Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has ruled the country for more than 24 years, fled his capital, Damascus, to Moscow early Sunday, December 8, where he was reportedly granted political asylum by Russia. The al-Qaeda affiliates that expelled him declared a “mujahideen” victory in Damascus. Both US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have claimed credit for the regime change, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of course, deserves a large share of the credit as well, though he has been more modest than Biden and Netanyahu in claiming credit for Assad’s ouster.

Yet, it is notable that there is still a reticence in the mainstream Western media and discourse to describe this process as a regime change operation supported by the United States and its allies. They claim that this was a 100% organic uprising driven exclusively by the Syrian people despite years and mountains of evidence to the contrary. The West pretended that this was the case (a popular uprising) even as the world watched the coalition of American power and its followers crush Syria using proxy warfare, starvation sanctions, continuous bombings, and a military occupation explicitly designed to cut off Syria from oil and wheat in order to prevent its reconstruction after the Western-backed civil war.

Major world events do not happen in isolation from the actions of major world powers that have a vested interest in their outcomes, experts say. Some may bristle at the prospect of US military involvement in Syria, they say, “because they would rather believe, or give the impression, that a brave group of heroic freedom fighters single-handedly overthrew a super-evil dictator as if in a Hollywood movie. But real life doesn’t work according to their preferences. In real life, the globe-spanning empire that is the United States is credibly involved in such events,” says Australian researcher Caitlin Johnston.

“When I say this, some may want to accuse me of denying the capacity of Syrians to act independently, which is the worst sin anyone can commit,” Johnston explains. “But nothing I say actually contradicts the idea that Syrians have agency. It is clear that many Syrians wanted Assad gone, and it is clear that many people had their own reasons for fighting him that had nothing to do with the American empire. There is no contradiction between this obvious fact and the well-documented fact that the US central power structure was embedded in Syria from the beginning of the violence in 2011, and that its involvement led to the events we are witnessing today.”

Johnston points out that no one is claiming that the American empire controlled the minds of the Syrians and forced them to revolt against their government without any agency of their own, “but the truth is that the (American) empire put a big thumb on the scale to ensure that one group of Syrians got what it wanted rather than another group.”

“You can claim that Western intervention to change the regime will produce positive results this time around (as long as you are willing to ignore mountains of historical evidence that consistently prove otherwise), but what you cannot do on any rational basis is deny that Western intervention to change the regime in Syria occurred,” the researcher adds.

“Western liberalism is funny in that its adherents depend so much on their ability to psychologically detach themselves from the actions of Western empire, and even from the very existence of that empire,” Johnston says. “Western liberals live in an alternate, imaginary world where Western powers mind their own business and Western leaders watch violence and destruction unfold around the world while calling for peace and diplomacy from their podiums. They pretend that empire does not exist, and that conflicts, coups, and uprisings still occur in ways that serve Washington’s strategic interests by sheer coincidence.”

“Indeed,” the researcher says, “it is impossible to understand what is going on in the world unless we understand that the United States is the center of an undeclared empire that works tirelessly to bring the world’s population under the umbrella of a single power that it presides over. The few countries that have successfully resisted being absorbed into this imperial bloc are the official villains that we Westerners have all been trained to hate: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a few socialist countries in Latin America. I used to include Syria on this list, but that is no longer the case, as Syria has been absorbed into the bloc dominated by the American empire.”

The researcher predicts that soon the imperial bloc will turn its fire on the next nation that is not conquered, or that is trying to hold on to its national master, “since this is the basic dynamic behind all major conflicts on earth. This dynamic is being removed from the mainstream Western worldview with the help of Western propaganda services known as the mass media, as well as the Western indoctrination system known as education. This dynamic is being removed from our worldview and hidden from our attention by the plutocrats and managers of empire who are working to manipulate our information systems, because otherwise we would realize that the American empire is the most tyrannical and abusive power structure on the planet today.”

“No other power has spent the century, except the United States, the 21st century—the 25 years since its beginning (and the 1990s as well)—killing people by the millions in wars of aggression while maintaining hundreds of military bases around the world, constantly crushing any group that opposes its dictates anywhere on earth; not China; not Russia…certainly not Iran, not Cuba. Not Bashar al-Assad.” “Only the American empire has practiced tyranny and abuse of the world to this extent in the modern era. And now the imperial bloc is rolling in to absorb its next target, having doubled in size to the size of Syria after having spent years digesting that country through proxy war, sanctions, relentless bombing campaigns by Israel, and a military occupation designed to steal its food and fuel.”

“Our world can never know peace as long as we are ruled by an empire fed by endless rivers of human blood,” Johnston says.