2 Oct 2016
OK you Russians! No more gentle American diplomacy! No more Mr. Nice Guy! So thundered US Secretary of State John Kerry last week.
Right on cue, the usually overwrought US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, blasted the Russians as ‘barbaric’ for their bombing campaign in Syria. She made no mention of the US using B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers as well as killer drones in Afghanistan. The lapdog US and British media were quick to run anguished pictures of Syrian babies but we saw narry a picture of an injured Afghan child.
Noble Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama, ducked and left Washington’s growing anti-Russian jihad to his aides while he flew off to Israel for the state funeral of the Shimon Peres, by now sainted by media as Israel’s ‘man of peace.’ In fact, Peres was the father of Israel’s nuclear weapons programs.
Under Peres’ auspices, Israel secretly offered nuclear warheads and then Jericho missiles to the embattled South African apartheid government. This was ironic because Israel has been insisting that Iran – which does not have nuclear weapons – will proliferate them around the globe.
Back in Washington, just about everyone is now ignoring lame duck Obama and doing their own thing. Recently, the Pentagon, which has no use for Obama, likely sabotaged joint US-Russians plan to end the bloody Syrian civil war by bombing a Syrian Army camp and killing close to 100 Syrian troops. ‘Ooops, sorry, a mistake’ explained the Pentagon.
More Russian warplanes are on the way to Syria. Ominously, Moscow just warned the US not to attack Russian military forces. Hillary Clinton’s supporters keep urging a so-called US-imposed ‘no fly zone’ in Syria, which is code for the US Air Force blowing Syria’s and Russia’s warplanes out of the skies and going after command control of Syria’s anti-aircraft systems. Which could be code for World War III.
Part of the reason for this intensified bellicosity is that Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air power, are making important if bloody progress in their siege of rebel-held sections of Aleppo.
At the same time, Turkey is decreasing its five-year old support for Syria’s rebels, including the al-Qaida allied Nusra Front (new relabled Jabhat Fateh al-Sham). The Saudis and Gulf emirates, who are financing much of the civil war, are hard up for cash. All sides in this bitter five-year old conflict are exhausted and war-weary. Once lovely Syria lies in ruins. For the extreme Sunni insurgents their best hope is direct US military intervention. They are waiting for the hawkish Hillary Clinton.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, claimed this week that Washington is protecting the Nusra Front as its ‘Plan B’ for Syria. He also asserted that the US will install Nusra in Damascus in the event that President Assad’s government falls. But the majority of Syrians and all its minorities would be bitterly opposed to being ruled by fanatical Wahabi Islamists.
This writer believes the US has long aided ISIS and still sees it as a potent weapon against the Assad government. Why else would it take the US and its Arab and Kurdish foot soldiers so long to move against ISIS strongholds at Raqqa and Mosul– which are, as this writer knows, only a taxi-ride away? ISIS is a rag-tag bunch of 20-something amateur Rambos, not the Wehrmacht.
One likely answer is that imperial Washington is totally confused over whom to support and how to do it. The bewildering fracas between Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, Arabs, Yazidis, assorted Christians, ISIS wildmen, egged on the US, Israel, Turkey, Russia, France, Britain, Lebanon, Jordan, the oil Arabs is just too much for Washington’s ill-educated, or often downright dim policy makers.
This writer has long believed that certain elements in Washington helped create ISIS as a potentially useful tool against non-obedient Mideast regimes, notably Syria and Libya. Israel, which whispers a lot into Washington’s ears, did the same thing by encouraging the growth of Hezbollah and Hamas as enemies of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Today, they are Israel’s toughest enemies, not the utterly corrupt regimes that run the Arab world.
The bright idea to overthrow Syria’s recognized government goes back to that Father of Disasters, George W. Bush. He planned to attack Syria with Israel. Bush was restrained when no suitable Syrian opposition group could be found to install in power. The Sunni opposition was mainly Muslim Brotherhood, a name that spooked Washington. So Washington waited until 2011 to ‘regime change’ disobedient Syria.
Copyright Eric Margolis 2016
This post is in: Afghanistan, International Politics, Russia, Syria, USA
Just saw this on Facebook: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1962638/putin-orders-all-russian-children-and-relatives-studying-abroad-to-return-to-the-motherland-as-he-prepares-for-wwiii/.
The Daily Star also published something similar… should we be concerned…?
I agree with your analysis of the Syrian Situation, having come to the same suppositions. The Syrian Reality is in fact, a World War, no matter how much the MSM spin it as a “civil war.” War is the disappearance of the last vestige of civility in every case. The old adage, ‘Truth is the 1st casualty of War’ and in the smearing of Assad and Putin/Russia, it is more ferocious and deceitful than ever before.
