Peter Ford: The “Permanent Government” Imperial War on Syria & World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph44p4SMWBQ Retired British Ambassador to Bahrain and Syria Peter Ford discusses the Syrian War and its latest developments, including attempts to try Bashar al-Assad at the ICC. He describes the "permanent government" of the U.S. which is a key driver of the war, as well as America's European counterparts such as France and Britain, who still cling to the coattails of their imperial past glory. Ambassador Ford believes Gulf unity is shattered and that Syria will remain weak, but will slowly rebuild in the coming years. *Support/Donate to Geopolitics & Empire: Patreon https://www.patreon.com/empiregeopolitics PayPal https://www.paypal.me/geopolitics Bitcoin http://geopoliticsandempire.com/bitcoin-donate Transcript Podcast: This is the Geopolitics and Empire podcast, and we're talking to retired British diplomat and ambassador to Bahrain and Syria, Peter Ford. He is also the Director of the British Syrian Society. We will be discussing the war in Syria, the US and European foreign policy of regime change, the media propaganda that enables it, and what we can expect to see in the future. Podcast: It's great to have you on, Ambassador Ford. Peter Ford: Thank you for having me, I look forward to our dialogue. [spoiler] Podcast: Yes. And let's get started with the different narratives that exist of the Syrian War. Because the prominent narrative is that it's a civil war, but you recently gave a speech in the House of Lords, which you sent me a copy, and you explained that in effect, the war is part of a multi-decade long war on Syria by the West. We know we have declassified files that go back to 1957, I believe, where the CIA had the plan to overthrow Syria. I believe in 1983, in the 80s there were other documents, and Wikileaks in the 2000s as well released such documents. Podcast: So can you give us a frank explanation of what really the Syrian War was, or is, all about? Peter Ford: Well, you'll recall in 2011, when everything kicked off in Syria, there had been a genuine popular uprising in some other Arab countries, beginning with Tunisia, and across North Africa, spreading through Libya and Egypt. And to a large extent, I believe those were genuine domestic uprisings. The case of Syria was always going to be different. While those countries in North Africa, the sectarian issue hardly applied, because the people were almost all Sunni Muslim. Syria is a social and religious mosaic. It was always likely that in the event of any uprising with religious factors, social factors would come into play. Peter Ford: So Syria was always destined to be different. It was also destined to be different because the West, particularly the United States, has had this anti-Syrian agenda going back several decades, and has been constantly looking for opportunities to destabilize Syria and remove the Damascus regime, as they would call it. And such an opportunity arose in 2011, and the Western powers lost no time in piling in on the back of some limited local demonstrations, particularly in southern Syria, in Daraa, and in no time, for example, the US Ambassador was marching up with his French colleague to Hama to participate themselves in demonstrations there. Peter Ford: So the die was cast from a very early stage, and what may have begun as local demonstrations quickly escalated. Islamist fighters began to appear. Very quickly they were armed by the United States, and other powers, particularly Gulf powers acting in cooperation with America. And in a very short time indeed, the conflict had become essentially another episode in the West's war against Syria. Podcast: Since you brought up some of these fighters, these proxy fighters, I'm gonna jump ahead to one of my questions. Tell us a little bit of how this war was fought, so, you know, some people say they're proxy fighters, mercenaries, these moderate rebels, jihadists. We have declassified documents that say the US knew what it was doing. Judicial Watch declassified the DIA documents, we had Michael Flynn, the head of the DIA revealed this, Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan leader. And many other people say that the United States directly arms, funds, trains, transports ISIS, Daesh, for use. Podcast: Is this too simplistic a way of describing the proxy force? Or how does this mechanic work? Peter Ford: The United States didn't look carefully at the credentials of the Islamic fighters that they were training. I don't think they wanted to know which groups the fighters actually belonged to. I don't say that the United States deliberately trained ISIS, or Al Qaeda, or Mossad fighters, but this was the overall effect of giving training and weapons more or less indiscriminately to anybody who would take them. Peter Ford: Many of these radical fighters were masquerading under the brand of the Free Syrian Army, which originally began with some defecting elements of the Syrian