By John Vibes

This week, it seems that the U.S. military may be getting the green light to escalate their war in Syria, after an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, which was consequently blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Most Americans don’t realize it, but the U.S. military has already been at war in Syria for years, with indiscriminate drone strikes that many times kill innocent civilians, with thousands of troops also on the ground. This is a war that has been waged without the knowledge of most Americans and without a declaration of war from Congress.

The coverage that this war has received in the mainstream press—from both liberal and conservative sources—has suggested that the US military is just there trying to help. However, classified State Department documents leaked in 2015 showed that regime change in Syria has been a major goal of the US establishment since well before the Arab Spring when the protests and rebellions in the region began.

Sure enough, as the years have passed and the cracks in Syria’s political system have deepened, the U.S. military and NATO have taken every opportunity to further their goal of regime change—most of the time, at the expense of the Syrian people. From arming and funding the rebels who would eventually become ISIS, to drone bombing schools and hospitals, the U.S. military has done nothing but add to the death and destruction that people in this part of the world are experiencing.

Considering the pain and bloodshed that the US military and their allies have unleashed upon Syria, it should be easy for anyone with this information to see that the renewed threats on Assad have everything to do with opportunism, and nothing to do with helping Syrians or “punishing the bad guys.”

Sadly, this is nothing new. The U.S. government has a long history of senselessly killing millions of people in wars of conquest that were sold as “humanitarian interventions.” Most recently, the war of regime change in Libya has left the country in ruins, torn by civil war and ravaged by slave traders, where there was once a thriving civilization.

Let’s also not forget about Afghanistan or Iraq, where regime change was achieved, but over a decade later these places are still riddled with terrorism, occupied by foreign troops and experiencing a quality of life much lower than they had prior to US intervention.

It is now well established that the war in Iraq was built on a total lie, and that Saddam Hussein never actually had the weapons of mass destruction that were used as a pretext for U.S. invasion. It is quite possible that these stories of Assad using chemical weapons on Syrian people could be lies as well. Former Congressman Ron Paul seems to think that it could be a false flag attack, designed to justify an invasion.

Regardless of what actually happened in these chemical attacks, the U.S. government has no business getting involved because their track record has proven to be horrible in these types of situations, regardless of their stated motives.

In the string of military conflicts that the United States and NATO have been involved in since World War II, they have always attempted to maintain the high road by claiming that they were responding to some kind of threat, and apparently helping the people that they were bombing.

This approach is largely accepted by the general public who is either too afraid or unable to suspect malicious intentions on the part of their masters. In helping themselves to rationalize the nonsensical things that are happening in their name, many people are firm believers in the idea that their government is doing good and “policing the world.”

However, military goals and ambitions have nothing to do with “policing the world.”

Just as ancient Rome’s government could not care less about “spreading civilization” in their conquests, today’s Western governments are not interested in “spreading democracy” or “policing the world,” but rather, their goal is to rule the world.