The truth about the conflict in Syria

[Caretaker]

Like so many of the wars over the past 150 years, it was engineered in Washington.

By the mid twentieth century Washington's war making had become so egregious - and obvious - that 5 star general, WWII Supreme Allied Commander, and two-term US president Dwight David Eisenhower cautioned the nation about the threat posed by the military industrial complex. A quarter century before that US Marine General Smedley Butler revealed the truth in his book, War is a Racket, which can be found online here: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

In his book, A Century of War, circuit judge John V. Denson tells the truth behind the origins of US wars of the past century.

In his book, The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys, explores the origins of World War II.

Syria, tragically, is one of the latest chapters in the ongoing story of how moneyed and powerful men have manipulated the American people into becoming entirely too close to "the great satan" some have claimed we are.

Natives of the targets of our aggression are often used to help inflame the American people with lies like the stories that broke just before the first US war against Iraq that Iraqis were raiding Kuwait hospitals, ripping babies from incubators, and stealing the incubators: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015...tor-infants-kuwait-criminally-incite-war.html.

Here are two articles that describe how the conflict in Syria is the result of US meddling.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/11/the-uprising-against-assad-was-engineered-in-washington.html

http://themillenniumreport.com/2015...d-sustained-a-brutal-war-of-naked-aggression/

 

[football5680]

I don't think the US caused the war but some of our actions and policies have allowed it to grow bigger and more rapidly than it would have on its own. The origin of the war is the strife that exists between Sunni's and Shia's and it seems like in every country where you have a large Sunni and Shia population, there is conflict or instability.

In Iraq, our involvement was obviously a huge factor in the current conflict but the Shia Governments attempt to consolidate power and ostracize Sunni's is the main cause. This made it so that the Sunni population was either supportive or indifferent towards the rise of ISIS. There is a similar conflict occurring in Yemen and we did nothing to cause or support it.

The Syrian conflict was handled terribly by our politicians (both Republicans and Democrats) and I would have preferred to do the complete opposite of what they decided to do. We should have either supported Assad or remained indifferent and provide no aid to the rebels. Our politicians are delusional if they actually think that some sort of secular democracy could be established. The two choices from the beginning were either Assad remains in power or an Islamic state would be established and this is even more clear today. Assad is not an ally of the US but he is not a threat either and we know what we are getting with him as the leader of Syria.

 

[ChristsSoldier115]

I don't think the US caused the war but some of our actions and policies have allowed it to grow bigger and more rapidly than it would have on its own. The origin of the war is the strife that exists between Sunni's and Shia's and it seems like in every country where you have a large Sunni and Shia population, there is conflict or instability.

In Iraq, our involvement was obviously a huge factor in the current conflict but the Shia Governments attempt to consolidate power and ostracize Sunni's is the main cause. This made it so that the Sunni population was either supportive or indifferent towards the rise of ISIS. There is a similar conflict occurring in Yemen and we did nothing to cause or support it.

The Syrian conflict was handled terribly by our politicians (both Republicans and Democrats) and I would have preferred to do the complete opposite of what they decided to do. We should have either supported Assad or remained indifferent and provide no aid to the rebels. Our politicians are delusional if they actually think that some sort of secular democracy could be established. The two choices from the beginning were either Assad remains in power or an Islamic state would be established and this is even more clear today. Assad is not an ally of the US but he is not a threat either and we know what we are getting with him as the leader of Syria.

For some reason our politicians live in some sort of fantasy land where they believe every culture and country can turn out like south korea or japan.

 

[Caretaker]

I don't think the US caused the war but some of our actions and policies have allowed it to grow bigger and more rapidly than it would have on its own. The origin of the war is the strife that exists between Sunni's and Shia's and it seems like in every country where you have a large Sunni and Shia population, there is conflict or instability.

In Iraq, our involvement was obviously a huge factor in the current conflict but the Shia Governments attempt to consolidate power and ostracize Sunni's is the main cause. This made it so that the Sunni population was either supportive or indifferent towards the rise of ISIS. There is a similar conflict occurring in Yemen and we did nothing to cause or support it.

The Syrian conflict was handled terribly by our politicians (both Republicans and Democrats) and I would have preferred to do the complete opposite of what they decided to do. We should have either supported Assad or remained indifferent and provide no aid to the rebels. Our politicians are delusional if they actually think that some sort of secular democracy could be established. The two choices from the beginning were either Assad remains in power or an Islamic state would be established and this is even more clear today. Assad is not an ally of the US but he is not a threat either and we know what we are getting with him as the leader of Syria.

It is true that there are historical conflicts among the peoples of the middle east. But that is true of any region of the world, including the United States. Irresponsible people who make money selling the weapons of war will take advantage of these regional, historical conflicts and fan them into flames for the purpose of making a buck.

"There is a similar conflict occurring in Yemen and we did nothing to cause or support it." -- football5680

Sorry, but the notion that we are not supporting Saudi Arabia's incursions into Yemen is patently false: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/02/giving-saudis-a-pass-on-yemen-war/

However, I do agree with the balance of your post.

 

[Landon Caeli]

Like so many of the wars over the past 150 years, it was engineered in Washington.

By the mid twentieth century Washington's war making had become so egregious - and obvious - that 5 star general, WWII Supreme Allied Commander, and two-term US president Dwight David Eisenhower cautioned the nation about the threat posed by the military industrial complex. A quarter century before that US Marine General Smedley Butler revealed the truth in his book, War is a Racket, which can be found online here: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

In his book, A Century of War, circuit judge John V. Denson tells the truth behind the origins of US wars of the past century.

In his book, The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys, explores the origins of World War II.

Syria, tragically, is one of the latest chapters in the ongoing story of how moneyed and powerful men have manipulated the American people into becoming entirely too close to "the great satan" some have claimed we are.

Natives of the targets of our aggression are often used to help inflame the American people with lies like the stories that broke just before the first US war against Iraq that Iraqis were raiding Kuwait hospitals, ripping babies from incubators, and stealing the incubators: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015...tor-infants-kuwait-criminally-incite-war.html.

Here are two articles that describe how the conflict in Syria is the result of US meddling.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/11/the-uprising-against-assad-was-engineered-in-washington.html

http://themillenniumreport.com/2015...d-sustained-a-brutal-war-of-naked-aggression/

I don't think Western (not just Washington) influence is the only factor to have played a part in the revolutions that occured through social media fueled Arab Spring, Like the article says, drought added to the "perfect storm", as well as Shia / Sunni fundamental differences.

A culture so fragile and willing to self destruct is a ticking time bomb to begin with... A frail culture, I think, is to blame.

Just my opinion of course.

EDIT: I dont know why this line is here.

 

[football5680]

"There is a similar conflict occurring in Yemen and we did nothing to cause or support it." -- football5680

Sorry, but the notion that we are not supporting Saudi Arabia's incursions into Yemen is patently false: https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/02/giving-saudis-a-pass-on-yemen-war/

When I said cause and support, I was referring to the start of the conflict. Nothing we did caused the war and we did not give support to the Houthis and tell them to revolt. Any support we gave to Saudi Arabia was after the fact.

 

[JackRT]

Why Tyrants Rule Arabs

For 60 years, the West has propped up Arab despots, creating poverty and illiteracy where education once thrived


By Gwynne Dyer (Toronto Star --- 20 July 2004)

It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: Only 300 books were translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per million Arabs. For comparison's sake, Greece translated 1,500 foreign-language books, or about 150 titles per million Greeks. Why is the Arab world so far behind, not only in this but in practically all the arts and sciences? The first-order answer is poverty and lack of education: Almost half of Arabic-speaking women are illiterate.

But the Arab world used to be the most literate part of the planet; what went wrong? Tyranny and economic failure, obviously. But why is tyranny such a problem in the Arab world? That brings us to the nub of the matter. In a speech in November, 2003, President George W. Bush revisited his familiar refrain about how the West has to remake the Arab world in its own image in order to stop the terrorism: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe ... because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty" - as if the Arab world had willfully chosen to be ruled by these corrupt and incompetent tyrannies.

But the West didn't just "excuse and accommodate" these regimes. It created them, in order to protect its own interests - and it spent the latter half of the 20th century keeping them in power for the same reason. It was Britain that carved the kingdom of Jordan out of the old Ottoman province of Syria after World War Iand put the Hashemite ruling family on the throne that it still occupies. France similarly carved Lebanon out of Syria in order to create a loyal Christian-majority state that controlled most of the Syrian coastline - and when time and a higher Muslim birth rate eventually led to a revolt against the Maronite Christian stranglehold on power in Lebanon in 1958, U.S. troops were sent in to restore it. The Lebanese civil war of 1975-'90, tangled though it was, was basically a continuation of that struggle. Britain also imposed a Hashemite monarchy on Iraq after 1918, and deliberately perpetuated the political monopoly of the Sunni minority that it had inherited from Turkish rule.

When the Iraqi monarchy was finally overthrown in 1958 and the Baath party won the struggle that followed, the CIA gave the Iraqi Baathists the names of all the senior members of the Iraqi Communist party (then the main political vehicle of the Shias) so they could be liquidated.

It was Britain that turned the traditional sheikhdoms in the Gulf into separate little sovereign states and absolute monarchies, carving Kuwait out of Iraq in the process. Saudi Arabia, however, was a joint Anglo-U.S. project.

The British Foreign Office welcomed the Egyptian generals' overthrow of King Farouk and the destruction of the country's old nationalist political parties, failing to foresee that Gamal Abdul Nasser would eventually take over the Suez Canal. When he did, the foreign office conspired with France and Israel to attack Egypt in a failed attempt to overthrow him. Once Nasser died and was succeeded by generals more willing to play along with the West - Anwar Sadat, and now Hosni Mubarak - Egypt became Washington's favourite Arab state. To help these thinly disguised dictators to hang on to power, Egypt has ranked among the top three recipients of U.S. foreign aid almost every year for the past quarter-century. And so it goes.

