By JEFFREY D SACHS & SYBIL FARES
There is no doubt that Bashar al-Assad has often erred and faced great internal discontent, but his regime has been targeted for collapse for decades by the US and Israel.
In the famous lines of the Roman historian Tacitus, “To devastate, to massacre, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” In our time, it is Israel and the United States that make a desert and call it peace.
The story is simple. In total violation of international law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers claim the right to govern seven million Palestinian Arabs. When Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands leads to militant resistance, Israel labels this resistance “terrorism” and calls on the US to overthrow Middle Eastern governments that support the “terrorists.” The US, under the influence of LOBBY of Israel, go to war in the name of Israel.
The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of an Israeli-U.S. campaign against the country that dates back to 1996, with the arrival of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. The Israeli-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when Barack Obama secretly tasked the CIA with overthrowing the Syrian government in Operation Timber Sycamore. This effort was finally “realized” this week, after more than 300.000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011.
Syria’s collapse came quickly, due to more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the burden of war, the U.S. seizure of Syrian oil, Russia’s priorities regarding the conflict in Ukraine, and, most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, which had been the Syrian government’s main military supporter. There is no doubt that Bashar al-Assad often erred and faced great domestic discontent, but his regime was targeted for collapse by the U.S. and Israel for decades.
Before the US-Israeli campaign to overthrow Bashar al-Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a functioning and growing middle-income country. In January 2009, the IMF Executive Board said: “The Executive Directors praised Syria’s strong macroeconomic performance in recent years, as reflected by rapid non-oil GDP growth, comfortable foreign reserves, and low and declining public debt. This performance reflected both robust regional demand and the authorities’ reform efforts to shift toward a largely market-based economy.”
Since 2011, Israel and the US's perpetual war on Syria, including bombings, jihadists, economic sanctions, US seizure of oil fields and more, has plunged the Syrian people into misery.
In the two days immediately following the government collapse, Israel carried out about 480 attacks throughout Syria and completely destroyed the Syrian fleet in Latakia. Continuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has illegally claimed control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared that the Golan Heights will be part of the State of Israel “for all eternity.”
Benjamin Netanyahu's ambition to transform the region through war, which stretches back nearly three decades, is unfolding before our eyes. In a Press conference On December 9, the Israeli prime minister boasted of an “absolute victory,” justifying the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the escalation of violence throughout the region: “I tell you, just think, if we had given in to those who told us over and over again, ‘The war must be stopped’ – we would not have entered Rafah, we would not have taken the Philadelphia Corridor, we would not have eliminated Sinwar, we would not have surprised our enemies in Lebanon and around the world with a daring strategic operation, we would not have eliminated Nasrallah, we would not have destroyed Hezbollah’s underground network, and we would not have exposed Iran’s weakness. The operations we have carried out since the beginning of the war are dismantling the axis brick by brick.”
The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian government is not widely understood, but the documentary record is clear. Israel’s war on Syria began with American and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who devised for Benjamin Netanyahu a strategy called “Deep Rupture” for the Middle East when he took office. The core of the “deep rupture” strategy called for Israel (and the US) to reject “land for peace,” the idea that Israel would withdraw from occupied Palestinian lands in exchange for peace. Instead, Israel would retain the occupied Palestinian lands, govern the Palestinian people in a state of apartheid, would ethnically cleanse the state step by step and enforce so-called “peace for peace” by overthrowing neighboring governments that resisted Israel’s land claims.
The “Deep Rupture” strategy states: “Our claim to the land—to which we have held on with hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble,” and goes on to state that “Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, with which Americans can sympathize, would be for Israel to seize the strategic initiative along its northern borders, engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran as the primary agents of aggression in Lebanon…”
In his 1996 book, Fighting Terrorism, Benjamin Netanyahu laid out the new strategy. Israel would not fight the terrorists; it would fight the states that supported the terrorists. More precisely, the US would make Israel fight for them. As he elaborated in 2001: “The first and most important thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states… Take away all such state support and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will crumble to dust.”
Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy has been integrated into US foreign policy. Ending Syria has always been a key part of the plan. This was confirmed by General Wesley Clark after 11/XNUMX. He was told during a visit to the Pentagon that “we are going to attack and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years—starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Iraq would be first, then Syria and the rest. (Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign for the Iraq War is explained in detail in Dennis Fritz’s new book, Deadly Betrayal. The role of LOBBY Israel’s Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic is explained in Ilan Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic. The insurgency that hit U.S. troops in Iraq delayed the timetable by five years, but it did not change the basic strategy.
So far, the US has led or sponsored wars against Iraq (2003 invasion), Lebanon (US funding and arming of Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation in the 2010s), Sudan (support for rebels to secede from Sudan in 2011) and Somalia (support for the 2006 invasion of Ethiopia). A possible US war with Iran, ardently desired by Israel, is still pending.
As strange as it may seem, the CIA has repeatedly supported Islamic jihadists to fight these wars, and the jihadists have just toppled the Syrian regime. After all, the CIA helped create al-Qaeda by training, arming, and financing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan starting in the late 1970s. Yes, Osama bin Laden later turned against the US, but his movement was still a US creation. Ironically, as confirms Seymour Hersh, it was Bashar al-Assad's intelligence that “warned the US of an imminent al Qaeda bomb attack on the US Navy's Fifth Fleet headquarters.”
Operation Timber Sycamore was a covert, billion-dollar CIA program launched by Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The CIA funded, trained, and provided intelligence to radical and extremist Islamic groups. The CIA effort also involved a “rat line” to transport weapons from Libya (which was attacked by NATO in 2011) to jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his article “The Red Line and the Rat Line”: “A highly classified annex to the report, which has not been made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It concerned the rat line. Under the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for moving weapons from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”
Shortly after the release of Timber Sycamore in March 2013, at a joint conference At a White House address from former President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama said: “Regarding Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends and with the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of the government of Bashar al-Assad.”
In the Israeli-American Zionist mindset, a request for negotiations by an adversary is considered a sign of weakness by the adversary. Those who call for negotiations from the other side usually end up assassinated by Israel or US agents. We saw this happen recently in Lebanon. Lebanon’s foreign minister confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, the former secretary general of Hezbollah, had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel days before his assassination. Hezbollah's willingness to accept a peace agreement according to the Arab-Islamic world's desire for a two-state solution is long-standing. Similarly, instead of negotiating an end to the war in Gaza, Israel assassinated the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.
Similarly, in Syria, instead of allowing a political solution to emerge, the US has repeatedly opposed the peace process. In 2012, the UN had negotiated a peace agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Americans, who demanded that Bashar al-Assad step down on the first day of the peace agreement. The US wanted regime change, not peace. In September 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the General Assembly with a map of the Middle East divided into “Blessing” and “Curse,” with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran as part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s curse. The real curse is Israel’s path to chaos and war, which has now engulfed Lebanon and Syria, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s fervent hope of also leading the U.S. into war with Iran.
The US and Israel are celebrating the successful destruction of yet another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Benjamin Netanyahu claiming “the credit for starting the historical process”. Syria will most likely now succumb to ongoing warfare between multiple armed protagonists, as has happened in previous US-Israeli regime change operations.
In short, American interference, at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations towards that eventuality.
All of this is in the service of a deeply unjust cause: denying Palestinians their political rights in the service of Zionist extremism based on the 7th-century B.C.E. Book of Joshua. Shockingly, according to this text—which Israel’s own religious fanatics rely on—the Israelis were not even the original inhabitants of the land. Instead, according to the text, God instructs Joshua and his warriors to commit multiple genocides in order to conquer the land.
Faced with this scenario, Arab-Islamic nations and, indeed, almost the entire world have repeatedly joined in calling for a two-state solution and for peace between Israel and Palestine. Instead of a two-state solution, Israel and the US made a desert and called it peace.
*Jeffrey D. Sachs is professor of economics at Columbia University. Author, among other books, of The era of sustainable development (Current Publisher).
Sybil Fares is a consultant for the Middle East and Africa for the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
Originally published on the portal The new arab.
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