The Arab Spring: Made in the USA

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>]

http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/10/the-arab-spring-made-in-the-usa/

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Enquête sur le rôle des États-Unis dans les révoltes arabes
(Investigation into the US Role in the Arab Uprisings) is an update of
Ahmed Bensaada’s 2011 book L’Arabesque Américaine. It concerns the US
government role in instigating, funding and coordinating the Arab
Spring “revolutions.” Obviously most of this history has been
carefully suppressed by the western media.

The new book devotes much more attention to the personalities leading
the 2011 uprisings. Some openly admitted to receiving CIA funding.
Others had no idea because it was deliberately concealed from them. A
few (in Egypt and Syria) were officially charged with espionage. In
Egypt, seven sought refuge in the US embassy in Cairo and had to be
evacuated by the State Department.

Democracy: America’s Biggest Export

According to Bensaada, the MENA Arab Spring revolutions have four
unique features in common:

None were spontaneous – all required careful and lengthy (5+ years)
planning, by the State Department, CIA pass through foundations,
George Soros, and the pro-Israel lobby.1
All focused exclusively on removing reviled despots without replacing
the autocratic power structure that kept them in power.
No Arab Spring protests made any reference whatsoever to powerful
anti-US sentiment over Palestine and Iraq.
All the instigators of Arab Spring uprisings were middle class, well
educated youth who mysteriously vanished after 2011.

Nonviolent Regime Change

Bensaada begins by introducing non-violent guru Gene Sharp (see The
CIA and Nonviolence), his links with the Pentagon and US intelligence,
and his role, as director of the Albert Einstein Institution, in the
“color” revolutions.2 in Eastern Europe and the attempted coup against
Hugo Chavez in 2002.))

The US goal in the Arab Spring revolutions was to replace unpopular
despotic dictators while taking care to maintain the autocratic
US-friendly infrastructure that had brought them to power. All
initially followed the nonviolent precepts Sharp outlines in his 1994
book From Dictatorship to Democracy. In Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US
and their allies were clearly prepared to introduce paid mercenaries
when their Sharpian “revolutions” failed to produce regime change.

Follow the Money

Relying mainly on Wikileaks cables and the websites of key CIA pass
through foundations (which he reproduces in the appendix), Bensaada
methodically lists every State Department conference and workshop the
Arab Spring heroes attended, the dollar amounts spent on them by the
State Department and key “democracy” promoting foundations3, the
specific involvement of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Obama’s 2008
Internet campaign team in training Arab Spring cyperactivists in
encryption technologies and social media skills, US embassy visits,
and direct encounters with Hillary Clinton,  Condoleezza Rice, John
McCain, Barack Obama and Serbian trainers from CANVAS (the CIA-backed
organization that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000).

Bensaada focuses most heavily on the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt.
The Washington Post has estimated approximately 10,000 Egyptians took
part in NED and USAID training in social media and nonviolent
organizing techniques. For me the most astonishing information in this
chapter concerned the role of an Egyptian exile (a former Egyptian
policeman named Omar Afifi Suleiman) in coordinating the Tahrir Square
protests from his office in Washington DC. According to Wikileaks, NED
paid Suleiman a yearly stipend of $200,000+ between 2008-2011.

When Nonviolence Fails

Arabesques$ devotes far more attention to Libya, Syria and Yemen than
Bensaada’s first book.

In the section on Libya, Bensaada zeroes in on eleven key US assets
who engineered the overthrow of Gaddafi. Some participated in the same
State Department trainings as the Middle East opposition activists and
instigated nonviolent Facebook and Twitter protests to coincide with
the 2011 uprisings in Tunisian and Egypt. Others, in exile, underwent
guerrilla training sponsored by the CIA, Mossad, Chad and Saudi
Arabia. A few months after Gaddafi’s assassination, some of these same
militants would lead Islamic militias attempting to overthrow Assad in
Syria.

Between 2005 and 2010, the State Department funneled $12 million to
opposition groups opposed to Assad. The US also financed Syrian exiles
in Britain to start an anti-government cable TV channel they beamed
into Syria.

In the section on Syria, Bensaada focuses on a handful of Syrian
opposition activists who received free US training in cyberactivism
and nonviolent resistance beginning in 2006. One, Ausama Monajed, is
featured in the 2011 film How to Start a Revolution about a visit with
Gene Sharp in 2006. Monajed and others worked closely with the US
embassy, funded by the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). This
is a State Department program that operates in countries (such as
Libya and Syria) where USAID is banned.

In February 2011, these groups posted a call on Twitter and Facebook
for a Day of Rage. Nothing happened. When Sharpian techniques failed
to produce a sizable nonviolent uprising, as in Libya, they and their
allies (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Jordan) were all set up to
introduce Islamic mercenaries (many directly from Libya) to declare
war on the Assad regime.

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