Covert Arms Operations from Bosnia to Syria.

On Syria, radical journalist Neil Clark has commented back in 2012,

'The only way we can have a peaceful solution to this is if the Western powers and countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia say to the rebels “look, stop,” and stop supplying them with arms.

But unfortunately the stakes are so high here, because what happens in Syria is of enormous global importance, because the West wants this regime to go. They want a pro-Western regime that will come in, that will be more pro-Israel, that will be anti-Iranian, and that would prepare the way for an attack on Iran. So the stakes are incredibly high here. And unfortunately I don’t see the West backing down here. I think, unfortunately, we are going to get more and more aggressive behavior from the West, more and more backing the rebels

The continuities in Western foreign policy also lie in the use of CIA operatives to funnel arms to the "rebels", who would otherwise be termed "insurgents" or even, in the case of some of the militias, "terrorists" if they were fighting in Iraq on sectarian/ethnic lines ( against one another and not Saddam ).

The covert policy of channelling arms, as well as tacitly allowing British born jihadists to go and fight our proxy war in Syria, is a pure example of Orwellian doublethink. Arms are being diverted by covert forces from the Balkans through Turkey into Syria. That was done in order to topple the regime in Baku in 1993 and jihadists were deployed by US in Bosnia and Serbia.

The catastrophic result may well not merely be the possibility for a conflagration of war across the Middle East but also the "blowback" of British born jihadists returning to Britain and with the potential to cause terrorist atrocities as emphasised by historian Michael Burleigh, though it's a pity he tends to overlook the evidence whereby jihadists are used to advance our geopolitcal interests.

As Burleigh wrote, Dewsbury to Damascus: The danger of young British Muslims learning to wage Jihad in Syria,

 'All it takes is a cheap air ticket to Turkey, and then a ride over the border into northern Syria. That is the route being taken by British-based jihadists from London and the Midlands, who are making their presence felt in the fight against Assad.

Mediocre politicians playing at being "global statemen" such as William Hague need to return to a more realistic and pragmatic foreign policy and stop uncritically following the top down revolutionary strategies that the world's remain superpower is trying to foist on the area.

If British foreign policy is riddled with contradictions it is between the post colonial guit over the condition of the Middle Eastern settlement created after 18 in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the greedy for resources which, alas, our wasteful consumer economies depend upon