Al–Sharaa’s White House visit is a reminder of Washington’s longstanding abhorrence of democratic processes and anyone — beyond the perimeter of the West and sometimes within it — who stands for them.
President Donald Trump during a halftime ceremony ahead of Veterans Day at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland, on Sunday. (White House/Daniel Torok)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
I never thought I would see the day, but the day came Monday, when Ahmed al–Sharaa arrived at the White House for a sit-down with President Donald Trump and the usual gaggle of misfits who must be there to make sure the Trumpster understands at least a little of what is being said.
A freak-show terrorist amid all that retro Oval Office elegance: Who could have imagined so offensive a tableau?
Al–Sharaa, alert readers will know, is one of those dripping-with-blood Sunni jihadists who, during the West’s extended covert operation against the Assad regime in Syria, had the habit of changing their names and the names of their murderous militias whenever the world figured out who they were and the extent of their savagery.
Al–Sharaa was known back then as Abu Muhammad al–Jolani, the surname translating as “He of the Golan.” Past beneficiary of C.I.A.–MI6 profligacy during those years when American and British intel financed, armed and trained primitive killers of al–Sharaa’s kind, he is now the president of Syria — the result of a final Anglo-American push that put him in Damascus a year ago next month.
Al–Sharaa–al–Jolani began his brilliant career in 2003, when, at 21, he joined al–Qaeda in Iraq to fight against the American occupation (which, one has to say, was a creditable thing to do in and of itself). Then he hooked up with the Islamic State, via the infamous Abu Bakr al–Baghdadi, to get the Sunni barbarism going back in his native Syria.
After the C.I.A. and MI6 turned “Arab Spring” protests in Syria into a bloody armed conflict in 2011 (early 2012 at the latest), al–Jolani (as he was by this time) helped form Jabhat al–Nusra, al–Qaeda’s front organization in Syria.
But by 2017 al–Nusra was getting an other-than-brilliant press, and al–Jolani changed its name to Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham, HTS, via a merger with… let’s see… by my count, six other not very nice Salafist militias.
HTS was designated a year later as a terrorist organization by the United States and the U.N.; al–Jolani, with the same designation, had a $10 million price on his head.
The world is run in secrecy, I long ago concluded. And it is hard to tell when the invisible powers that determine global events decided to buy al–Jolani some suits, tell him to change his name back to what it was and make him legit.
Rehab Operation
Portion of a poster by the U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice program, 2017. (Rewards for Justice / Wikimedia Commons/ CC0)
I first clocked that some kind of rehab operation was afoot when, in April 2021, PBS broadcast the first interview with al–Jolani ever to appear in a Western medium. In it, the specially designated terrorist in a blue blazer and a buttoned-down shirt promised to found a “salvation government” in Syria. Martin Smith, a correspondent with a good reputation (at least until April 2021) nods credulously.
Three years and change later, al–Jolani leads his expensively armed forces in a lightning march toward Damascus, backed, as it was all along, by the Western powers, this time by the Turks and probably but not demonstrably the Israelis.
HTS had not even got to Damascus before you read of how terrific it was all going to be. Headline in the Dec. 3 editions of The Telegraph: “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state.”
The sectarian violence for which al–Sharaa has lived and breathed all these years has not stopped since he declared himself president for the next five years — violence against the Druze, violence against Christians, violence against Alawites.
The place is a riot of Sunni-driven brutality, so far as one can make out from the spotty reporting. Some of this is reportedly the work of foreign Salafists who have continued to operate — under al–Sharaa’s direction? with his tacit approval? — since the Assad regime fell.
The American edition of The Spectator ran an interesting piece in its Monday edition by Theo Padnos, who spent a year as a prisoner of HTS, under the headline, “The jihadist I knew: my life as al–Sharaa’s prisoner.”
Here is Padnos’s lead:
“As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al–Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al–Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus.
Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al–Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria.”
Al-Sharaa at the U.N. General Assembly in September. (UN Photo/Manuel Elías)
You don’t read much about what is unfolding in Syria in the mainstream American press. Instead, you read about “Mr. Sharaa’s journey from a jihadist intent on killing American soldiers to today’s suave, impeccably dressed, conciliatory leader wooing nations across the globe” — this from Roger Cohen in Monday’s New York Times under the headline, “A Syrian Village and the Long Road to the White House.”
Slather on the uplift, Roger.
