The winner: Al Qaeda. The loser: Obama

America is supporting Al Qaeda in Syria, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

The evidence is absolutely damning. Even one of the most important generals in the so-called Free Syrian Army has now pledged fealty to Al Qaeda (a.k.a. Jabhat Al Nusra, or JAN -- or just Nusra, if you're feeling informal). All the proof you need is here.

It was always going to be a difficult task to convince the American people to support a group they have been constantly told was responsible for the death of thousands of US soldiers and civilians. They were reminded by their own government every year to “never forget 9/11” and their young men were sent to die to avenge the incident, now they are being asked to forget just that.

But the task of rebranding JAN has been fraught with other difficulties, the main being that Al Nusra is not co-operating with the US-Qatari plan. In an angry statement, JAN denied US media reports that they were breaking ties with Al Qaeda. The AFP wrote that JAN had rejected “any plan to break away [from Al Qaeda ] and become a more internationally acceptable rebel force.”

But the AFP falls short of explaining how dropping a label would make JAN more internationally acceptable and no longer a ‘terrorist’ organisation.

Toward the end of the video, Maram Susli makes an excellent point: The time will come when the Americans will turn against the new Al Qaeda government in Syria. That is inevitable. Everyone knows that the new Syrian government will surely commit terrible atrocities -- so terrible that even our compliant news media will be forced to acknowledge that DC replaced Assad with worse-than-Assad.

Guess what? The neocons are already preparing for that day, as Robert Parry reports.

So, what we’re now seeing in Official Washington is the beginning of a neocon finger-pointing narrative that promotes the theme that if President Barack Obama had only armed and trained “moderate” rebels and bombed the Syrian military (to create “safe zones” or to punish the government for its alleged use of sarin gas), everything would have worked out just fine.

The reality is far different.

Obama understood -- hell, everyone understood -- that the Free Syrian Army was largely fictional, and only the jihadis had the necessary muscle. That's why the neocons decided that we had to buddy up with Al Qaeda, rebranded as the Nusra Front.

But today’s immediate concern for the neocons is to create a framework for the “who lost Syria” blame-game that would surely follow the collapse of the secular government of Bashar al-Assad and its replacement by a coalition of Sunni jihadists led by Al-Qaeda’s affiliate Nusra Front. Since the neocons still dominate the opinion circles of Official Washington, it’s important to get everyone into a “group think” that blames Obama for not intervening militarily earlier.

Parry:

And with Israel indicating that its primary goal is to overthrow Assad and thus hit back at Iran – even if that means a victory by Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State – the U.S. political/media opinion circles will continue to push the “Assad must go” theme. But what Official Washington seems most concerned about right now is to make sure that — if Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State wins — Obama gets the blame.

Why did Obama -- the guy who was elected because everyone thought he opposed the Iraq invasion -- go along with this disgusting neocon scheme?

Nothing good will come of the overthrow of Assad. The jihadis will institute an ultra-maniacal rule throughout Syria, and everyone will blame Barack Obama. Not only will his page in history will be forever mud-stained, his hypocritical neocon pals will be the first to toss mud.

So why did Obama do it? What's in it for him? He had attained all the power any man could want, and he is set for life financially. Why, why, why did he do it?

If you get into bed with a neocon, you'll get a disease worse than AIDS.