a proxy war that it is now being escalated into a direct military intervention.
This escalation of U.S. military intervention in Syria is a result of the U.S. policy makers’ recognition of the obvious fact that the Syrian government enjoys the support of a significant part of the country’s population and cannot be directly defeated by a bunch of mercenaries armed and funded by Western powers and their proxy states in the region. As Karen Koning AbuZayd, a former U.S. diplomat and member of the UN independent panel investigating human rights violations in Syria, stated in a recent interview with CBC Radio, “there’s quite a number of the population, maybe as many as half, if not more, who stand behind him [Assad].”7
After more than 20 months of U.S. orchestrated criminal effort to impose a regime change on Syria, which has resulted in close to 50 thousand deaths, 700,000 refugees—three quarters of them women and children, according to the UN—and the displacement of more than two million people out of a population of 20 million,8 a shift of policy toward direct military intervention in Syria seems to have become inevitable if the U.S. is to achieve its hegemonic domination over a completely subdued “New Middle East.”
