The Neocon Alliance With Terrorists
The Lessons of Syria
In 1975, as the Church Committee hearings began, the malignant grouping within the U.S. national security establishment had already charted a foreign policy course that emulated the worst features of the British Empire.
Professor Bernard Lewis was a leading British intelligence operative and academic, who arrived in America in 1974 to take up joint positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Studies. He promoted the idea among U.S. government circles that the spread of Islamic fundamentalism could weaken their opponents in the Cold War, by creating a zone of instability along the southern flanks of Russia and China (this was a further elaboration of what 19th century Empire strategists called the “Great Game.”) This tactic was enthusiastically supported by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and other leading lights of the emerging neoconservative movement. Neocon think-tankers dubbed it the “Arc of Crisis” for public consumption. Insiders, however, still called it the “Bernard Lewis Plan.”
The use of Islamic radicals as mercenaries had been pioneered in the 1950s by the British, who attempted to use the Muslim Brotherhood against Egypt’s nationalist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Under Lewis’ tutelage, the U.S. funded, trained, and armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, using them to harass the Russian military which had occupied that nation. After they succeeded in driving the Russians out, the Mujahideen soon morphed into groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, and began to commit acts of terrorism in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and other countries. Anglo-American intelligence disavowed their role in enabling this transformation, describing their former “fiercely independent Afghansi freedom fighters” as having become a “Frankenstein’s monster” of sorts.
Then, using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext, the U.S. and British began to systematically target the secular, multiconfessional governments in Southwest Asia for various types of destabilization and “regime change,” using radical Islamicist groups as proxies. The nation of Syria proved to be a challenge for them. Syria resisted these destabilization tactics even after the U.S. began, in 2012, to directly support Islamicist elements to the tune of roughly $1 billion per year, in what was later exposed as Operation Timber Sycamore. As the BBC approvingly wrote, "Those who supported his approach, the Arms for Rebels group, included then-CIA Director David Petraeus, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and most of the foreign-policy establishment in Washington, both Democrat and Republican."
But it was not until December 8, 2024 that the government of Bashar al-Assad was finally toppled and replaced by a grouping led by Ahmed al-Sharaa AKA Abu Mohammed al-Julani, a man whom the U.S. had previously designated as a terrorist, and had even offered a $10 million bounty for his capture. The replacement of a secular, nationalist government by a gang of “fiercely independent jihadists” should have been a humiliating embarrassment for the neocons, but the compliant American media obediently characterized it as a “victory for democracy.”
Tulsi Gabbard played an important role in calling attention to this decades-long “regime change” travesty. As a Congresswoman from Hawaii in 2016, she introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act into the House of Representatives, saying, “Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda, ISIS or other terrorist groups. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”
The following year, she traveled to Damascus, where she met with the Syrian President, causing howls of outrage from the neocon sect. During this visit, she gained first-hand knowledge of British operations in that country, which include the MI6-linked “White Helmets” organization and the British-based “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.”
The White Helmets organization was founded by James Le Mersurier OBE, a former British military officer who later admitted to embezzling the organization’s funds and apparently died by his own hand. The organization identifies itself as a “volunteer civil defense organization” that provides aid to communities in Syria, but has been characterized as allies and “hidden soldiers” by the Islamist insurgents there. The White Helmets have been lionized by the neocons, and an Oscar-winning documentary film was even produced in order to sell them to the public. The US and UK governments have funded them to the tune of $70 million since 2014.
Neocons, who venerate the British Empire as the model they wish to emulate, are particularly anxious to hide the British role in Syria. One incident in 2013 which was exploited for propaganda purposes was an alleged chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, which was quickly blamed on the Assad government. There is some debate about whether such an attack actually took place, due to a suppressed report by the original Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) team that went to Syria, and did not find any evidence of a chemical weapons attack.
On September 13, 2023, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency internal assessment. It stated that the al-Nusrah Front, one of the numerous al-Qaeda offshoots operating in Syria, possessed the capability of carrying out the attack. This information had been deliberately withheld from President Obama, who went on to make public statements that only the Syrian government could be responsible. This echoed the pronouncements of the British Joint Intelligence Organisation, which had issued a statement that “there is no credible intelligence or other evidence to substantiate the claims or the possession of CW [chemical weapons] by the opposition.”
The Grayzone news source has offered meticulously documented evidence that the White Helmets deceived and manipulated the OPCW, in order to further the propaganda narrative that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people. It was important to the British and their neocon associates that Assad be blamed, because they hoped to use the alleged attack as the pretext to persuade the U.S. to launch a military attack on Syria, as one part of the grand geopolitical agenda of the Bernard Lewis Plan.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard had this to say:
Where is the evidence? Where is the evidence that would provide the basis for the US to launch a military strike against Syria? That evidence was never presented, and it's very clear now that as time has gone on that there was a cover-up, and why was there a cover-up? It became very clear that this OPCW report, the final report, was tailored before it was finally released, in order to provide cover for that un-Constitutional military strike that the United States launched against Syria in April of 2018. And really what's at stake here is the credibility of this international organization, the OPCW, that people are supposed to be able to trust to be a neutral entity, to provide objective facts based on what their investigators have found on the ground. And it's very clear that this did not happen in this instance. And the impact of this is not only credibility of this investigation into this alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, in Syria, but it will undermine the credibility of all past reports and investigations from the OPCW as well as any future reports and investigations they conduct. It calls into question their very integrity.
Gabbard’s resistance to such a coordinated international media operation demonstrates her qualifications as an appointee to the position of DNI, inasmuch as it demonstrates her ability to discern war-mongering “psychological operations” from real, human intelligence.