Manufacturing Consent For Regime Change In Syria

Monitoring corporate media performance for 25 years – week after week, war after war – has done little to diminish our dismay at the robotic automaticity of ‘mainstream’ enthusiasm for US-authored regime change.

Each time, without fail, thousands of media commentators function, not as critical-thinking individuals, but as cookie-cutter cogs in a propaganda printing machine stamping the word ‘GOOD’ on the public mind.

It is not that we are told what to think – they know we mostly just skim the headlines – we are told what to feel. The result is a thin veneer of symbolic headline ‘news’ painting a positive picture followed by ‘in-depth’ content that hides as much as it reveals. This ‘coverage’ is not comprehensible and is not intended to be because it serves the needs of power rather than truth.

The latest propaganda blitz is particularly remarkable given that the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group led by Mohammed al-Jolani that overthrew Syria’s Assad dictatorship in December is a proscribed terrorist group under UK law. The UK government website currently reads:

‘“Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” should be treated as alternative names for the organisation which is already proscribed under the name Al Qa’ida.’

Donald Trump put it more bluntly in August 2013:

‘Remember, all these “freedom fighters” in Syria want to fly planes into our buildings.’

A 2016 Amnesty report described abuses carried out by Jabhat al Nusra and associated groups, now known as HTS, in Syria:

‘The cases of abduction, torture and summary killings documented by Amnesty International offer a glimpse into the reality of life under armed opposition groups in Aleppo and Idleb governorates. Civilians who live under constant threat of indiscriminate attack by government forces simply for living in areas controlled by armed groups have suffered abuse at the hands of these groups as they assert their authority through rough “justice” and cruel punishments. Media activists, journalists, lawyers, humanitarian workers and others have been subjected to abduction and torture and other ill-treatment at the hands of armed groups that form part of the Army of Conquest and Aleppo Conquest coalitions.’

None of this has deterred the ‘mainstream’ cheerleaders using endless pictures of smiling Syrians, with women notably to the fore in a brazen attempt to exploit #MeToo kudos. See here and here for examples. One typically cheerful BBC home page reported ‘relief’ at HTS’s violent regime change.

After years spent propagandising for this result, a Guardian home page was similarly full of celebration. US journalist Glenn Greenwald commented:

‘The U.S. lists Mohammed al-Jolani as a wanted terrorist, yet he is now being reframed as a polished, blazer-wearing rebel willing to partner with the West.’

Thus, a bizarre Telegraph headline read:

‘“Moderate” jihadist leader storms Syria – but tells troops not to frighten children’

The BBC commented of HTS:

‘It previously publicly broke ranks with al-Qaeda, although it remains proscribed as a terrorist group by the UK, as well as the UN, the US, Turkey and other countries.

‘Questions remain over whether it has completely renounced those links, but its message in the run-up to Assad’s deposition has been one of inclusiveness and a rejection of violence.’

Words are what matter, it seems, even if the claimed ‘rejection of violence’ is challenged somewhat by HTS having just conquered Syria using methods that owe more to Hitler’s blitzkrieg than Gandhi’s satyāgraha.

Words also mean a lot to the Observer’s editors:

‘So far, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the formerly al-Qaida-linked Islamist militia that led the charge against Assad, has belied its extremist roots with moderately reassuring words.’

Former head of MI6 Sir John Sawers went so far as to say:

‘It would be rather ridiculous, actually, if we’re unable to engage with the new leadership in Syria because of a proscription dating back 12 years.’

No surprise, then, when media reported:

‘UK could consider removing proscription of Syria’s HTS, says minister’

The US having already led the way in that regard.

Economist and former politician Yanis Varoufakis captured it perfectly:

‘The Western media’s duplicity has broken all records. When jihadists entered Kabul, ousting the US regime, it was the end of the world. Now that jihadists have entered Damascus to overthrow a secular enemy of the West, it is a triumph of the human spirit.’

