Dr. Ron Paul, a former Republican congressman, and Daniel McAdams, Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, noted that US strategies in the Middle East are related to geopolitical significance of countries such as Libya, Afghanistan and Syria.
“Samantha Power’s statement about Syria when she said it’s not a winning strategy is almost comical because she never created a winning strategy. She was one of the big voices in favor of bringing democracy to Libya and that hasn’t worked out very well either,” McAdams said.
“In 2013, the US almost went in directly attacking Assad for this claim but it turns out that it simply wasn’t true, but Samantha Power repeated it as if it was true. It was really propaganda.”
Ron Paul said that these accusations were aimed to become a pretext for blaming Russia and building up the animosity between NATO and Russia. “It was done to further aggravate parts of Europe such as Ukraine and Latvia where the US is putting cruise missiles. It is all part of a scheme.”
McAdams said in regards to US airstrikes in Syria that there have been “2,500 airstrikes on Syria alone. They have destroyed factories and infrastructure and places of business that is one of the reasons that people are fleeing due to absolute economic despair.”
Ron Paul noted that interest in Syria's natural resources may be the real reason of US involvement in the country's affairs.
“It has become the US strategy to try to reduce Russia’s geopolitical influence and one way of doing that is to decrease the importance of Russian oil pipelines to Western Europe. Syria is a key center in these pipelines so it is isolating Russia and Iran to a degree.”
“Their real goals are oil, pipelines and geopolitics after getting rid of Assad,” Ron Paul noted. “If you look at the whole region our policy doesn’t work. ISIL is the consequence of what the US has done in the Middle East.”