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By Wayne Sonter
Source: The Guardian – The Workers’ Weekly
The war on Syria is a covert CIA-managed war the USA and its allies have initiated to overthrow the Syrian government. The Syrian adventure was to be a relatively brief regime change exercise, camouflaged by the social unrest of the Arab Spring and a step in re-ordering the Middle East in the interest of the US and its allies.

This accorded with the US global strategic objective of remaining the world’s ‘first, last and only’ truly global empire, despite a declining economic base relative to rest of the world.

Five years later the US-led War on Syria is showing itself to be one more brutal, costly and disastrous venture into which the US state has dragged much of the world.

The plan was to trigger the collapse of the Syrian government, through inciting sectarian war, mainly used foreign gangs paid, armed, trained and logistically supported by US and its allies, as the CIA itself disclosed to a US congressional budget committee in 2015.

Not only did the CIA train and equip nearly 10,000 fighters out of its own budget in the previous few years, as part of a broader, multi-billion dollar effort involving Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, it also managed a sprawling logistics network to move fighters, ammunition and weapons into the country.

The process of grinding Syrian society into subjugation, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Syrian lives, creation of millions of refugees and destruction of the country’s heritage and civil infrastructure, was suddenly interrupted by Russia’s intervention last October, at the invitation of Syria’s government.

Russia’s serious concern with jihadi terrorism and its joint efforts with the Syrian army have rapidly collapsed the anti-Syrian, fundamentalist militias. It has disrupted ISIS’s multi-million dollar oil trade with Turkey, previously untouched by the US-led “war on ISIS”. The joint forces are set to lift the siege on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and cut the ISIS/Al-Qaeda supply lines between Syria and Turkey. They are preparing to take Raqqa, the ISIS “capital”.

At this rate peace could be restored in Syria within a few months and the Syrian people could start to rebuild their lives. The destruction of ISIS and Al-Qaeda related terrorist forces and the end of this cruel war should be welcome.

However, the US and its allies are portraying the Syrian and Russian gains as a disaster, a narrative a compliant media unrelentingly transmit to Western audiences.

The “disaster” is that those military assets the US-led coalition created to directly subjugate or dismember Syria are being destroyed “in the field” before they can be used to enforce a regime “transition” “at the table”.

Instead, the US is warning it will create a “quagmire” for Russia in Syria if it does not disengage, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia are openly preparing to invade Syria if Assad is not promptly despatched at peace talks.

Russia has warned that the US and its allies risk “a new world war” if they send troops into Syria. If the outside powers seeking regime change in Syria do not back off, but instead escalate the war, then Syria could suck the world’s two main nuclear powers into direct conflict.

At this stage it is only a matter of whether this is what the US wants – a war with Russia to permanently relegate it to economic colony status – or whether the US has already lost control of what it has set in train, and is being dragged towards disaster.

US society itself is under tremendous duress, and both Turkey and Saudi Arabia are riven by internal tensions. These are regimes whose policies are driven by desperation, as well as imperialist ambitions.

Ultimately the war on Syria will need a political solution – not the one of imposed regime change, but the one where the democratic and progressive forces within the countries aiding the US to prosecute this war demonstrate that they know what their governments are up to and act forcefully to rein them in.

This includes Australia – whose government has moved in lockstep with the US in all its imperialist ventures, obligingly breaking diplomatic relations with Syria, participating in a US-initiated sanctions regime against Syria and deploying military forces to the Middle East to participate in the US pseudo-war against ISIS.