Atlas Monitor | 3 June 2015

“The US invasion of Iraq created the ISIS phenomenon in Iraq” according to New Zealand Labour Party Defence spokesperson Phil Goff.

However, Goff goes on to say “In Syria al Assad and his father did awful things, and he refused to concede to the demands of the Arab Spring.  He carries prime responsibility for the rise of ISIS in Syria.”

These comments were in response to declassified Pentagon documents that prove the US and her allies enabled and facilitated the rise of ISIS on top of providing materiel support as well as training and funding for the takfiri group.

Goff’s Arab Spring romanticism is cute. However, it reeks of liberal interventionism that has a penchant for regime change.

How can Goff be sure that the Arab Spring in Syria would not simply have replaced secular tyrants with even more repressive Islamist regimes?

What would have conceding to the demands of the Arab Spring looked like in real world Syria?

Can anyone point to a single country affected by the Arab Spring that is now significantly better off?

One might say Tunisia; however, violence persists with suicide bomb attacks and a war between government forces and Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia. “Improved living standards – one of the basic demands of Tunisia’s revolution – have not materialised for most Tunisians” according to an Al-Jazeera report.

In response to Goff’s comments, geopolitics analyst Tony Cartalucci notes

It strikes me as a lazy but typical attempt to justify not doing anything about Western governments and their allies openly creating and perpetuating terrorism, then being caught openly in the act. The DoD paper is a signed and dated confession, which means defense spokespeople across the Western world have two choices – speak up and lose their jobs, or recede further into cognitive dissonance as they continue working for a criminal regime openly allied with Al Qaeda and perpetrating crimes against humanity”.

The “Arab Spring” was entirely engineered, prepared for, activists trained, funded, and equipped by the United States, years in advance, based on successes and experience garnered from decades of extraterritorial meddling. In particular, a coalition between the US State Department, NGOs, corporations, and organizations entirely contrived for the sole purpose of fomenting unrest in foreign nations, began as early as 2008 preparing for what has unfolded in the Middle East and North Africa.

Syria had been slated for regime change since at least 1991. In 2002, under the Bush administration, Syria would be added to the growing “Axis of Evil.” It would be later revealed that this escalation was accompanied by covert funding for opposition groups inside of Syria.

Washington Post released cables indicating the US has been funding Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005 under the Bush administration and was continued under Obama. Coupled with Posner’s remarks regarding the training of Syrian activists who were sent back to their homeland to confront their government, it is clear that it was not “the people themselves who launched these movements.” We will also see that it is most certainly not be “the people” who determine their outcome either.