Syria's Muslim Brotherhood Propped Up by US Since 2007 Under Bush
By Tony Cartalucci
In 2007, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “To Check Syria, U.S. Explores Bond With Muslim Brothers.” And even then, it was noted that the Brotherhood held close links with groups the US recognizes and lists as terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Al Qaeda.
The report gives a disturbing foreshadowing of US support that would eventually see the Muslim Brotherhood rise as both a political and terroristic power across the Arab World, after decades of hard-fought attempts to crush the sectarian extremist organization everywhere from Tunisia to Syria, from Egypt to Libya, to Jordan, and beyond. In fact, the 2007 Wall Street Journal article specifically noted that the US partnership could “destabilize governments in Jordan and Egypt, two US allies where the Brotherhood is a growing opposition force.”
Egypt is now run by a sectarian-extremist Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship, after the US incited unrest there in 2011, while Jordan is seeing increasing unrest led by the Jordanian arm of the Brotherhood.
What is also disturbing about the 2007 report, is that it shows how allegedly “Bush-era” policies transcended the 2000-2008 administration and continued in earnest under President Obama.
The report, written by Jay Solomon, echoes similar foreshadowing of the coming violent sectarian bloodbath now engulfing Syria, found in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker piece titled, “The Redireciton: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?“
Solomon begins by stating:
On a humid afternoon in late May, about 100 supporters of Syria’s largest exile opposition group, the National Salvation Front, gathered outside Damascus’s embassy here to protest Syrian President Bashar Assad’s rule. The participants shouted anti-Assad slogans and raised banners proclaiming: “Change the Regime Now.”
Later in the article, it would be revealed that the National Salvation Front (NSF) was in contact with the US State Department and that a Washington-based consulting firm in fact assisted the NSF in organizing the rally:
In the weeks before the presidential election, the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, which promotes regional democracy, and NSF members met to talk about publicizing Syria’s lack of democracy and low voter turnout, participants say. A Washington-based consulting firm, C&O Resources Inc., assisted the NSF in its planning for the May 26 anti-Assad rally at the Syrian embassy, providing media and political contacts. State Department officials stress they provided no financial or technical support to the protestors.
Just like the Arab Spring, what was in fact foreign-backed sedition, was peddled publicly by professional PR firms with the help of a bought-off, complicit corporate media, as a “pro-democracy” uprising.
And while the Wall Street Journal then, just as the US State Department and the Western media houses are now portraying the Syrian opposition as representing a wide range of interests across Syrian society, it was admitted then, just as it is plainly obvious now, that the sectarian extremist Muslim Brotherhood was in fact at the very center of the “uprising:”
One of the NSF’s most influential members is the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood — the decades-old political movement active across the Middle East whose leaders have inspired the terrorist groups Hamas and al Qaeda. Its Syrian offshoot says it has renounced armed struggle in favor of democratic reform.
The article would describe a fractured, disorganized opposition, must like the 2011 “National Syrian Council” (NSC) and its more recent US-Qatari contrived reincarnation, the “National Coalition,” whose only common denominator and prevailing ideology was and still is the sectarian extremism practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood. Similarly, the current “National Coalition” is headed by Moaz al-Khatib who, on Qatari state-owned Al Jazeera, openly admitted his aspirations of establishing an “Islamic State” in place of Syria’s current secular society. Al-Khatib also vigorously protested the US’ listing of Al Qaeda terrorist franchisee, Al Nusra, who is openly fighting as part of Al-Khatib’s “National Coalition.”
These are the “freedom fighters” then and now, that the US has been supporting, funding, and in fact arming. The most recent accusation of the US arming known-terrorists came from retired US Army General and former Special Forces Commander, William G. Boykin, who claimed the US is not only arming terrorists in Syria, but they are doing so by running guns through the terror emirate of Benghazi, Libya.
From the pan-Arab logistical networks NATO is using to flood Syria with weapons and terrorists, to the current leadership of the so-called opposition, and with documented evidence from 2007 of a US conspiracy to prop up the Muslim Brotherhood and other known, violent extremist groups in Syria to overthrow the government, it is clear that every aspect of the US’, UK’s, NATO’s, and even the UN’s narrative regarding the conflict in Syria is an intentional fabrication. Furthermore, it indicates a much wider deception – one involving the misconception that presidential elections bring in both new leadership, and new policies. The wars engineered under Bush, are being carried out under Obama, by the same policy makers from the very same corporate-funded think-tanks that handed Bush his agenda years ago.
With French, British, and now US troops becoming increasingly involved in Mali, allegedly fighting terrorists with direct connections to the fighters armed, funded, and given diplomatic recognition by the West in Libya, and with the conflict already spilling over the borders with Algeria, one must recognize that an agenda is being carried out contra to both the will of the people and their best interests. Identifying the corporate-financier interests involved in this agenda, and both boycotting and replacing them with local alternatives is our only recourse. Clearly – as illustrated in the case with the non-transition, continuity of agenda between “right-wing” Republican Bush and “left-wing” Democrat Obama – elections don’t count. As proven with the “Arab Spring” and the US underwritten protests of the NSF – protests don’t either.
