Finian Cunningham (PRESS TV),- The military victory for Syria’s government forces in the strategic central town of Qusayr last week was a watershed event for several reasons. But of the crucial turning points heralded by this event, one is inimitably clear – the Western powers, the would-be emperors of Syria, stand naked in their failed criminal conspiracy to destroy that country.

These would-be emperors – Washington and the region’s former – has been colonial powers, Britain and France – have been shown demonstratively to have not a shred of credibility. The emperors have no clothes and they are running for cover. 

The Syrian army now has the upper-hand and the momentum towards outright victory in a conflict that has ransacked large swaths of the Levantine nation, resulting in up to 80,000, mainly civilian, deaths, and causing 4-5 million internal and external refugees.

Photo courtesy of PRESS TV

Western-backed insurgents are being destroyed or routed from villages and towns across Syria as the Syrian army moves swiftly on to its next objective of freeing the country’s second major city, Aleppo, in the north. That clash may prove a more bloody and protracted fight than the three-week campaign to retake Qusayr. But, given their withering loss of fighters and the severance from key supply routes through Qusayr, the eventual defeat of insurgents in Aleppo looks all but assured.

The recapture of Aleppo, and shutting off the NATO weapons supply line from Turkey in the north, would then prove to be the last stand for the foreign-backed mercenaries. These mercenaries have been terrorizing Syria since March 2011 at the behest of NATO powers and their regional allies, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Western agenda of regime change to oust President Bashar al-Assad is therefore, in a word, a dead letter.

But perhaps a more telling repercussion from the victory in Qusayr is the stripping bare of the ugly face of Western imperialism in Syria and the wider region.

The routing of the mercenaries who had laid siege to Qusayr for the past year showed more clearly than even the largely foreign component of the so-called Free Syrian Army and the minimal support among the Syrian population for this outfit of Al Qaeda-linked extremists. The FSA should henceforth be known as the Foreign Supplied Army. Without foreign supplies, there is no FSA, and there never would have been one in the first place.

Why were the 30,000 inhabitants of Qusayr obliged to hide in their homes for the past year while gangs of Libyan, Egyptian, Tunisian, Saudi, Chechen, Yemeni, French and British self-styled jihadists and, yes, local Syrian criminal opportunists, roamed the streets, looting and brutalizing?

When these Western-backed killers and bandits were eventually run out of Qusayr last Wednesday, why did the inhabitants greet the Syrian army and their Lebanese Hezbollah comrades with relief and gratitude? Why have street celebrations been held in Qusayr feting the restoration of civilian life?

Why did thousands of Qusayr’s residents flee the town over the past year? Of course, it was to escape from the Western-backed so-called “rebels” who imposed their draconian, twisted fundamentalist tyranny that they have adopted from their Saudi and Qatari paymasters. This is the same kind of tyranny that is being imposed on the suffering communities of Aleppo still under the control of the mercenaries.

This week, reports emerged of a 14-year-old boy in Aleppo who was executed in a public square by foreign gunmen because he allegedly blasphemed over a cup of coffee. He was sentenced to death by a kangaroo court before being shot twice in the head in front of his mother and father.

Why is it that now those inhabitants who had fled Qusayr – Muslim, Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Christian alike – are returning to the resumed safety of their town to pick-up their hitherto peacefully co-existing lives?

None of these questions are being asked in the mainstream Western media, or off Western politicians, since the fall of Qusayr. Incredibly, the Western media coverage on Syria seems stricken by a sudden muteness over the past week, as if crippled by a huge spanner tossed into its wheels. Conveniently, the news agenda seems to have inexplicably moved on to other matters.

At this juncture, what Western governments and their media propaganda system want most to avoid is for the Western public to see the naked, glaring truth: that these governments and media have been lying for the past two years about what is going on in Syria. This country is not undergoing a pro-democracy uprising, supported by Syrian people and benevolent Western powers. Rather, Syria has been subjected to a criminal covert war of aggression by Western powers for selfish strategic interests in the oil and gas-rich Middle East. This kind of conspiracy is what war criminals at Nuremburg were hanged for.

Qusayr has made Western government crimes in the Middle East abundantly clear. And that is why the story is being discarded down the Western media memory hole.

So let’s drag it out of the memory hole. To achieve their illicit objectives, Western governments have secretly funneled weapons, money, Special Forces and networks of foreign cutthroat killers into a sovereign country to terrorize its people into submitting to their agenda for regime change. The blood of 80,000 Syrian people is on the hands of Western presidents, prime ministers and their foreign diplomats: Barack Obama, David Cameron, Francois Hollande, John Kerry, William Hague and Laurent Fabius. They all stand accused and should be tried before a war crimes tribunal.

When Syrian army forces retook the bombed-out, sabotaged town of Qusayr, the façade of Western pretense and propaganda was demolished forever.

Now, as with the dregs of the retreating insurgents, Western governments are running scared from the damning exposure. This week the White House is to hold a series of emergency meetings on Syria. US Secretary of State John Kerry has had to cancel a tour of the Middle East in order to attend those meetings. On the cards for discussion is the US moving towards sending weapons and other lethal aid openly to its Foreign Supplied Army in Syria – a desperate move that probably won’t happen because the Western criminal agenda has already been defeated. The Obama administration – assailed by other scandals and imploding legitimacy among the American people and the wider world – is in no position to step up criminality in the Middle East.

The Associated Press reports, “[Syrian] opposition leaders [that is, Western stooges] have warned Washington that their rebellion could face devastating, irreversible losses without greater support.”

That one sentence says it all. The emperors have no clothes.

Finian Cunningham via PRESS TV