The Full text of Robert Parry's piece, which appeared on the consortium news website on Monday, is as follows:

In Campaign 2016, the American people have shown little stomach for more foreign wars. The Republican candidates who advocated neoconservative warmongering crashed and burned, losing to Donald Trump who sold himself to GOP voters as the anti-neocon, daring even to trash George W. Bush’s Iraq War to an aghast field of Republican rivals.

Sen. Bernie Sanders went even further, daring to mildly criticize Israel’s repression of Palestinians, yet still ran a surprisingly strong race against the hawkish former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And, if Libertarian and Green anti-imperial candidates are counted in general election polls along with Trump, the trio makes up a majority of voters (54 percent in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll).

Only Hillary Clinton (who comes in at 39 percent) is carrying the neocon banner proudly in the general election, advocating a US “regime change” invasion of Syria – dressed up as “no-fly zones” and “safe zones” – while she also cheers on more hostilities toward nuclear-armed Russia.

But very few of Clinton’s backers seem to support her because they want more neocon-style imperialism abroad. They usually express their desire to see a woman president (“it’s her turn”) or praise her pragmatic approach to domestic issues (“she can get things done”).

While some followers like the fact that she has traveled the world and has dealt with many leaders as First Lady, US Senator and Secretary of State, that doesn’t mean these Democrats like that she voted for the Iraq War, pushed President Obama into the Libyan disaster, and wants to escalate the costly and dangerous new Cold War with Russia.

Indeed, if there were an effective peace movement in the United States – along the lines of the 1960s civil rights movement – many Clinton supporters might join the peace leaders in demanding face-to-face meetings with her and threaten to withhold their backing if she doesn’t repudiate her neoconservative war policies.

That no such peace movement exists reflects the failure of anti-war advocates to penetrate the world of practical politics the way that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. did in working with President Lyndon Johnson to end racial segregation. But that’s not really the fault of peace advocates since they have been shut out of the mainstream media to a far greater degree than the civil rights movement was in the 1960s.

To extend the comparison, it’s as if today’s New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC were behaving like the dominant white Southern newspapers of the 1960s, turning their collective backs toward those who favored racial integration.

Just like the white Southern press tried to pretend the civil rights movement wasn’t happening, today’s US mainstream media ignores voices opposed to America’s imperial wars, no matter how credentialed those citizens are. Consider, for instance, how the major media won’t publish anything from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that reflects the views of such international figures as Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

If it weren’t for today’s biased and imbalanced US media, there would be daily, front-page, primetime, network news attention to the dangers of perpetual war and a critical examination of Hillary Clinton’s role in wasting trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives.

There would surely be a serious and thorough debate about the wisdom of Clinton’s continued hunger for an expanded war in Syria. Yet, today’s mainstream “debates” are limited to slight deviations between Official Washington’s dominant neocons and their understudies, the “liberal interventionists,” who only differ regarding which excuses to use in justifying an invasion of Syria.

Both the neocons and the liberal hawks favor airstrikes to kill young Syrian soldiers who have been at the forefront of a nasty war to stop Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Daesh (ISIL) from seizing and holding Syrian territory. Yet, both the neocons and the liberal hawks favor a bigger US military intervention against the Syrian army but dress up the rationale for the invasion differently, either as neocon “democracy promotion” or liberal-hawk “humanitarian war.”

Publicly, Hillary Clinton has toyed with both the democracy and humanitarian arguments but one of her official emails – released by the State Department –explains that the underlying reason for the Syrian “regime change” war was the Israeli government’s desire to remove Syria as the link in the supply chain between Iran and Israel’s foe, Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Though undated and unsigned, the Clinton email reflected the thinking of the then-Secretary of State and her inner circle as of late April 2012 (when it appears to have been sent), about one year into the Syrian civil war. (The position paper appears to have been drafted by Clinton’s former adviser James Rubin but then was passed along by Clinton to other recipients with the author’s name deleted.)

