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2025-12-08 Jeremy Kuzmarov – Transcript and Summary
The Taylor Report, December 8, 2025
Jeremy Kuzmarov – Syria Anatomy of Regime Change
00:00:00 – Phil Taylor
Good morning.
Welcome to CIUT 89.5 FM in Toronto. This is the Taylor Report. I’m Phil Taylor, your host. We’re going to be talking today with one of the authors of a book, “Syria, Anatomy of Regime Change”…of regime change. And one of the authors, Dan Kovalik, is going to be speaking tonight in Hamilton at 7 p.m. And he’ll be, and that’s at 24 Main Street West in Hamilton, New Vision United Church. And he’ll also be speaking tomorrow evening at 6.30 at “A Different Booklist,” at 779 Bathurst Street, and it is Dan Kovalik, and the book is “Syria, Anatomy of Regime Change,” and we expect to be talking shortly with the co-author, Jeremy Kuzmarov, and… But it’s very important. I hope people will be able to attend the talks by Mr. Kovalik. Kovalik is a very busy and brilliant spokesperson, I’d say, for the cause of truth in journalism. But also, he is a lawyer who has represented the Steelworkers Union in Pittsburgh, the International Office, as it’s called. And also… He’s been in the news somewhat lately, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. But I think we’re joined now by Jeremy Kuzmarov. Are you there, Jeremy?
00:01:53 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Yes, I’m here.
00:01:55 – Phil Taylor
Well, thank you very much for talking to us. Your book couldn’t be more timely. Today is the day, if the front pages are accurate. It’s been one year since the arrival in power of celebrated terrorists who turned out to be statesmen and actually quite wonderful people. They met the President of the United States. I don’t know who else is on the list, but… It’s a really bizarre story, in my opinion, that all these things could happen so quickly. Your book, “Anatomy of Regime Change,” together with Dan Kovalik, forward by Oliver Stone, you have a nice quote in the book. I don’t have it right in front of me, but from Randolph Bourne. And he said, we better get this story straight before all the noise of a glorious war prevails. And, it seems to me, that’s what your book is attempting to do.
I guess, let me ask you the first question, I guess, is it’s being told today, the Globe and the CBC, CNN, that… This taking of power in Syria was a democratic, turns out, democratic process. And it was won by, they’re now calling it an uprising. They do not, none of these outlets are saying the U.S. was involved or Israel or Turkey. It was apparently just a really popular movement, according to them. I think your book makes a strong case. It actually seems to have been a well-planned, well-engineered, long-term effort coming from Western capitals. Is that right?
00:03:59 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
That is correct, yeah. And yeah, the media has been part of this regime change operation, and so have the alternative media. Unfortunately, outlets like “Democracy Now!” are also cheerleading the victory of al-Qaeda in Syria and totally silent about what was the largest CIA covert operation.
The Operation, “Timber Sycamore,” from 2013 to 2018 or so was the largest CIA covert operation since the support for the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s. But more broadly, that was just one phase. We argue in our book that this was basically a 40-year regime change operation that started targeting Hafez al-Assad in the 70s and 80s because the Assads were nationalists. I mean, they may have had their flaws as leaders, but they were authentic Syrian nationalists who, you know, coup-proof prior to the overthrow, you know, because the U.S. had been involved in meddling in Syria going back to the 1940s.
As our book shows, that was the first major CIA covert operation overthrew a nationalist regime in the 40s, and a key issue was an oil pipeline that its leader, al-Quwatli, was refusing to build through Syria. That (proposed pipeline) would benefit foreign oil interests, and Syria was marred by political instability, and this is the period after it gained independence from France. And the Assads, yeah, they had harsh aspects of their rule, but they coup-proofed the government for many years, and they advanced Syria’s economy, and they governed based on the interests of the Syrian population. And they were standing up to the Israelis. They were allied with revolutionary Iran. Those are the reasons they were targeted for regime change. And they had drawn close to the Soviets and the Russians. So they were not a proxy of the West or United States. And that’s what they wanted in Syria.
