The Syrian government is being blamed for the massacre in the area of Houla on Friday, May 25, where at least 108 people, including 34 women and 49 children were killed, FPG reports.

Yet circumstances indicate that rebel forces or terrorist groups with backing from the U.S., NATO, and its regional allies may have actually been responsible, and the atrocity will likely be cited as a pretext in increasing calls for military intervention to overthrow the Assad regime on “humanitarian” grounds.

The U.S. has been providing to the Syrian opposition what the State Department has called in Orwellian newspeak “nonlethal assistance”, which effort is coordinated with those of U.S. “friends and allies in the region”, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are funding and arming the rebel forces, including with antitank weaponry. The U.S. coordination effort includes directing arms shipments to “worthy rebel recipients”, according to the Washington Post.

The U.S.’s NATO ally Turkey has provided a base of operations for the Free Syrian Army, where they are supplied with surplus weapons from NATO’s campaign to oust the Gaddafi regime in Libya. The arms are “being shipped on NATO aircraft”, according to former CIA military intelligence officer Philip Giraldi. Turkey is “taking the lead as U.S. proxy”, Giraldi wrote last December, in a clandestine NATO effort with the ultimate goal of another military intervention that would be based on the pretext of “humanitarian principles, to defend the civilian population based on the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine that was invoked to justify Libya.”

And as Daniel McAdams has observed, “as soon as the U.S. began supplying the rebels with specialized communications equipment enabling them to more accurately target government forces and institutions, some of the most deadly and gruesome bombings have taken place.”

As former NATO commander General Wesley Clark explained in a talk at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California, on October 3, 2007, after 9/11, there was a “policy coup” in which the long-term goals of the neoconservatives were implemented. Clark was an inside witness to the efforts to use 9/11 as a pretext to launch the war on Iraq, despite the complete lack of evidence of any Iraqi involvement in the attacks or possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But the plan didn’t stop with Iraq.

Clark recalled a discussion with an officer in the Defense Department who showed him a memo he had received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office. “It says we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran,” Clark recalled the officer telling him. He explained to his audience that the foreign policy goal of the U.S. was “to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.”

Taking out the Assad regime in Syria, in addition to being a goal in its own right, would also be another step towards implementing the ultimate goal of regime change in Iran, which would be further isolated by the loss of its regional ally.