Or, from Christina Goldbaum in the same paper, same day:
“Mr. al–Sharaa’s meeting in Washington is the latest turn in the transformation of the Islamist former rebel leader, who was once designated as a terrorist by the United States with a $10 million bounty on his head.”
Suave? Conciliatory? Impeccably dressed? No, no, and those suits look like cheap schmatta to me. The latest turn in the transformation?
You see what is happening here, I hope. Just take this criminal as the powers behind him present him and think no more about what was on that long road, or the beheadings, or who financed the journey.
Ms. Goldbaum informs us that al–Sharaa went to Washington this week “to sign an agreement to join 88 other countries in the global coalition to defeat the Islamic State, which remains active in Syria.” Say whaaa?
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Al–Sharaa, no stranger to the Islamic State, was sanctioned as a terrorist until the Treasury Department removed him last Friday; Syria is still designated a state sponsor of terrorism. And al–Sharaa is in the Oval Office for some kind of enlistment ceremony?
Age of Comprehensive Secrecy
In our Age of Comprehensive Secrecy we may never know why Trump and his people had al–Sharaa into the Oval Office. My surmise: At issue Monday was how al–Sharaa is to manage — how he will be told to manage — his relations with Israel, given the Zionist state’s objective is to reduce what is still formally called the Syrian Arab Republic to a smashed mosaic mess as it proceeds with its “seven-front war.”
Al–Sharaa is, in short, now a fully certified instrument of the imperium and its appendages. He is to serve an assigned purpose.
Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa has become the first Syrian leader to visit the White House in at least 80 years.
Sharaa and US President Donald Trump reached agreements on sanctions and the fight against ISIL. pic.twitter.com/mwThMIl4yN
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) November 11, 2025
As I considered the spectacle of this Salafist murderer sitting in one of those Empire armchairs opposite the Trumpster, it came me that I had seen many times in my somewhat lengthy life the day I thought I would never see.
I had simply forgotten for a moment the history of America’s crumbling republic since the 1945 victories brought it more power than it was ever to manage wisely.
No ground to claim “horrified,” this is to say. Al–Sharaa is an egregious case, brought to Washington by the most egregious man ever to occupy the White House, but he is one in a long line of dictators and assorted deplorables to be so honored.
He is possibly, dare I say this, the crudest of them but not otherwise the worst.
There is the shah of Iran, to take an early postwar case. President Harry Truman welcomed him at the White House in 1949, just two years into the Cold War that he, Truman, started, and fully four years before the C.I.A. and the Brits deposed the democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh in Teheran.
Four more presidents brought him back for five more visits — John F. Kennedy in 1962, Richard Nixon in 1969 and 1973, Gerald Ford in 1975 and Jimmy Carter in 1977.
Carter and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. (National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain)
In 1970 it was Suharto’s turn. Nixon had him for a state visit in 1970, five years after Indonesia’s rivers ran red with the blood of — latest estimate — a million people defending the pride the inimitable Sukarno had imparted to them at independence.
When Reagan had Suharto to the White House he hosted a state dinner and praised this vicious dictator for “your wise and steadfast leadership.”
Augusto Pinochet was Carter’s guest in 1977, four years after the coup that deposed Chile’s President Salvador Allende. Efraín Ríos Montt arrived at Reagan’s invitation in 1982, when, as the worst of Guatemala’s military dictators, he was well into the campaign of terror and genocide that has so scarred psyches of Guatemala’s Mayan population.
Etc., unfortunately.
All of these people and who can count how many others had a purpose, just as al–Sharaa has one. If we insist we are horrified by al–Sharaa’s presence in the Oval Office this week it behooves us to be horrified by the past eight decades of the imperium’s conduct abroad.
Let us take this occasion to come to terms with our purported leaders’ preference for all manner of mass-murders, tyrants, genocidists and dictators, and equally our policy cliques’ abhorrence of democracy and its processes and anyone — beyond the perimeter of the West and sometimes within it — who stands for them.
These people are not aberrations or wrong turns. They are the dramatis personae of American foreign policy. America created some of them. Certainly it created the man who now names himself Syria’s president.
