Professor Jeremy Salt

By calling violent armed groups ‘rebels’ and ‘the opposition’, these ‘human rights’ organizations conceal their true nature. By calling the Syrian government a ‘regime’, instead of the legitimate government of Syria, representing Syria at the UN and representing the interests of the Syrian people, they seek to demean it. By accusing it of carrying out indiscriminate attacks on its own civilian population, on the basis of what they are being told by their tainted sources, they seek to demonize it.

The attack on Syria was part of the long-term US neoconservative project to destroy all seven regional countries (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran) that stood in the way of the US and Israel. As the destruction of the government would entail the collapse of the country ‘regime change’ was never just about that. It was always the countries that would be destroyed, with a ‘new’ or ‘greater’ Middle East being built out of the ruins.