There has been a resurgence of the neo-orientalist discourse of “the axis of evil” coined and perpetuated by the Bush administration in 2002 by applying the stereotypes and clichés about the East. The Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have been using this as part of their ‘public diplomacy’, which they have exploited to intervene in the affairs of the so-called Middle East. Today, 15 years later, the US regime with Trump in office continues to use fabricated pretexts and false flag operations against some major players in the West Asian region, justifying US and its allies’ meddling.
15 years ago, when US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to invade Iraq under the claim that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, the US and its allies declared with certainty they had proof and evidence of the WMD existence.
However, one simple example of the fabrication of evidence by this alliance is the Chilcot’s report, published in July 2016, which found that the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein posed “no imminent threat” at the time of the invasion of his country in 2003, and that the war was fought on the basis of “flawed” intelligence. It found that the British cabinet’s decision to invade along with the US was made in circumstances that were “far from satisfactory”. Also, we must remember that it was the US and its allies that provided Iraq with chemical weapons during the 80s in its war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The fake dossier of Iraq has been replaced with fake intelligence on Syria today. The only difference is that in Syria, the US and its allies cannot accept the enormous defeats of its allies that consist of the terrorist groups that have been funded and supported by the US and its allies as well as ideologically fed by Saudi Arabia. This is not the first false accusation against the Syrian government; similar fabricated accusations were made in 2013 and 2017. Several reports based on field research were issued back then, providing facts that prove it could not have been the Syrian government behind the attack, such as reports by American historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter, United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter, Veteran prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, American investigative journalist and political writer Seymour Hersh, and MIT’s Theodore Postol.
Fabricated accusations against the Syrian government are to help create pretexts for deeper foreign intervention in the war-struck country in favor of the US and its allies’ interests as well as the Israeli apartheid regime. Perhaps, the most notorious of these false flag operations is the East Ghouta incident of August 2013, when Syria was misleadingly accused of using the nerve agent Sarin in an alleged attack in Ghouta. However, according to a senior UN diplomat, Testimony from victims strongly suggests it was the rebels, not the Syrian government, that used the weapons.
In 2017, the US accused President Bashar al-Assad of carrying out an alleged attack, which stunningly came after less than a week after US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said that removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was no longer a "focus" of diplomatic policy, which raises questions on the incentive behind such a move.
On 7 April 2018, reports emerged from the opposition-held city of Douma east of the Syrian capital Damascus that scores of civilians had been killed and hundreds injured in a chemical attack. Soon Trump used Twitter, which has become his platform of communication, to accuse the Assad government of carrying out the attack, and threatening that soon, or maybe not so soon he will teach the “monster” a lesson.
However, facts trigger the thought on such a case. Why would President Assad; who is clearly winning the war use Chemical weapons? Nevertheless, American, British and French forces fired more than one hundred missiles targeting different military and civilian facilities Saturday at dawn, in breach of all international laws and norms, and even before US Congress approval on the strike.
Talking to the American Herald Tribune, Iranian Middle East expert Dr. Masoud Asadollahi underlined the timing of the strikes, which came after the successful advances of the Syrian army and its allies across Syria. The Wahhabi terrorists, otherwise called rebels by many mainstream Western media outlets, are the only faction that has anything to gain from chemical weapons use in Syria; only a US-Western intervention can save them from annihilation and compensate for the defeats they have faced.
“The Wahhabi and terrorist groups have been badly defeated in the different areas across Syria, especially during the past few months. These defeats include that of Daesh in Deir al-Zour and Abu Kamal, the collapse of the so-called Islamic Caliphate, as well as the defeats of other armed groups across Syria whether in East of Aleppo, the North of Hama, Abu al-Duhur and Eastern Ghouta. These groups lost areas which they had been occupying for the past 7 years,” said the Dr. Asadollahi.
The Middle East expert assured “this defeat is not only a defeat for the terrorist groups, but also a defeat to the supporters and backers of these terrorist groups including the US, Britain and France, as well as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who all see this as an intolerable downfall.”
The expert points out those foreign powers cannot tolerate the fact that they have been defeated at the hands of the Syrian army, supported by Iran, Russia and Hizbullah through what seems to be unconventional warfare.
“Since the very beginning of the crisis in Syria, we have witnessed that every time the Syrian army advanced in battles, it was instantly accused of using chemical weapons. But let us stop and think for a second, why would an army that has been advancing and is liberating more and more occupied lands resort to such means? It simply does not need to,” said the expert.
Previous experiences prove this fact; the US and its allies cannot tolerate the situation, and therefore use a fabricated scenario of chemical weapons as a pretext to meddle in the region, such as in the instances of 2013 in Ghouta and 2017 in Khan Sheykhoun.
Dr. Asadollahi reiterated that “During the past years, whenever the Syrian army was advancing and defeating the armed groups in Syria’s Eastern Aleppo, Khan Sheykhoun, the North of Hama, and the Eastern Ghouta, this was when it would get accused of using chemical weapons.”
According to the Middle East affairs expert, “During the Obama administration, when the Syrian government was accused of using chemical weapons and the US declared it was willing to hit Syria, Russia mediated to end the stand. The difference is that Trump’s threats today come in the context of putting extreme pressure on Russia, a staunch supporter of the Assad government in international bodies and on the ground. The US, France and Britain’s goal is to have Russia put pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step aside. However, this will not happen.”
These powers, according to Dr. Asadollahi, are trying to compensate for their loss through such an attitude, however real political change does not happen overnight and that easily, and this US-led aggression cannot really change anything on the ground.
He also underscored that “the US missiles launched on Saturday at Syria was a ‘performance’, which Trump has used to find his way out of the embarrassing situation in which he had put himself, especially in absence of consensus on the attacks by US government personnel such as the US Defense Secretary James Mattis who expressed concerns over the matter as well as Western allies such as Italy and Germany who opposed the move.”
In anticipation of what the Russian response might be Dr. Asadollahi said “Russia will most probably target terrorist groups in Syria’s Idlib in response to the American attacks that took place this morning.”
Syria and its allies are winning, it is very clear and such aggression by the US and its allies and client regimes will not change the course of the war.
Trump’s explicitly vulgar language, along with the US and its allies’ actions in Syria today unveil the real face and nature of the West, which is ‘anything’ but democratic. It shows how they simply cannot tolerate the fact that the terrorist groups in Syria and the broader “Middle East”, with whom they are aligned and who they support and fund, have failed in achieving the American goals of hegemony.
With all these facts and history in mind, the US and its allies are what should dubbed as the “Axis of Evil”; an alliance including the US, Britain, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey; players that have been sponsoring terrorism, supporting and funding Wahhabi terrorist groups and meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.
The US and its allies, by ignoring international law and before having any concrete evidence against the Syrian government surely confirm that this is the case. This is simply a repetition of history.
A study released by two nonprofit journalism groups showed that President Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the security risk posed by Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001. “In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003," reads an overview of the examination, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
Today, even if western public opinion choses to believe that the UK’s Prime Minister Theresa May and Trump are certain that Syria did in fact stage a chemical attack in Syria’s Douma, the international community will probably see May as another Blair, who may choose to say in the future “If I knew then what I know now, of course I would never have taken Britain to war in Syria,”
Perhaps, the US president after Trump may say what Trump once said “You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”
These are the world’s unlearned lesson; the forgotten truths about why the US and its allies invaded Iraq.
WRITER
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