By the end of this week, Assad will have been fitted up for every appalling horror from the Lusitania to the Nolan Sisters -- with 300+ phantom 'chemical weapons attacks' looming large. All of which I consider significant mostly for the way absolutely none of his government's misdeeds, real or imaginary, would even have been mentionable had he gone through the door held open for him by the Blair regime back in 2002. As folks may remember, Bashar and Asma were courted quite shamelessly by our governing clique, right down to a visit to Madge at yer actual Buck House, all of it written up with the kind of fawning, fashion-parade bubble-headedness that shows the elites are up to something...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1416391/Syrian-president-meets-the-Queen.html

... Blair & Co, clearly, were hoping Assad -- at that point two years into his presidency -- would agree to be Israel's catamite, to turn away from Russia, to be a servile friend to the US empire, and maybe even to do some of our torturing for us. Had he agreed to that, Syria would have been called -- or, at the evry least, treated as -- a democracy, and a blind media eye turned to whatever its secret police were doing. As it is, Assad didn't play ball, either in the short or the long run, whence photos of his visit were removed from the internet (first I saw 'em, then I didn't...), and the applicable media-political vocabulary switched from 'westernised pluralist taking over a country in a complex and difficult situation' to 'tyrannical tyrant doing tyrant things'.

M.