‘March Madness’ is such a NATO thing. The Western military alliance routinely kicks off conflicts in foreign countries during this particular month, most recently Serbia (1999), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Syria (2011). In that last case, it took a few years for the US to actually invade, but the sanctions and the covert support of anti-government forces began right away.

Remember Bashar Assad, the Syrian president who simply ‘had to go’, according to everyone from then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and then-Secretary of State John Kerry, to then-Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni Silveri. Whatever happened to Assad, anyway? Turns out that he’s still living a quiet life as president of Syria, and hardly ever finds his name being rolled around in the mouths of NATO’s regime change enthusiasts anymore.

Nearly a decade after mounting a propaganda campaign to support a US-led NATO invasion of the country, the State Department’s special envoy to the conflict, Ambassador James Jeffrey, confirmed in 2020 that the US was no longer seeking Assad’s ouster. Instead, he said, it wanted to see “a dramatic shift in behavior,” evoking Japan’s transformation in the wake of the US dropping a couple of bombs on it during World War II.

That’s quite the policy shift. But it can be explained in exactly the same way that a guy who lusts after a girl and gets shot down suddenly starts telling people that he was never really into her anyway. The attitude changed because Washington had no choice. It had tried just about everything, and failed.

The anti-Syrian propaganda, now virtually non-existent, had for years been relentless. We were told that Assad had simply lost control of the country, and that the US and its allies couldn’t risk having ISIS terrorists running around as a threat and trying to establish a caliphate in Syria because Assad simply wasn’t able to stop them. And whenever he did try, he was conveniently accused........

© RT.com