Syria - What the Clinton Department of State Wanted for the Nation

With Bashar al-Assad's version of Syria now dead on arrival, a brief look back at history is quite interesting.  Thanks to WikiLeaks and the release of Hillary Clinton's U.S. Department of State emails to the world, we can see why Washington was cheering for  the ultimate downfall of Syria.

 

In an unclassified Department of State document dated November 30, 2015, we find the following with my highlights throughout:

 

 

Note that the document states that "a successful intervention in Syria would require substantial diplomatic and military leadership from the United States" and that "Washington should start by expressing its willingness to work with regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize, train and arm Syrian rebel forces."  It also states that the costs of military intervention to the United States could be "limited" if Washington takes steps to arm the Syrian rebels and use its air power to ground the Syrian Air Force.  The author of the document claims that a victory over the Assad regime would have two results:

 

1.) strategically isolate Iran

 

2.) Syrians would view the United States as a friend, not an enemy

 

What do you think the odds are that the rebel forces that have now taken Syria will view the United States as a "friend"?  Or that Syrian civilians will view the United States as acting in their best interest once the new leadership starts to implement its extremist Islamic views on the nation?

The document also states that Libya was an easier case when it came to direct military intervention by the United States against Muammar Qaddafi.  That said, how have things turned out in Libya?  Rather than bringing Libyans under a single umbrella, the nation is now divided into several rival governments/power centres and is now home to a wide range of Islamic jihadist groups as you can see on this map:

 

In my humble opinion and as an observer of history, I suspect that Syria, a nation made up of Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Turks, Druze, Isma'ilis and Shiite Muslims, will ultimately be divided geographically and socially along ethnic and religious lines.  While Bashar al-Assad may have been dictatorial, he did serve to generally keep the peace among these wide-ranging groups of people.  Now that control of the nation has fallen into the hands of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Islamic, Salafi-jihadist militant group that Washington has declared as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, it will be interesting to see how tolerant they are of non-Sunni Syrians.  I'm guessing that they won't be terribly tolerant of those that they view as infidels.

 

Right now, we don't know how involved Washington was in the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.  What kind of back channel negotiations took place with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Turkey, Israel and other players in the region that wanted to see an end to the Syrian nation and its close ties to Tehran?  Only time will tell just how convoluted the geopolitics are of the very brief military actions that saw an end to one of Israel's key foes in the Middle East.

In any case, as Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations have shown the world, Washington's efforts at nation-building have been a complete and utter failure with a long series of unintended and painful consequences.  Syria will be no different.  In this case, you can assure yourself that any intervention by Washington was done on behalf of and at the behest of its proxy in the Middle East - Israel.