Disinformation and deflection
Ever since the start of the direct military intervention of the US in the Syrian war in September 2014 (and indeed before), Syrians have long protested that beyond its mandatory declarations of support for the ‘Syrian Spring’, the US has been actively supporting the Assad regime and preventing its “collapse”. Syrians argued that the US stood opposed to the victory of the armed revolution, preferring the Assad regime’s survival – whether with or without Assad personally at its head – than the prospect of Assad leaving power by force.
On the other hand, many self-denominated “anti-imperialist” westerners repeating the propaganda of Assad, Mubarak and Saleh – all western collaborators who put on the robe of “anti-imperialism” when their populations turned against them – argued that it was in fact the revolutionaries of the ‘Arab Spring’ who were the western-orchestrated “conspiracy”. The irony that the regime itself would welcome US airstrikes in 2014 and celebrate it across its national media, whilst Assad personally would boast that western governments criticised him in public but provided his regime with intelligence in private, earned a new title for this category of western propagandists: more pro-Assad than Assad himself.
