As Syria falls, is the US now targeting Iran?

Gibson Nyikadzino

UNSURPRISINGLY, the world is moving towards a stage of confrontation and crisis.

Now that the West has in its equation successfully overrun Syria and placed it under the rule of jihadists, it can be expected that more instability is going to be the order of the day as Israel annexes more Syrian territory, suffocates Lebanon to deal with Hezbollah and carries on with the carnage in Palestine with less opposition.

Understandably, targeting Syria was an elaborate plan that the United States put in place over two decades ago as part of its “forever war” policy and regime change agenda schematics.

In an interview in 2001, US General Wesley Clark exposed how his country’s foreign policy in the Middle East and Africa would unfold.

Gen Clark made reference to a conversation he had with an official from the Secretary of Defence on how the US was “going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off Iran”.

This remains perspectival in predicting whether the US, with its “forever war” policy, will be successful in Iran.

Right now, Iran understands it is in a technical war with the US and the collective West.

But when that happens, there will be no winner.

The US has asserted the regime change position in Iran by appropriating millions of dollars through supporting and funding terrorist groups that are infiltrating and blowing up infrastructure in the Middle Eastern country.

The West is cognisant of this and is encouraging it.

Countries on the US list agreed on in 2001 were also born out of a list that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drafted in 1996 when he first assumed office.

Destroying six of the seven Arab countries was the US and Netanyahu’s theory on the latter’s need to dominate the Palestinian people, elevate Israeli “ethnic supremacist” politics and entrench apartheid.

By overthrowing the governments that sympathise and support the Palestinian cause, it would be difficult for them to provide logistical support to the resistance by Hezbollah, Hamas and other groups against Israel and US interests in the Middle East.

It should be understood that once the US foreign policy establishment maintains an agenda item, despite administrative changes, the successive leaders will pursue that with all their zealotry.

While it was the George Bush Jr administration that invaded and toppled the Saddam Hussein government in Iraq in 2003, it was in 1998 that the US entertained the idea.

In 1998, US President Bill Clinton paved the way for the invasion of Iraq by legislating the Iraq Liberation Act.

Congress cheered him for that.

After the 9/11 attacks, the pretext to occupy Middle Eastern countries was translated into an actual war doctrine for the Pentagon.

After destroying Iraq, as Syria was to become the next target, the US got tied down there for several years by Arab freedom fighters, leading the Barack Obama administration to give the greenlight to the occupation of Syria in 2011 and the overthrow of the government by terrorists last week.

Of all the countries invaded and where the US supported insurrections, not a single one has experienced stability and security.

The situations in Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon and Syria are so dire that the words disaster and catastrophe cannot adequately describe the plight of the ordinary people there.

This is a devastation that the US has unleashed at the behest of Israel.

And the one goal that Netanyahu wants, the big prize, which has not happened yet, is to get the US to engage in war with Iran.

This implies, at the moment, that the US does not have an independent foreign policy because of the Jewish lobby that is pulling strings.

Israel has made steps to provoke Iran.

On April 1, Israel attacked Iran’s consulate in Damascus.

On July 31, it assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

In October, it attacked Iranian military infrastructure to open a new geo-political front.

Terror elements have also been used to attack Iran’s interests.

It is not a new phenomenon.

In the 1980s, towards the end of the Cold War, US President Ronald Reagan once referred to Osama Bin Laden as a “freedom fighter”, just to align with the Washington narrative against the then-Soviet Union.

Along the way in 1993, a British newspaper (The Independent) labelled Bin Laden an “anti-Soviet warrior” fighting for peace.

The same script was replicated a fortnight ago when the Western mainstream media characterised Abu Mohammed al-Golani, a designated terrorist and leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an official wing of Al-Qaeda, as a man who “has evolved from jihadist leader to rebel statesman” while fighting to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria.

Al-Golani, like Bin Laden, is at the moment a useful instrument in the hands of mainly the US, whom they supported to overthrow the Assad government.

It has become the strategy for the Western mainstream media to rebrand jihadists or terrorists as “freedom fighters”, “anti-Soviet warriors” and “rebel statesmen” just to serve geo-political objectives.

This is so because when dealing with the West, you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Bin Laden moved from “freedom fighter” to “anti-Soviet warrior” and later “terrorist”, who was killed by the same people who praised him.

So, for geo-political goals, Syria is now a new geo-political experiment that should be understood in the context of appreciating that what has been happening in that country since 2011 was not an effect of the “Arab Spring”.

It was a proxy war waged by over 100 000 jihadists who were flown into Syria from many parts of the world to further destabilise the Middle East with the help of the US, Israel, Britain and other states.

It is Netanyahu who appears to be the biggest winner because at the beginning of the year, his political destiny was in doubt, and he was in danger domestically, regionally and internationally.

Following the international pressure to isolate Israel, the toppling of the Syrian government served as a strategic comeback initiative which is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for Netanyahu. This is a man who, in April this year, could not afford a war of attrition against the Axis of Resistance.

He later led the infiltration of Hezbollah’s communication network, implanting explosives into thousands of pagers and pursued a decapitation strategy against the organisation’s leadership. All was meant to inflict massive damage on Hezbollah and push it into a ceasefire, which, however, “coincided” with the HTS offensive in Syria.

While all of this happens, Israel continually tests the limits of Iran’s red lines. But that military expedition will have no winner.

On Iran, both Israel and the US should think twice.

Gibson Nyikadzino is a politics and international affairs analyst. He can be contacted on gnyikadzino@gmail.com