A 2007 New Yorker article written by renowned journalist Seymour Hersh revealed a plan under the Bush Administration to organize, arm, train, and deploy a regional army of terrorists, many with ties directly to Al Qaeda, in a bid to destabilize and overthrow bothSyria and Iran. The plan consisted of US and Israeli backing, covertly funneled through Saudi proxies to conceal Washington and Tel Aviv’s role, in building the sectarian extremist front.

According to Seymour Hersh’s 2007 article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?,” Saudi Arabia, a more credible candidate for openly interfacing with the militants, openly admitted that it was a danger, but that they “created it,” and therefore could “control it,” in meetings with Washington.The plan called for not only setting up terrorist enclaves in nations neighboring Syria, including Lebanon, Jordan, and US-occupied Iraq, but also for building up the Muslim Brotherhood, both inside Syria’s borders and beyond – including in Egypt. [emphasis added]

Hersh also pointed out the long history between the Saudi Royals and their funding of religious fanatics for the purposes of destabilization since the 1970s’ proxy war against the Soviet Union, the Iranians, and to the more recent (in terms of the writing of the article) possibilities of using such types of fighters in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Iran, and Syria. He wrote,

Nasr went on, “The Saudis have considerable financial means, and have deep relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis”—Sunni extremists who view Shiites as apostates. “The last time Iran was a threat, the Saudis were able to mobilize the worst kinds of Islamic radicals. Once you get them out of the box, you can’t put them back.”

The Saudi royal family has been, by turns, both a sponsor and a target of Sunni extremists, who object to the corruption and decadence among the family’s myriad princes. The princes are gambling that they will not be overthrown as long as they continue to support religious schools and charities linked to the extremists. The Administration’s new strategy is heavily dependent on this bargain.

Nasr compared the current situation to the period in which Al Qaeda first emerged. In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Hundreds of young Saudis were sent into the border areas of Pakistan, where they set up religious schools, training bases, and recruiting facilities. Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and his associates, who founded Al Qaeda, in 1988.

In a more telling passage, however, Hersh describes the connection between the Saudis, Jihadists, and the U.S. government. He wrote,

This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.” [emphasis added]

Hersh continued by stating that the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Americans have “developed a series of informal understandings about their new strategic direction.” In addition to the security of Israel, the weakening of Hamas, and the countering of “Shiite ascendance in the region,” there was also a fourth goal of the three entities. Hersh wrote,

Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah. The Saudi government is also at odds with the Syrians over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, in Beirut in 2005, for which it believes the Assad government was responsible. Hariri, a billionaire Sunni, was closely associated with the Saudi regime and with Prince Bandar. (A U.N. inquiry strongly suggested that the Syrians were involved, but offered no direct evidence; there are plans for another investigation, by an international tribunal.)

Hersh also quoted Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze minority in Lebanon and adamant Assad opponent who stated to Hersh that he had actually traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with then Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the possibility of weakening and destabilizing the Assad government in Syria. Hersh stated,

Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.”

There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefited the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents. [emphasis added]

Hersh also spoke with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who told Hersh that he believed that the United States wished to cause the partitioning of both Lebanon and Syria. Hersh states that, “In Syria, he [Nasrallah]said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.”

The idea that Syria would be partitioned is an interesting concept to say the least since it echoes the typical geopolitical strategy of “Micro States and Mini States” espoused by Neo-Liberal members of the governing class such as Zbigniew Brzezinski. Yet, the ruling regime at the time of the writing of Hersh’s article and the interview conducted with Hassan Nasrallah was the Neo-Conservative regime of Bush/Cheney, a branch of the Anglo-American ruling class that typically expresses geopolitical strategy in the manifestation of hard power and ham-fisted warfare.

The fact that the Brzezinski method of using puppet states, mercenaries, and religious fanatics against target states while “leading from behind” was being planned and orchestrated during a branch of the ruling elite that typically exhibits a different strategy is telling in that it shows both that the plan to partition Syria was developed long before the recent “rebellion” and that the plan crosses not only both political parties but also both factions of the ruling elite. In short, the existence of such a plan during the Bush/Cheney regime and the attempted implementation of the plan by the Obama regime shows that not only are political parties operated by the same (somewhat) hidden forces but even the hidden hand behind the hidden forces are themselves more centralized than what many informed political analysts would choose to believe.

The Syrian partition issue is also interesting considering the fact that a potential false flag attack was discovered by German hackers involving the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian death squads to be blamed on the Assad government and accomplishing this goal. This “attack” would have then been followed by the entrance of ambulances emblazoned with the words “Syrian People’s Relief.” Although the pretext would have been humanitarian aid, the ambulances would have been, in reality, nothing more than armored personnel carriers designed to create “buffer zones” in the border areas of Syria during the midst of a crisis and the panic that would have resulted.

