How Idlib reveals danger of a larger bloodbath
While the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, warned the Syrian and Russian governments to stand down from attacking Idlib—the last stronghold of the armed Syrian opposition—as that may lead to a possible "bloodbath", the term itself brought to mind chapter 10 of the book The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire. According to Wikileaks, the chapter "reveals how the US aggressively pursued regime change in Syria, igniting a bloodbath [emphasis mine]" in the country and, perhaps, even the wider region.
According to leaked cables included in the chapter, the goal of the US government going as far back as December 2006 was to "undermine the Syrian government by any available means, and that what mattered was whether US action would help destabilise the government, not what other impacts the action might have."
This idea that some western governments (and intelligence agencies) were eagerly waiting for the downfall of the Assad government in Syria long before the Syrian crisis actually began was further corroborated by former French Minister for Foreign Affairs, Roland Dumas, who said in an interview with the French TV station La Chaîne parlementaire in 2013 that: "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria [began]…I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria…Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria."
Dumas also said that the operation to destabilise Syria went "way back". And the real reason why it was "prepared, preconceived and planned" was because the Assad government had "a very anti-Israeli stance". This again was substantiated by some of Hillary Clinton's emails that were leaked to and published by Wikileaks in 2016.
One of those emails, dated July 24, 2012, said that, "The fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commaders [sic] would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies." Another dated January 1, 2001 said that the best way to help Israel deal with Iran was "to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad."
One email sent by the former close confidante of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, Cheryl Mills, to Ms Clinton on September 24, 2009, went as far as to describe how western governments could achieve this. It said, "When Jared and I went to Syria, it was because we knew that Syrian society was growing increasingly young (population will double in 17 years) and digital and that this was going to create disruptions in society that we could potential [sic] harness for our purposes."
Despite legitimate criticisms against the Assad regime—particularly with the president having broad and unchecked decree authority under a long-standing state of emergency until the early stages of the Syrian crisis—the true extent of outside meddling in Syria, according to these documents, is truly astonishing.
Yet, shocking as they may sound, these revelations also expose the double standard of the US as it accuses the Syrian and Russian governments of being wholly responsible for the violence in Syria, when it knows that the US and its allies are at least partly responsible.
A part of that double standard includes the US pretending as if Idlib is not controlled by terrorists—rather by what the western mainstream media hypocritically calls "moderate rebels"—when the US Department of State itself admitted as recently as last year, in one of its travel warnings, that Idlib is controlled by al-Qaeda. While this game of shadows continues, the US and Russia, the world's two greatest nuclear powers, edge ever closer to a direct confrontation. Last week, in response to Russia's accusations that Idlib was occupied by terrorists who needed to be eradicated for peace to return to Syria, Nikki Haley warned Russia, "Don't test us."
After that, the US military made public a plan to unilaterally launch another attack on Syria, which dangerously included attacking Russian and Iranian military positions, according to the Russian Ministry of Defence. This was clearly done purposefully to send a message to the Iranian and Russian governments. But having invested so much in supporting the Assad government in Syria, it is difficult to see either Russia or Iran back down now in the face of US threats—and already both governments have said as much in their respective responses.
Meanwhile, what the US and its allies are doing is a cynical media manoeuvre to delegitimise the Syrian government and its sovereign right to respond to heavily armed groups causing havoc all across Syria. And the constant changes in names being assigned to such groups—ranging from Al-Nusra, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, Ahrar al Sham, Jaysh al Islam and so on—cannot hide the fact that they are all connected to violent extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
But what is most tragic is that this could all have been easily avoided if only the western mainstream media would do its job of honestly covering the news, instead of going along with the regime change plans of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned about. As that would instantly put an end to such Machiavellian games in the face of increased public opposition to the west's interventionism in Syria.
In the absence of honest reporting, what we have instead is an (nuclear) arms race, as evidenced by President Putin's over-the-top show of Russia's nuclear arms capability last year, as well as the largest ever joint military drill (by some margin) held by Russia and China this week.
And, to add to that, we now have a melting pot in Syria just waiting to explode at any moment unless those cheering for intervention recognises where that path eventually leads to.
Eresh Omar Jamal is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star. His Twitter handle is: @EreshOmarJamal