army. But very quickly, it was overrun by radical Islamists, and became the Free Syrian Army indistinguishable, virtually, from Al-Nusra, with which it was very often collaborating on the battle front. And these other groups like Ahrar al-Sham, and so many others that they're not ... there were literally hundreds of these Islamo-fascist groups, and the United States, and Britain, and France, were up to the eyeballs in supporting them with training, and weapons, and direction on the field of battle. There were military control rooms coordinating the jihadis in northern Jordan, and in southern Turkey. Podcast: And you mentioned previously, in 2011 a bit of unrest that started in Syria, and we're bombarded by a lot of propaganda. We heard all these things about Saddam Hussein, yeah, you know, Saddam Hussein wasn't a nice guy, I knew people from Iraq a long time ago, and they did whatever they could to get out of Iraq, and they didn't want to go back. But for the allegations that were launched against Saddam ... for example, weapons of mass destruction, that he worked with Al-Qaeda, that he was involved in 9/11 ... none of that was true. So, you know, I'm skeptical, often, about these narratives that are replayed in the media. Podcast: So we're told that Assad gassed his own people and things like this, but apart from ... Maybe you can tell me, tell us, apart from this repetition in the Western media that he gassed his own people, has there been any evidence of such a thing? Peter Ford: Look, no government ... no government in the Middle East has been a paragon of virtue. In varying degrees they have all been authoritarian governments. And maybe there were good reasons for this, maybe Western [inaudible 00:08:01] like democracy doesn't fit, for whatever historical, social reason. But the fact is that Assad was no worse than, for example, the King of Jordan, who the West supports to the hilt, in terms of repressing domestic political activity. Certainly better than Egyptian, successive Egyptian presidents in terms of repression, and much better than the Gulf leaders in terms of encouraging pluralism and some degree of parliamentary control. And relative free speech, so it's all relative. Assad is no angel, his secret police did indeed carry out some excesses, but so did everybody else's secret police in the Middle East. Podcast: Some say the war is over, but you say the war goes on by other means. Has President Assad won? Peter Ford: It's too early to say he has won. He controls over 70% of the territory of Syria now, but important parts of the country are still beyond his control. And the war goes on by other means, particularly economic means. Also, I don't think that Western powers have conceded victory to Assad. Whatever they say sometimes, out of one corner of their mouth, they say, "Yeah, Assad has won, we have to move on to the next phase," but out of the other side of their mouth, they say, "Ah, we insist on a transition." This is the euphemism prepared for regime change. Peter Ford: The phrase regime change has become a dirty word after Iraq, and after Libya. So they can't call it regime change, they call it, therefore, transition, and they say, "Well, we insist that there must be a transition away from Assad's rule. There must be UN supervised, democratic elections." But they never tell us who, which paragon of virtue is going to take over, going to win in an election over Assad, or why they believe that Assad would not win. Most people who actually know anything about Syria would say that he would get more than 40%, which is more than Trump, or May, or Macron, or Merkel. And yet we've set the bar so high, that we demand that he do better than all these Western democratic leaders who enjoy the right to continue to govern his country. Podcast: You gave an interview last year that I listened to, and you mentioned something that I never thought of, and you know, regarding going forward, the Syrian economy ... how another weapon of war is demographics, and the depopulation being used as a weapon. How this exodus of Syrians will have an impact on the economy, and the future of Syria, and will weaken the state. Can you talk a little bit about that? Peter Ford: Yeah, absolutely. The Western powers, by their action in fueling the conflict, pumping weapons and money, and effectively running jihadi armies who have ethnically cleansed huge areas, are provoking an exodus of population in the first place. Secondly, in sustaining the existence and encouraging the culture of refugees by giving billions to keep them in place. In places like Jordan, and Turkey, and Lebanon, effectively the Western powers have been paying people to leave Syria and accept charity in camps in these countries. Peter Ford: And now, there is a deliberate, calculated policy, to discourage these people from going back. They continue to be offered amounts of money to remain, and they are given advice not to return unless they are absolutely certain that their young men, for example,