Syrian soldiers and children at a checkpoint in the besieged and devastated city of Homs, Syria, March 23, 2014. For both sides of Syria's civil war, Homs, a central Syrian crossroads with a diverse prewar population of 1 million, is crucial to the future. (Sergey Ponomarev / The New York Times)
In 2010, WikiLeaks became a household name by releasing
251,287 classified State Department cables. Now, a new book collects in-depth
analyses of what these cables tell us about the foreign policy of the United
States, from authors including Truthout staff reporter Dahr Jamail and our
regular contributors Gareth Porter, Robert Naiman, Phyllis Bennis and Stephen
Zunes.
"The essays that make up The WikiLeaks
Files shed critical light on a once secret history," says Edward
Snowden.
The
following is Chapter 10 of The WikiLeaks Files:
"...History shows that
public understanding of US foreign policy depends crucially on assessing the
motivations of US officials. It is likely inevitable as a result that US
officials will present themselves to the public as having more noble motivations
than they share with each other in private, and therefore that if members of
the public had access to the motivations shared in private, they might make
different assessments of US policy. This is a key reason why WikiLeaks'
publishing of US diplomatic cables was so important.
The cables gave the public a recent window into the
strategies and motivations of US officials as they expressed them to each
other, not as they usually expressed them to the public. In the case of Syria,
the cables show that regime change had been a long-standing goal of US policy;
that the US promoted sectarianism in support of its regime-change policy, thus
helping lay the foundation for the sectarian civil war and massive bloodshed
that we see in Syria today; that key components of the Bush administration's
regime-change policy remained in place even as the Obama administration moved
publicly toward a policy of engagement; and that the US government was much
more interested in the Syrian government's foreign policy, particularly its
relationship with Iran, than in human rights inside Syria...
Knowing that the US never really abandoned a regime-change
policy in Syria informs our understanding of the question of US military
intervention in Syria today. It shows us that the US is not an innocent victim
of circumstance, having to consider the use of force because diplomacy has been
exhausted; rather, the US faces a situation that it helped create, by pursuing
regime change for years and never fully switching to diplomacy."
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