Stephen Lendman

Brookings Institution calls itself a Washington-based NGO "conducting high-quality, independent research" to advance three goals: democracy, economic and social welfare for all, and a "more safe, prosperous and cooperative international system."

In fact, it's a corporate financed imperial tool. It serves wealth and power. It deplores democracy, social welfare, and equal opportunity. It supports Washington's longstanding Syria and Iran regime change agenda. Doing so ignores rule of law principles.

In June 2009, its report titled "Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran" was a regime change policy paper. Six pro-Israeli right-wing ideologues prepared it.

Topics addressed included military options for disarming Iran, invasion, air strikes, allowing or encouraging an Israeli attack, regime change, and containment.

It falsely accused Tehran of developing nuclear weapons, supporting terrorist groups, and engaging in "wider efforts to overturn the regional status quo."

It claimed "incontrovertible" evidence that "Iran has aided groups seeking to overthrow the governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain (and arguably Lebanon and Israel as well) at various times," but didn't reveal any.

It said Iran helped derail Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. It asked if Washington "should (be) willing to accept the Islamic Republic at all." It stressed "ticking clock" urgency to act. It stopped just short of demanding war.

It ignored over 200 years of Iranian history. For generations, Tehran neither attacked or threatened other nations. It doesn't now.

It ignored other issues mattering most. It does what its corporate backers wish. It's well financed to lie, deceive, misreport, and support imperial lawlessness.

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Bill Van Auken

“Our policy is to try to accelerate the arrival of that tipping point” at which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is toppled, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman explained last March to the US Senate’s foreign relations committee.

Thursday saw the latest incarnation of this policy. The devastating car bombs that slaughtered 55 people and left nearly 400 more wounded in Damascus mark a new stage in the criminal imperialist campaign for regime change in Syria.

Having hijacked the protest movement that began in Syria in March of last year in the bid to turn it into a vehicle for installing a client regime in Damascus, Washington went on to back the formation of the “Friends of Syria”, modeled upon a similar international formation used to prepare the war on Libya.

It declared the Syrian National Council, a collection of Islamist politicians from the Muslim Brotherhood and aging exile assets of various Western intelligence agencies to be the “legitimate representative” of the Syrian people and backed the formation of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) to carry out armed attacks on Syrian security forces.

Washington’s closest allies in the Arab world, the dictatorial feudal monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, set up a $100 million fund to place FSA members directly on their payroll, while the US announced it was sending “non-lethal” aid to these same forces, including sophisticated communications equipment, night vision goggles and US intelligence.

None of this has had the desired effect. The FSA has barely put up token resistance to the Syrian military in most areas, and there is no sign of mass popular support for the Syrian National Council.

So now comes the turn to terrorist bombings. The explosions Thursday in Damascus were only the latest and most deadly in a string of bomb attacks over the past several weeks. On Friday, the Syrian government reported that it had foiled another suicide bombing, this one in the commercial capital of Aleppo involving a car loaded with a ton and a half of explosives.

The aims of this campaign are to terrorize the Syrian people and, together with the unilateral US and European Union sanctions, paralyze the country’s economy, creating conditions for a social and political implosion. At the same time, it is designed to prove that the United Nations cease-fire agreement brokered by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan is unworkable.

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Philip Giraldi

A tipping point is where physical momentum, inclined in one direction, reverses its course, stabilizes, and then begins to move the opposite way. Those of us who have been arguing for a sane United States foreign policy in the Middle East have well understood that the odds on shifting the prevailing narrative have been heavily against us thanks to the overwhelming resources possessed by a powerful domestic lobby. Ten years ago in America, it was impossible to place even a letter in a mainstream newspaper or magazine that was in any way critical of Israel. Apart from Pat Buchanan, no one on television provided a critique of Israel and its policies. In the U.S. media, Israel was ever the beleaguered little democracy surrounded by savage Arabs.

But then, all of a sudden, the conspiracy of silence began to break down. It began with the revisionist history of the antecedents of the Iraq War as that conflict continued to drag on. Many began attributing Washington’s initiation of the fighting, at least in part, to Israeli interests. Philip Zelikow, chief counsel for the 9/11 Commission Report, famously noted in March 2004 that the war was “to protect Israel,” surely an exaggeration but containing more than a kernel of truth. Many also began to observe that the agitation for a new war with Iran was following the same pattern, with supporters of Israel leading the charge.

In 2006, former President Jimmy Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It provoked considerable outrage and highly publicized resignations from the board of the Carter Foundation together with charges that Carter was supporting Palestinian terrorism. But the big breakthrough came with the publication of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in the following year. It became a New York Times best-seller, and it suddenly became acceptable to talk about Israel without the usual bromides. For the first time, people in America were taking notice of the power of the Israel lobby and the inherent downside for U.S. national interests.

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