Empire ! expanding emperical proof.

In his 1859 essay, On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mills described the power of empire. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,” he wrote, “provided the end be their  improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also believed in the bloody conquest of others as “a triumph of Christianity and civilization” that was “clearly pre-ordained in the sight of Providence.”

Syria is an enduring project. This is a leaked joint US-UK intelligence file:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces … a special effort should bemade to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup demain [sic] incidents within Syria,working through contacts with individuals … a necessary degree of fear … frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention … the CIA and SIS should use … capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, though it might have come from a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, A Collision Course for Intervention , whose author says, with witty understatement:  “It is highly likely that some western special forces and intelligence sources have been in Syria for a considerable time"

In Anglo-American scholarship, influential theorists known as “liberal realists” have long taught that liberal imperialists – a term they never use – are the world’s peacebrokers and crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. They have taken the humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon that serves warmongering power. Laying out whole nations for autopsy, they have identified “failed states” (nations difficult to exploit) and “rogue states” (nations resistant to western dominance).

Whether or not the regime is a democracy or dictatorship is irrelevant. The same is true of those contracted to do the dirty work. In the Middle East, from Nasser’s time to Syria today, western liberalism’s collaborators have been Islamists, lately al-Qaeda, while long discredited notions of democracy and human rights serve as rhetorical cover for conquest, “as required.” Plus ca change…

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32370.htm


Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive "regime change" in another Arab country they accused of spreading terror and threatening the west's oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures.

Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria's pro-western neighbours, and then to "eliminate" the most influential triumvirate in Damascus

The plan called for funding of a "Free Syria Committee", and the arming of "political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities" within Syria. The CIA and MI6 would instigate internal uprisings, for instance by the Druze in the south, help to free political prisoners held in the Mezze prison, and stir up the Muslim Brotherhood in Damascus

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/27/uk.syria1