Politics & Power Quote by Bashar al-Assad

Assad’s line is less a description of Washington than a bid to reframe his own predicament as everyone else’s scandal. By pointing to “the Israeli lobby” and its “clout,” he’s tapping a familiar, combustible narrative: the idea that U.S. Middle East policy is not merely aligned with Israel but effectively commandeered by it. The rhetoric does two jobs at once. It flatters his domestic and regional audience’s suspicions about American power, and it relocates agency away from Syrian governance and toward an external puppet master.

Notice the architecture of the claim: it starts with a plausible premise (lobbying exists; pro-Israel advocacy is influential), then vaults to a totalizing conclusion (“control over the American administration”). That escalation is the tell. It turns messy, interest-driven policymaking into a single lever pulled by a single actor. “Re-arranging the region” is deliberately vague, a phrase that can absorb Iraq, sanctions, peace processes, uprisings, pipelines - any destabilization can be read as evidence. “Controlling its resources” completes the triangle of motives (Israel, America, oil), packaging geopolitics into an easily portable indictment.

The subtext is defensive: Assad is arguing that pressure on Syria is not primarily about his regime’s violence or legitimacy but about a grand design imposed from abroad. Coming from a statesman with a record of harsh internal repression, it also functions as preemptive discrediting of U.S. criticism: if Washington is “controlled,” then its human-rights language becomes theater. The danger is that the framing leans into conspiratorial logic that can slide from policy critique into insinuation about hidden ethnic power - a move that rallies sympathizers while poisoning the analytical well.