Yet Hersh’s information, which was published in 2007, was not the first mention of the Syrian destabilization being manufactured by Western powers.

In 2005, for instance, writing about the possible options for defeating the then-powerful insurgency in Iraq, Michael Hirsh and John Barry of Newsweek wrote an article entitled, “‘The Salvador Option: The Pentagon May Put Special -Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq,’” where the writers acknowledged a plan by the Pentagon to install Special Forces hit teams or death squads made up of religious fanatics to engage in the policy of assassinations and outright terror. This strategy came to be known as “The Salvador Option,” after the methods used by the United States in El Salvador in the 1980s which resulted in the deaths of nearly 50,000 innocent civilians.

With this in mind, Hirsh and Barry write tellingly of the plan to use such a strategy in Iraq and Syria. They state,

[O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called ‘snatch’ operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria,activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries. [emphasis added]

It is interesting, then, that death squads would be invading and terrorizing the nation of Syria only six years later, attempting to accomplish some of the very goals set forward by the Anglo-Americans as indicated by the aforementioned reports.

Yet, while the majority of the fighting (as well as the looting, beheading, torturing, and raping) is being undertaken by the death squads themselves, one also wonders just what hand actual intelligence agents have played in the foreign-backed destabilization.

It is almost a certainty that the Western intelligence agencies that coordinated so much of the foreign insurgency would not leave the death squads, with their quality of intellect (or more accurately the lack thereof), alone to control the entirety of the operations themselves. The operation itself is much too important to be left in the hands of mere death squad operatives.

It is for this reason that many have suspected for some time that the intelligence agencies and military special ops divisions have themselves been involved in the fighting; or, at the very least, the direct coordination inside Syria.

Without a doubt, U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford has played a major role in the organizing of the Syrian death squads, alongside former CIA Director and U.S. General David Petraeus as I have documented in past articles such as “Syria Under Attack By Globalist Death Squad Experts.” In addition, serious questions have been raised regarding the role Norwegian General Robert Mood has played in the death squad organization.

The question of direct intervention via actual intelligence agents as opposed to mere coordination, however, has been a murkier question. Yet, although harder to decipher in terms of hard evidence, such a suggestion is not entirely without evidence.

After all, it was reported early on in the Syrian destabilization effort that 13 French military officers acting as mercenaries/death squad participants were captured by the Syrian government, all the while the mainstream Western media reported the events as “peaceful protest” and a grassroots level organic Syrian uprising against an oppressive regime.

Around the same time, hacked emails obtained by Anonymous in December 2011 and released by WikiLeaks in steady drips ever since February 27, 2012, revealed that NATO troops, including those from the U.S., U.K, and France, were likely already operating inside Syria.

The emails were obtained from the private U.S. intelligence firm, Stratfor, and were apparently sent by Stratfor’s Director of Analysis, Reva Bhalla (bhalla@stratfor.com) and contain discussion of a December confidential Pentagon meeting which was attended “by senior analysts from the US Air Force, and representatives from its chief allies, France and the United Kingdom.

Tellingly, the email’s author stated that US officials “said without saying that SOF [special operation forces] teams (presumably from the US, UK, France, Jordan and Turkey) are already on the ground, focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” Later in the email, it was stated that “the idea ‘hypothetically’ is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.”

This should come as no surprise since Western troops and intelligence agents maintained a heavy presence inside Libya during the destruction of that nation, increasing their presence as the destabilization and subsequent invasion succeeded.

Regardless of the direct involvement of Western forces inside Syria, however, there is absolutely no doubt that the Syrian conflict is very much the result of Anglo-American treachery, control, and coordination. The entire invasion of secular Syria with religious fanatics, mercenaries, and maniacs was the brainchild of Western governments and Israel, the Mad Dog of the Middle East, along with the usual Gulf state feudal monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others acting as proxies and puppets.

Indeed, with the recent announcement of even more commitments to openly arm, aid, and assist the death squads, the idea that the Syrian destabilization was organized and is being controlled by Western governments is no longer up for debate.

The only debate yet to be had is whether or not citizens of Western countries will continue to allow their governments to run roughshod over both their rights and the rights of sovereign people in foreign countries.

Clearly, the continued assault on Syria is part of a major agenda that is slowly unfolding before our eyes. It would be wise for Americans and all other Western nations to get off of the Path to Persia before the mutual destruction of the world is the only thing left at the end of the road.