However, in the case of Syria, that carefully constructed ideological
framing is now imploding as a result of its own internal
contradictions. The white supremacist “responsibility to protect,” the
21st century version of the “white man’s burden,” requires an adolescent
bad guy-good guy framing. The dictator/authoritarian figure and the
suffering people longing for freedom -- Western style freedom that is-
provided a familiar cultural framing for this epic struggle between
“good” and “evil.”
In Syria, Assad was the villain and the Kurds the virtuous other who
took on the savage forces of ISIS -- that appeared out of nowhere
according to this version of the story. While the Kurds were saving
Western civilization from ISIS -- and that is how it was framed because it is the
only way real support is generated for non-European life (you have to
be saving white folks) -- the good guy revolutionaries and moderate
opposition in the form of the FSA were fighting Assad to liberate the
millions of people who didn’t seem to understand that they were being
oppressed by Assad.
But all of that has now been turned on its head with the Trump
administration’s decision to abandon the Kurds and give a greenlight to
the illegal invasion of Syria by Turkey, with none other than the FSA acting as the point of the spear operating with the Turkish army to crush the Kurds.
In the anger toward Trump, the corporate press forgot the memo that
the FSA were the good guys who had been supported by U.S. authorities
from the very beginning of the manufactured war. The new framing became
the “Turkish supported FSA,” especially after gruesome videos began to
circulate that demonstrated in graphic images what many of us knew,
along with the CIA and most of the honest foreign policy community, that
the FSA was always al-Qaeda’s Syria operation in the form of Jabhat
al-Nusra and other jihadist militias.
Independent journalist Aaron Mate, who was one of the many journalist
smeared as an Assadist simply because he attempted to raise objective
questions about what was unfolding in Syria and the impact of U.S.
policies in the region, suggests that now that it is no
longer viable to pretend that the FSA and the so-called moderate rebels
ever existed, all those who smeared independent analysts on this
question should apologize.
-- Ajamu Baraka, "Syria: Exposing Western Radical Collaboration with Imperalism" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).