Attack on Ghouta, One Year On

This week marks the first anniversary of the infamous chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta.

What makes that incident significant, both politically and historically, is the fact that, despite the evidence of Syrian government involvement being non-existent, the Obama administration nearly began a war with Syria using Ghouta as the pretext.

As the months have passed however, scientific studies amassing an impressive body of evidence have shown that, not only were Washington’s claims of “certainty” that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons in their war with extremist fighters utterly baseless, but in fact the reality was quite the opposite – the rebels were the most likely culprits of the attack.

Additionally, in the year since the Ghouta attack, the nature of the war in Syria, and specifically the way in which it is understood in the West, has changed dramatically. The so-called rebels have been defeated in regular battles and skirmishes with Syrian military forces, while the specter of ISIS has emerged as the embodiment of evil in the eyes of the Western public.

While ISIS (now the Islamic State, or IS) was summarily executing Syrian civilians in Aleppo and smaller towns in Syria, they were no threat. While they were merely destroying Christian and Shiite shrines, crucifying prisoners, and sowing terror throughout Syria, they did not constitute a serious problem.

However, now that the IS has emerged on the world stage, controlling parts of Syria and Iraq, and expanding into Lebanon, the equation on the ground in Syria has changed. With the West, in particular the United States, desperately seeking to reestablish a politically dominant position in Syria and delegitimize Assad and his government, the pretext for aggression has shifted from chemical weapons and Assad’s ‘butchery’ to the inescapable need to combat the IS.

Though conditions on the ground have changed in the last 12 months, the West’s agenda for Syria has changed very little. Regime change is still the name of the game.

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