Indeed, this is an eerily exact re-run of supposedly independent and impartial media performance celebrating US-UK regime change in Iraq. On 9 April 2003, as US tanks stormed Baghdad, the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell beamed:

‘It is absolutely, without a doubt, a vindication of the strategy.’

ITN’s Tom Bradby declared: ‘This war has been a major success’ (ITN Evening News, 10 April 2003). According to ITN’s John Irvine, the outlook was rosy:

‘A war of three weeks has brought an end to decades of Iraqi misery.’ (ITN Evening News, 9 April 2003)

At least one million Iraqis died in the hell that was being unleashed. In 2016, the BBC reported of Iraq:

‘Grinding poverty has made the trafficking of kidneys and other organs a phenomenon in Baghdad.

‘About 22.5% of Iraq’s population of nearly 30 million people live in abject poverty, according to World Bank statistics from 2014.’

The same media cookie-cutter cogs greeted the overthrow of the Libyan government – different ‘rebels’, same Western bombers. As the Libyan state collapsed, the BBC’s Nick Robinson observed that Downing Street ‘will see this, I’m sure, as a triumphant end’ (BBC News at Six, 20 October 2011). In Washington, the BBC’s Ian Pannell surmised that Obama ‘is feeling that his foreign policy strategy has been vindicated – that his critics have been proven wrong’. (BBC News online, 21 October 2011)

On and on, this was an exact repetition of Iraq with little or no reflection on the results of that earlier ‘intervention’. A 2016 report into the Libya war by the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee summarised the consequences:

‘The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.’

That NATO-led ‘intervention’ killed an estimated 40,000 people. Once one of Africa’s most advanced countries for health care and education, Libya became a failed state, with the collapse of essential services, the re-emergence of slave markets and a raging civil war with murderous ethnic cleansing. The West’s alleged motive or casus belli was not the commission, but the supposed hypothetical threat of a massacre of civilians, dismissed by the Foreign Affairs Committee as baseless. The real interest in Libya, as Iraq, was oil.

‘An Extraordinary Amount Of Arms’

Because corporate ‘journalism’ is a propaganda machine, the message must always be clear, with no room for doubt. The public forehead is not to be branded with messages of: ‘GOOD, but…’ Naturally, then, it is deemed beyond the remit of responsible journalism to ask how the smartly dressed Syrian ‘rebels’ with high-tech weapons became powerful enough to overthrow a national government supported by Russia and Iran. How did that happen? Who gave them the weapons, funded them, trained them, organised them? Economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and Sybil Fares of Sustainable Development Solutions Network explain:

‘Operation Timber Sycamore was a billion-dollar CIA covert program launched by Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The CIA funded, trained, and provided intelligence to radical and extreme Islamist groups. The CIA effort also involved a “rat line” to run weapons from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to the jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his piece “The Red Line and the Rat Line”:

‘“A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”’

Sachs and Fares continue:

‘Soon after the launch of Timber Sycamore, in March 2013, at a joint conference by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Obama said: “With respect to Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends and the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of Assad’s rule.”’

Our search of the ProQuest newspaper database finds no mention of ‘Timber Sycamore’ in any UK newspaper in the last three months. Mentions did appear in The Pioneer, New Delhi; Haaretz in Israel; in the Sri Lanka Guardian and the Tehran Times. That simple finding gives an idea of the current state of UK press freedom. See Sachs’ excellent interview here for further discussion.

WikiLeaks notes that in a September 2016 leaked audio US Secretary of State John Kerry said of anti-Assad forces: ‘we’ve been putting an extraordinary amount of arms in… Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, huge amount of weapons coming in, huge amount of money…’. In June 2015, the Washington Post reported of the US:

‘At $1 billion, Syria-related operations account for about $1 of every $15 in the CIA’s overall budget… US officials said the CIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years — meaning that the agency is spending roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program.’

