If Donald Trump doesn’t take the Oath of Office on January 20, 2021, one principal but little-noted reason for this may be that he crossed one of the most powerful and least accountable forces in the nation: the military-industrial complex. As Trump said last September, “the top people in the Pentagon…want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars, you know how we’re doing.” Now, however, that Joe Biden has been anointed “President-elect” by the establishment media, the propaganda is already starting to get us back into one of those endless wars, in Syria.
We learned just recently that we never really left Syria in the first place. As Victoria Taft noted at PJ Media Friday, President Trump’s former special envoy for Syria, Never-Trumper Jim Jeffrey, has boasted that he circumvented Trump’s orders to withdraw American troops from Syria by lying to the president. Jeffrey explained: “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” and “the actual number of troops in northeast Syria is ‘a lot more than’ the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.”
What the Masters of War have in mind, however, is a far greater commitment of American troops than even Jeffrey’s shell game allows for. After all, how else are they going to keep happy “all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes”? There’s money to be made even in the devastated hellscape that is Syria after nearly a decade of civil war, and so our moral superiors are starting to beat the drums of war in Syria once again in order to ensure that President Biden, if such a nightmare comes true, commits enough American troops to keep that money flowing into the right pockets.
And so the Associated Press reminded us Sunday (in an article that was reprinted in the Huffington Post, which indicates an effort to make sure the far-Left will be on board) that “a half century after Hafez Assad launched a bloodless coup in Syria, his family still rules the country.” AP quoted English swamp creature Neil Quilliam of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program: “There can be no doubt that 50 years of Assad family rule, which has been ruthless, cruel and self-defeating, has left the country what can only be described as broken, failed and almost forgotten.”
The obvious subtext here is that we must remember Assad’s oppression, and not just remember, but act. “As U.S. election results rolled in,” AP intoned, “showing Joe Biden the winner, memes by Syrian opposition trolls mocked how the Assads have now outlasted nine American presidents since Richard Nixon.”
Oh no! Mockery from trolls! AP is essentially saying, You’re not going to stand for that, are you, you racist, redneck yahoos? We have to go into Syria, and pronto, in a big way, to avenge America’s honor!
AP was not alone. The U.S. Embassy in Syria, no doubt a particularly fetid corner of the swamp, tweeted Sunday: “Russia and the Syrian regime hosted the so-called International Conference on Refugees. Conference staff left their microphones on during a live broadcast, they exposed the lies of the Assad regime by stating that Syrians would rather flee the country than return to it.” That followed a tweet Thursday by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch: “Why are so few refugees willing to risk returning to Syria? Well, fear of being detained, tortured, and executed plays a big role. But rather than empty his nightmarish prisons, Syria’s Assad blames Western sanctions.”
And on Monday, when Syria’s foreign minister Walid al-Moalem died, Reuters’ obituary stated in its lead paragraph that al-Moalem was an “unyielding defender of Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters that sparked a decade-old conflict.” Reuters did deign to inform us later on in the article, in sneering tones, that al-Moalem “labeled insurgents ‘jihadi terrorists,’” without bothering to note that he was correct.
They behaved like jihad terrorists: in July 2013, U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army fighters entered the Christian village of Oum Sharshouh and began burning down houses and terrorizing the population, forcing 250 Christian families to flee the area. Then in September 2013, a day after then-Secretary of State John Kerry praised the Free Syrian Army as “a real moderate opposition,” the FSA took to the Internet to post videos of its attack on the ancient Syrian Christian city of Maaloula. And the New York Times reported in August 2014 about “a combined operation involving fighters from the Free Syrian Army, the Nusra Front and ISIS.” That is, jihad terrorists.
Assad is, without any doubt, a scoundrel. But as his undeniable evils begin to preoccupy the media anew, it is useful to ask cui bono. Who benefits? There are oppressive rulers all over the world; why is Assad once again the focus of all this negative attention? The answer is clear enough: toppling Assad is a bit of unfinished business left over from the Obama administration. Now that it looks as if the messianic internationalists are going to be back in the saddle again, they’re ready to resume working to “make the world safe for democracy,” as their messianic internationalist forbear Woodrow Wilson put it, and to remake the globe in accordance with their smug and miseducated sense of the way things ought to be.
And if, along the way, a few friends make a bit of money, what could be wrong with that? The world’s policeman is back on the beat, heedless once again of the spiraling risks of interventionism, and that guarantees that the weaponry will continue to be needed, and the money will keep on flowing. So tell us more, AP, Reuters, and friends, about just how bad this Assad chap is, and why it is up to the United States to do something about it militarily. You’ll no doubt manage to fool millions yet again.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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