So they worked for many years. And part of the regime change operation was to demonize over generations to… demonize the Assads and make like they were devils. This went back to the 80s, and they accused them of all kinds of crimes which were not proven, including drug trafficking. They tried to claim Bashar al-Assad had this major drug empire. And we see that kind of propaganda now against Venezuela. And they accuse them of all kinds of crimes. And then look what we see now. There’s silence. This new government was involved from the outset when it came in last December in ethnic cleansing and massacres targeting the Shia Alawite population. And they’re staging protests now, and they’re starting to rise up against this government. But the media has been silent. And during the years of the Syrian war, al-Jolani and his group were carrying out heinous human rights crimes. Things like suicide bombing, raping of women and girls. They didn’t even accuse Assad of doing that, kidnapping and raping young girls. And that’s something that Jolani and his group have been doing consistently for years and terrorizing the Syrian people. Cutting off heads and videotaping it.
00:07:45 – Phil Taylor
I want to ask you about that, by the way. If I could. By the way, I want to remind everybody, this is Jeremy Kuzmarov, and he’s the managing editor of Covert Action Magazine and has authored five books on U.S. foreign policy, including “Obama’s Unending Wars” and “Warmonger.” He lives in Oklahoma, by the way.
Jeremy, that business about how quickly, let’s talk about the media, how nicely they deliver. I’m thinking of an expression we used to hear called “Full-Spectrum-Dominance.” Part of the, whatever a general revealed their little thought pattern, he said that controlling the narrative is an absolutely essential part of the regime change work, and this should win a prize for doing that. You mentioned the cutting off of heads, etc. Now, there’s been headlines in the past couple of days that they’re now finding old evidence against Assad, that there was people tortured, etc. But I remember clearly looking… On mainstream media, footage of prisoners on their knees in special outfits for identification, and men standing behind them, and then in one command, they cut their throats. Who were the people who had their throats cut? I don’t hear media talking about them. Instead, somebody’s looking at photographs found in Germany. Could you talk about that subject, how they’ve managed to control this whole story?
00:09:47 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Absolutely. Well, I mean, there’s an excellent book written a number of years ago, I think in the late 70s, by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. And they presented the thesis of, you know, worthy versus unworthy victims. And that’s what we’re seeing here, you know, related to your point. You know, if they’re allied with the United States and they’re killing people, those victims are unworthy. If they’re enemies of the United States and, you know, can be used for propaganda advantage, then they play it up to no end. So, you know, Assad’s abuses, real or imagined, were played up, you know, to no end. And they’re still, yeah, because I read the New York Times every day and they’re silent about what’s going on now in Syria, but their periodic articles, usually once every week or every two weeks, as you say, oh, we’ve unearthed some new evidence of atrocities, or this woman was tortured allegedly years ago in a prison by Assad.
So, you know, those are the worthy victims, and the unworthy victims are the Shi’a Alawites who are being massacred as we speak. Or all the Syrians who were killed in the war, or Syrian government forces. I mean, they [ed. Jolani’s militias] tortured and brutalized prisoners of war in violation of the Geneva Convention, and just one of the many atrocities they committed. But those are unworthy victims. So I think that analogy was a very good one, and unfortunately we see that in a lot of different conflicts. You can apply it to Ukraine as well. There’s been no attention to the people of eastern Ukraine who’ve been terrorized since 2014 Maidan coup by the Ukrainian military, heavily armed by the United States, starting the Obama administration. No coverage at all about these victims, including the alternative media… has proven to be as fraudulent as the mainstream.
00:11:46 – Phil Taylor
By the way, wasn’t that their biggest success? To me, it’s been a shocking story since, you know, if we were to pick it up at 2011, immediately people bought into it. You mentioned Democracy Now!, but there was Counterpunch, which under Alexander Cockburn had a terrific reputation, and he always approached everything with skepticism, but they went in holus bolus. And they had all these strange stories. They would interview people who nobody had ever heard of before and suddenly they’re calling them journalists and they’re reporting on the ‘crimes of Assad.’
And I’m sorry to say, you mentioned Chomsky. Chomsky got involved with, and maybe you could talk about it a little bit, because it seems to be one of the remaining burning issues in front of them, which is a matter of the Kurdish population, where they had, they romanticized an armed group of Kurds, and they seem to be in a real jackpot today. But I recall Chomsky said they should, the U.S. Air Force should protect them. It’s just like he had a special group there. Everybody else could fight, but he thought the U.S. Air Force, if you recall, they were claiming they were going to withdraw from Syria. I think it was Trump in his first administration who said he was going to withdraw. Chomsky said, well, you’ve got to protect the Kurds. Is that accurate?
