In his new book, "The WikiLeaks Files," Julian Assange writes that the United States had planned to overthrow Syria long before the 2011 uprising and current proxy war against the government of Bashar al-Assad.

A chapter in the book references a 2006 diplomatic cable from the U.S. Ambassador to Syria, William Roebuck, which discusses a plan to force the Syrian government to overreact to perceived threats as the orchestrated Arab Spring unfolded.

Assange writes:

That plan was to use a number of different factors to create paranoia within the Syrian government; to push it to overreact, to make it fear there's a coup… so in theory it says "We have a problem with Islamic extremists crossing over the border with Iraq, and we're taking actions against them to take this information and make the Syrian government look weak, the fact that it is dealing with Islamic extremists at all."