by Selvam Canagaratna Courtesy The Island

“W[ith] extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.”

– Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps, 1942.

Thomas S. Harrington, a Professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and a regular contributor to CounterPunch magazine, was brutally frank about America’s deadly play-acting in Syria in his opening observation: “The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to do the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up.” [Wow! That’s certainly ‘telling it like it is’!]

And that, precisely, was how Russian President Vladimir Putin dramatically chose to expose Barack Obama’s elaborate and quite costly pretense in Syria – indeed, in the whole of the Middle East, for that matter. In a series of sudden, unannounced aerial strikes, the Russian Air Force bombed the hell out of the bloodthirsty US/Saudi-backed ISIS jihadist cadres in their Syrian strongholds, something that America had for long claimed to be doing, thereby giving the wrong impression to many that ISIS was, in fact, so powerful as to successfully neutralize even the awesome military might of the world’s sole ‘super-power’!

But even before Putin’s bold move in Syria, which literally caught hypocritical America ‘with its pants down’ (as Harrington put it), the world’s ‘indispensable nation’ has been shown up to be a two-timing skunk by many investigative journalists. My mind goes back to Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, the 2006 book by Robert Dreyfuss which set out in damning detail how Washington actively promoted the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in pursuit of its own hegemonic ambitions.

As Dreyfuss made clear in his Introduction, this little-known US policy of funding and encouraging right-wing Islamist activism, conducted over six decades, “is partly to blame for the emergence of Islamist terrorism as a worldwide phenomenon”, adding, “Indeed America’s would-be empire in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South Asia was designed to rest in part on the bedrock of political Islam. At least, that is what its architects hoped. But it proved to be a devil’s game.”

Dreyfuss noted that the US played not with Islam, but with Islamism. “Unlike the faith with fourteen centuries of history behind it, Islamism is of more recent vintage. It is a political creed with its origins in the late nineteenth century, a militant, all-encompassing philosophy whose tenets would appear foreign or heretical to most Muslims of earlier ages and that still appear so to many educated Muslims today. Whether it is called pan-Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, it is an altogether different creature from the spiritual interpretation of Muslim life as contained in the Five Pillars of Islam. It is, in fact, a perversion of that religious faith. That is the mutant ideology the United States encouraged, supported, organized, or funded.”

It’s worth quoting one more crucial point made by Dreyfuss: “The US spent decades cultivating Islamists, manipulating and double-crossing them, cynically using and misusing them as Cold War allies, only to find that it spawned a force that turned against its sponsor, and with a vengeance.”

America’s hegemonic objective in the Middle East has always been, at best, a badly kept secret, thanks to leading US ‘policy planners’, a.k.a. warmongers, making known their views over the years both in published documents and in public statements. Their ‘plans’ certainly encompassed Syria from year 2000 – when that ‘accidental Prez’, George W. Bush and his partner in political criminality, Vice-Prez Dick Cheney, took office. Their sole objective was ‘regime change’ in just about every nation in the Middle East that refused to kow-tow to Big Brother’s dictats.

Dick Cheney’s focus in Syria was not, as they openly claimed, to  save the Syrian people from the ravages of the long-standing Assad dictatorship, but rather to heighten the level of internecine conflict in that country to the point where it would not be able to serve as a bulwark against Israeli regional hegemony for at least another generation.

As Professor Harrington noted, important protagonists in the Israeli-American policy planning elite have advertised the fact with a surprising degree of clarity  that the only way to deal with ‘the Arabs’ in and around Israel was through unrelenting force and the inducement of cultural fragmentation. Israeli journalist, Oded Yinon, who had formerly worked at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, published an article in which he outlined the strategic approach his country needed to take in the coming years. The main thrust of Yinon’s piece (as translated into English by Israel Shahak) read:

“Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. . . The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short-term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon. . .

“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. . .”

Professor Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Drake University, noted that America’s recent call for “negotiations and a political settlement in Syria was a reflection, if anything, of the sheer hubris of a bully that wouldn’t allow him to acknowledge defeat and give up a botched plan to loot, hurt or murder.” It was an attempt by America “to wiggle its way out, regain strength and prepare for another attack at an opportune time.”

The Professor reminded readers that what he was saying had already been disclosed in congressional hearings by none other than the head of the US Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, who admitted “that a year after it was launched at a cost of $500 million, the Pentagon’s program to recruit and train a “moderate” US proxy fighting force in Syria had been able to field a grand total of ‘four or five’ fighters inside the country!

“From the time it embarked on the criminal mission of regime change in Syria nearly five years ago,” Prof. Hossein-Zadeh added, “the US and its puppet and mercenary allies rejected all attempts to negotiate with the government of President Bashar Al-Assad or its geopolitical allies Russia and Iran. Now, all of a sudden, it is calling for negotiation with these same adversaries in pursuit of ‘de-escalation’ and a political deal that would not include President Assad’s immediate removal from power. The long-term strategic goal of removing him from power, however, remains unchanged; it is simply postponed. It would be fulfilled consequent to a negotiated political settlement, or at the end of a “transitional period.”