00:13:24 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
It is accurate, yeah. I don’t think that was Chomsky’s finest hour. I mean, he’d done some great work in the past, him and Edward Herman to help illuminate these issues and for people to understand it. I don’t know what his thinking was with that. Yeah, there were a lot of… There was a group of leftist intellectuals. I think he signed the letter. It was in the New York Review of Books. And all these supposed leftist luminaries signed this letter that Trump shouldn’t withdraw troops to protect the Kurds. And it obscured the fact that, I mean… The U.S. and CIA were mobilizing the Kurds to fight, as the proxy force in an oil-rich area. And then you had this whole leftist craze over the Rojava, that there’s supposedly this model anarchist society taking root from the Kurdish groups in the Rojava. And yeah, they totally over-idealized and romanticized that. And really, I think this was CIA… propaganda targeting the left. The CIA is very, very savvy in infiltrating left-wing groups. I’m not saying Chomsky was himself compromised, but he may have been dissuaded by some of the arguments being made in these left-wing publications… that were infiltrated by the CIA and by intelligence assets. And they have a long history of doing that.
00:14:55 – Phil Taylor
I’m really glad you, by the way, you really put your finger on something kind of important that I’m remembering, too, is that when Ronald Reagan came in after the debacle in Vietnam and people said, you know, these guys are doing, CIA and others are doing crimes, and they’re too prevalent in our culture. They’re into intellectual journals that they’re paying for and running. And all that. And we need to clean it up.
And then Ronald Reagan came in, and said “we’re not going to address that subject anymore, and we’re not going to say whether or not,” because if I remember, and you can correct me, is Senator Church, I think it was, said, you can’t put intelligence people in a media, in a democratic society. You can’t do that.
And when the Reagan administration came in, they said, well, we’re no longer addressing the matter. We’re not gonna tell you whether we are or not. That seemed to be a, they turned a real corner. And now, as you say, we seem to have an issue of infiltration with people not asking where money comes from to make this type of journalism.
00:16:15 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
I think you’re right, yeah. They use these corporate foundations. And a lot of these upstart or alternative media get money through certain foundation grants. And that’s how the intelligence agencies operate. And they may also plant articles strategically. And I think they’re increasingly savvy, because historically the anti-war movement came from the left. So they target left-wing publications and journals, as well as academia and higher education. Which has been rabidly anti-Assad and pro-regime-change. Academia is another place for that. So yeah, they’re very savvy, and yeah, there’s no transparency, and it’s very difficult to track the funding.
But you can see the kind of articles that they’re publishing, and often they make a deliberate attempt to attack and ridicule anybody who presents genuinely critical analysis and anti-imperialist views. They’re attacked as ‘Assad lovers.’ And, you know, there’s this guy, Shane Bauer. He was all over Mother Jones and Democracy Now! And he was attacking people like, you know, there are a small number of journalists who, you know, were critical, you know, gained some prominence, like Max Blumenthal. He was constantly attacked.
So, and then there was the issue of the chemical warfare. Seymour Hersh broke the story, and there were other independent investigations, including by Robert Fisk, that showed that that was a false flag operation. Assad was blamed for chemical gas attacks that were either carried out by rebels or never actually took place and were staged. But then you had all these left-wing outlets attacking Seymour Hersh and just advancing the official story. And attacking anybody who questioned that as a dupe of Russian propaganda or something like that. But that’s a sign of infiltration of these media. But it had a huge effect, because on the left there was very little activism against Syria, and even today. And, you know, you had these campus movements against Gaza, but they were saying nothing about Syria. And some of the people even supporting U.S. intervention.
00:18:42 – Phil Taylor
Yeah, that was rather disruptive. You had a very popular movement, but there was a disruptive element that caused problems at various demonstrations because they wanted and were working for the overthrow of Assad. It complicated things. [Kuzmarov: “Exactly.”] By the way, a Canadian journalist, Aaron Maté, tackled that. He was rather exemplary in terms of the amount of abuse that they threw at him, but he has held up rather well through this, hasn’t he?
00:19:21 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Absolutely, yeah. I think he’s a very principled and very good journalist, and his writing was very illuminating. But yeah, he was confined to the fringes. I think he left “Democracy Now,” and I don’t know who he works for. He may work with the Grayzone, but he’s kind of marginalized and frequently attacked. But he has done very good reporting, absolutely.
00:19:48 – Phil Taylor
He’s got a very thick skin, the amount of abuse he’s taken. And I noticed, by the way, how well his points have stood up, that the people who were attacking him basically run after they throw a few charges against him. They tend to run away because they can’t deal with the quality of his research on the matter. And the things he’s exposed.