I almost gagged when I read this in Foreign Policy: “Kerry not happy. Leaked audio of John Kerry speaking with Syrian rebel leaders leaked to the New York Times reveals his frustration with the Russians, and his own government. “I think you’re looking at three people, four people in the administration who have all argued for use of force, and I lost the argument,” he said. Looking at Moscow, he said, “the problem is the Russians don’t care about international law, and we do.”
What this is saying without saying it, is there are people in the US government pushing for War with Russia. Obama has resisted up to now.
That part is True, and then this blatant lie, “the problem is the Russians don’t care about international law, and we do.”
1. Remember when the US went to the UN asking for legal permission to invade Iraq? The UN said NO, but the US invaded anyway, breaking International Law with Impunity. While claiming Moral Superiority, by it’s example, it ushered in the Law of the Jungle in the Middle East and the world which is so evident Today for those with eyes to see.
2. The US went to the UN asking for a “no fly zone” over Libya. NATO was given UN permission because the Russians did not VETO on the assurance the US gave Russia it was not a regime change situation. The US immediately started attacking Gadaffi’s troops on the ground, not Gadaffi’s planes in the air, enabling the the current situation of the Law of the Jungle in Libya, while the CIA ran Gadaffi’s weapons from their Station in Benghazi to the US supported rebels in Syria. All violations of International Law.
3. Russia is in Syria at the request of the legitimate government of Syria to help fight foreign mercenaries, armed and supported by foreign Nations.. The US has no right under International Law to be bombing another Sovereign Nation that is no direct threat to the American homeland.
4. The delusions Kerry is operating under with his lie, is more evidence the threat of US-Russia war I have been warning about, is more real than people care to realize. It’s your Future in this world!
This is what the US Secretary of Defence recently said at a missile launching site. ” In reality, assuming the continuation of the present “security environment” and the continued existence of nuclear weapons, there is good reason to fear that the world will be incinerated in the lifetimes of “our children and their children.”
— Here’s Carter in a 1998 essay in Foreign Affairs, co-written with Philip Zelikow, who would later be executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and former Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch:
“An act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.”
” this event would divide our past and future into a before and after.”
As I worked as a Courier doing my deliveries in Ottawa on 9/11, and listening to the radio and watching bits of the TV reporting in every business that had one, all I said to everybody that Day was, “The World as we knew it ended Today.”
“The Father of Disasters” George Bush a.k.a. “Abu Naqba” – this might possibly be the next meme in the Arab world for the former US President. The article covers the complexity of the situation in Iraq and Syria very accurately. I personally believe that after 15 years of an endless and costly conflict, the war-weary world, including the US have recognized the character of the insurgencies are not so much more different than the same regimes they have worked with in the past and in some countries even today, in essence, rule the pond by befriending the alligator if you can’t kill it (sound better in when you say it in the original language).
It does behove the imagination as to what is holding the US from obliterating small towns and cities where ill-equiped teenagers that comprise ISIS have been holed up since the world declared war on them. The US and its allies are not in the mood to invade ‘Syriaq’, the ISIS ground force is already at hand and ferocious enough to keep the Russians at bay.
Excellent article, as always. I agree with you, Eric, that the US was behind the creation of ISIS. As you say, that would explain in part why it hasn’t done much to obliterate it. ISIS is actually serving the west’s interests in a few ways, one of which is to act as a magnet for a lot of misfits and loony-tunes, in the hope of eventually killing or maiming most of them somewhere in Syria and Iraq. I also think that Israel might have a hand in supporting ISIS, perhaps in arming and / or financing it. Otherwise, if the Israelis really perceived it to be a real threat to the country, they would insist quite loudly that the US move quickly to wipe out ISIS or else see Israel move to do so on its own.
Eric – came across this earlier today. Source is not the most reliable and I have no corroboration but sounds like Bibi!
http://whatsupic.com/news-politics-world/1475330512.html
Thoughts?
My concern is not only this will happen but something no one is even considering. Donald Trump has become a religion and there are people among his followers who literally look at him as a god. No matter how much you prove what he is they will not believe it. The Republican party has gone completely insane. Right wing extremists in the media has America more divided than at any time in its history.
Add to this many American generals have publically stated they will not support Trump if he is elected. Not having the full support of the military is the first part of a coup.
There is over 200,000 members in America’s various militias. Most have military training and are very heavily armed and extremely right wing. The NRA has 2,000,000 fanatics in it. All fanatically support Donald Trump. So basically Trump has an army of over two million at his call. Sure they have no air force, armour, artillery, but there are most likely some generals who support Trump.
Regardless of who wins the second American civil war is less than 3 years away.