US Complicit in Efforts to Overthrow Mideast States

The UK Guardian reports that the US Defense Department had plans to
"attack and destroy the governments" in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran just a few weeks after 9/11.  Former NATO Secretary Gen. Wesley Clark  said that strategy was fundamentally geopolitical not ideological or humanitarian. Its purpose is to control the region's vast oil and gas resources. The RAND Corp. 2008 report funded by the US Army, Unfolding the Future of the Long War, said since industrialized countries of the west continue to rely heavily on oil, "the region will therefore remain a strategic priority, and this priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war". The French foreign minister Roland Dumas told French TV that as early as 2009 Britain was planning covert operations in Syria. Assad had refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar, a western client state, for a pipeline running from its North Field through Syria to Turkey, thus cutting into Russia's dominance of the European natural gas market. The private intelligence firm, Stratfor confirmed Pentagon training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at collapsing the Assad regime. But because of the sectarian fault lines in the Mideast, these covert efforts to destabilize Syria mean indirectly aiding Sunni-Salifi jihadis. Jihadist organizations are supported by Saudi Arabia as a means of counterbalancing the Shia regime of Iran. The RAND report temporized this apparent illogicality by saying, "One of the oddities of this long war trajectory is that it may actually reduce the al-Qaeda threat to US interests in the short term....it is very likely that al-Qaeda might focus its efforts on targeting Iranian interests throughout the Middle East."

credit: AFP

That Saudia Arabia has been a foreign actor in the current Syrian civil war and is supported in those efforts by the US and Britain is undeniable. Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, (the higher up in Saudi aristocracy the more names one has) the 'Sultan of Spooks' went so far as to bribe President Putin into switching sides against Assad.[photo] He offered an $11 billion arms purchase and an implied guarantee that the next government after Assad would not compete with Russian gas exports. Putin turned him down. So while the pictures of dead children killed in their sleep by a nerve agent are profoundly distressing, the humanitarian calls for US intervention also provides cover for a great game with much larger stakes: the control of the Middle East's one strategic resource, oil. Assad is a brutal dictator in the mold of his father, and the revolt against him is legitimate even with Islamist jihad organizations in the forefront of the rebellion. But for an empire like the US which is paranoid about running out, oil is worth fighting for everywhere in the world. President Putin put in this way in his editorial in the New York Times, it is "alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Millions around the world "increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying on brute force."