Events in Syria are having an impact upon India already, with oil prices rising further to buffet an already weakened rupee and the stock market falling on fears that this will push the economy into tailspin. Therefore, what happens in Syria concerns us directly. If your only source of news was the coverage in the Indian print media, though, you might not think so. Indian news television, on this occasion, has done a better job.

None of the major broadsheet newspapers had the story on the front pages of their Mumbai editions on September 2 or September 3. It did not even make the lead on the foreign page in Hindustan Times. All the newspapers did have some coverage on the front page a day earlier, when US President Barack Obama had referred the planned military attack to his country’s parliament for a vote.

The coverage, such as it was, reflected the realities of the way our media covers world news. The stories written by Indian correspondents were all datelined Washington, because that is one of very few places in the world where Indian newspapers have correspondents. The remainder of the coverage came from Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Press or the New York Times news syndication service. These stories were filed from Washington, London, Beirut, Jerusalem or Moscow. Television also used feeds from western agencies or American affiliates such as CNN.

The Indian Express, which uses content from The Economist, carried a piece from that publication headlined “Hit him hard”, and accompanied by a photo of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. It had earlier carried a special page on the conflict in Syria using content from The New York Times, headlined with a quote from US Secretary of State John Kerry. The headline was, “Clear, compelling proof Assad used chemical weapons: Kerry”. There was nothing in the entire page to suggest that there may be another side to the story.

This has been the tenor of much of the coverage coming out of American sources, and faithfully reproduced by certain allegedly Indian news outlets; given its stance, you’d think the Indian Express was the American Express.

As it happens, the warmongering may well be propaganda rather than journalism.

Following allegations of human rights violations in the Syrian conflict, a United Nations commission of enquiry was set up in 2011. A member of that commission of enquiry, Carla Del Ponte, told Swiss TV in an interview in May this year that “there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas…I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got… they were about the use of nerve gas by the opposition”. She was saying that it was the rebels, not the Syrian government, that had used the gas.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22424188

Later that same month, on May 30, Turkish media reported that 12 people with Al Qaeda links fighting the government in Syria were caught with 2 kilos of sarin gas near the border between Turkey and Syria.

President Barack Obama himself explained the American position in an interview to PBS last week. He was not his usual eloquent self, and mixed up chemical weapons with nuclear weapons, but went on to say that the US had concluded that it was the Syrian government which had used chemical weapons.

The Syrian government has consistently denied allegations that it used chemical weapons. The situation, therefore, is that there are two sides to the story, and two versions, and no concrete proof yet that one or the other is the truth.

So is the US warmongering really about chemical weapons being used in a civil war halfway around the world from the United States? Well, that’s what they’d said about Iraq, which was invaded in March 2003, a little more than a year after Afghanistan was invaded. The story then was about Iraq possessing “weapons of mass destruction”.

The address to the American nation, by then President George Bush, was instructive. It spoke about “carrying on the work of peace” and “defending freedom”. The body count of Iraqi civilians from then to now has crossed 100,000, according to Iraq Body Count, which keeps track of this otherwise forgotten number. Peace and freedom are still not adequately defended.

It was memories of American neoconservative lies over Iraq that swung the vote in British parliament against rushing into war in Syria. The British media’s coverage of the issue has generally been more credible than the American media’s, with newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent, apart from the BBC, presenting a more balanced view of the conflict. This may have played a role in the way British parliament voted.

However, the stranglehold that the Western media enjoys on world news coverage has become even more apparent during this crisis. They have a near monopoly on the world’s stories, and we in turn are conditioned to kowtow to their greater knowledge at every step.

The net result is that “all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others”. So, the Americans and British and French are more equal than the Indians or Pakistanis or Russians or Syrians. Not only do they see the world through their eyes — we too must see the world through their eyes.

However, thanks to technology, anyone interested in finding different versions of a story has access to alternative sources.

On the Syria conflict, some of the most relevant coverage can be found on Russia Today. One of these is an interview of Assad conducted in November last year, in which he answers a lot of straight questions. Assad views the conflict as caused in part by aspirations of Turkish premier Erdogan to “become a new caliph in Istanbul”.

Turkish and Saudi ambitions are one piece of the geopolitical puzzle. Israeli fears and plans are probably another. To understand what is happening in the Middle East, a look back in time to 2002 or further, to the end of the Ottoman Empire, would be necessary. A detailed study is beyond the scope of this article, and indeed, this writer. However, there are a couple of points that can be made quickly.

One goes back to an article in The Guardian published almost exactly 11 years ago, in September 2002. It talks about the impending invasion of Iraq and then Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak’s opposition to it. The article then goes on to say that, “For the hawks, disorder and chaos sweeping through the region would not be an unfortunate side-effect of war with Iraq, but a sign that everything is going according to plan”.

The plan, publicly expressed in a paper published by an Israeli American think-tank in 1996, was to remake the Middle East. It had laid out a blueprint back then that planned the remaking of the region with a war in Iraq. “With Saddam out of the way and Iraq thus brought under Jordanian Hashemite influence, Jordan and Turkey would form an axis along with Israel to weaken and ‘roll back’ Syria”.

It would seem that things have gone more or less according to plan. Saddam is gone (and so is Mubarak), though Iraq remains a mess…but that is nobody’s concern. Now Syria is being “rolled back”. After that, it will be Iran’s turn

These are not state secrets. Former US general and NATO supreme commander Gen Wesley Clark narrated a story in a television interview about walking through the Pentagon a few days after 9/11. He was called aside by a fellow general who told him the decision had been made to attack Iraq. Neither of the US generals knew why they were attacking Iraq.

Gen Clark returned to the Pentagon a few weeks later. By then the war in Afghanistan had started. He asked if the plan to attack Iraq was still on. He was told it had gotten bigger: the plan was to attack Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.

The moralistic tales of WMDs and chemical weapons are nice stories to fool children and adults of below average intelligence. The US has no morality in war. The greatest ever acts of terror against civilian populations were the atom bombs dropped on citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, after Germany and Italy had surrendered. The war was almost over; there was no need to use those weapons.

The worst use of chemical weapons against civilian populations in world history was the use of Agent Orange and Agent Blue in Vietnam by the Americans.

Just because American media and Hollywood films always portrays them as the good guys, and the others as the bad guys, doesn’t mean it’s the truth.

As Star Wars showed us all, the jedi are not the bad guys. The empire is.

The writer is author of The Urban Jungle (Penguin, 2011) and Consulting Editor at The Asian Age. These are his personal views.