خبرگزاری جمهوری عربی سوریه Syrian Arab News Agency
Damascus, SANA U.S. interference is always cloaked by the same pretexts; humanitarian intervention or protecting endangered religious or national minorities, while the real reason has never been less obvious, and that reason is nothing other than the self-serving and egocentric interests of the U.S. administration.
Even when addressing the phenomenon of terrorism which is sweeping the Middle East, a phenomenon which is a result of the U.S. support for terrorist organizations in the first place, the U.S. administrations perfected Machiavellian methods to benefit from murder and bloodshed.
These methods include but are not limited to potential direct military operations and forming and supporting terrorist organizations under slogans and names that seek to mask these organizations’ true nature and pass them off as “revolutionaries” and “freedom seekers.”
This tactic may have been learned from what happened in Afghanistan, where the Reagan administration supported “freedom fighters” there against the former Soviet Union, only for those alleged freedom fighters to become a bane of Afghanistan as Taliban and a threat to international security as Al Qaeda.
Beside their use on the ground to weaken the opponents of the U.S. administration, another use was found for terrorist organizations: justifying aggressive and morally-questionable international policies, with Al Qaeda becoming the go-to boogeyman used to scare to U.S. public opinion into going along with their administrations’ international machinations, a handy ploy once the “Red Menace” no longer sufficed to intimidate American taxpayers.
To avoid direct blame and accountability, Washington has been establishing Al Qaeda-like organizations of “freedom fighters” in Syria, and mostly avoided being openly involved in funding or financing these organizations, opting out of spending U.S. taxpayers’ money on this in favor of outsourcing this task to the Arab Gulf states and any internationally-infamous terrorist who would like to contribute, with the U.S. turning a blind eye to all suspicious transactions made from the Gulf States to Syria via U.S. or western banks.
Statistically, most of the U.S. interventions under “humanitarian” pretexts or claims of “protecting endangered minorities” actually resulted in social or geographic fragmentation, in the areas of interference, and sometimes both.
Phyllis Bennis, member of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which is a think tank based in Washington and one of the five major independent think tanks in the US, said in a televised interview that Washington has no friends; there are only interests, and that most of those who call for U.S. military intervention to solve crises consider this intervention as a measure of the U.S. strength.
Bennis added that the interests of the US are beyond being restricted to controlling petroleum supplies or protecting its ally Israel; rather the U.S. third strategic interest lies in expanding its powers and securing a specific level of stability or instability for that end.
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has been operating in Syria and Iraq for more than three years, employing terrorism to force its control and domination, committing brutal acts of murder that claimed the lives of thousands of civilians, with this organization even recording these acts on video and using them as part of the fear mongering policy the ISIL employs. Despite that, neither the US nor the other NATO members have ever intervened in any way to deal with the growing power of ISIS, on the contrary; the U.S. has repeatedly and assuredly prevented the UN Security Council from condemning the atrocities committed by ISIS or other organizations that are different from it only in name and marginal details.
For his part, Charles Lester from the Brookings Doha Center for studies says that the strategy of containing jihadist groups is fruitless as they work in the shadows and always find a way to overcome any containment strategy.
Proving that, ISIS has managed to expand and now it poses a very real threat to regional and international security, and the time will come when the U.S. and the West will be forced to intervene on greater scale beyond their original plans.
The US did not think of intervention even when ISIS took control over al-Mosul, the third largest Iraqi city, and Mount Sinjar, and the situation remained the same when ISIS committed massacres and atrocities which left hundreds of thousands of Christians, Yazedis and ISIS oppositionists.
However, everything changed when the terrorists got near Erbil and threatened to storm it.
Bennis considered that the U.S. intervention in Kurdistan or in Mount Sinjar was not of humanitarian concern, as the U.S. policy is not based on such things but rather they use them to convince an increasingly-wary public opinion of the need for more intervention operations, adding that intervention only came because of the importance of investments made by Washington in northern Iraq.
Lester concurs to Bennis, saying that the struggle in Syria and Iraq poses a threat to the U.S. and western interests in the region and threatens regional security, and that is why the U.S. has an interest in providing more stability in Syria and Iraq now.
Washington opted to punish the ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, another terrorist organization that employs the same tactics and embraces the same ideology as ISIS, at the UN Security Council because the two organizations have crossed the lines drawn by the US, but it still refuses to make a similar move against organizations similar to them in their ideologies and conduct like the Islamic front and Ahrar al-Cham simply because Washington is still betting on these organizations having a potential use in its war against the region’s people and states.
Bennis highlights that the U.S. military support to those who are labeled as “moderate organizations” in Syria will only lead to more death and suffering, and the results will not change if the U.S. intervenes directly, as its intervention also leaves behind death and suffering that is callously glossed over by mass media.
Bennis pointed out to the results of the U.S. intervention in Libya, which was then described as a “very limited operation,” saying that this operation resulted in a catastrophe, with militias fighting among themselves and the central government suffering a total collapse. Iraq was once a strong country similar to Syria, but was left crippled when the U.S. decided to dissolve its military upon its occupation. Bennis said the Syrian army is being targeted in the same manner and to the same end.
Politicians and analysts forecast that the U.S. will eventually blacklist those whom it dubs moderate organizations and will put the UN Security Council on alert in order to fight them once they are past their expiration date, or when they are replaced by new, more pliable and controllable organizations with new “revolutionary” or “moderate” characteristics, depending on the status quo at that time.
The extent of the benefits reaped by the U.S. from overlooking and supporting terrorism is still to be assessed. However, it’s most unlikely that any such benefits outweigh the cost in blood, pain, and misery the innocent civilians of the Middle East had to pay in exchange for them.
Mohammad Nassr / Hazem Sabbagh