Foundation for Defense of Democracies [12]' Clifford May in an article titled, "The Battle of Syria: Assad’s survival would be a victory for Iran — and a defeat for the US [13]," openly dispels the commonly held notion among the West's remaining public support, that their meddling in Syria's ongoing strife has anything to do with humanitarian concerns. In fact, May openly states that defeating Syria as a proxy of Iran is far more important than "the dearth of sincere Muslim freedom fighters" or "humanitarian concerns."Video: Clifford May begins by playing the "humanitarian card" but ends admitting the entire conflict is a proxy war with Iran, and by implication, Russia. Amid a myriad of lies directed at Iran, May proposes worldwide occupation is necessary to maintain American "influence in the long run," a notion that sounds suspiciously a lot like Empire.
May also makes mention of "strange bedfellows" in the current conflict, by quoting a fellow commentator who stated, "the McCain wing of the Republican party, and the rest of Washington’s progressive, Islamophilic clerisy” are aligning with “al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muslim Brotherhood icon Yusuf al-Qaradawi.”Aligning with Al Qaeda indeed, something that, while May claims is a spontaneous convergence of interests, was actually being planned as early as 2007, as stated in Seymour Hersh's article, "The Redirection [14]" in the New Yorker. And just like May concedes now, Hersh painted a picture of US-Israeli-Saudi machinations to destroy Lebanon and Syria as a means of undermining and toppling Iran - and using sectarian extremists to do so. Hersh specifically mentioned that many of the militant groups the West was arming and staging for this operation now unfolding in Syria today, were affiliated with Al Qaeda. The 2007 article specifically states:
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
May, perhaps hoping his readership is as profoundly ignorant of history as he assumes they are of current events, claims that Al Qaeda was a creation of Iran, willfully remiss of the fact that America's CIA indeed created the terror organization in the mountains of Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980's [15], and have continuously retooled it to execute Western foreign policy since [16], up to and including in Syria now [17]. Essentially, May expects readers to believe that Iran created Al Qaeda and unleashed it upon its own ally. Clearly, May's narrative not only falters at face value, but contradicts the somewhat more reputable, and certainly better cited work of Seymour Hersh. May's faulty conclusion is that should Syria prevail against these long-planned US machinations, with the help of Russia and Iran, the world would face a "nuclear armed" Iran emboldened by its ability to throw off American influence and would run roughshod over the peoples of the Middle East.
May induces fear with the threat of an uncontrollable "nuclear armed" Iran specifically as a smokescreen for his true fear, and the fear of all Western neo-imperialists - that Iran, Syria, and Russia would begin overturning the decades old hegemonic order of Wall Street and London.
The internal documents of US policy makers, including Brookings Institution's "Which Path to Persia?" concede that [18] even if Iran were to obtain nuclear weapons, they would not be deployed as anything but a means of deterrence, just as the US and Soviets did during the Cold War. Brookings concedes that it is a feared shift in geopolitical influence at the expense of America and its proxies that drives Western ambitions toward regime change in Iran, not any legitimate threat to the national security of either America or Israel.
The doomsday scenario Clifford May paints is unfounded, his accusations against Iran as being a "state sponsor of terror" ring hollow as he himself backed the overthrow of the Libyan government and direct military intervention that saw millions of dollars of weapons and cash, along with air support and diplomatic backing go to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) [19], literally a wing of Al Qaeda. May also conveniently fails to mention that the US and Israel are funding, training, and arming a US State Department-listed foreign terror organization (#29), [20] Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) against Iran. May does however mention Al Qaeda being in Syria, and how US policy runs parallel to its agenda. Since the US is admittedly funding these armed militants [21], it turns out that the US is yet again a state that is sponsoring terrorism.
[22]Image: Brookings Institution's Middle East Memo #21 "Assessing Options for Regime Change (.pdf) [23]," makes no secret that the humanitarian "responsibility to protect" is but a pretext for long-planned regime change.
While May's writings may seem like throwaway statements designed to stoke fear amongst the weakest of minds, it is instructive to note, after navigating through overt contradictions, that he makes no illusions of Syria being a battle fought for humanitarian causes. His colleagues at Brookings Institution, who authored the "Middle East Memo #21" that suggested Syria be "bled [24]" with unending violence confirms this is the general consensus of prevailing Western policy makers. The goal is to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at any cost, including the utilization of "strange bedfellows" like Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, and regardless of how high the cost is in terms of human life - with some options including US-subsidized bloodshed that extends over the period of several years.
There is nothing noble about the West's involvement in Syria - the architects and promoters of this agenda, like Neo-Con Clifford May and those amongst the Bookings Institution, confirm this in their own words. It is and always has been about expanding Western hegemony across the planet. If common sense, healthy skepticism, and critical thinking have yet to awaken some amongst the public, perhaps their governments' own policy makers telling them the conflict is an unjust act of aggression, will.