I want to ask you about this, some of the things that have caused people who are ordinarily opposed to colonialism and opposed to intervention, U.S. interventionism, et cetera. It’s a concept of two arguments seem to have been very persuasive in moving people away from that position. One is humanitarian interventionism, and the other is the “human rights” doctrine. That they judge every country that has a foreign policy hostile or adversarial to US and London, et cetera.
They say that they want to look into the human rights record. And there seem to be people who were once, at one time, they were called peaceniks, they were anti-war, et cetera. They bought into this idea that we have a right to scrutinize the human rights records of various countries, and then also we have the “responsibility to protect” people. All that, those seem to be prevailing arguments, right? That didn’t exist previous.
00:21:35 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Yeah, and actually I taught a whole course this past semester on this topic at Brooklyn College. And yeah, we looked at how they kind of manipulated that rhetoric over human rights.
And, you know, you had this growth of human rights consciousness with the Vietnam anti-war movement in the 60s. And a lot of it was focused on U.S. foreign policy and its support for dictatorships, not just in Vietnam, but around the world. And the political economic dimensions.
And that’s something leftist intellectuals of that era, like Chomsky and Herman in their writings, were pointing attention to. But then, yeah, the so-called deep state found a way to manipulate those sensibilities, and growing kind of global consciousness and compassion for human rights, and spin it around as a kind of weapon in the Cold War by focusing on U.S. adversaries and their human rights abuse, whether Assad, whether China, the Soviet Union.
And I think that the National Endowment for Democracy played a key role. That was established by the Reagan administration, in the 1980s, to advance political propaganda and spotlight dissidents in countries like China and Russia. So they were able to, yeah, really, and even with Vietnam, once the communists took over, they kind of spotlighted the abuse of the communists to present this kind of revisionist analysis that, oh, the U.S. was actually fighting a noble cause in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan framed it.
And, yeah, they were able to divorce any kind of anti-imperialist sensibility from the human rights movement and channel it into ultimately supporting these humanitarian interventions, but often they distorted the political goings-on in the countries that were targeted for these humanitarian interventions, they oversimplified conflicts and they made it seem like there was a bad guy.
They exaggerated or even outright fabricated atrocity stories, as occurred with Syria, as occurred with Libya, and they marshaled liberal opinion in support of these imperialistic endeavours. Which ultimately destroyed human rights in those countries completely, and just destroyed the entire fabric of the nation state, as we’ve seen. In Syria and Libya, the nation state is disintegrating and the quality of life is plummeting back to Middle Ages levels.
00:24:21 – Phil Taylor
Your book points out that, again, you establish such a pattern of that we had the experience with Libya where you have an advanced economy, basically in terms of delivery to the people of employment, of schools, all the basic things that make for a decent life and all that. To demonize Gaddafi and bring him down with a group that appeared almost overnight. And it’s basically the same playbook, right, that they delivered.
Similar to Syria, they were both very strong voices, anti-colonial voices, leading voices 20, 30 years ago. And no one thought there’d be any problems because they were basically successful. But I don’t know if you noticed, we had the funeral of Cheney and there was Obama and Bush and it looked like, to me it summarized the whole situation. Cheney was torturing people in Abu Ghraib and people were horrified. Then some years later, he passes on and there’s Obama and there’s Bush. And a little child from Abu Ghraib was Mr. Jolani, right? What happened there at Abu Ghraib? Can you tell us a little about his background? It’s always strange to me, that story.
00:26:11 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Yeah, well, I think the theories, I mean, there’s a clouding mystery as to what happened. I mean, many suspect that he was kind of turned, because he was a terrorist fighting against the U.S. forces in Iraq. He was then imprisoned for several years at Camp Bucca. And, you know, who knows what kind of mind control and programming he underwent. Because, I mean, the military had these mind control programs. And, you know, offshoots of the old CIA MK-Ultra. Where they’re masters at kind of hypnotizing and programming people. They develop all these techniques for doing that. So it’s believed that al-Jolani was turned while he was in prison and he may have been subjected to mind control techniques.
