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The Revolutionary Distemper in Syria That Wasn't
 Stephen Gowans, What's Left 
October 22, 2016
 

 Apparently, the US Left has yet to figure out that Washington doesn't try to overthrow neoliberals. If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were a devotee of the Washington Consensus–as Counterpunch's Eric Draitser seems to believe–the United States government wouldn't have been calling since 2003 for Assad to step down. Nor would it be overseeing the Islamist guerilla war against his government; it would be protecting him.

There is a shibboleth in some circles that, as Eric Draitser put it in a recent Counterpunch article, the uprising in Syria "began as a response to the Syrian government's neoliberal policies and brutality," and that "the revolutionary content of the rebel side in Syria has been sidelined by a hodgepodge of Saudi and Qatari-financed jihadists." This theory appears, as far as I can tell, to be based on argument by assertion, not evidence. Forthcoming April 2017 from Baraka Books.

Forthcoming April 2017 from Baraka Books.

A review of press reports in the weeks immediately preceding and following the mid-March 2011 outbreak of riots in Daraa—usually recognized as the beginning of the uprising—offers no indication that Syria was in the grips of a revolutionary distemper, whether anti-neo-liberal or otherwise. On the contrary, reporters representing Time magazine and the New York Times referred to the government as having broad support, of critics conceding that Assad was popular, and of Syrians exhibiting little interest in protest. At the same time, they described the unrest as a series of riots involving hundreds, and not thousands or tens of thousands of people, guided by a largely Islamist agenda and exhibiting a violent character.

Time magazine reported that two jihadist groups that would later play lead roles in the insurgency, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, were already in operation on the eve of the riots, while a mere three months earlier, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood voiced "their hope for a civil revolt in Syria." The Muslim Brothers, who had decades earlier declared a blood feud with Syria's ruling Ba'athist Party, objecting violently to the party's secularism, had been embroiled in a life and death struggle with secular Arab nationalists since the 1960s, and had engaged in street battles with Ba'athist partisans from the late 1940s. (In one such battle, Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father, who himself would serve as president from 1970 to 2000, was knifed by a Muslim Brother adversary.) The Brotherhood's leaders, beginning in 2007, met frequently with the US State Department and the US National Security Council, as well as with the US government-funded Middle East Partnership Initiative, which had taken on the overt role of funding overseas overthrow organizations—a task the CIA had previously done covertly.

Washington had conspired to purge Arab nationalist influence from Syria as early as the mid-1950s, when Kermit Roosevelt, who engineered the overthrow of Iran's prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh for nationalizing his country's oil industry, plotted with British intelligence to stir up the Muslim Brothers to overthrow a triumvirate of Arab nationalist and communist leaders in Damascus who Washington and London perceived as threatening Western economic interests in the Middle East.

Washington funnelled arms to Brotherhood mujahedeen in the 1980s to wage urban guerrilla warfare against Hafez al-Assad, who hardliners in Washington called an "Arab communist." His son, Bashar, continued the Arab nationalists' commitment to unity (of the Arab nation), independence, and (Arab) socialism. These goals guided the Syrian state—as they had done the Arab nationalist states of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi and Iraq under Saddam. All three states were targeted by Washington for the same reason: their Arab nationalist commitments clashed fundamentally with the US imperialist agenda of US global leadership.

Bashar al-Assad's refusal to renounce Arab nationalist ideology dismayed Washington, which complained about his socialism, the third part of the Ba'athists' holy trinity of values. Plans to oust Assad—based in part on his failure to embrace Washington's neo-liberalism—were already in preparation in Washington by 2003, if not earlier. If Assad was championing neo-liberalism, as Draitser and others contend, it somehow escaped the notice of Washington and Wall Street, which complained about "socialist" Syria and the country's decidedly anti-neoliberal economic policies.

