The recent "Paris Attacks" are highly unfor-tu-nate not only because they claimed the lives of 130 inno-cent peo-ple, but also because they united the world against the Syr-ian Rev-o-lu-tion. And this is not the first time ISIS, through its actions, has had this effect on this Revolution. The Syr-ian Rev-o-lu-tion began back in 2011 as an off-shoot of the Arab Spring. It started when in March of that year across all section of Syr-ian soci-ety came on to the street to demand fun-da-men-tal changes to the polit-i-cal sys-tem of the coun-try. The pro-tes-tors demanded not just removal of the pres-i-dent, but a removal of all the pil-lars of power and their rebuild-ing accord-ing to the will of the populace. The ini-tial reac-tion of the west-ern gov-ern-ments showed that they had not fore-seen this event. The Al Assad fam-ily has ruled Syria with a bru-tal, iron fist for decades. First under Hafiz Al Assad and there-after under his son Bashar Al Assad, even the sus-pi-cion of dis-sent was enough for an indi-vid-ual to be arrested, impris-oned, tor-tured (inex-tri-ca-bly con-nect to impris-on-ment in Syria) and quite pos-si-bly being killed. There-fore, the gen-eral expec-ta-tion amongst pol-icy mak-ers in the West was that no one in Syria would dare to try and repli-cate what the Mus-lims had done in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. For exam-ple, on the 7th of March 2011, just days before the protests in Syria erupted, For-eign Affairs mag-a-zine pub-lished an arti-cle by Michael Br"on-ing under the title "The Sturdy House that Asad Built: Why Dam-as-cus is not Cairo". Two months later, how-ever, on the 19th of May 2011, Br"on-ing was forced to write another arti-cle: "Cracks in the House of Asad: Why a Sup-pos-edly Sta-ble Regime Is Look-ing Frag-ile". In addi-tion to sur-prised Amer-ica was also not pleased with the events in Syria. Behind the scenes it had been closely coop-er-at-ing with the Syr-ian regime, namely. When Hafez Al Assad died in 2000, Amer-ica pushed for his son Bashar to take over. Madeleine Albright, then Sec-re-tary of State, said in this regard "I think that it is impor-tant for Dr. Bashar Assad to take on the man-tle and for the tran-si-tion process to be pur-sued". Ever since Bashar Al Assad was been vis-ited by John Kerry and other lead-ing mem-bers of the US Con-gress on numer-ous occa-sions and Wik-ileaks revealed that accord-ing to Bashar Al Assad the US and Syria agreed on 70% of all issues dis-cussed dur-ing these meet-ing. Con-se-quently, Syria was very sup-port-ive of the Amer-i-can War on Ter-ror, even going so far as tor-tur-ing indi-vid-u-als on behalf of the Amer-i-cans. Unsur-pris-ingly, there-fore, Amer-ica responded to the civil upris-ing in Syria by call-ing for a "polit-i-cal set-tle-ment". It orga-nized an inter-na-tional Action Group to gather sup-port for this objec-tive and after a meet-ing in Geneva this Action Group released a "final com-mu-nique" that explained the exact mean-ing of this "polit-i-cal set-tle-ment": "Estab-lish-ment of a tran-si-tional gov-ern-ing body with full exec-u-tive pow-ers that could include mem-bers of the gov-ern-ment and oppo-si-tion, and should be formed on the basis of mutual con-sent", to ensure "Con-ti-nu-ity of gov-ern-men-tal insti-tu-tions and qual-i-fied staff" includ-ing "mil-i-tary forces and secu-rity ser-vices". In other words, the Amer-i-can plan was for the head of the regime to fall, such that the other pil-lars of the regime, the mil-i-tary and the secu-rity agen-cies, could be preserved. Thus, Amer-ica decided it would not sup-port the Syr-ian Rev-o-lu-tion-ar-ies and Hillary Clin-ton explained why this deci-sion was made. "If you're a mil-i-tary plan-ner or if you're a sec-re-tary of state and you're try-ing to fig-ure out do you have the ele-ments of an oppo-si-tion that is actu-ally viable, that we don't see", she said, the mean-ing of which is that Amer-ica was unable to find any-one of influ-ence among the oppo-si-tion will-ing to work for Amer-ica. Aron Lund, a Syria ana-lyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think -tank, con-firmed Clinton's assess-ment. "You are not going to find this neat, clean, sec-u-lar rebel group that respects human rights and that is wait-ing and ready because they don't exist", he said, and that is why the Amer-i-can attempts to develop a "mod-er-ate oppo-si-tion" have been a com-plete fail-ure - the