00:27:04 – Phil Taylor
On that matter, I just want to ask you this. Among the striking things to me is that the horror story of Abu Ghraib is basically lost, but you remember all those photographs and they actually prosecuted low-level American military personnel. They found the lowest possible ranking reserve corporal to lock up for a year or so. My memory is that Obama decided that they weren’t going to release any more of those pictures. Those pictures were devastating, but… It’s curious that out of that they managed to graduate this guy. Is it possible, by the way, that he could have been an agent the whole way? I mean, sometimes you put a guy in prison with other prisoners, right? Yeah.
00:27:59 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Well, the other thing, it makes it absurd that they’re claiming they have to go in and overthrow Assad because he tortured people, and yet they’re running a vast torture gulag. And Dick Cheney sanctioned water-boarding.
00:28:16 – Phil Taylor
He called it enhanced interrogation.
00:28:18 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Yeah. So the irony is just unbelievable and how people could fall for this. It shows, as you say, they deserve an Academy Award. And I think they’re manipulating people’s mind in the West. And related to the other question, I mean, I don’t know exactly what happened, but Yeah, it could be he was an asset all along. Who knows?
At some point, they recruited him. And, I mean, now he’s doing the bidding. He’s not really the leader for Syria. He’s basically a foreign asset running Syria. And he’s doing everything to benefit foreign powers. I mean, he said he’s going to have a Trump Tower. He’s doing everything. He’s allowing the Israelis to expand their occupation of the Golan Heights and take… more and more Syrian land and mineral wealth. He’s selling off the oil, privatizing it. He’s probably going to go forward with oil pipeline projects that they long wanted. So he’s basically doing everything on command that a foreigner would want. He’s not ruling in the interest of his own people. And I don’t know how long he can last. I mean, there’s already the Shiite Alawite population becoming more and more active. And maybe a return to civil war in Syria in the near future.
00:29:40 – Phil Taylor
Well, and you have a chapter which is very pertinent for Canadians because about the White Helmets … so-called. And it’s interesting, by the way, a helmet is a hat, so basically the ‘white hats,’ that is the good guys. It was created. And we just learned in Globe and Mail about one week ago that there are now, I think, four Canadian citizens, Syrian Canadians, who are in the cabinet, such as it is, of Jolani. And two of them were from the White Helmets. Can you tell us a little story? Again, it’s a humanitarian group, apparently just grew out of the desert with a little fertilizer and water. But there’s never any mention of the British intelligence officer and who provided all the money. Could you talk about that?
00:30:41 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Sure. Well, yeah, in the White House, I mean, as you say, there was a huge information war going on for years and years. And I think the West won the information war with regard to Syria. They may have lost it with the Israel-Gaza, but they won it with regard to Russia, Ukraine. Oh, there they’re losing from the battlefield.
But Syria, they won the information war, and I think White Helmets was a major coup, and they had this award-winning film that was made about them, and it was very, very heavily publicized that these were these great humanitarians who were saving people – [Phil: “That one did get an Academy Award.”] Yeah, it actually won the Academy Award.
They’re saving people from the depredations of Assad’s butcher that they were presented in the media. But it turned out, as you say, that the organization was founded by a British intelligence agent, James Le Mesurier, who died under very suspicious circumstances. And that they were linked with Al-Qaeda and that they were actually participating in military actions.
00:31:55 – Phil Taylor
And they were permitted to call themselves, you quote them in the book, fiercely independent. Fiercely independent. Two of them are now in the cabinet.
00:32:06 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Yeah. That’s amazing, yeah.
00:32:10 – Phil Taylor
By the way, what happened to the poor old Red Cross? I recall when they tried to steal the label of Red Cross at one point. There was some kind of little ploy where they were being regarded as a Red Cross when there actually was a Red Cross in Syria. So they knocked them off.
00:32:27 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Yeah, exactly. And they probably knocked off any legitimate aid, so regular Syrians who needed aid weren’t actually getting it.
00:32:37 – Phil Taylor
Yeah. Oh, go ahead. I’m sorry.
00:32:42 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
I mean, the human rights situation was just devastating with the, when you compound the effects of the war with the devastating sanctions they’re applying. And then yeah, they’re basically hijacking the aid, all aid organizations in the country. So, you know, as far as human rights, the situation is truly horrific for average Syrians.
00:32:46 – Phil Taylor
Mm-hmm.
For my own information, you mentioned, is it called Operation Sycamore or Sycamore something? What is that?
00:33:18 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
(Operation) “Timber Sycamore.”