A Death Feud Heats Up With US Assistance

In late January 2011, a page was created on Facebook called The Syrian Revolution 2011. It announced that a "Day of Rage" would be held on February 4 and 5. [1] The protests "fizzled," reported Time. The Day of Rage amounted to a Day of Indifference. Moreover, the connection to Syria was tenuous. Most of the chants shouted by the few protesters who attended were about Libya, demanding that Muammar Gaddafi—whose government was under siege by Islamist insurrectionists—step down. Plans were set for new protests on March 4 and March 5, but they too garnered little support. [2]

Time's correspondent Rania Abouzeid attributed the failure of the protest organizers to draw significant support to the fact that most Syrians were not opposed to their government. Assad had a favorable reputation, especially among the two-thirds of the population under 30 years of age, and his government's policies were widely supported. "Even critics concede that Assad is popular and considered close to the country's huge youth cohort, both emotionally, ideologically and, of course, chronologically," Abouzeid reported, adding that unlike "the ousted pro-American leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, Assad's hostile foreign policy toward Israel, strident support for Palestinians and the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah are in line with popular Syrian sentiment." Assad, in other words, had legitimacy. The Time correspondent added that Assad's "driving himself to the Umayyad Mosque in February to take part in prayers to mark the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and strolling through the crowded Souq Al-Hamidiyah marketplace with a low security profile" had "helped to endear him, personally, to the public." [3]

This depiction of the Syrian president—a leader endeared to the public, ideologically in sync with popular Syrian sentiment—clashed starkly with the discourse that would emerge shortly after the eruption of violent protests in the Syrian town of Daraa less than two weeks later, and would become implanted in the discourse of US leftists, including Draitser. But on the eve of the signal Daraa events, Syria was being remarked upon for its quietude. No one "expects mass uprisings in Syria," Abouzeid reported, "and, despite a show of dissent every now and then, very few want to participate." [4] A Syrian youth told Time: "There is a lot of government help for the youth. They give us free books, free schools, free universities." (Hardly the picture of the neo-liberal state Draitser paints.) She continued: "Why should there be a revolution? There's maybe a one percent chance." [5] The New York Times shared this view. Syria, the newspaper reported, "seemed immune to the wave of uprisings sweeping the Arab world." [6] Syria was distemper-free.

But on March 17, there was a violent uprising in Daraa. There are conflicting accounts of who or what sparked it. Time reported that the "rebellion in Daraa was provoked by the arrest of a handful of youths for daubing a wall with anti-regime graffiti." [7] The Independent's Robert Fisk offered a slightly different version. He reported that "government intelligence officers beat and killed several boys who had scrawled anti-government graffiti on the walls of the city." [8] Another account holds that the factor that sparked the uprising in Daraa that day was extreme and disproportionate use of force by Syrian security forces in response to demonstrations against the boys' arrest. There "were some youngsters printing some graffiti on the wall, and they were imprisoned, and as their parents wanted them back, the security forces really struck back very, very tough." [9] Another account, from the Syrian government, denies that any of this happened. Five years after the event, Assad told an interviewer that it "didn't happen. It was only propaganda. I mean, we heard about them, we never saw those children that have been taken to prison that time. So, it was only a fallacious narrative."[10]

But if there was disagreement about what sparked the uprising, there was little disagreement that the uprising was violent. The New York Times reported that "Protesters set fire to the ruling Ba'ath Party's headquarters and other government buildings and clashed with police .In addition to the party headquarters, protesters burned the town's main courthouse and a branch of the SyriaTel phone company." [11] Time added that protesters set fire to the governor's office, as well as to a branch office of a second cellphone company. [12] The Syrian government's news agency, SANA, posted photographs of burning vehicles on its Web site. [13] Clearly, this wasn't a peaceful demonstration, as it would be later depicted. Nor was it a mass uprising. Time reported that the demonstrators numbered in the hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands. [14]

Assad reacted immediately to the Daraa ructions, announcing "a series of reforms, including a salary increase for public workers, greater freedom for the news media and political parties, and a reconsideration of the emergency rule," [15] a war-time restriction on political and civil liberties, invoked because Syria was officially at war with Israel. Before the end of April, the government would rescind "the country's 48-year-old emergency law" and abolish "the Supreme State Security Court." [16]

