(This is the second of two blogs about the covert US war against Syria. The case Obama is making for sanctions and “humanitarian” intervention in Syria is a total fabrication. The US goal in Syria is regime change. The people Assad is attacking aren’t unarmed protestors. They are Islamic militants that the US and NATO have been funding and training for at least ten months.)
The People of Syria Support Assad
According to John R Bradley, author of After the Arab Revolution and the only analyst to predict the Egyptian revolution, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also providing arms and funding to the Free Syrian Army. In an interview with Russia Today, Bradley supports the prevailing view of Assad as a ruthless despot. However he also points out that Syria’s president is one of the last secular Arab leaders in the most ethnically diverse nation in the Middle East. At the moment, he enjoys wide popular support because many Syrians view him as the last bastion between them and a fundamentalist Islamic government, like the one just installed in Libya.
Recent callers from Homs (the Syrian city under siege) to the February 10, 2012 BBC Have Your Say seem to support this perspective. While none are big Assad fans, the growing strength of the Islamic resistance worries them. Moreover they see Assad’s secular administration as far preferable to Sharia Law.
The US Military Agenda in the Middle East
Michel Chossudovksy, who has also been writing for months on the covert US war in Syria, is more alarmed about its significance in the context of broader American objectives in the Middle East. He explains that the US has targeted Syria, both because of its strategic alliance with Iran and because of Pentagon’s underlying strategy of isolating and encircling Iran as a prelude to toppling its current government. In a recent interview on Guns and Butter, he describes how the US has systematically occupied and/or militarized nearly all the countries that border Iran. First you have US-occupied Afghanistan and Pakistan (the target of a second undeclared US war) on Iran’s eastern border. Then you have Iraq, which is still partially occupied, Kuwait (where the US deployed 15,000 troops in December), and Turkey, with its US airbases, on Iran’s western border. Finally you have Saudi Arabia (also host to major US military bases) and Qatar to the south. According to Chossudovksy, US military intervention in Syria will spill over and involve the Hezbollah in Lebanon, effectively neutralizing Iran’s last remaining allies.
In a disturbing article entitled When War Games Go Live , Chossoduvsky quotes from retired General Wesley Clark’s 2003 book Winning Modern Wars regarding the role of military intervention against Syria and Iran in the Pentagon’s grand Middle East strategy. According to Clark, the Pentagon has been making preparation to attack both countries since the mid-nineties. On page 130 of Winning Modern Wars, Clark states
“As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.”
The reliability of these predictions, despite a 2008 regime change from George Bush, the so-called neocon hawk, to Barack Obama, a supposed soft power advocate, is uncanny. The US persists in its occupation of Iraq, in addition to major military engagements in Somalia and Sudan. Presumably the military intervention in Libya is complete, now that the new US-friendly regime has agreed to privatize Libyan oil for the benefit of US oil companies.
According to Chossudovsky, countries such as Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Iran and Sudan became US military targets because they refused to play ball by allowing Anglo-American oil company unlimited access to their oil resources. In contrast, oil-poor countries like Syria and Lebanon are current targets because of strategic alliances with oil-rich Iran.
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Comments
We wil stay tuned.
r
When the US and NATO covertly support Islamic militants (in violation of international law), they are clearly not giving a say to Syrians who want to maintain a secular state.
I admire the ways you are putting the argument for non-intervention, which is usually the more popular viewpoint anyway. It is true that Assad was supported by most of the minorities and even among the Sunni majority in Syria, and probably could have stayed that way if he had given some real concessions early on. But the tables have turned, and the war drums are beating, just as they did against Qaddafi once he started killing people wholesale.
Wesley Clark was (is?) a brave man, but to assume that a decade-old strategic plan means that intervention is imminent is not realistic. That's just how they roll at the Pentagon when things are in turmoil somewhere - get ready for the worst.
Lots of bad information floating around about Syria too - not surprisingly since it was in the shadows for so long. If the Russkies have a naval base in southern Syria, they must have some incredible sand-burrowing subs technology. It is in northern Syria at Tartous, near Lattakia.
