How the US and Israel destroyed Syria and called it peace

JEFFREY D SACHS

Syria’s downfall came quickly, due to more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the burdens of war, the US confiscation of Syrian oil, Russia’s priorities regarding the Ukraine conflict, and, most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, which was the Syrian government’s main military backer. To be sure, Assad often misplayed his own cards and faced serious internal discontent, but his regime was targeted for collapse by the US and Israel for decades.

Before the US-Israeli campaign to overthrow Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a functioning and growing middle-income country. By January 2009, the IMF Executive Board He said the following:

Directors welcomed Syria's strong macroeconomic performance in recent years, as reflected in rapid non-oil GDP growth, comfortable foreign exchange reserves, and low and declining public debt. These results reflect both robust regional demand and the authorities' reform efforts to move toward a more market-based economy.

Since 2011, the perpetual war waged by Israel and the United States against Syria, including bombings, jihadists, economic sanctions, the US seizure of Syrian oil fields, etc., has plunged the Syrian people into misery.

In the two days immediately following the government's collapse, Israel carried out some 480 attacks throughout Syria and He destroyed completely the syrian fleet in Latakia. Pursuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Netanyahu illegally claimed control of the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared that the Golan Heights will be part of the State of Israel.for eternity. "

Netanyahu's ambition to transform the region through war, dating back almost three decades, is unfolding before our eyes. In a Press conference On December 9, the Israeli prime minister boasted of an "absolute victory," justifying the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the escalation of violence throughout the region:

I ask you, think about it, if we had agreed to those who told us over and over again: “We must stop the war,” we would not have entered Rafah, we would not have taken the Philadelphia corridor, we would not have eliminated Sinwar, we would not have surprised our enemies in Lebanon and around the world in a daring ploy operation, we would not have eliminated Nasrallah, we would not have destroyed Hezbollah’s underground network and we would not have exposed Iran’s weakness. The operations we have carried out since the beginning of the war are dismantling the axis brick by brick.

The long history of Israel's campaign to overthrow the Syrian government is not well known, but the documentary record is clear. Israel's war on Syria began with American and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who devised a strategy of "breaking up" the Syrian government. cleaning» for the Middle East for Netanyahu when he came to power. The core of the “clean break” strategy called for Israel (and the United States) to reject the idea of ​​“land for peace,” under which Israel would withdraw from occupied Palestinian lands in exchange for peace. Instead, Israel would retain occupied Palestinian lands, rule over the Palestinian people in an apartheid state, ethnically cleanse the state step by step, and impose so-called “peace for peace” by overthrowing neighboring governments that resisted Israel’s territorial claims.

La Clean Break Strategy He states: “Our claim to the land – to which we have clung in hope for 2000 years – is legitimate and noble,” and goes on to state: “Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which the United States can sympathize, would be for Israel to take the strategic initiative along its northern borders by confronting Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon…”

In his 1996 book Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu laid out the new strategy. Israel would not fight terrorists; it would fight states that support terrorists. More accurately, it would get the United States to fight for Israel. As he explained in 2001:

The first and most important thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states… If all this state support is removed, the entire framework of international terrorism will collapse.

Netanyahu's strategy was integrated into American foreign policy. Destroying Syria was always a key part of the plan. This was confirmed to him to General Wesley Clark after 11/XNUMX. He was told, during a visit to the Pentagon, that “we are going to attack and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years: starting with Iraq, then moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Iraq would be first, then Syria and the rest. (Netanyahu’s campaign for the Iraq war is explained in detail in Dennis Fritz’s new book, Deadly BetrayalThe role of the Israeli lobby is explained in detail in Ilan Pappé's new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic). The insurgency that hit US troops in Iraq set back the timetable by five years, but did not change the basic strategy.

So far, the US has led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (US funds and arms Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation during the 2010s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break away from Sudan in 2011) and Somalia (backing the invasion of Ethiopia in 2006). A possible US war against Iran, ardently sought by Israel, remains pending.

As strange as it may seem, the CIA has repeatedly backed Islamist jihadists to fight these wars, and the jihadists have just overthrown the Syrian regime. The CIA, after all, helped create al-Qaeda in the first place by training, arming, and financing the mujahideen in Afghanistan from the late 1970s. Yes, Osama bin Laden later turned against the United States, but his movement was an American creation nonetheless. Ironically, as confirms Seymour Hersh, it was Assad's intelligence that "warned the United States of an imminent al-Qaeda attack on the headquarters of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet."

Operation Timber Sycamore was a multi-million dollar covert CIA program launched by Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The CIA funded, trained, and provided intelligence to radical and extremist Islamist groups. The CIA effort also involved a “rat line” to get weapons from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his work «The red line and the rat line"

«A highly classified annex to the report, which was not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. He was referring to the rat line. Under the terms of the agreement, funding was to come from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and the CIA, with support from MI6, was to deliver weapons from Gaddafi's arsenals to Syria.

Shortly after the release of Timber Sycamore in March 2013, in a joint conference President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Obama said: "On Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends and with the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of the Assad government."

For the American-Israeli Zionist mindset, a call for negotiations by an adversary is taken as a sign of weakness by the adversary. Those who call for negotiations on the other side often end up assassinated by Israel or by American assets. We have seen this recently in Lebanon. The Lebanese foreign minister confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, former secretary general of Hezbollah, had A ceasefire was agreed with Israel days before his assassination. The wish of Hezbollah to accept a peace agreement in line with the wishes of the Arab-Islamic world for a two-state solution, it is a long time coming. Similarly, instead of negotiating to end the war in Gaza, Israel assassinated the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

Similarly, in Syria, rather than allowing a political solution to emerge, the United States repeatedly opposed the peace process. In 2012, the UN had negotiated a peace agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Americans, who demanded that Assad must leave on the first day of the peace agreement. The US wanted regime change, not peace. In September 2024, Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly with a map of the Middle East divided between “Blessing” and “Curse,” with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran as part of Netanyahu’s curse. The real curse is Israel’s path of chaos and war, which has now engulfed Lebanon and Syria, with Netanyahu’s fervent hope of also dragging the United States into the war against Iran.

The United States and Israel high-five for having succeeded in sinking another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, and Netanyahu He attributes "the merit of having started the historical process." Syria will most likely now succumb to a continuing war between the numerous armed protagonists, as has happened in previous US-Israeli regime change operations.

In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu's Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with more than a million dead and open wars in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, pushed against its own inclinations toward this eventuality.

All of this in the service of a deeply unjust cause: denying Palestinians their political rights in the service of Zionist extremism based on the Book of Joshua 7th century BC. Surprisingly, according to that text – on which Israel’s own religious fanatics rely – the Israelites were not even the original inhabitants of the land. Rather, according to the text, God orders Joshua and his warriors to commit multiple genocides in order to conquer the land.

Against this backdrop, Islamic Arab nations and indeed almost the entire world have repeatedly joined together in calling for a peaceful solution. Two States and Peace between Israel and Palestine.

Instead of a two-state solution, Israel and the United States have made a desert and called it peace.

Jeffrey D.Sachs He is director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University (USA) and president of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has been an adviser to three UN secretaries general.

This article is published in collaboration with Common Dreams.