by Caitlin Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone:

President Trump reiterated to the press today that the United States is maintaining its military presence in Syria not to patrol the nation’s border with Turkey, but to control its oil fields.

“We’ve kept the oil,” Trump said. “We’ve stayed back and kept the oil. Other people can patrol the border of Syria, frankly, and Turkey, let them – they’ve been fighting for a thousand years, let them do the border, we don’t want to do that. We want to bring our soldiers home. But we did leave soldiers because we’re keeping the oil. I like oil. We’re keeping the oil.”

This open “kick their ass and take their gas” policy is nothing new for America’s reality TV president; he’s been saying it for years. It was recently addressed head-on by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who said during an interview that it’s nice to have a US president who is honest about America’s true motives in the Middle East for once.

“As for Trump, you might ask me a question and I give you an answer that might sound strange,” Assad said. “I say that he is the best American President, not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president.  All American presidents perpetrate all kinds of political atrocities and all crimes and yet still win the Nobel Prize and project themselves as defenders of human rights and noble and unique American values, or Western values in general.  The reality is that they are a group of criminals who represent the interests of American lobbies, i.e. the large oil and arms companies, and others.  Trump talks transparently, saying that what we want is oil. This is the reality of American policy, at least since WWII.  We want to get rid of such and such a person or we want to offer a service in return for money.  This is the reality of American policy. What more do we need than a transparent opponent?”

Syrian President Assad said on Thursday that President Trump is the best type of president for a foe due to his open talk of annexing Middle Eastern oil. pic.twitter.com/F0ZHv7dEKd

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 1, 2019

Some establishment media chose to deliberately misinterpret Assad’s scathing criticism of US foreign policy as praise for Donald Trump, with The Hill tweeting out “Syrian President Assad praises Trump: He is ‘the best’ because he’s ‘most transparent president’”, and The Jerusalem Post running the headline “SYRIAN LEADER BASHAR ASSAD: DONALD TRUMP IS THE ‘BEST U.S. PRESIDENT’–The Syrian leader, who allegedly committed war crimes against his own people to suppress public demands and win a bloody civil war, seemed to approve of Trump’s honesty.”

Many US foreign policy critics have been rightly attacking this administration’s open resource grab; if Russia had forcefully invaded a sovereign nation and seized its oil fields without permission the American political/media class would be shrieking hysterically and working to manufacture support for World War Three within minutes. Yet that is what American exceptionalism leads the empire to do without a second thought.

Assad’s comments mirror what I wrote more than a week ago (so please note that I’m not an Assadist–he’s a Caitlinist), but it’s important to point out that Trump’s oil narrative is just the latest in a long list of excuses that the US government and its apologists have been making to justify the illegal occupation of Syria.

We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because the Syrian government was massacring its people. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria in order to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East. We were told that the US must intervene in Syria because Assad used chemical weapons. We were told that the US must occupy Syria to fight ISIS. We were told that the US must continue to occupy Syria to counter Iranian influence. We were told the US must continue to occupy Syria to protect the Kurds. Now the US must continue to occupy Syria because of oil.

These wildly different reasons the public has been given for America’s need to forcibly insert a military presence into Syria all have only one thing in common, and that’s America forcibly inserting a military presence into Syria. This is because they are not reasons, but excuses. The US forcibly inserted a military presence into Syria with the full intention of keeping it there, and then started diddling a bunch of completely different narratives in order to justify the thing it already wanted to do long before any of those excuses arose.

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