The Covert War on Syria: how the West cynically wages war indirectly against nations targeted for regime change

Carlton Meyer, “The Covert War on Syria” (Tales of the American Empire, 27 November 2020)

Sequel to an earlier installment “The Plot to Destroy Syria” on Carlton Meyer’s Tales of the American Empire Youtube channel, this episode may not be an exhaustive account of the seven-year war that the US and its allies waged indirectly against Syria but it is a good introduction into the type of secret war of regime change that the West currently conducts against nations it disapproves of and the role that Western news media propaganda play to capture and maintain the support of the Western general public behind such wars.

After the successful overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddhafi’s government in Libya in 2011 (actually, even while NATO was attacking Libya, the US government was already moving terrorists and weapons from Benghazi in eastern Libya to Syria), the US turned its attention to Syria to incite violence in parts of Syria that could be escalated into all-out war. Getting public support for an invasion of Syria however was going to be difficult; Western publics were shocked at NATO’s use of a no-fly zone over Libya to start bombing the country and the Russians and Chinese on the UN Security Council were not to be fooled twice into supporting a no-fly zone over Syria. Under the then Obama administration, the US began encouraging foreigners through social media platforms and propaganda demonising the Syrian government as a repressive dictatorship to travel to Syria and support various disaffected groups (unemployed farmers made so by privatisation of land and utilities, Iraqi war refugees) in fighting Damascus. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Middle Eastern nations in Syria’s immediate neighbourhood began arming and funding such mercenaries, and introduced them to extremist Wahhabi and Salafi ideologies, with the result that groups preaching extreme forms of Islam and glorying in the executions of even other Muslims in addition to non-Muslims grew up in the region.

The episode is rather selective in what it emphasises during the West’s cynical conduct of the war from 2011 to 2018. Very little is said about Israel’s involvement in the war, in providing medical aid and patching up wounded terrorists in hospital, even though that country had an interest in retaining and annexing the Golan Heights. On the other hand, Meyer draws a fairly detailed link from Turkey’s support for oil tankers illegally taking Syrian oil and transporting it to Turkey to the shoot-down of a Russian jet fighter by jihadists in late 2015 (not long after Russia began assisting the Syrian Arab Army at Damascus’ request), the subsequent Russian wreckage of the Turkish economy, Turkey’s refusal to accept any more refugees fleeing the conflict and the aborted July 2016 coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The episode takes a detour to explain the rise of the White Helmets as a fake humanitarian aid organisation and supports its explanation with an excerpt of a Q&A session in which Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett sets a questioner right by detailing Western news media’s failure to adequately cover the Middle East by putting correspondents on the ground to get first-hand evidence.

Maps, photographs and excerpts of interviews are used to illustrate Meyer’s narration and the result is a detailed work that should be viewed as both an introduction into the current way Western nations try to overthrow governments of sovereign nations, preferring stealth and the cynical use of these nations’ citizens and foreign mercenaries to do the fighting; and the role propaganda has to play in convincing even educated people capable of knowing better to believe in false narratives about Syrian President Bashar al Assad being a dictator and about the Syrian public wanting to get rid of him. At the end of the episode, using economist / academic / analyst Jeffrey Sachs as a sort of mouthpiece (though what Sachs says is very much his own opinion), Meyer makes a case for the US to get all its troops out of Syria, give up trying to overthrow Assad and leave Syria and Syrians alone to deal with their problems and start reconstructing the country.

Viewers need to do their own research if they want to learn more. A 14-minute film, good and detailed as it is, can only be the start of the journey into understanding Syria and recent Syrian history.