In 2017, The New York Times reported that the US had been embroiled in a dirty war in Syria that constituted ‘one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A’, running to ‘more than $1 billion over the life of the program’. The aim was to support a vast ‘rebel’ army created and armed by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to overthrow the Syrian government.

It is difficult to suppress so much naked ‘intervention’. Ignoring the broader context reviewed above, the Daily Mail reported:

‘US special forces warned Syrian rebel fighters to “be ready” weeks before Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) fighters launched the large-scale coup that toppled former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, it has emerged.’

See Aaron Maté here for further discussion.

Blithely ignoring the role of the West, the Observer concluded its leading article with what was presumably not an attempt at humour:

‘But the west must not attempt to dictate events.’

The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall did a magnificent job of reversing the truth by pretending not to be aware of a mountain of evidence, saying of the West:

‘It largely looked on as the most terrible suffering, mass displacement, war crimes, illegal use of chemical weapons and other horrors unfolded. Its occasional interventions – such as Donald Trump’s one-off 2017 bombing of regime military facilities after a chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhun in Idlib – were undertaken more to ease collective consciences than to effect real change.’

Other invasions supported by the West are being casually soft-soaped by Western media in a way that would be unthinkable for Official Enemies. On December 9, Associated Press reported:

‘As Israel advances on a Syrian buffer zone, it sees peril and opportunity’

Israel, then, merely ‘advances’ into ‘a buffer zone’; it’s not invading, much less illegally invading. Associated Press previously reported:

‘Russia presses invasion to outskirts of Ukrainian capital’

In similar vein, The New York Times wrote:

‘Israel Enters Demilitarized Buffer Zone In the Golan Heights’

The BBC reported that Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights ‘are considered illegal under international law, which Israel disputes’. Imagine the BBC saying: ‘The invasion of Ukraine is considered illegal under international law, which Russia disputes.’ Unthinkable, of course – why would anyone care what the Russians think?

The BBC also provided a darkly amusing map of Syria reflecting its power-friendly worldview. Highlights included a completely undiscussed, preposterously named ‘US outpost’ inside Syria. Who is in there, we wondered; the US cavalry? What are they up to? Is there any oil there? There is also no mention in the BBC’s annotation that the blank space marking the Golan Heights is under illegal Israeli occupation.

By contrast, independent member of parliament Zarah Sultana commented on X:

‘Israel is invading Syria.

‘While committing genocide in Gaza, settler terror in the West Bank & bombing raids on Lebanon, Israeli tanks roll into Damascus.

‘This is a system of oppression that knows no borders — yet the UK government parrots lines about “Israeli self-defence”.’

Sachs is less positive than our reflexively joyous media:

‘Most likely Syria will now succumb to continued war among the many armed protagonists, as has happened in the previous U.S.-Israeli regime-change operations.’

That terrible outcome would be the natural assumption for anyone with any knowledge of Iraq and Libya.

The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen managed to wave vaguely in the direction of the ugly truth:

‘Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq were removed without a ready-made replacement waiting in the wings. Ill-considered foreign intervention did much to create two catastrophes.’

‘Foreign intervention’? By whom? Bowen would be out of a job if he told us those ‘catastrophes’ were committed by the same people driving the latest events in Syria. Was the main problem with those ‘interventions’ that there was not ‘a ready-made replacement waiting in the wings’? Was there a problem with the idea that the US and UK had any business imposing replacements on anyone? Especially given their nihilistic moral track record.

The truth is that violent regime almost always has catastrophic consequences for the civilian population. However violent or corrupt a state may be, if and when it collapses, so do many of the support systems needed to keep people alive and healthy.

A short BBC report discussed the fate of Iraq and Libya in three sentences, none of which mentioned that the US-UK alliance was behind those disasters. That omission allowed the BBC to tragicomically reflect on ‘the UK’s and US’s potential roles in preventing a similar situation from emerging in Syria’.

Truth is reversed, history is buried and the propaganda thunders on…

DE