While many in Washington claim to defend Christianity and Western values, their policies have led to the systematic annihilation of some of the world’s oldest Christian communities. The same politicians who posture as defenders of faith have not just turned a blind eye to the suffering of Christians in the Middle East, from Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza to Lebanon and Syria, they have chosen instead to fund their murderers.
U.S. tax dollars funneled through the CIA and USAID, have played a pivotal role in arming and enabling extremist factions whose ascendance has resulted in atrocities.
The forces of Syria’s new self-proclaimed “interim president” a Salafist, Sunni Muslim who currently goes by the name Ahmed al-Shara, over this past weekend lined up civilians, both Alawites and Christians, against the wall and executed them. Their crime: Infidelity to Salafism, a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Elizabeth and I have visited Syria many times. We have traveled through it and experienced a beautiful, secular country where being Syrian was more important than a difference in faith, where communities attending churches, synagogues and mosques lived as one.
Syria has been torn apart over the last decades by external interventionism and ignorance giving rise to extremism and the worst humanitarian disaster of the 21st Century.
Many Syrian Christians historically supported the Assad government and its Ba’athist secular ideology because it guaranteed religious freedom and protected minorities.
Unlike certain Islamist movements, the Assad regime maintained a secular state where Christians could practice their faith without persecution. Christians held positions in the government, military, and business sectors.
The Alawites are a religious minority in Syria, with smaller communities in Lebanon and Turkey. The Assad family which ruled from 1970 to earlier this year is Alawite.
The Alawite practice of Islam incorporates elements of Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Christianity. It is distinct from mainstream Islamic sects. Former President Assad promoted secularism consistent with Alawite support for secular governance.
Soul-searing videos have surfaced from the mass murders of recent days: Alawite and Christian Syrians pleading for their lives while being dehumanized, ordered to crawl on all fours and bark like dogs to prepare for “dying like dogs,” in a fusillade of bullets. The killers are seen being cautioned to turn off their phones and not to share such videos so as not to turn world opinion against them.
Public relations are always to be desired to cover up cold-blooded murder and its designs and to protect the West’s fantasy that the new self-declared rulers of Syria are kinder and gentler than the propagandized descriptions of their predecessors.
How did the situation get to this point?
The ongoing humanitarian crisis and severe sectarian violence in Syria are direct outcomes of policies dating back to the “Clean Break” doctrine of 1996, by a D.C. think tank which counseled Benjamin Netanyahu to make a “clean break” from “the previous government’s ‘peace process’.” (their quotes) which it saw as a serious weakness.
The Clean Break doctrine laid the groundwork for aggressive policies toward Syria which emerged through an effort coordinated by the Bush White House as several authors of the Clean Break strategy ascended to federal government policy-making positions.
The “Clean Break” approach was further advanced by Hillary Clinton, who, as Secretary of State, together with CIA Director David Petraeus, proposed arming Syrian rebels.
The White House rejected the plan, but, somehow, the momentum generated to overthrow Assad was propelled by the CIA, President Obama’s 2012 presidential directive, which explicitly called for the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, merely authorized what was underway without his permission.
It was not the last time the CIA found a way to subvert Obama in Syria. On September 12, 2016, a ceasefire agreement was negotiated by the US Secretary of State, John Kerry and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, aimed at the two major powers cooperating to limit extremist groups.
According to a source familiar with the arrangements, Robert Malley, Obama’s special Middle East envoy, was planning to fly to Lebanon and then to travel to Damascus to meet with Assad, to capitalize on the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire and open the possibility of a new direction in U.S.-Syrian relations.
The very next day a US airstrike killed over 100 Syrian soldiers. Malley’s trip was cancelled and the ceasefire ended within hours.
The plan to oust Assad went into high gear. Obama was played by Hillary Clinton and the CIA in Syria, just as he was played by them in Libya.
Judicial Watch obtained documents which proved the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was aware that the strategy of supporting opposition forces—largely comprised of Salafist and extremist factions, including Al-Qaeda affiliates—would lead directly to the establishment of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria, with a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam.
The DIA explicitly stated this outcome was precisely “what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”
The Clean Break, Benjamin Netanyahu, the CIA, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Defense Intelligence Agency are all responsible for the disintegration in Syria which has resulted in extreme sectarian violence. Most of those who are being killed today were then just children, in a country where communities attending mosques, churches and synagogues existed side by side.
U.S. tax dollars, funneled through the CIA and USAID, have played a pivotal role in arming and enabling extremist factions whose ascendance resulted in the atrocities.
In Syria, America’s Middle East machinations scaled tragic heights. Under the Obama administration, the CIA launched “Timber Sycamore” in 2012, a covert operation that funneled billions of dollars in weapons and training to so-called “moderate” connected to Al-Queda, Al-Nusra and ISIS. A good deal of weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers and intended to be used against Syria, ended up in the for sale on the black market.
The American people were told a fairy tale that we were supporting freedom fighters against a dictator. What we actually accomplished was funding the terrorists who now murder Christians, massacre Alawite villages, and impose radical Islamic rule in areas they seize.
