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'US aims to replace Syrian govt. with pro-Western regime'

Friday, 04 March 2016 6:14 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 04 March 2016 6:47 PM ]

The US and its allies aim to overthrow the democratically elected Syrian government to replace it with a pro-Western regime, Stephen Lendman says.

The United States and its allies aim to overthrow the democratically elected Syrian government and replace it with a pro-Western regime, according to an American author and radio host.

“There are lots of reasons that America wanted to eliminate [the government of] Bashar al-Assad,” Stephen Lendman told Press TV on Friday.

The main reason that Washington targets any nation is when that state is not aligned with American and Western interests, Lendman stated. “The key thing is Assad’s independence.”

“The neocons, the imperialists in Washington have picked out at least seven countries in the Middle East and Central Asia for regime change,” he added.

"The US and Israel plotted the initial protests in Damascus in 2011 that resulted in the country’s ongoing conflict,” Lendman observed.

Since March 2011, the United States and its regional allies, in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have been conducting a proxy war against Syria. The years-long conflict has left somewhere between 270,000 to 470,000 Syrians dead and half of the country’s population displaced.

Washington’s intention to overthrow Syria's legitimate government results from his refusal to back a Qatari gas pipeline project, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wrote in an article published by Politico on Thursday.

The US decided to topple Assad after he declined to back a gas pipeline project of the Qatari government, wrote Kennedy, an American attorney and nephew of US President John F. Kennedy.

The project was aimed at building a gas link from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey to Europe.

The $10 billion pipeline project first surfaced in 2000 and the CIA went ahead with the plan until nine years later Assad announced that he would not support the pipeline initiative, a move that could grant Qatar direct access to European energy markets via terminals in Turkey.

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www.presstv.co.uk