00:33:21 – Phil Taylor
By the way, we haven’t mentioned money, but a lot of money. has been spent on this popular uprising. And Sycamore goes way back, right? Can you talk about that? But also this issue, where does the money come from for all the weapons, for the base in Idlib, et cetera?
00:33:43 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Well, and there are other facets, I mean, that the book goes into, like… The National Endowment for Democracy for years was sponsoring anti-Assad media and opposition groups. So that’s another aspect. But the Timber Sycamore, yeah, was a CIA operation started by the Obama administration.
And it poured in, I don’t know the exact total off the top of my head, but I think the data is in the book. It’s certainly well over a billion dollars. And it was the largest CIA COVID operation since the 80s, you know, Mujahideen effort against the Soviet Union. And similarly, in both cases, the CIA was supporting the regressive hardline Islamic fundamentalist group, arming them.
In the case of Timber Sycamore, they were armed in Jordan, Turkey, and they were trained there. This was a criminal operation. A lot of the weapons were smuggled from Eastern Europe. They used an Azerbaijani airline. It was kind of shady of the Iran-Contra in many ways.
They were procuring weapons from mafia groups in Eastern Europe, and Obama cozied up to Bulgarian leader Boyko Borisov, who had strong ties with organized crime. And so, very, very shady stuff. And, yeah, they’re arming these terrorists to basically terrorize the Syrian people.
And, I mean, you know, they admitted that there were no moderates. They tried to preserve the fiction that they’re moderate rebels. But then even Joe Biden gave a speech at Harvard and admitted there’s no moderates. And the group they’re funding, or like the group Jolani was part of, that were involved with terrible atrocities, head-cutting and abuse of women, and things like suicide bombing. And they’re implicating a lot of massacres that are cited in the book, some of them. I mean, the book’s not exhaustive, so another researcher would probably find more massacres than we detail, but there are certainly a lot of them.
00:36:04 – Phil Taylor
You know, there’s been this curious situation in the international community, so-called. That’s a term that kind of irritates me, but it does, I guess, at the United Nations.
Jolani has been given status. I think he’s even been to the UN. He’s certainly been to Washington, and he’s been to Moscow. I don’t know if he’s going to make it to China. But I was thinking, one element of this, and your book touches on it, is foreign fighters that they basically carried out most of the dirty work in terms of killing people. And there is one group that is basically from an area called, I think, East Turkestan. It’s actually a province of China, Xinjiang, I believe. And a representative of the new government visited China, and the Chinese news service, they said item one of the discussion was the terrorists, as they described them, who are in Syria, are not to ever show up in China. And they said the Syrians gave them some undertaking of that. But it looks like maybe they got a new project that China’s already calling out saying don’t even try that. Could you talk about who those guys are?
00:37:44 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Well, the East Turkestan was a separatist movement in Xinjiang province, led by Islamic fundamentalists. And I think some of their fighters… fought in Afghanistan as well as Syria. And I think the book, you know, cites the number of foreign countries that were involved in supporting this Timber Sycamore and foreign fighters that were in Syria.
And I forget the number off the top of my head, but it was certainly a lot of different countries. And, yeah, that was one of the groups. And that conflict is misunderstood, you know, in the West. China is accused of genocide, but it’s taken totally out of context that there was an Islamic uprising and terrorism directed against Han Chinese citizens. I think China was trying to re-educate them. They never resorted to large-scale violence to put down this uprising, but in any event, that conflict is completely misrepresented in the Western media.
Unfortunately, there’s a pattern. Our citizens are poorly informed about world affairs because the media just totally distorts these conflicts. Unfortunately, our education system is not filling the gap either primarily.
00:39:10 – Phil Taylor
It is striking. Your book really makes it clear that this, the intelligence operation, the regime change operations, is just a part and parcel of running an empire. When Libya ends, Syria begins, Iraq ends, and trouble begins. It’s like it never sleeps. And it doesn’t call off the drive for hegemony. It’s like it’s a 24-7 operation, right?
00:39:50 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Absolutely, yeah. And Syria was viewed as a major success. As he pointed out at the beginning, these media outlets are still gushing. And Thomas L. Friedman, the imperial messenger, as he was called in the book by Bell and Fernandez in the New York Times, and December 8th, of last year, he had this calm raving about how great this was, that Assad has fallen, and it’s the light at the end of the darkness.
And the Wall Street Journal as well. And the Wall Street Journal is validating the Israeli policy in Gaza. They’re like, oh, look, we changed the map of the Middle East in one fell swoop and undermined Iran. And who cares about the… They say nothing about the you know, hundreds of thousands of deaths, whether in Gaza or, I mean, the immiseration of the Syrian population.
