Authored by Eric Zuesse,

Peter Ford, who was the UK’s Ambassador in Syria during 2003-2006, was asked by the BBC in their “The Big Questions” interview on February 14th, whether the current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would have to be a part of the solution in that country after the war is over, and Ambassador Ford said:

“I think sadly, but inevitably, he is. Realistically, Assad is not going to be overthrown. This becomes more clear with every day that passes. Western analysts have been indulging in wishful thinking for 5 years; it’s time to get real, we owe it to the Syrian people to be much more realistic and hard headed about this. The West has to stop propping up the so-called ‘moderate opposition’, which is not moderate at all.”

This was quoted by Almasdar News on February 18th, which went on to note that,

"The frustrated interviewer asked Mr. Ford about 'what we should have done,' and he responded that 'we should have backed off, we should have not tried to overthrow the regime.' Mr. Ford eloquently added that this policy has been 'like a dog returning to vomit.’”

The video of the interview below showed him making that statement in this context:

The interviewer was clearly anti-Assad, and Ford responded with evident anger by noting (starting at 2:55 on the video) the shocking fact that:

“In Aghanistan, Iraq, Libya, like a dog returning to vomit, we go back to [and the audience already was started to clap here], we never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow.”

He was saying there that we support only non-secular regimes, sectarian regimes, in Arabia, this meaning fundamentalist Sunni governments — especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, the very same regimes that even the U.S. Secretary of State acknowledged in a 2009 cable that was wikileaked, are the chief regimes that are funding Al Qaeda, ISIS and other jihadist groups. Ford was noting that the United States and UK strive to keep in power those governments, the ones that are led by royal families that supply the bulk of funding for jihadist groups — jihadists who perpetrate terrorism in the United States and Europe. “We never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow”: Ambassdor Ford was so bold as to imply that our governments are supporting, under the table, the very same ruling families that they know to be funding (as that cable only vaguely referred to them) “Sunni terrorist groups worldwide” (which includes in Western countries, too).

The BBC’s interviewer ignored that statement; he wasn’t struck by it, such as to ask: “Why are we supporting the chief funders of Islamic jihad? Why are we overthrowing (or in Syria are trying to overthrow) a secular regime, against which we join foreign jihadist groups in order to overthrow that non-sectarian regime; why are these dogs, as you call the U.S. and UK, returning time and again to that vomit?”

This was a live interview program, and so the BBC censors weren’t able to eliminate Ambassador Ford’s responses from the interview; but, instead, the interviewer did his best to interrupt and to talk over Ford’s shocking — and shockingly truthful — assertions about the government (ours) that supposedly represent our interests (and not the interests of Western oil companies etc.). Ford will probably not be invited again to be on live television in the West to air his views about Syria.

Ford’s evident anger at what’s going on, and at the media’s resistance to letting the public know about the reality, appeared to reach near to the edge of his blurting out that ulterior motives have to be behind this addiction to “vomit” — but he was a professional diplomat, and so he was able to restrain himself there.

The U.S. Secretary of State who had specifically requested the fundamentalist-Islamic Arab ‘allies’ to stop funding terrorism was Hillary Clinton, the leading candidate now contending for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. Here she was, expressing her current view regarding Syria, in a recent debate against her Democratic Party opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders: