Covering Syria: The information war

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Covering Syria: The information war

July 12th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

You won’t read how Saudi Arabia and Qatar have bullied satellite hosting channels in the region to stop broadcasting “pro-regime” public and private Syrian television channels; or that the Syrian opposition has set up 10 satellite channels, all with an Islamist orientation and which take a strong sectarian line – calling on the FSA to “kill Iran’s mice” and “the rats of the Lebanese devil’s party” (Hezbollah); or how Russia has been attempting to facilitate a political process of reconciliation with the internal opposition since the onset of the crisis.

By Aisling Byrne
Asia Times
Jul 12, 2012

The narrative that has been constructed by the Western mainstream media on Syria may seem to be self-evident from the scenes presented on television, but it is a narrative duplicitously promoted and coordinated so as to conceal and facilitate the regime-change project that is part of the war on Iran.

What we are seeing is a new stage of information war intentionally constructed and cast as a simplistic narrative of a struggle for human rights and democracy so as deliberately to exclude other interpretations and any geo-strategic motivation.

The narrative, as CNN puts it, is in essence this: “The vast majority of reports from the ground indicate that government forces are killing citizens in an attempt to wipe out civilians seeking [President Bashar] al-Assad’s ouster” – the aim being precisely to elicit a heart-wrenching emotional response in Western audiences that trumps all other considerations and makes the call for Western/Gulf intervention to effect regime change.

But it is a narrative based on distortion, manipulation, lies and videotape.

In the first months, the narrative was of unarmed protesters being shot by Syrian forces. This then evolved into one of armed insurgents reluctantly “being provoked into taking up arms”, as US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton explained, to defend peaceful protesters.

It was also a narrative that from the outset, according to a recent report in Time magazine, that the US has facilitated by providing training, support and equipment to Syrian opposition “cyber-warriors”.

Reports confirmed by leading Syrian opposition leaders in April 2011 reveal that in addition to cyber-training, weapons and money from Syrian exiles, as well as from a “major Arab Gulf country” and a Lebanese political party, were being distributed to “young demonstrators”. The former head of Russian intelligence, Yevgeny Primakov, similarly noted that the Syrian conflict “started with armed revolts against the authorities, not peaceful demonstrations”.

Ironically, one of the most accurate descriptions of the sectarian conflict we are witnessing in Syria comes from an assessment by the neoconservative Brookings Institute in its March 2012 report “Assessing Options for Regime Change in Syria”, one option being for “the United States [to] fight a “clean” war … and leave the dirty work on the ground to the FSA [Free Syrian Army], perhaps even obviating a massive commitment to Iraq-style nation-building”.

“Let the Arabs do it,” echoed Israeli President Shimon Peres. “Do it yourself and the UN will support you.” This point was not lost on one leading Turkish commentator, who noted that US Senator John McCain “said that there would be no American boots on the ground in Syria. That means we Turks will have to spill our precious blood to get what McCain and others want in the States.”

In the wake of the failures at state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, direct intervention, with all the responsibilities this would entail, would not go down well in cash-strapped Western nations. Better to get others to do the “dirty work” – pursue “regime change by civil war”.

“The United States, Europe and the Gulf states … are starving the regime in Damascus and feeding the opposition. They have sanctioned Syria … and are busy shoveling money and helping arms supplied by the Gulf get to the rebels,” Joshua Landis, director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies, wrote in Foreign Policy in June.

With regional allies prepared to do the “dirty work” of providing increasingly sophisticated weapons clearly geared for purposes other than “self-defense”, and the FSA and its jihadist allies doing the “dirty work” within Syria (their salaries paid by Saudi Arabia), the US and European nations can proffer their clean hands by limiting support to communications equipment, intelligence and humanitarian aid, and of course to providing the moral posturing required to topple the Syrian system and implant a regime hostile to Iran and friendly to Israel. Having “clean hands” enables the US, France and Britain to pose as abiding by UN standards, while at the same time flouting the UN Charter by promoting an attack on a member state.