influ-ence of the Syr-ian National Coun-cil (SNC) has always been lim-ited to the lob-bies of the hotels they have been stay-ing in , while most of the few Syr-ian fight-ers that were trained by Amer-ica ended up rejoin-ing the inde-pen-dent Syrian rev-o-lu-tion-ary groups. In this sit-u-a-tion the arrival of ISIS in Syria has actu-ally been very help-ful to the Amer-i-cans. An analy-sis by Janes Intel-li-gence found that for the period Novem-ber 21 2013 to Novem-ber 21 2014 around 64% of verifi-able ISIS attacks in Syria tar-geted other rebel groups and just 13% of tar-geted the Syr-ian regime. Sim-i-larly Al Assad's forces left ISIS alone to a large extent. Of their 982 oper-a-tions dur-ing the same period just 6% tar-geted ISIS. Effec-tively, there-fore, the arrival of ISIS in Syria brought the Syr-ian Rev-o-lu-tion-ar-ies a sec-ond enemy and exposed them to a sec-ond front, as Al Assad con-tin-ued his attacks on them from the South and West of the coun-try while ISIS started attack-ing them from East. One would not expect Amer-ica to make too big a deal of ISIS, there-fore, since their arrival on the Syr-ian scene sup-ported the Amer-i-can objec-tive to keep the Syr-ian regime in place, i.e. pre-vent the Syrian Rev-o-lu-tion-ar-ies from defeat-ing Al Assad. And indeed, the Amer-i-can attacks against ISIS in Sep-tem-ber 2014 hardly hit ISIS tar-gets - they were just a cover to tar-get the inde-pen-dent rev-o-lu-tion-ary groups. Obama recently acknowl-edged that America's objec-tive vis-`a-vis ISIS has never been elim-i-na-tion. He said: "from the start our goal has been first to con-tain and we have con-tained them. They have not gained ground in Iraq and in Syria they'll come in, they'll leave. But you don't see this sys-temic march by ISIL across the ter-rain" Despite all this, dur-ing the sum-mer of 2015 Amer-ica began to fear the down-fall of the Syr-ian regime. In short suc-ces-sion the regime lost Idlib, Homs, Deraa, Aleppo and Deir Al Zor to the rev-o-lu-tion-ar-ies, leav-ing only Lat-takia and Dam-as-cus under its con-trol. But the rev-o-lu-tion-ar-ies were gath-er-ing to attack both these areas in a coor-di-na-tion. Amer-ica and Rus-sia then began to for-mally meet to dis-cuss the sit-u-a-tion. The out-come of these meet-ings was that the Rus-sians began to sup-port the regime mil-i-tar-ily. The Russ-ian For-eign Min-is-ter Sergey Lavrov said: "We all want a demo-c-ra-tic, united, sec-u-lar Syria, we dis-agree (with Amer-ica) on the details and how to get there. But we agree on a few steps that will be taken shortly" The dis-agree-ment Lavrov hinted to was on the role for Bashar al Assad in America's "polit-i-cal set-tle-ment", but both par-ties soon reached a set-tle-ment in this area as well. In Octo-ber 2015, after 4 years of insist-ing that Al Assad had to go, Amer-ica sud-denly declared he had to go but not nec-es-sar-ily imme-di-ately. In other words, Amer-ica came over to the Russ-ian posi-tion and the dis-agree-ment between Amer-ica and Rus-sia was resolved. Accord-ing to Israeli sources, the Rus-sians recently also told Assad dur-ing his Octo-ber 20 visit to Moscow that even-tu-ally he will have to go. There-fore, when early Octo-ber 2015 Rus-sia launched mil-i-tary oper-a-tions in Syria, this was not an attempt to under-mine the Amer-i-can inter-ests in the coun-try. Since Rus-sia acted in agree-ment with Amer-ica, it was in sup-port of these interests. Just as Amer-ica had done in Sep-tem-ber 2014, Rus-sia only used ISIS as a jus-ti-fi-ca-tion for its mil-i-tary actions in Syria because it did not begin with hit-ting the areas of ISIS oper-a-tions. Rather, it attacked the areas from where the Syr-ian regime was being threat-ened and attacked by the Syrian rev-o-lu-tion-ary groups. Lavrov explained this by say-ing: "We see eye to eye with the coali-tion on this one. We have the same approach: it's ISIL, Al-Nusra and other ter-ror-ist groups." At that moment, the coali-tion referred to by Lavrov did not yet include France. In fact, in Syria France had a his-tory of going against the plans of the American-led coali-tion. For exam-ple, in 2013, when Assad used chem-i-cal weapons and killed 1,400 peo-ple in the Ghouta area near Dam-as-cus, France pushed hard for a mil-i-tary inter-ven-tion while US pres-i-dent Barack Obama refused to act. More recently, when Amer-ica back-tracked on its orig-i-nal demand that al-Assad had to go, sig-nal-ing that