I mean, I attended a forum where we had doctors from Syria. They were talking about the effect of the war and the sanctions, and these were medical doctors from Syria. And they were in tears and describing just the total breakdown of their society and just the plunging of living standards. And the sicknesses that they had to deal with because of malnourishment of kids.
And they said, you know, that’s one reason people couldn’t continue to fight to defend the country. And, you know, some were going to terrorist groups because they paid a lot of money and their families were starving. And they just described a horrible situation.
And, I mean… Where is the humanity? It’s horrible to see people suffering like that. And these people have no concern. The empire managers are just inhuman.
They don’t care. They think, oh, the U.S. gained some strategic advantage out of this, but it’s caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and immiseration of people. And it’s a nebulous strategic advantage because, again, Syria will probably be marred by instability because this government, it’s so unpopular, and it may plunge into further civil war. And that’s ultimately not that great. Oil companies, to build a pipeline, need political stability. So they may ultimately not profit that much out of this. So, I mean, it is questionable. I can see that Iran is weakened because Assad was a close ally of Iran. But, I mean, the humanity is just… I don’t know how anybody could… because ‘I have no compassion for other humans.’
00:42:35 – Phil Taylor
Well, I guess I’m tempted to ask you one last question here. They set a fire, they destroy things, they declare a victory and move on, but aren’t they—I shouldn’t put it that way— Do you think they’re losing some steam with this? I mean, in other words, the Gaza thing seems to expose a lot of problems in terms of propaganda.
They haven’t won that propaganda war because the people, certainly Canada, U.S., around the world are hearing and seeing, and they just aren’t buying anymore this talk of, oh, we’re, you know, this is, Israel represents Western civilization and all that. What’s your view on this? Are they having to make up new language? Are they losing steam, or do you think that it’s going the other way? What’s your opinion?
00:43:33 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
I think they are losing steam around the world. I think we’re moving toward more multi-polar world order. I think China is gaining a lot of ground in capital economically. I think a lot of countries are turning more to China and even Russia. I mean, you see that in Africa. In West Africa, new governments are you know, liberating themselves from any French influence, like in Burkina Faso.
They’re paying more for alliances with Russia and China. So, I mean, I think it just further undercuts the, you know, moral high ground that the U.S. or West may have had in any parts of the world.
I think the U.S. population has become more cynical. And that’s why they’re using more and more authoritarian methods, more and more censorship, because the public is kind of not buying it.
They don’t want to spend all that money on wars and regime change that they don’t see yielding beneficial results. So they’re resorting to more authoritarian measures against a population that’s not really on board with what they’re doing.
So, yeah, it’s looking uglier and uglier. I don’t know where this will lead. I mean, they can continue. They still have a very powerful military, a trillion-dollar military budget, and they’re still, you know, they tried to cut NED, but it still has pretty robust funding, which is a kind of soft power that they manipulate into other countries. So, I mean, they’re going to continue doing this. They have a powerful military, but nobody, not too many people are supporting it anymore. I don’t know how it will play out, but I agree. They’re losing ground and they’re hated increasingly, including by their own people. U.S. leaders of recent vintage, like the ones you mentioned, they’re hated. Whether Democrats, whether it’s Obama, Clinton, Bush, Cheney, these people are hated everywhere in the United States, if not the world.
00:45:38 – Phil Taylor
Absolutely.
00:45:39 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
And I think Trump, too. He had some fanatical supporters, but a lot of them are turning against them now, too. Of course, half the population hated Trump to begin with. Something may have to give at some point. You can’t rule in that way when the people hate their leaders. Something will change at some point.
00:46:05 – Phil Taylor
I guess Lincoln’s, ‘you can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.’ And Jeremy Kuzmarov, managing editor of Covert Action Magazine and co-author of “Syria, Anatomy of Regime Change,” Your book couldn’t be more timely. And if there is a turning, you guys have contributed tremendously to it. And you’re right. Obama was loved, but he ain’t no more. Thank you very, very much.
00:46:40 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Well, thank you. Yeah, great discussion.
00:46:43 – Phil Taylor
Pleasure to talk. Thank you very much. We’ll talk soon.
00:46:45 – Jeremy Kuzmarov
Absolutely. Okay, take care. Bye-bye.
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