No, Ahmed al–Sharaa ‘r’ us, and we ought finally to come to terms with the reality of which he is merely the latest manifestation.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
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“Bravissimo!” Patrick Lawrence unpack’n “How, “The Donald” didn’t exactly “flip the $cript” i.e., “Washington’s longstanding abhorrence of democratic processes and anyone — beyond the perimeter of the West and sometimes within it — who stands for them”; but, “How, ‘The Donald” ‘Shot the Plot,” ‘when Ahmed al–Sharaa arrived at the White House for a sit-down with” [Trump-Vance, Inc., his Board of Executioners] “who must be there to make sure the Trumpster understands at least a little of what is being said.” Patrick Lawrence.
“al–Jolani more than his name changed”…‘See something. Say something”. Hence, I, LeoSun phoned 1-800-USRewards, twice, 1st response was, “Yo!” followed by silence; 2nd, response, “Good morning” followed by silence. The phone number is jacked-up! The website’s rock’n, hxxps://rewardsforjustice.net/
Rewards For Justice – Intelligence-Driven Law Enforcement – Do Your Part. Secure a Safer World, Submit A Tip. An RFJ representative will soon contact you. Please be patient, as RFJ reads every tip we receive). TIP: Check the WH, Ahmed al-Sharaa fka “Wanted” is w/“The Donald”. No doubt the stench of Musk, Netanyahu, Volodymyr “El Chapo” Zelensky & “Corruption” wafts fm the WH’s walls, halls, rubble. The WH’s rockin’ the sound of DOGE’s Chainsaw.
RFJ, please, do your part, “Make America Healthy Again.” Start here, exorcise the WH.
For the west principal overrules principles.
All of that information provides a great deal of context regarding why Gen. Petraeus would ultimately end up openly advocating that the United States should outwardly embrace al-Qa’ida in Syria a decade prior to his Sep. 2025 meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa, then known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (Nancy A. Youssef and Shane Harris, “Petraeus: Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS,” The Daily Beast, Aug. 31, 2015), as did others at the time such as Barak Mendelsohn in the pages of the Council on Foreign Relations’ publication (“Accepting Al Qaeda,” Foreign Affairs, Mar. 9, 2015), all while Thomas Friedman even acted as a transparent cheerleader for US ties with the Islamic State (IS) itself in his NYT columns (Adam Johnson, “Thomas Friedman’s Perverse Love Affair With ISIS,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Apr. 13, 2017).
Good article, Patrick, exposing another misfit we support, turning him into a knight in shining armor. But then again the US supported more dictators and tyrants than peace adherents in much of our history, especially after WWII.
The late historian, William Blum chronicles what the CIA and military did around the globe since then and even more since Blum’s passing some years ago in his book, ‘Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II’
Check it out at thirdworldtraveler.com and read the excerpt from Z magazine, June 199.
And now those “narcotic smuggling” fishing boats from Venezuela being blown out of the water, killing those on board without proof they were transporting illegal drugs. So much for “international law” which the United States disregards. But they have oil and plenty of it in that neck of the woods, (like Iraq and Libya)
This strongly suggests CIA/MOSSAD asset.
Hypocrisy just doesn’t fit the bill any more. We need a new word for this.
In 2007 US journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker magazine that the Bush administration had formed an explicit covert policy agreement with Saudi Arabia and Israel to arm and fund Sunni jihadists in order to overthrow the governments of Lebanon, Syria, and later Iran.
The US government allowed allies such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf States to arm, finance and enable ISIS over several years. ISIS and Islamic terrorism did not arise in a vacuum but as direct result of US policy and state sponsorship.
In 2013 the Brookings Institution published “Why Private Gulf Financing for Syria’s Extremist Rebels Risks Igniting Sectarian Conflict at Home,” a confirmation of this US policy.
If you want to know the source of the Iraqi and Syrian suicide bombers then look at the detailed 2008-9 demographic study by researchers at the US West Point Military Academy. It showed that the jihadist insurgents behind the Iraqi insurgency and suicide bombings had been shuttled into Iraq by Syrian allies from places like Libya and Morocco. These same people formed the basis of the later Libyan uprising. All Sunnis, most of them from abroad, were known to the West as jihadists and fully backed by NATO fighter aircraft. Following the fall of Gaddafi, his weapons and those same jihadists made their way into Syria via Turkey courtesy of the CIA.
