Gowans has summarized the important findings and implications of a research study published in 2005 by the Congressional Research Service. Unless one reads the report, one has to trust the good judgement of Gowns and his interpretations. I have followed his writings for a number of years, posted many of them, and I have reached the conclusion that he is an absolutely reliable source of information. (For example, last December I posted a "must-read" article by him, a part of which, made an excellent attempt to explain how bourgeois democracy, the capitalist fake version of democracy, works.)
Documents prepared by US Congress researchers as early as 2005 revealed that the US government was actively weighing regime change in Syria long before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, challenging the view that US support for the Syrian rebels is based on allegiance to a “democratic uprising” and showing that it is simply an extension of a long-standing policy of seeking to topple the government in Damascus. Indeed, the researchers made clear that the US government’s motivation to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is unrelated to democracy promotion in the Middle East. In point of fact, they noted that Washington’s preference is for secular dictatorships (Egypt) and monarchies (Jordan and Saudi Arabia.) The impetus for pursuing regime change, according to the researchers, was a desire to sweep away an impediment to the achievement of US goals in the Middle East related to strengthening Israel, consolidating US domination of Iraq, and fostering free-market, free enterprise economies. Democracy was never a consideration.
