The Uprising in Syria

Abstract

The United States, Great Britain and France toppled the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in about 8 months with the bombings carried out under the mantle of NATO, the participation of al-Qa’ida militants and the special forces of Qatar and other countries. Unlike Libya, it would have been hard to believe that the protests in Syria, which began on January 26, 2011, almost at the same time as the uprising in Benghazi and presented by the international media as peaceful demonstrations, would have transformed into an insurgency by March in four regions of Syria simultaneously, and that the armed struggle would continue for more than a year despite the harsh and bloody repression by the Bashar al-Assad government. But as Polonius remarked on Hamlet’s behavior, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”

In fact, there was a method to the demonstrations in both Libya and Syria. There were objective and subjective conditions for the upheavals that occurred in the Arab countries, but the United States and its partners of the European Union had nevertheless methodically developed a scheme with a broad economic, geopolitical and strategic dimension in the Middle East and in the Maghrib, especially with respect to the uprisings in Libya and Syria that began in 2011. The “cold revolutionary war”, including the protests to capitalize on international public opinion, which remained within the bounds of legality, soon evolved into a “hot revolutionary war”.