As for the shelling of Homs, it's the impression of residents of Homs (the ones who called into the BBC) that the government was shelling armed militants who were leading an armed insurrection against a sovereign government (you can read the report of the Arab League Observer Mission - I have a link in my prior post - this is confirmation by neutral observers that this is happening). And yes, the right of a sovereign government to protect itself against armed insurrection is protected under international law. If Occupy Wall Street decided to take up arms and storm government installations in Washington DC, the US government would be perfectly within its rights under international laws to use all its military might against them.
Ordinary joe, your comment confuses me. If we can't hold the Commander in Chief accountable for what the US military and CIA, exactly who do we hold accountable? What makes you say that our strategy in the Middle East has changed since 2001? The US has carried out military intervention in Iraq, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan, just like Clark predicted - there are still active duty troops on the ground in Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. Moreover we seem to be on track to attack Iran - if the January 2012 war game Austere Challenge 12 is anything to go by (the largest war game in world history. Check out "When War Games Go Live" http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28542
I'm sure this blog will attract lots more controversy. I'm tied up in a Green Party conference for the next few days but promise to respond on Sat.
No, I don't blame our aggressive stance on Obama, at not as singlehandedly as many do. Presidents don't have the power to wage war, and of course this was a point of dissension over intervening in Libya, where I think Obama followed a conscientious path to Congress' ire. It took Pearl Harbor to convince Congress to enter WWII, something the Roosevelt administration was unable to do on its own. Bush Jr. was not the instigator of the Iraq tragedy - he was suckered by Wolfowitz and the rest of the "New Right". Vietnam, I still believe, happened because Kennedy (son of a Hitler appeaser) and Johnson could not stand the pressure from the right - I blame them more for their weakness in opposing the diplomatic (who lost China? was still fresh) and military-industrial complex that was largely ignored after Eisenhower outed it, because it meant jobs, jobs, jobs and votes, votes, votes. I fault Obama for naivete about being able to bring the m-i c to heel rather than for bloodthirstiness. Leon Panetta gave it a shot, probably ineffectually but then again, today I heard The Despicable Hannity say that he has to go, so maybe he's OK after all.
That's my take. I could wish for more enlightened foreign policy, but I'll settle for leading from behind for now. At least we can discuss it without calling names as in several other blogs I've seen on OS.
Assad has sheltered leaders of terrorist organisations for years. Khalid Mishal runs Hamas from Syria, for a start. He also gave refuge to one of the worst Nazi war criminals of WW2 and was probably responsible for the assassination of Hariri.
He needs to go.
"If only R2P really did stand for “responsibility to protect”, the alleged intention of the UN’s mandate, and an evolved international community with honorable intentions could enter stage left, WITHOUT guns blazing, to help a hapless and endangered citizenry and to promote peace and national welfare. Instead, as Pepe Escobar has declared, “R2P” has clearly come to stand for “right to plunder” among the hyper-militarized, avaricious, and what might well be called “Axis of Western Evil,” the US, NATO and Israel (and their new and growing collection of Arab/African puppets)."
"So, as more and more innocent citizens die in Syria by the bloody hand of their government, the imperialist vultures (another Escobar apt coinage) circle, ready to ruthlessly exploit and expand the destruction of Syria’s infrastructure, seriously ignoring the hellish plight of the people save for possible shallow and shameless pr war-perpetrating purposes."
"“No fly zone” in Libya had such peaceful connotations upon first hearing, did it not? HAH! As did “humanitarian interference.” As with Libya, as violence toward Syria inevitably breaks out from the faux-humanitarian “Western Axis of Evil” will the citizen-killing chaos be hidden behind a fraudulent, “international community” mask? Will the word "war" Orwellianly and shamelessly be dropped from the Western corporate media once again?"
"The Syrian citizens are damned from within, damned from without. One might say, forgive the pun but it also seems apt, they are between “I-raq” (a looming and dooming “Iraqization” of their country, so to speak) and a hard place (their betraying, vicious government)."
Tease ;)
And, Drew, I do not know my ancient history, but show me where Iran has been the aggressor in any recent conflict. They haven't.