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria, marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.\u201d Wow. the NAS argues that Assad should have been more dictatorial! That would have helped prevent the effects of the drought? Does nothing that comes from the U.S. Establishment possess credibility anymore \u2014 publishing garbage like this in PNAS?<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>Is Assad more of a dictator than Obama? Does the U.S. National Academy of Sciences really think he should have been? How absurd does the propaganda need to be in order for the U.S. to become a laughingstock to the entire world for its \u2018democratic\u2019 pretensions? After all: it\u2019s not a democracy<\/span><\/a>. And the one scientific study that has been done of that has confirmed that it\u2019s not<\/span><\/a>. So: the U.S. now insists upon installing \u2018democracy\u2019 in Syria, where all polls show that Assad would win any free election<\/span><\/a> (and the latest polled finding is that he\u2019d win at least 55% of the votes<\/span><\/a>) but Obama insists that he must be ousted, so that there can be \u2018democracy\u2019 there?<\/span><\/p>\n

Marshall\u2019s news report about the origin of the Syrian war was published at Consortium News on 20 July 2015, but was picked up and reported to a broader audience only at a very few news-sites, each no larger (or even smaller) in audience-size than is the publisher (Consortium News) itself. Only RINF, CommonDreams and Truthout republished it. Reddit posted that story\u2019s headline, \u201cHidden Origins of Syria\u2019s Civil War,\u201d linking to the Consortium News report, but no one up-marked it there, and still no reader-comments have been posted to it there.<\/span><\/a> It was just another voice of real news unheard in the wilderness of propaganda that causes an individual tree to be ignored among the forest.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus: This blockbuster three-month-old news-report still remains news in the U.S., even today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marshall\u2019s news report was one of the most important of all news reports on the Syrian war, and it certainly deserves larger public distribution than that. So:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here<\/a><\/span>\u00a0is his historical account of the origin of the Syrian war.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org A terrific news report by Jonathan Marshall at Consortium News provides the first-ever presentation in the West of the event that sparked the demonstrations that sparked the Syrian civil war, and of the entire origin of that war. Unlike so many online \u2018news\u2019 reports that are merely authoritarian trash […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":171709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[4483,115,30,27,32,96,1034,1017,753,804,543,524,754,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-198748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-assad","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-bush","12":"tag-cia","13":"tag-cover-up","14":"tag-independent-media","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-police-state","17":"tag-politics-2","18":"tag-putin","19":"tag-russia","20":"tag-syria","21":"tag-usa-news","22":"tag-warfare","23":"tag-white-house","24":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}