It was a reckless intervention, driven by a geopolitical obsession with weakening Iran and Russia. It has not only destroyed Syria but it has also created a breeding ground for global terrorism.
The vaunted Timber Sycamore escapade was said to be eliminated by the first Trump Administration, yet the intent of Timber Sycamore, ousting Assad, continued under the Biden Administration. For those students of dendrology, the sycamore is a tree characterized by weak limbs and large leaves which decay slowly upon falling to earth.
As I reflect on America’s disastrous policies in Syria, I am left with a haunting question: Why would the United States pursue strategies that have led to the slaughter of Christians and Alawites, the destruction of ancient communities, and the triumph of extremism?
For years, as a Member of the House of Representatives, I stood on the floor of Congress and sounded the alarm about reckless regime-change policies. I opposed the neoconservative “Clean Break” strategy.
I spoke out against the Iraq War in 2002, knowing it would unleash sectarian violence and provide a breeding ground for jihadist groups. I rejected the illegal U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, warning that removing Gaddafi would turn Libya into a failed state and open the door to Islamic extremists.
Each time, I was ignored, dismissed, or even vilified by those Washington insiders eager to remake the world in their own image, (and to cash in while doing so) without regard to the human cost.
I demanded transparency.
I demanded accountability.
I called for a congressional investigation into the CIA’s role in arming extremist groups.
I was met with official silence and media-induced public ridicule.
In 2013, I opposed Obama’s plan to bomb Syria, warning that U.S. military intervention would do nothing but strengthen jihadists. When I traveled to Syria in 2017 with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, I spoke directly with Christian leaders, civilians, and government officials who told us what the American media refused to report: The U.S. was not helping the Syrian people—it was destroying them.
I came back determined to expose the truth, to tell the American people that our tax dollars were funding a war that targeted innocent people, people whose families had lived in the region for centuries.
Most in mainstream media, every loyal to war narratives, dismissed the findings. The bipartisan political establishment stayed the course, ensuring that weapons and resources continued to flow into the hands of extremists.
Now, in the aftermath of Assad’s fall, the worst-case scenario has come to pass. Cities that once housed some of the world’s oldest Christian communities lie in ruins, their people slaughtered or driven into exile. Christians and Alawites are labeled heretics by the very groups America helped empower.
And I ask again: Why?
Why would America champion policies that lead to the killing of Christians, the destruction of churches, the massacre of Alawites and the rise of radical jihadists? Why did our leaders knowingly aid those who murdered the very people America claimed to want to protect?
The answer lies in a corrupt, immoral foreign policy dictated not by ethics, human rights, or even national security, but by the interests of the military-industrial complex and strategists who view human lives as pawns in a geopolitical chess game.
This tragic situation in Syria is but one example of in the catalogue of chaos which is U.S. foreign policy; Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Lebanon in the 1980s, Afghanistan in the 1980s-90s, to Iraq post-2003 are notable examples of similar perfidy, though these debacles are by no means exclusive.
U.S. foreign policy all too often reveals calculations to excite and exploit sectarian, religious, or ethnic divisions to achieve vainglorious geopolitical goals which blowback in disintegration and defeat.
Like a coterie of Snidley Whiplashes “Curses, foiled again!” our policy geniuses ignore the devastation they have wrought and proceed headlong into plotting the next disasters: future prolonged civil wars, systemic persecution, massive human suffering, refugee crises, and enduring political instability.
The deliberate exacerbation of sectarian tensions has repeatedly left behind weakened states, emboldened extremist groups, and countless innocent victims. It perpetuates human suffering on a vast scale. It has severely damaged America’s global reputation. It has fostered extremism, instability, and ongoing conflict.
I have spent my career fighting against these wars of aggression. I have cautioned that regime-change operations never lead to peace, only to greater suffering.
Now, with the fall of the Assad government to extremists, the nightmare that I and others warned about has become reality. The Syrian war, fueled by U.S. intervention and covert operations, has led to the very outcome that interventionists claimed they were trying to prevent—a bloodbath.
The neocons, interventionists, and war profiteers have achieved their aims, their machinations whitewashed by a reckless and complicit mainstream media whose ignorant naïveté or willful deception has paved the way for these atrocities. Another government toppled, another nation in ruins, and another generation of innocent people paying the price for metastatic arrogance.
Americans believe in religious freedom. Our government does not practice that abroad.
Americans believe in human dignity. Our government pulverizes it in other countries, with our tax dollars.
Americans want peace. But we will never have peace until we confront the reality that our own government has been spending trillions of our precious tax dollars in furtherance of stirring conflict and igniting wars, to the benefit of a few and to the manifest detriment of the rest of us.
I did all I could while in office. Now I pray for those suffering under the yoke of oppression we have caused, and pray for America to change course.
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Featured image: War-torn Syria, 2017: Elizabeth Kucinich, Dennis Kucinich and Tulsi Gabbard meet with Syrian Christian Leaders
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