Why did the government make these concessions? Because that's what the Daraa protesters demanded. Protesters "gathered in and around Omari mosque in Daraa, chanting their demands: the release of all political prisoners the abolition of Syria's 48-year emergency law; more freedoms; and an end to pervasive corruption." [17] These demands were consistent with the call, articulated in early February on The Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page "to end the state of emergency in Syria and end corruption." [18] A demand to release all political prisoners was also made in a letter signed by clerics posted on Facebook. The clerics' demands included lifting the "state of emergency law, releasing all political detainees, halting harassment by the security forces and combating corruption." [19] Releasing political detainees would amount to releasing jihadists, or, to use a designation current in the West, "terrorists." The State Department had acknowledged that political Islam was the main opposition in Syria [20]; jihadists made up the principal section of oppositionists likely to be incarcerated. Clerics demanding that Damascus release all political prisoners was equal in effect to the Islamic State demanding that Washington, Paris, and London release all Islamists detained in US, French and British prisons on terrorism charges. This wasn't a demand for jobs and greater democracy, but a demand for the release from prison of activists inspired by the goal of bringing about an Islamic state in Syria. The call to lift the emergency law, similarly, appeared to have little to do with fostering democracy and more to do with expanding the room for jihadists and their collaborators to organize opposition to the secular state.

A week after the outbreak of violence in Daraa, Time's Rania Abouzeid reported that "there do not appear to be widespread calls for the fall of the regime or the removal of the relatively popular President." [21] Indeed, the demands issued by the protesters and clerics had not included calls for Assad to step down. And Syrians were rallying to Assad. "There were counterdemonstrations in the capital in support of the President," [22] reportedly far exceeding in number the hundreds of protesters who turned out in Daraa to burn buildings and cars and clash with police. [23]

By April 9—less than a month after the Daraa events—Time reported that a string of protests had broken out and that Islam was playing a prominent role in them. For anyone who was conversant with the decades-long succession of strikes, demonstrations, riots, and insurrections the Muslim Brotherhood had organized against what it deemed the "infidel" Ba'athist government, this looked like history repeating itself. The protests weren‘t reaching a critical mass. On the contrary, the government continued to enjoy "the loyalty" of "a large part of the population," reported Time. [24]

Islamists played a lead role in drafting the Damascus Declaration in the mid-2000s, which demanded regime change. [25] In 2007, the Muslim Brothers, the archetypal Sunni political Islamist movement, which inspired Al-Qaeda and its progeny, Jabhat al Nusra and Islamic State, teamed up with a former Syrian vice-president to found the National Salvation Front. The front met frequently with the US State Department and the US National Security Council, as well as with the US government-funded Middle East Partnership Initiative, [26] which did openly what the CIA once did covertly, namely, funnel money and expertise to fifth columnists in countries whose governments Washington opposed.

By 2009, just two years before the eruption of unrest throughout the Arab world, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood denounced the Arab nationalist government of Bashar al-Assad as a foreign and hostile element in Syrian society which needed to be eliminated. According to the group's thinking, the Alawite community, to which Assad belonged, and which the Brothers regarded as heretics, used secular Arab nationalism as a cover to furtively advance a sectarian agenda to destroy Syria from within by oppressing "true" (i.e., Sunni) Muslims. In the name of Islam, the heretical regime would have to be overthrown. [27]

A mere three months before the 2011 outbreak of violence in Syria, scholar Liad Porat wrote a brief for the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, based at Brandeis University. "The movement's leaders," the scholar concluded, "continue to voice their hope for a civil revolt in Syria, wherein ‘the Syrian people will perform its duty and liberate Syria from the tyrannical and corrupt regime.'" The Brotherhood stressed that it was engaged in a fight to the death with the secular Arab nationalist government of Bashar al-Assad. A political accommodation with the government was impossible because its leaders were not part of the Sunni Muslim Syrian nation. Membership in the Syrian nation was limited to true Muslims, the Brothers contended, and not Alawite heretics who embraced such foreign un-Islamic creeds as secular Arab nationalism. [28]

