That the Syrian regime had squeezed the Syrian state to an extent that it had jeopardised its very conditions for existence is borne out by the recent uprising and ongoing social and political unrest. The reasons for the ongoing collapse are many. In the literature they oscillate between the purely economic to the wholly political, with shades of synthesis in between. To whichever side of the argument one leans, the Syrian military in alliance with various strata of society is allegedly the perpetrator of the ruin or, literally, the subject of this passage of history. But the most relevant overtone of the uprising to date has little to do with domestic conditions and more to do with the great tectonic collision between the Sino- Russian camp on one side and the Euro- American camp on the other. The world appears to be reliving a proxy war for the division of peripheral formations, resembling to some degree a pre- World War I scenario. Prior to the uprising, the Syrian regime and its associated social class usurped the resources of Syria, deepening its misery and driving it to the point of uprising, doing so with the tutelage of Western powers and World Bank (WB) instructions on liberalisation. Since the uprising, the Syrian regime and its associated class, battered as they are, could not have remained in power this long without the support of the Sino- Russian constellation. Thus, the discourse that conflates the Syrian regime with the subject of history is a miscategorisation and an inadequate conceptual tool for communicating developments in a process. ‘The regime is to blame’ catchphrase extracts selective details from the historical process in order to provide a lessthan- full understanding of the ongoing conditions. It is social science meant for an ideologically biased culpability game, or one that exonerates US- led imperialism from its crimes against humanity.

Tangentially and on ethical grounds, or by Kantian moral equivalence, all parties involved in the making of conflict are implicated. But by an act or reasoned position that mitigates the intensification of the atrocities of the US- led class and its ideology on a global scale as a result of Syria's succumbing to the US- led imperialist camp and the subsequent deepening of the rule of capital, it is only the Syrian cohort realigned with US militarism that bears the burden of responsibility.