{"id":314333,"date":"2026-03-30T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=314333"},"modified":"2026-03-25T06:48:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T06:48:57","slug":"syria-anatomy-of-regime-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/03\/syria-anatomy-of-regime-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Doors, left to right: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

Dan Kovalik and Jeremy Kuzmarov\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change<\/em><\/a> was published on September 1, 2025. What can it teach us now that the empire has pulled the trigger on three more nations resisting its drive to dominate?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

11 Mar 2026\u00a0<\/em>– In his introduction to Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change<\/em><\/a>, filmmaker Oliver Stone\u00a0calls\u00a0it a warning against what regime change means for the people living in the nations targeted, and a\u00a0call\u00a0to organize to prevent future regime-change wars, but we haven\u2019t been doing well at that, to say the least. Barely more than a year after Bashar al-Assad\u2019s government fell in December 2024, the US military\u2019s elite Delta Force swept into Venezuela to kidnap President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and his\u00a0wife,\u00a0Cilia Flores<\/a>, President of the National Assembly of Venezuela. Then, according to the\u00a0State Department<\/a>, the US government began \u201cmarketing Venezuelan crude oil in the global marketplace for the benefit of the United States, Venezuela, and our allies.\u201d On a particularly humiliating\u00a0note<\/a>, 200,000 barrels of crude oil that would have gone to Cuba were shipped to Israel. Americans had long been conditioned to accept this by the media drone about Maduro being a dictator and a narco-trafficker, an accusation made up out of whole cloth.<\/p>\n

Trump then imposed a harsher blockade than ever on Cuba and even threatened \u201ca friendly takeover\u201d if that didn\u2019t bring the Cuban people to their knees. Next, he followed Israel into war with Iran, which eminent MIT weapons expert\u00a0Theodore Postol<\/a> says could easily go nuclear and spread beyond the Middle East. This goes well past \u201cwhat regime change means for the people living in the nations targeted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many elements of the story of Syria\u2019s fall have been repeated over and over again. Chapter 7, \u201cShades of the Gulf of Tonkin: Chemical Weapons as False Flag\u201d\u00a0 describes the chemical weapons fraud, echoing the Tonkin Gulf fraud used to justify the US entry into the Vietnam War and the weapons of mass destruction fraud used to justify the Iraq War. Obama had tried other arguments to justify \u201cintervention\u201d in Syria, but chemical weapons was the story that finally stuck, convincing many Westerners that US air strikes were necessary. Kovalik and Kuzmarov quote Obama, who asked, \u201cWhat message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?\u201d<\/p>\n

The chemical weapons story, which anguished so many Western leftists, defied logic. Even if Assad were that indifferent to the pain of his own people, why would he do that which would most certainly give foreign aggressors an excuse to attack? As Kovalik and Kuzmarov explain, this appealed to Orientalist stereotypes of despotism and savagery regurgitated by all the corporate media, helping our ruling class and misleaders take us into yet another imperialist war.<\/p>\n

Who would gas their own people? Non-white people of course, which includes Arabs, no matter the actual color of their skin. This argument was strangely persuasive to the liberal intelligentsia even though anti-racism and identity politics are at the heart of their concerns.<\/p>\n

Chapter 8, \u201cA War by Other Means: Sanctions and the U.S. Regime Change Operations,\u201d tells the story of trade strangulation imposed by the overwhelming economic power of the US, who not only deny even basic medicines to sanctioned countries but also restrict trade so as to suppress economic development, causing widespread hardship and unemployment. US sanctions typically frighten less powerful nations into \u201covercompliance,\u201d causing them to refuse to trade with sanctioned countries for fear of falling afoul of the US and, for example, losing their own access to US markets.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 2023,\u201d Kovalik and Kuzmarov write, \u201cmore than 609,000 Syrian children under the age of five were reportedly stunted from chronic malnutrition, 12 million Syrians lacked enough food to meet daily dietary needs, and 90% of Syrians were said to be living in poverty.\u201d The same liberal intelligentsia who fell for the chemical weapons fraud also tend to know little about how sanctions strangle a people and are therefore easy to convince that the suffering of Syrians, Venezuelans, Cubans, or Iranians are due to the incompetence, callousness, or greed of their leaders.<\/p>\n

What do Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran share in common that makes them subject to sanctions\u2019 strangulation, false flags, and military force?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe targets of regime change,\u201d Kovalik and Kuzmarov write, \u201care inevitably leaders who are independent nationalists intent on resisting U.S. corporate penetration of their countries and challenging U.S. global hegemony. Bashar al-Assad fit the bill for the latter because he backed Palestinian resistance groups and stood up to Israel, aligned closely with Iran and Russia, and adopted nationalistic economic policies. Assad was also growing economic relations with China and refused to construct the Trans-Arabian Qatari pipeline through Syria, endorsing instead a Russian approved \u2018Islamic\u2019 pipeline running from Iran\u2019s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon.\u201d<\/p>\n

The details and the pipelines vary, and there does seem to be a pipeline involved more often than not. However, as the late great Glen Ford said, any nation that tries to raise an independent head against the empire becomes \u201cgeostrategic.\u201d That\u2019s why the US had to do away with the socialist New Jewel Movement on the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada in 1983. Grenada\u2019s population is 115,000 and its only export is nutmeg, but even that couldn\u2019t become the people\u2019s property.<\/p>\n

Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran all share fierce resistance to Israel, the last settler colonial state, and to the Zionist expansionism that now has us all wondering what the boundaries of \u201cGreater Israel\u201d are.<\/p>\n

Kovalik and Kuzmarov tell us that Syria\u2019s new ruler,\u00a0Ahmed al-Sharaa claims to \u201clove Israel\u201d and wants to build a Trump tower in Damascus and open up Syria\u2019s oil and gas industry to US corporations. Prior to his ascension to the presidency, al-Jolani headed an Al Qaeda affiliate, Tahrir al-Sham, backed by Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UK, France, Canada, the US, and Israel.<\/p>\n

“The president of Syria,\u201d Trump said, \u201cwho I essentially put there, is doing a phenomenal job.”<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize<\/em> for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at <\/em>ann@anngarrison.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 blackagendareport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Mar 2026\u00a0– In his introduction to Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change, filmmaker Oliver Stone\u00a0calls\u00a0it a warning against what regime change means for the people living in the nations targeted, and a\u00a0call\u00a0to organize to prevent future regime-change wars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":314334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[93,530,742,741,178,1190,413,249,70,557],"class_list":["post-314333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-afghanistan","tag-cuba","tag-iran","tag-iraq","tag-libya","tag-regime-change","tag-syria","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314335,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314333\/revisions\/314335"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}