he could remain in a tran-si-tional gov-ern-ment for a few months, France con-tin-ued to stand firm demand-ing the removal of Al Assad. And when Amer-ica and Rus-sia were nego-ti-at-ing over the Al Assad issue, the French sud-denly launched a crim-i-nal inves-ti-ga-tion into the Assad regime for war crimes. The French mil-i-tar-ily oper-a-tions in Syria, which began in Sep-tem-ber 2015, were also under-taken with-out coor-di-na-tion with Amer-ica. Con-se-quently, France wasn't part of the so-called Five Eyes intel-li-gence alliance com-pris-ing Amer-ica, Aus-tralia, Canada, New Zealand and Great-Britain. Under this alliance the five men-tioned coun-tries share the infor-ma-tion they col-lect about ISIS, and Syria more gen-er-ally. The French had pressed the Amer-i-cans and British to allow them to join the Five Eyes intel-li-gence alliance but were refused, obvi-ously for no coop-er-at-ing with the alliance on the ground. The attacks on Paris on the evening of Fri-day, Novem-ber the 13th, greatly helped Amer-ica to deal with this situation. Amer-ica was at that moment meet-ing the inter-na-tional com-mu-nity in Vienna, with the aim of unit-ing the world behind its plans for Syria. Offi-cially, the meet-ing was orga-nized to "find a solu-tion", but the pro-ceed-ings made clear this was not the case. Amer-ica assumed lead-er-ship of all the work-ing groups set up by Staffan de Mis-tura, the UN envoy for Syria, and defined for each the agenda. The other lead-ing coun-tries in the world, Rus-sia, Great-Britain and France, were not given a lead-er-ship role and were only allowed to par-tic-i-pate in the dis-cus-sions based on the agen-das pre-pared by Amer-ica. In other words, Amer-ica wanted the inter-na-tional com-mu-nity to agree with the solu-tion it pro-posed, and Rus-sia even com-plained about this. This lead to progress at the con-fer-ence being stalled. That is, until Paris was attacked. On the 14th of Novem-ber, namely, the par-tic-i-pants in the con-fer-ence sud-denly reached an agree-ment. As the inter-na-tional media reported: "Sev-en-teen nations, spurred on by Friday's deadly attacks in Paris, over-came their dif-fer-ences on how to end Syria's civil war and adopted a time-line". "The ter-ror-ist attacks in Paris gal-va-nized the diplo-mats, who at pre-vi-ous talks had been unable to resolve the dis-cord within their ranks. The Paris attacks 'show that it doesn't mat-ter if you're for Assad or against him', said Lavrov, 'ISIS is your enemy'." The details of this Amer-i-can plan for Syria are as follows: In 1 month, or, by the 14th of Decem-ber 2015: Diplo-mats will recon-vene to review progressBy the 1st of Jan-u-ary 2016: UN will seek to con-vene Syr-ian gov-ern-ment and oppo-si-tion in for-mal negotiations In 6 months, or, by the 14th of May 2016: Cease-fire between Syr-ian gov-ern-ment and oppo-si-tion groups, process for draft-ing new constitution In 18 months, or, by the 14th of May 2017: Free elec-tions admin-is-tered by the UN held under the new con-sti-tu-tion. It was also decided that ISIS terrorist along with the al-Qaeda affil-i-ated Nusra Front, would be placed on a list of groups sub-ject to mil-i-tary strikes even when a cease-fire is in place. The list, man-aged by the King-dom of Jor-dan, can later be expanded to include other groups in Syria that refuse to sub-mit to the plans of the America-led coali-tion. This agree-ment was sup-ported even by France. Phone calls between the Amer-i-can Sec-re-tary of Defense Ash Carter and the French Min-is-ter of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian over the week-end fol-low-ing the Paris attacks had cleared the air between the two coun-tries, as caused France to accept being led by Amer-ica in Syria. Amer-ica then began to share intel-li-gence infor-ma-tion with France, and the two coun-tries began to coor-di-nate mil-i-tary attacks in Syria. French air-planes began to attack tar-gets in Syria selected for them by the Amer-i-cans. In con-clu-sion, there-fore, the arrival of ISIS in Syria has helped pro-long the rule of the Al Assad regime, it has jus-ti-fied Amer-ica, Russ-ian and French (and oth-ers') mil-i-tary action in Syria that in real-ity sup-ports the Al Assad regime, and it has united the world behind the Amer-i-can plan for Syria.

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Deciphering America's Syrian Plan

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