Editor’s
Note: Following is a TNI interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former
White House national-security adviser under Jimmy Carter and now a
counselor and trustee at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and a senior research professor at the School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. The interview was
conducted by Jacob Heilbrunn, TNI senior editor.
Heilbrunn: Here
we are five years into the Obama administration, and you’re stating
that the West is engaging in “mass propaganda.” Is Obama being drawn
into Syria because he’s too weak to resist the status quo? What happened
to President Obama that brought us here?
Brzezinski: I
can’t engage either in psychoanalysis or any kind of historical
revisionism. He obviously has a difficult problem on his hands, and
there is a mysterious aspect to all of this. Just consider the timing.
In late 2011 there
are outbreaks in Syria produced by a drought and abetted by two
well-known autocracies in the Middle East: Qatar and Saudi Arabia. He
all of a sudden announces that Assad has to go—without, apparently, any
real preparation for making that happen. Then in the spring of 2012, the
election year here, the CIA under General Petraeus, according to The New York Times of
March 24th of this year, a very revealing article, mounts a large-scale
effort to assist the Qataris and the Saudis and link them somehow with
the Turks in that effort. Was this a strategic position? Why did we all
of a sudden decide that Syria had to be destabilized and its government
overthrown? Had it ever been explained to the American people? Then in
the latter part of 2012, especially after the elections, the tide of
conflict turns somewhat against the rebels. And it becomes clear that
not all of those rebels are all that “democratic.” And so the whole
policy begins to be reconsidered. I think these things need to be
clarified so that one can have a more insightful understanding of what
exactly U.S. policy was aiming at.
![Γιατί το Ουίμπλεντον είναι το ιερό δισκοπότηρο του τένις - Χόρτο, σαμπάνια, φράουλες και κρέμα [εικόνες]](http://www.iefimerida.gr/sites/default/files/federer_0.jpg)