That the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood played a key role in the uprising that erupted three months later was confirmed in 2012 by the US Defense Intelligence Agency. A leaked report from the agency said that the insurgency was sectarian and led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the forerunner of Islamic State. The report went on to say that the insurgents were supported by the West, Arab Gulf oil monarchies and Turkey. The analysis correctly predicted the establishment of a "Salafist principality," an Islamic state, in Eastern Syria, noting that this was desired by the insurgency's foreign backers, who wanted to see the secular Arab nationalists isolated and cut-off from Iran. [29]

Documents prepared by US Congress researchers in 2005 revealed that the US government was actively weighing regime change in Syria long before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, challenging the view that US support for the Syrian rebels was based on allegiance to a "democratic uprising" and showing that it was simply an extension of a long-standing policy of seeking to topple the government in Damascus. Indeed, the researchers acknowledged that the US government's motivation to overthrow the secular Arab nationalist government in Damascus was unrelated to democracy promotion in the Middle East. In point of fact, they noted that Washington's preference was for secular dictatorships (Egypt) and monarchies (Jordan and Saudi Arabia.) The impetus for pursuing regime change, according to the researchers, was a desire to sweep away an impediment to the achievement of US goals in the Middle East related to strengthening Israel, consolidating US domination of Iraq, and fostering open market, free enterprise economies. Democracy was never a consideration. [30] If Assad was promoting neo-liberal policies in Syria, as Draitser contends, it's difficult to understand why Washington cited Syria's refusal to embrace the US agenda of open markets and free enterprise as a reason to change Syria's government.

To underscore the point that the protests lacked broad popular support, on April 22, more than a month after the Daraa riot, the New York Times' Anthony Shadid reported that "the protests, so far, seemed to fall short of the popular upheaval of revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia." In other words, more than a month after only hundreds—and not thousands or tens of thousands—of protesters rioted in Daraa, there was no sign in Syria of a popular Arab Spring upheaval. The uprising remained a limited, prominently, Islamist affair. By contrast, there had been huge demonstrations in Damascus in support of—not against—the government, Assad remained popular, and, according to Shadid, the government commanded the loyalty of "Christian and heterodox Muslim sects." [31] Shadid wasn't the only Western journalist who reported that Alawites, Ismailis, Druze and Christians were strongly backing the government. Times' Rania Abouzeid observed that the Ba'athists "could claim the backing of Syria's substantial minority groups." [32]

The reality that the Syrian government commanded the loyalty of Christian and heterodox Muslim sects, as the New York Times' Shadid reported, suggested that Syria's religious minorities recognized something about the uprising that the Western press under-reported (and revolutionary socialists in the United States missed), namely, that it was driven by a sectarian Sunni Islamist agenda which, if brought to fruition, would have unpleasant consequences for anyone who wasn't considered a "true" Muslim. For this reason, Alawites, Ismailis, Druze and Christians lined up with the Ba'athists who sought to bridge sectarian divisions as part of their programmatic commitment to fostering Arab unity. The slogan "Alawis to the grave and Christians to Beirut!" chanted during demonstrations in those early days" [33] only confirmed the point that the uprising was a continuation of the death feud that Sunni political Islam had vowed to wage against the secular Arab nationalist government, and was not a mass upheaval for democracy or against neo-liberalism. If indeed it was any of these things, how would we explain that a thirst for democracy and opposition to neo-liberalism were present only in the Sunni community and absent in those of religious minorities? Surely, a democratic deficit and neoliberal tyranny, if they were present at all and acted as triggers of a revolutionary upsurge, would have crossed religious lines. That Alawites, Ismailis, Druze and Christians didn't demonstrate, and that riots were Sunni-based with Islamist content, points strongly to the insurrection, from the very beginning, representing the recrudescence of the long running Sunni jihadist campaign against Ba'athist secularism.

"From the very beginning the Assad government said it was engaged in a fight with militant Islamists." [34] The long history of Islamist uprisings against Ba'athism prior to 2011 certainly suggested this was very likely the case, and the way in which the uprising subsequently unfolded, as an Islamist-led war against the secular state, only strengthened the view. Other evidence, both positive and negative, corroborated Assad's contention that the Syrian state was under attack by jihadists (just as it had been many other times in the past.) The negative evidence, that the uprising wasn't a popular upheaval against an unpopular government, was inhered in Western media reports which showed that Syria's Arab nationalist government was popular and commanded the loyalty of the population.

