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Press TV has interviewed author and Middle East expert Dr. Kevin Barrett to get his views on recent advances by the Syria army against foreign-backed militants.

Press TV: Dr. Barrett, do you agree with Mr. Peterson there this is the first stage towards full and complete victory by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government?

Barrett: Yes, for once I do agree with Mr. Peterson. In fact I can take up right where he left off. I think that this is of course, on the heels of a long series of victories for the Syrian government forces and this has been going on, really the tide has been turning now for well over a year. But this most recent series of victories is sort of the exclamation point on the sentence when the sentence states very clearly that the government in Syria is not going to be overthrown by this hodgepodge of rebel groups which includes everything from Jihadists to criminals freed from Saudi prisons, some well-meaning people, many mercenaries, all of these people tend to be supported by outside forces which do not usually have the best interests of the Syrian people at heart.

And it looks like this effort to overthrow the government by force of arms in Syria has failed definitively and that means it’s time to move on to a new stage in working with the government of Syria to address the concerns that led some Syrian people to protest back when this all got started. The military state of this has been a tragedy and it can’t be over soon enough.

Press TV: Who would you hold responsible for the emergence of terrorism and now the spreading of terrorism in the region?

Barrett: Well, as much as I agree with everything essentially that I have heard from Mr. Peterson today, it has been his friends in Washington DC who are largely responsible for this tragedy and I’m glad that he has come around to see things this way. As I recall, I have debated him in the past a few times, and he didn’t seem to get it then, but I’m glad he does now.

In any case, I think that the policy of destabilizing regimes around the world has backfired once again in Syria. This is very similar to the situation that we saw in Ukraine recently where we had the Western powers destabilizing a government for political reasons and creating chaos and out of that chaos emerges a situation that may not even be in the interest of the Western powers that caused the trouble. I think the same thing happened in Syria.

The same sort of thing has happened so many times around the world. In Iran in 1953, for example, the Western powers destabilized that government, overthrew it and installed a brutal dictator and look where it got them! Iran being the only free country in the Middle East, which is not exactly what they had intended, what the great powers intended.

So there is a long history of this kind of meddling and destabilizing governments in hopes of achieving some kind of strategic objective and once again, it has failed. The strategic objectives in this case, really, they’re not even the American ones, they were primarily Israeli and to some extent Saudi and [Persian] Gulf states strategic objectives. These countries wanted to destabilize Syria and take it out of the equation as a significant power that could oppose Israel in the case of the Zionists and could oppose the agenda of the gulf monarchies, and it did succeed in causing a lot of trouble and destabilizing the country, but when it gets all put back together again, it’s not going to be a situation that anybody is going to think it was worth killing all those people for.

So, I do have to agree with everything Mr. Peterson said. It’s time to move beyond this stage of tragic armed conflict with atrocities, yes committed by both sides, but as he said, some of the most noticeable ones have been coming from the rebel side, including false flags. I wonder whether Mr. Peterson now has come around to agreeing with me after the second Seymour Hersh article came out on the subject that the gas attack in August was an obvious false flag by the rebel supporters, the Saudis and apparently the Turks and possibly with some American and Israeli involvement as well, and we had just another gas attack that was probably another false flag. I’m very happy to see Mr. Peterson is getting it and I hope that his friends in Washington are getting it as well.

Press TV: Up until now, roads towards a political solution have been looking blocked in Geneva, talks were suspended. Do you think that there is this international will for a political solution? What has required for that political solution to work?

Barrett: Well, I hope there is and what I am hearing from the other guest is certainly very encouraging and I hope that reflects some other people’s thoughts in Washington DC as well. But I think the real key thing to look at in terms of a solution to come out of this is the amnesty offers that have come from the Assad government.

I think that those offers to the extent that they have been made in good faith and that they will be honored, that is amnesty for actual Syrians who were misled into joining this doomed and horrific armed conflict should be. That’s the way out of this, is let actual Syrians take advantage of these amnesty offers, let’s hold Assad, and everyone should agree to this, including Assad’s international supporters to these Amnesty offers and also, hold him to his offers to democratize, that his to hold elections that are observed by all sorts of outside observers, so we know that there are free and fair elections. In the past it’s been the rebels that didn’t want that because they were afraid that Assad would win the elections. Sort of the same way the South Vietnamese felt about elections to solve the Vietnamese problem back in the 1950s when Ho Chi minh would have won.

So I think that going through with this amnesty offer that the Syrian government has been putting on the table for quite some time and having the international community and especially countries that have supported the Syrian government to make sure that that is respected and that human rights is respected to the greatest extent possible, is the only road towards the future here.