A 2013 US Senate hearing received detailed accounts of a US willingness to tacitly enable, if not actively support, the rise of ISIS. Then CIA director Leon Panetta admitted to Sen. John McCain in the Senate that he, the Joint Chiefs, then CIA chief Gen. David Petraeus, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had all supported a plan to arm the Syrian rebels who were known to be jihadists. The plan was vetoed by the White House. Yet those arms shipments continued to make it from Benghazi to Syria from Aug 2012 right up until 2017. A highly classified annex to the Senate report described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.
The operation was run by CIA Director David Petraeus who later denied the program. The program did take place.
hxxps://landdestroyer.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/nato-using-al-qaeda-rat-lines-to-flood.html
I met a woman at a dinner party who was a former ambassador under Obama. I mentioned I was horrified that a head-chopping jihadist was now president of Syria. She said, and people around agreed, that it was better to have al-Jolani as president rather than Assad. I said nothing because I didn’t know. I have heard Assad held people in torture prisons but I know nothing else. Any thoughts on this comparison?
If the US government were so concerned about torture prisons, why are they allies with Israel? Assad, no angel and no democrat, was secular and defended the rights of minority religions (he being Alawite himself) and was infinitely better for Syria than any jihadist ruler.
Here is what Nizar Nayouf (a political prisoner under Bashar’s brutal father Hafez al-Assad during the 1990s, subjected to tortures such as the “German chair” devised by fugitive Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner – an Assadist collaborator until he outlived his own usefulness – while detained at the Tadmor and Mezzeh Prisons until his 2000 release, before later going on to expose US/NATO/Jordan/Gulf State regime change machinations and intrigues with jihadists in Syria during the 2010s) had to say regarding the relative merits of Bashar al-Assad and his militant opposition in an Aug. 31, 2007 interview with Lara Marlowe of “The Irish Times”:
“‘The Americans created mass graves, not democracy. Democracy cannot happen in Syria in the foreseeable future. It would be like Iraq. The present situation is better than blood flowing in our streets.’ Through long access to sources within the military and intelligence establishment, Nayouf has collected what he calls ‘the most dangerous archives of Syria.’ He distrusts intensely the Western intelligence agencies that court him. ‘They are very dirty; all like each other. They are criminals,’ he says. […] The least bad option, Nayouf says, is for UN agencies, the European Parliament and human rights groups – ‘not hypocritical states’ – to continue to press for an end to ill treatment, respect for fundamental rights and the release of political prisoners. ‘But to change the regime by force? No. I don’t want to see Syria destroyed.'”
Similarly, in an April 12, 2017 interview with Jeremy Scahill on his “Intercepted” podcast (“The Emperor’s New Cruise Missiles”), Maher Arar, the wrongfully-accused Syrian-Canadian terror suspect extraordinarily renditioned by the United States to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured in 2002, stated that “I will never cheer the U.S. government striking other countries in any way, shape, or form because history has shown that when U.S. government intervenes, it’s never because of humanitarian reasons. But at the same time, we have to realize that a lot of people are dying in Syria, and Assad has committed horrible crimes. […] I don’t think the United States should have ever intervened in Syria at all, or in any other place.”
Ms. Freeman,
You should ask Tulsi Gabbard. She visited Syria shortly after becoming a Congresswoman.
You should ask one of the New York reporters (sorry I can’t remember her name nor which NYC newspaper) who used to publish videos of her week-long visits with leaders, officials, etc. I saw the video she did of her visit staying very close to Esme, Assad’s wife, for a week. Perhaps someone else here saw it as well and can remember the details, where one could see that video today.
Another person you could ask is former Senator of Virginia Richard Black.
In fact, you could go back a few years, prior to Robert Parry’s passing on, and read tens or hundreds of articles written for and published in this very online news source, Consortium News. Plus the comments of the many very informed individuals.
Thank you, Patrick Lawrence and Fred, for showing once again why theCIA set up and continues to fund Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Syrians have faithfully voted in the secular Baath party for years to protect their religious minorities. Once again the U.S. refuses to allow small countries with oil their self-determination. Zohran for President, anyone?
More awakening – thank you for the awful history lesson and thump on the head to dispatch notions of the once
idealized nation to take hold of -reckon with- the ever more of its rank sordidness and limitless hypocrisy. Shame, so much awful shame. Embarrassment. I wonder what a nation would do if it were to see the light and to do penance? From our treatment of our Indigenous, Blacks, Japanese, Chinese, workers, women, our poor – to our devastation of so many outside our borders and our wondrous earth – the wretchedness leaves one breathless.