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 ‘news’ reports
that are merely authoritarian trash because they don’t link to any of
their sources (they rely instead upon dumb readers’ faith or trust in
the ‘reporter’ 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’s
presentation of them, constitute a solid historical account of how the
war to bring down Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, actually started. It
didn’t start by Assad’s dumping (as U.S. President Barack Obama loves to
claim) “barrel bombs,” 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 “Arab Spring” 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 describes it, two years before the “Arab Spring” even began:
In the past three years, 160 Syrian farming villages have been abandoned near Aleppo as crop failures have forced over 200,000 rural Syrians to leave for the cities. This news is distressing enough, but when put into a long-term perspective, its implications are staggering: many of these villages have been continuously farmed for 8000 years.
That source had been published on 16 January 2010. The drought continued on; the situation only got
even worse right into 2011 and up through the public demonstrations in
Aleppo that started the war. There were no “barrel bombs” then. There
was instead surging economic dislocation. Obama merely took advantage of it. He knew that it was coming, and he planned so as to exploit it.
In fact, a wikileaked confidential 26 November 2008 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to the CIA and other associated agencies referred to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization by saying:
UNFAO Syria Representative Abdullah bin
Yehia briefed econoff and USDA Regional Minister-Counselor for
Agriculture on what he terms the “perfect storm,” a confluence of
drought conditions with other economic and social pressures that Yehia
believes could undermine stability in Syria. Because he is working with
such limited resources, Yehia plans to target FAO assistance to
small-holding farmers in the hardest-hit province of northeast Syria, Al
Hasakah. (Note: This province shares a northern border with Turkey and a
southern border with Iraq. Mosul is approximately 100km from Al Hasakah
province.) Because the UN appeal has, thus far, not been entirely
successful, Yehia has had to prioritize aid recipients.
That was institutional U.S. federal
government knowledge three months prior to Obama’s 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’s 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.
Obama knew what was going on. He knew
that the Syrian situation wasn’t just “barrel bombs” 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 “barrel bombs” after the situation in Syria blew up, suggests that he
takes advantage of the fact that the American public isn’t aware of
such facts. It suggests that he’s playing the American public as
trusting gulls, rather than as citizens.
In fact, America’s own National Academy of Sciences recently published a study (17 March 2015), “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought,” which opens (though propagandistically blaming Assad as having contributed to the drought):
“Before 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.”
(Of course, Obama doesn’t claim to be
bombing Assad’s forces because Assad had ‘unsustainable agricultural and
environmental policies.’) In the section of that report “Significance,”
the investigators-propagandists close:
“We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.”
So, the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences, in this recent study, is arguing, in effect, that Syria should
have a different government. Perhaps the failed state that Obama
insists upon producing there would be the ‘solution’? To what extent is
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (its PNAS) nowitself
politicized, nationalistic, propagandistic — that they are
retrospectively publishing something like this, which fails to criticize
the U.S. Government itself for having turned down the Syrian
Government’s years-long pleadings for assistance on the matter? The PNAS study
ignores this. Instead, it argues only that, “The 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.”
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 — publishing garbage like this inPNAS?
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 ‘democratic’ pretensions? After all: it’s not a democracy. And the one scientific study that has been done of that has confirmed that it’s not. So: the U.S. now insists upon installing ‘democracy’ in Syria, where all polls show that Assad would win any free election (and the latest polled finding is that he’d win at least 55% of the votes) but Obama insists that he must be ousted, so that there can be ‘democracy’ there?
Marshall’s 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’s headline, “Hidden
Origins of Syria’s Civil War,” linking to the Consortium News report,
but no one up-marked it there, and still no reader-comments have been posted to it there. 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.
Thus: This blockbuster three-month-old news-report still remains news in the U.S., even today.
Marshall’s 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:
Here is his historical account of the origin of the Syrian war.
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.
The original source of this article is Strategic Culture Foundation
Copyright © Eric Zuesse, Strategic Culture Foundation, 2015
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