West wants Assad down to null Iran presence in Syria: Analyst

Supporters of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad (portraits) attend a rally in central Damascus on February 5, 2012.

A senior Middle East expert says the West, aided and abetted by Turkey, Qatar and Israel, is plotting to overthrow the Syrian regime in a bid to strip the Islamic Republic of its regional sway.

“The extremist Wahhabis, the neo-colonist Zionists and the Western imperialists have taken up arms against those who fly in the face of extremism and expansionism in the region each with its own agenda on Syria as a whipping boy with the ultimate goal of relegating Iran to the outer fringes of political power,” Ismail Salami wrote in an article titled “West's shenanigans against Syria, Iran” on Press TV .

Salami, author of Iran, Cradle of Civilization , added that the “exorbitant efforts” the West is expending in Syria to overthrow its President Bashar al-Assad regime are “in fact directed against the Islamic Republic.”

The Iranian expert added that “presstitute media” such as the state-funded BBC, the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera and the Saudi-run Al Arabiya are also constantly distorting the facts on the Syrian ground to abet their respective government’s policies.

To this end, the events in Syria must be so choreographed that they should lead to the overthrow of Assad regime and consequently result in the supposed debilitation of the Iranian establishment, the senior political analyst said.

Efraim Halevy, head of Mossad from 1998 to 2002, wrote in an article posted on The New York Times on February 7 that the West should focus on terminating Iran’s influence in Syria instead of seeking a military assault on Tehran as this is the “safer and rewarding option.”

“The public debate in America and Israel these days is focused obsessively on whether to attack Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons ambitions; hardly any attention is being paid to how events in Syria could result in a strategic debacle for the Iranian government,” Halevy said.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since mid-March 2011. Hundreds of people, including Syrian security forces, have been killed in the turmoil.

The West and the Syrian opposition accuse the government of killing the protesters, but Damascus says “outlaws, saboteurs and armed terrorist groups” are responsible for the unrest, which it says is being orchestrated from abroad.

HMV/PKH http://www.presstv.ir/