During the recent Group of Eight (G8) Summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has had no hesitation in taking a tough line, criticized the West, and in particular the United States, for the decision to provide arms to Syrian rebels.

Putin asserted that the Syrian opposition had committed "appalling crimes". They were guilty of conducting terrorist attacks, and they had also killed their enemies and eviscerated them, eating their intestines in front of the public and cameras. This hardly conformed to the humanitarian values preached in Europe for hundreds of years, Putin observed – touching a raw nerve with the Americans in his audience.

The U.S. announced on June 13 it will send weapons to the rebels, then on June 22 at the "Friends of Syria" conference in Amman, it went on to encourage its key allies to follow suit. The U.S. move will inflame the civil war in Syria: the conflict will widen, become more intense, and last longer. The suffering of the ordinary people of war-ravaged Syria will be exacerbated. The U.S. actions expose the evil of hegemony.

Firstly, the U.S.-supported opposition is an irrational and violent group which rejects any political settlement of the Syrian crisis. Therefore the U.S. plan to arm the rebels will result directly in the deaths of Syrian people.

Supported by the Western powers and pro-American Arab monarchies, violent seizure of power is the only goal of the Syrian rebels. They have not only targeted government troops and officials, but also killed ordinary people in a program of intimidation. Even western media outlets are now acknowledging that the Syrian rebels have become more brutal than terrorists - even the most cold-hearted terrorists have not yet gone so far as to eat human flesh and drink blood.

Additionally, given that Syrian opposition groups have now formed alliances with Al Qaeda, the result of the U.S. plan to send weapons to the rebels will in fact be the supply of arms to terrorist organizations.

Secondly, direct military intervention by the U.S. in Syria may well result in a repetition of the "Libyan experience" in the country.

The U.S. is the main instigator of the Syrian civil war. Over the past two years it has being been helping Syrian rebels through the supply of "non-lethal" material aid, while at the behest of the U.S., pro-American Arab monarchies and Turkey have been supporting the Syrian opposition in the civil war by providing money, weapons and bases.

The U.S. seems to have reached the conclusion that this strategy is not going to achieve its goal – the overthrow of President Bashar Assad and the establishment of a compliant regime in Syria. Therefore it has now made the decision to take a more aggressive line and provide lethal weapons to the rebels, adding that it does not exclude the possibility of establishing a "no-fly" zone in Syria or the launching of cruise missiles against the Syrian government. This clearly indicates that the U.S. is prepared to intervene directly in the Syrian civil war; if it cannot achieve its aims through arming the rebels, the U.S. will transplant the "Libya model", even if in so doing it will cause an unprecedented humanitarian tragedy.

Thirdly, the U.S. is once more resorting to an old ploy - fabricating non-existent charges in order to demonize its opponent. The new claims that Syria has crossed America’s "red line" by employing chemical weapons against opposition forces produce an uncomfortable echo of the all-too-recent past. Obama’s actions appear no different from those of former American President George W. Bush, whose regime fabricated evidence that Saddam Hussein’s government had developed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Syrian government has rejected and dismissed allegations of the use of chemical weapons leveled against it. Russia believes the U.S. claims are unfounded, and the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has also stated that there can be no discussions on the value of any information on the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria until the evidence has been made public and subjected to proper analysis.

If the U.S. achieves its objectives in Syria, yet another Pandora's Box will be opened up in the region - in Syria, as elsewhere in the Middle East, there will be no peace. The U.S. strategy represents a high-stakes gamble, with the fate and the future of Syria and the Middle East at stake.

But whether the U.S. secures a political victory or is ultimately thwarted in its aims is of secondary importance. Neither its strategy nor its tactics in Syria are rooted in good faith, and that makes it a moral loser. Syria, as with the invasion of Iraq, will remain forever a stain on the history of international relations.

The author is Yin Chengde, former counselor of Chinese Embassy in the U.S.

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