The US Wants To Unseat Assad, But It’s Not Because Of Human Rights
The actual reason we launched military strikes on Syria.
On Friday, April 14, the United States bombed Syria in response to reported chemical attacks by Assad on his own citizens.The opposition-run health directive reports that 89 people were killed, including 33 children and 18 women, and another 541 were injured in rebel-held town Khan Sheikhoun. The attacks were horrific.
Assad is an absolutely horrific leader who has murdered countless Syrian citizens in unfathomable acts of violence and atrocity. But that’s not why the United States wants to stop him.
The reasons the US wants to overthrow the Assad regime are complicated, but they are not because of human rights. The US has a long history of backing dictators and terrorist movements of all kinds. In short, the US has a system of delineating ‘evil regimes’ vs. ‘appropriate regimes,’ and ‘harmful terrorists’ vs. ‘useful terrorists.’
Why We Want to Overthrow Assad
Tl;dr Answer: Protecting the petrodollar system and maintaining US dominance in the Middle East.
1. Syria undermines US dominance in the region.
The Syrian conflict is a proxy war between America’s gulf allies & Iran.
Syria’s alliance with Iran is critical to Iran’s regional ambitions, which threaten the regional ambitions of the US & US-backed allies.
Iran’s backing of Assad made him a target for some of America’s closest partners in the region. Since the Iraq War, and maybe earlier, the oil-rich Sunni Arab states along the Persian Gulf — particularly Saudi Arabia, the largest and strongest — had been embroiled in a sort of cold war with Iran, a Shiite theocracy. Both sides wish to steer the political course of the Middle East, and see the other as a fundamental threat to their security.
-Vice
The Syrian conflict is also a proxy war between America & Russia.
Russia backs Assad, and the United States backs the opposition. Both the United States and Russia want control of the region’s oil.
The Soviet Union essentially built the Syrian military at the height of the Arab-Israeli conflict during the cold war. Economic subsidies and arms transfers had been one of the pillars of the Russian-Syrian relationship during the cold war and had made it possible for Moscow to project its power and influence in the Middle East.
The US, through electronic surveillance conducted by Israel and Turkey, also learns information from Israel on Russian military systems and technology.
2. Syria opposes a US-backed gas pipeline from the Gulf States to Europe.
Another reason why the US wants Assad gone is a gas pipeline from the Gulf States to the Europe, which Assad opposes.
The US owns the Arab Gas Pipeline.
The West (through its alliances by proxy) owns a gas pipeline in the Middle East. The West wants to expand the pipeline with the goal of transporting gas from the Middle East to Europe. This pipeline is called the Arab Gas Pipeline, and it would give the US and its allies a huge amount of control over the gas supply in the region.
Nations supporting the Western-backed pipeline include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others.
Jerry Robinson writes:
“Syria now sits near the center of a competing effort by Sunni Islamic kingdoms and Western nations to pump cheap Middle East gas supplies to Europe and beyond.”
Assad opposed the Western-backed Arab Gas Pipeline expansion in favor of the more Sunni-favorable Islamic Pipeline.
Assad (i.e., Syria) and Iran want to build this competing pipeline, which would also transport gas from the Middle East to Europe, giving them control over the gas supply in the region.
Assad’s pipeline would obviously compete with the US-backed pipeline’s goal of transporting gas from the Middle East to Europe.
So what does it mean?
War, probably. We have now stepped into an extremely messy conflict that it will be difficult to get out of. While we were already backing rebel forces, military strikes set a new precedent. We have now stepped into one of the most bloody wars in the Middle East, and, perhaps equally dangerously- directly provoked Moscow in the process, who was threatened that “War World III” will ensue if we ever take military action in the region. Which we did on April 14th.
But will “World War III” happen? Probably not.
Modern war is entirely different than the wars of the 20th century. In a globalized world, and in a militarized country, we live in a constant state of total war, where conflict manifests on multiple fronts: through cyber warfare; propaganda campaigns; tariffs, sanctions, and economic restrictions; proxy wars; state-sponsored coups and rebel factions — and so on, beyond mention, In extreme circumstances, this manifests in military drone strikes or air, navel, or other distance operations- the last and most extreme resort is always boots on the ground.
It is possible, and honestly, even likely, that we’ll have boots on the ground in Syria quite soon. The scale, scope, complexity, and high-stakes nature of this conflict, should we choose even more direct involvements, warrants the process of direct oversight and military intervention by American troops.
What’s that quote? “These rich man’s wars, always the poor man’s fight.”
The Official U.S. Position
Our official justification for overthrowing Assad is humanitarian. We say he is a terrible, cruel leader who oppresses his people and blatantly violates their basic human rights. This is obviously true.
But if stopping his crimes was truly our motive- if we truly had humanitarian intentions- why are we indifferent to the same situations in other countries? Why do we not step in to defend South Sudan, Yemen, Niger, Congo, Chad, and Palestine from similar fates? Why do we only grow a sense of morality when there’s oil at stake?
The United States’ discomfort with Assad is not because we have somehow, after decades of CIA coups propping up countless dictators in the Middle East, suddenly grown a humanitarian conscience.
This is a war for U.S. dominance in the Middle East, and to maintain the stability of the petrodollar. It is an oil war, and the people of Syria have been through so much suffering already- largely borne from a mess American foreign policy has created- that it is deeply disheartening to imagine we would plan to invest another 20 years of our future in foreign wars, on foreign soul, propping up governments to feed our steady diet of fossil fuel.
There are no just wars. Never forget that.