Britain welcomed the coup by Col. Mohammar Gadhafi in Libya in 1969, mistakenly seeing him as a malleable young man who could serve the West's purposes. The United States and France both supported the old dictator Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, and still back his successor Ben Ali today. They always backed the Moroccan monarchy no matter how repressive it became, and they both gave unquestioning support to the Algerian generals who cancelled the elections of 1991. They did not ever waver in their support through the savage insurgency unleashed by the suppression of the elections that killed an estimated 120,000 Algerians over the next 10 years.

"Excuse and accommodate"? The West created the modern Middle East, from its rotten regimes down to its ridiculous borders, and it did so with contemptuous disregard for the wishes of the local people. It is indeed a problem that most Arab governments are corrupt autocracies that breed hatred and despair in their own people, which then fuels terrorism against the West, but it was the West that created the problem - and invading Iraq won't solve it.

 

[Caretaker]

Why Tyrants Rule Arabs

For 60 years, the West has propped up Arab despots, creating poverty and illiteracy where education once thrived


By Gwynne Dyer (Toronto Star --- 20 July 2004)

It was just a random statistic, but a telling one: Only 300 books were translated into Arabic last year. That is about one foreign title per million Arabs. For comparison's sake, Greece translated 1,500 foreign-language books, or about 150 titles per million Greeks. Why is the Arab world so far behind, not only in this but in practically all the arts and sciences? The first-order answer is poverty and lack of education: Almost half of Arabic-speaking women are illiterate.

But the Arab world used to be the most literate part of the planet; what went wrong? Tyranny and economic failure, obviously. But why is tyranny such a problem in the Arab world? That brings us to the nub of the matter. In a speech in November, 2003, President George W. Bush revisited his familiar refrain about how the West has to remake the Arab world in its own image in order to stop the terrorism: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe ... because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty" - as if the Arab world had willfully chosen to be ruled by these corrupt and incompetent tyrannies.

But the West didn't just "excuse and accommodate" these regimes. It created them, in order to protect its own interests - and it spent the latter half of the 20th century keeping them in power for the same reason. It was Britain that carved the kingdom of Jordan out of the old Ottoman province of Syria after World War Iand put the Hashemite ruling family on the throne that it still occupies. France similarly carved Lebanon out of Syria in order to create a loyal Christian-majority state that controlled most of the Syrian coastline - and when time and a higher Muslim birth rate eventually led to a revolt against the Maronite Christian stranglehold on power in Lebanon in 1958, U.S. troops were sent in to restore it. The Lebanese civil war of 1975-'90, tangled though it was, was basically a continuation of that struggle. Britain also imposed a Hashemite monarchy on Iraq after 1918, and deliberately perpetuated the political monopoly of the Sunni minority that it had inherited from Turkish rule.

When the Iraqi monarchy was finally overthrown in 1958 and the Baath party won the struggle that followed, the CIA gave the Iraqi Baathists the names of all the senior members of the Iraqi Communist party (then the main political vehicle of the Shias) so they could be liquidated.

It was Britain that turned the traditional sheikhdoms in the Gulf into separate little sovereign states and absolute monarchies, carving Kuwait out of Iraq in the process. Saudi Arabia, however, was a joint Anglo-U.S. project.

The British Foreign Office welcomed the Egyptian generals' overthrow of King Farouk and the destruction of the country's old nationalist political parties, failing to foresee that Gamal Abdul Nasser would eventually take over the Suez Canal. When he did, the foreign office conspired with France and Israel to attack Egypt in a failed attempt to overthrow him. Once Nasser died and was succeeded by generals more willing to play along with the West - Anwar Sadat, and now Hosni Mubarak - Egypt became Washington's favourite Arab state. To help these thinly disguised dictators to hang on to power, Egypt has ranked among the top three recipients of U.S. foreign aid almost every year for the past quarter-century. And so it goes.

Britain welcomed the coup by Col. Mohammar Gadhafi in Libya in 1969, mistakenly seeing him as a malleable young man who could serve the West's purposes. The United States and France both supported the old dictator Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia, and still back his successor Ben Ali today. They always backed the Moroccan monarchy no matter how repressive it became, and they both gave unquestioning support to the Algerian generals who cancelled the elections of 1991. They did not ever waver in their support through the savage insurgency unleashed by the suppression of the elections that killed an estimated 120,000 Algerians over the next 10 years.

"Excuse and accommodate"? The West created the modern Middle East, from its rotten regimes down to its ridiculous borders, and it did so with contemptuous disregard for the wishes of the local people. It is indeed a problem that most Arab governments are corrupt autocracies that breed hatred and despair in their own people, which then fuels terrorism against the West, but it was the West that created the problem - and invading Iraq won't solve it.

Good article. Thanks!