(ANTIMEDIA) On Tuesday, yet another chemical weapons attack occurred in Syria. This particular attack took place in the Idlib province, and dozens have reportedly died as a result.
Hours after an apparently self-evident false flag chemical attack in Idlib, Sean Spicer affirmed that it is no longer US policy to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power.
Spicer said,
“There is not a fundamental option of regime change as there has been in the past”.
The White House Press Secretary continued,
While both the mainstream and many parts of the alternative media have been distracted by Pamela Anderson’s well meaning and correct desire to help Julian Assange during his time of struggle, Assange has said something important that many all ready assumed to be true.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stands before laying a wreath at the mausoleum of Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, March 30, 2017. (AP/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit to Turkey has uncovered a dramatic shift in US policy toward Syria, as Tillerson declared in his visit with Turkey’s Foreign Minister that the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be left up to the Syrian people.
Whenever one doesn’t respect the right of sovereign states to exist, it does more than violate the letter and principles of international law. It opens up the floodgates to further crises. These crises often come back to bite the very countries who initially engaged in illegal interventions into sovereign states.
Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said that a week is a long time in politics. After months of Donald Trump’s foreign policy being something of a mystery, Secretary of State Rex Tilleron’s glob-trotting journey has made things a lot clearer.
The language of American foreign policy has changed significantly under Trump and Tillerson via-a-vis Obama/Clinton and Kerry. Ideology is and a kind of heavy handed but at times, surprisingly cordial pragmatism is in.
Here are the five ways this has manifested itself.
1. No More Lectures
Hours after US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during a visit to Turkey that the fate of Syrian President Assad should be decided by the Syrian people – reversing the Obama administration’s demand that Assad must go as part of any Syrian peace settlement – Nikki Haley, the US’s ambassador to the UN, has confirmed that there has indeed been a change in US policy, and that the US is indeed no longer ‘focused’ on getting President Assad to go.
An offensive launched two weeks ago by Al-Qaeda in the northern areas of Syria’s Hama province appears to be unravelling, with Jihadi forces in the area coming under heavy bombing by the Russian air force and forced onto the retreat by a counter-attack launched by the Syrian army.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson may have signalled a radical shift in US policy, when he appeared to say at a press conference in Turkey that the issue of Syrian President Assad’s future was one for the Syrian people to decide.
Tillerson’s exact words are reported to have been
I think the … longer term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people
