Crying wolf, foreign agendas and Israel’s role in destabilising Syria

It's been a dismally predictable, transparent and nasty lie by regimes under assault in the Arab Spring that the mass uprisings are being whipped up by foreign agitators - usually meaning Israel and the United States, maybe France, Europe generally, now sometimes Turkey or, heaven forfend, Al Jazeera journalists. Only the most gullible swallow these claims: their principal effect is to make the claimants look like buffoons. Still, a government's crying wolf doesn't mean a wolf isn't around somewhere. It's equally gullible to assume that foreign agendas have no role in Syria, for example. The flood of western money, supplies,…