Part 2: In March 2011, the Civil War began. What happened after?

• Why did the Syrian "Arab Spring" occur?: Three primary socio-economic factors were: The Great Recession. Historic Crop Failures. Shock Therapy. An untimely trifecta but only the third was really entirely the doing of the government. Bashar Al Assad was the second pick as his father's successor. The story goes that he was in his opthamology practice in London curing black eyes for Arsenal football rioters when his father from Syria rang him up and told Bashar that his military education-groomed elder brother Bassel got himself killed in a car accident and that Bashar would be the new heir to Syria. Western analysts were initially thrilled at the selection of the Western-educated Assad Junior and had their eyes gleaming at a potential "Syrian Gorbachev." Bashar would disappoint on the geopolitical front, but he would completely take up the role with his domestic reforms: replacing from his father's government "nearly every economic official in cabinet, [...] privatization of universities, banks and media, reducing subsidies on a number of basic goods, reducing tariff protections for domestic industries and the breaking the state monopoly on education which the party had maintained since 1963. Government funding for education was cut, and the influence of the party was undermined with party flags featured much less prominently at state events – often not at all – and non-party officials promoted to senior positions in government." Abrams writes:

  As has been widely observed since 2011, popular discontent in Syria was largely fuelled by opposition to its Western-style neo-liberal reforms moving Syria away from a state centred economy and towards privatisation. Former chair of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group and Oxford University lecturer in modern history, Dr. Mark Almond, was one of many to observe to this effect: “One of the big causes of discontent in Syria is precisely the transfer of the state assets into private hands.” This contrasted strongly with Western portrayals of discontent motivated primarily by calls for greater Westernisation of the country’s political system.

  As such, Bashar Al Assad basically recreated the same socioeconomic material conditions that led to the overthrow of the USSR and the appropriation of popular mass discontent in response to shock therapy towards the agenda of regime change by the West mirrored near perfectly the same context of the failed Tiananmen counter-revolution: resistance to neoliberal reform was then subverted in the Western narrative as a "pro-democracy uprising." The privatization of Syrian media and the entrenchment of Western discourse propagation mechanisms within the country meant that, just like every other color revolution, the initial causes for popular protest became irrelevant as the West's "pro-democracy" regime change narrative took over and became all-encompassing. The role of Facebook in the concurrent Egyptian Tahrir Square protests is well known and similarly, the adoption of Western social media platforms and Gulf State news media by the Syrian population meant that, once the initial protests began, they were susceptible to the same atrocity propaganda feedback loop seen in Ukraine 2014, Hong Kong 2019 and elsewhere. Initial reports of police brutality, then tear gas, then murders, then mass killings, then chemical gas. Combined with a manipulation of the ethno-religious and socio-economic divides in Syrian society, the West created an image of the Assad government that became demonic in the eyes of the population, providing the support for anti-Assad militant forces to emerge.

• Why did protests lead to civil war? It became possible with covert military infiltration by foreign entities including the US, UK, France, Turkey and the inbred monarchist comprador Gaza Genocide abetting shits in Jordan. Abrams:

  There was little illusion among Syria’s foreign adversaries that mass protests could topple the Ba’ath Party by themselves, with the protesting minority, no matter how well trained and vocal their organisers were, still relegated to outlying areas and holding few prospects of gaining support in the capital. What the protests did achieve, however, was to create enough confusion and disruption to allow Western-trained militants flowing across the borders to make serious gains. Al Qaeda commander Abu Mohammad Al Julani, (Yes, the same one being paraded around the Western press circuit right now) who would later lead the most powerful antigovernment militant group with strong foreign support, stated to this effect regarding the protests paving the way for a Syrian jihad: “Syria would not have been ready for us if not for the Syrian revolution… The revolution removed many of the obstacles and paved the way for us to enter this blessed land.”

• Who are the "Free Syrian Army”/"Syrian ‘Moderate’ Rebels”/"Syrian Opposition?”: The onset of the Syrian Civil War pitted a thousand different little anti-Assad and Islamist factions against Damascus. The Western brain is incapable of comprehending a conflict beyond that of a Manichean Good vs. Evil and so all the opposition forces to the Syrian government were clumped together for the sake of Western news coverage in a nominal "coalition" called the “Free Syrian Army.” For most of the Civil War, this allowed the West to present the conflict in an artificial David vs. Goliath angle, allowing for sucker Westoids to become volunteer Amnesty mouthpieces with an comprehensible story to sell. This avoids the “it’s complicated” aneurysms that would otherwise appear like you see currently with mainstream western media trying to grasp Myanmar’s civil war and watching them undergo mental contortions trying to calculate which of the multitude factions there would potentially be the biggest US toadie and stick it to China the most. Eventually, this became untenable with Al-Qaeda offshoot Al-Nusra and ISIS becoming the only operating contingents of this FSA “coalition" and that gave birth to the idea of the “moderate rebel.” There’s been enough said over the course of the civil war debunking this and I’ll just add the commentary of Cato Institute neocon John Glaser, who noted how remarkable it was that ISIS in 2017 “imploded right after external support for the ‘moderate’ rebels dried up.”

• Did Assad use Chemical Weapons?: There is no concrete evidence linking the Syrian forces with any chemical attack in the Civil War. This is the big one, the original sin for why "Assad must go" and the West has had over a decade of time to provide some definitive evidence, but they haven't because they can't. Though it hasn't stopped them from repeating it to this day. From a pragmatic standpoint, conducting mass atrocities of any kind would have been detrimental to the Syrian government when there’s such a long history of Western attempts to use allegations of such actions as pretexts for their military intervention, for example, in Yugoslavia. Regime change means you lose your government, while being pinned with atrocities by the West means you get a tribunal like Milosevic. Atrocity propaganda against the Syrian government had its pre-chemical attack precursors. In August 2012, a massacre of 245 in Daraya was scapegoated as done by “Assad’s army.” Independent UK journalist Robert Fisk investigated and later revealed it was done by the FSA. In December 2012, a massacre of 120-150 in Aqrab was blamed on Assad by the NYT. British journalist Alex Thompson revealed that "the Free Syrian Army had been the perpetrator and had held 500 villagers from the president’s Alawite religious minority hostage for nine days before carrying out mass executions.” In 2013, following months of Syrian government military successes, the Western objective became that of imposing a “no-fly zone” as they did with Libya to level the playing field for their “moderate rebels.” This was when the first breathless accounts of a “chemical attack” in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta. Abrams' books cover the later copycat allegations but this first is the one that created the "Chemical Assad" propaganda narrative and so I'll focus on this:

  Theodore A. Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories, which was published by the New York Times in December […] concluded based on the calculated maximum ranges for the sarin-filled rockets that the attack could not have come from Syrian Arab Army positions, and that Islamist insurgents were the most likely perpetrators. Evidence implicating Al Nusra mounted quickly […] reports indicated that the sarin used had been supplied by Saudi Arabian intelligence services, which had provided significant material support to the insurgency since early 2011.

  Seymour Hersh wrote a scathing indictment of the US narrative that Obama was waving around, reporting that:

  A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”