The email explains the need for “regime change” in Damascus as important to Israel, which wanted to blunt Iranian regional influence and protect Israel’s “nuclear monopoly,” which is acknowledged quite frankly although Israel’s status as a rogue nuclear state is still considered a state secret by the US government.

“The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad,” the email states, brushing aside President Obama’s (eventually successful) negotiations to restrict Iran’s nuclear program.

“Negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program will not solve Israel’s security dilemma,” the Clinton email says. “Nor will they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program — the capability to enrich uranium. At best, the talks between the world’s major powers and Iran that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May will enable Israel to postpone by a few months a decision whether to launch an attack on Iran that could provoke a major Mideast war.”

The email explains: “Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. For Israeli leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of both countries. What Israeli military leaders really worry about — but cannot talk about — is losing their nuclear monopoly.

“The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today. If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself.”

Israel’s Strategic Goal

In other words, all the “humanitarian” talk about “safe zones” and other excuses for Syrian “regime change” was only the camouflage for a desire to protect Israel’s “nuclear monopoly” and the freedom to mount what Israel has called “trimming the grass” operations, periodically mowing down Arabs in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere.

Removing the Assad government in Damascus was therefore an Israeli strategic goal to weaken the power of Iran and to cut the supply lines to Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

That is why Washington’s regional allies – Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have aided Sunni militants, including from Al Qaeda and the Daesh (ISIL) which regard Shiites as “apostates” to be slaughtered. The terrorists are considered the most effective and fanatical enemies of Shiite Islam, thus serving a purpose in seeking to destroy Iranian regional influence, in part, by ousting Syria’s government.

So, based on the logic expressed in the email, Clinton’s goal of “regime change” in Syria was driven in large part by Israel’s perception of its strategic interests.

By 2012, those Turkish-Saudi-Qatari-backed militants already included Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front and “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” which would soon spin off into the Daesh.

If Clinton’s larger scheme of orchestrating Syrian “regime change” were to succeed, the likely outcome would be horrific, with the powerful radical groups as the almost certain winners, benefiting from Clinton’s proposed aerial devastation of the Syrian military, which would be conducted under the “humanitarian” cover of creating “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.”

But Clinton and her neocon/liberal-hawk advisers never seem to anticipate events not turning out as they dream them up.

Since the April 2012 email, the situation in Libya deteriorated, too. On Sept. 11, 2012, terrorists attacked the US consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US personnel. Later, the US and other Western embassies in Tripoli were abandoned as Libya descended into a failed state with the Daesh seizing territory and carrying out its characteristic brutality, such as the beheadings of Coptic Christians.

Despite these bloody setbacks, Clinton’s views apparently have changed little. During the 2016 presidential campaign, she has announced her intention to follow Israel’s strategic lead in the region, vowing to take the relationship to “the next level.” She still views the chaos in Libya through rose-colored glasses and can’t wait to broaden the US invasion of Syria into “no-fly zones” and “safe zones,” again ignoring the risks of a violent clash with Russian forces.

If there were any doubts that Clinton is a committed neocon (or “liberal interventionist” since there is very little real difference between the two), she dashed them once she seized firm control of the Democratic presidential nominating race this spring.

With her dominance in unelected “superdelegates” giving her an insurmountable lead over Sanders, Clinton expressed her obeisance to Israel in a speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and in her last debate against Sanders. She was pivoting to what the mainstream media calls “the center,” signaling to neocon Republicans that she should be their choice for president.

In a normal world, Clinton’s reiteration of her plans for invading Syria should have sparked a firestorm of controversy and debate – since her ideas are completely illegal under international and US law as well as operationally dangerous – but her statements passed largely unnoticed since Official Washington’s foreign-policy establishment and mainstream media are so firmly in the neocon camp.

Despite 15 years of “perpetual war,” no effective anti-war movement has emerged in the West and – to the degree that prominent citizens do object – their serious arguments of dissent are rarely allowed inside the major media. As the world staggers toward what could be a nuclear abyss, the silence is deafening.