By contrast, anti-government demonstrations, riots and protests were small-scale, attracting far fewer people than did a mass demonstration in Damascus in support of the government, and certainly not on the order of the popular upheavals in Egypt and Tunisia. What's more, the protesters' demands centered on the release of political prisoners (mainly jihadists) and the lifting of war-time restrictions on the expression of political dissent, not calls for Assad to step down or change the government's economic policies. The positive evidence came from Western news media accounts which showed that Islam played a prominent role in the riots. Also, while it was widely believed that armed Islamist groups only entered the fray subsequent to the initial spring 2011 riots—and in doing so "hijacked" a "popular uprising"— in point of fact, two jihadist groups which played a prominent role in the post-2011 armed revolt against secular Arab nationalism, Ahrar- al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra, were both active at the beginning of 2011. Ahrar al-Sham "started working on forming brigades well before mid-March, 2011, when the" Daraa riot occurred, according to Time. [35] Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, "was unknown until late January 2012, when it announced its formation [but] it was active for months before then." [36]

Another piece of evidence that is consistent with the view that militant Islam played a role in the uprisings very early on—or, at the very least, that the protests were violent from the beginning—is that `"there were signs from the very start that armed groups were involved." The journalist and author Robert Fisk recalled seeing a tape from "the very early days of the ‘rising' showing men with pistols and Kalashnikovs in a Daraa demonstration." He recalls another event, in May 2011, when "an Al Jazeera crew filmed armed men shooting at Syrian troops a few hundred metres from the northern border with Lebanon but the channel declined to air the footage." [37] Even US officials, who were hostile to the Syrian government and might be expected to challenge Damascus's view that it was embroiled in a fight with armed rebels "acknowledged that the demonstrations weren't peaceful and that some protesters were armed." [38] By September, Syrian authorities were reporting that they had lost more than 500 police officers and soldiers, killed by guerillas. [39] By late October, the number had more than doubled. [40] In less than a year, the uprising had gone from the burning of Ba'ath Party buildings and government officers and clashes with police, to guerrilla warfare, involving methods that would be labeled "terrorism" were they undertaken against Western targets.

Assad would later complain that:

 "Everything we said in Syria at the beginning of the crisis they say later. They said it's peaceful, we said it's not peaceful, they're killing – these demonstrators, that they called them peaceful demonstrators – have killed policemen. Then it became militants. They said yes, it's militants. We said it's militants, it's terrorism. They said no, it's not terrorism. Then when they say it's terrorism, we say it's Al Qaeda, they say no, it's not Al Qaeda. So, whatever we said, they say later." [41]

The "Syrian uprising," wrote the Middle East specialist Patrick Seale, "should be seen as only the latest, if by far the most violent, episode in the long war between Islamists and Ba'athists, which dates back to the founding of the secular Ba‘ath Party in the 1940s. The struggle between them is by now little short of a death-feud." [42] "It is striking," Seale continued, citing Aron Lund, who had written a report for the Swedish Institute of International Affairs on Syrian Jihadism, "that virtually all the members of the various armed insurgent groups are Sunni Arabs; that the fighting has been largely restricted to Sunni Arab areas only, whereas areas inhabited by Alawis, Druze or Christians have remained passive or supportive of the regime; that defections from the regime are nearly 100 per cent Sunni; that money, arms and volunteers are pouring in from Islamic states or from pro-Islamic organisations and individuals; and that religion is the insurgent movement's most important common denominator." [43]

Brutality as a Trigger?

Is it reasonable to believe that the use of force by the Syrian state sparked the guerrilla war which broke out soon after?

It strains belief that an over-reaction by security forces to a challenge to government authority in the Syrian town of Daraa (if indeed an over-reaction occurred) could spark a major war, involving scores of states, and mobilizing jihadists from scores of countries. A slew of discordant facts would have to be ignored to begin to give this theory even a soupcon of credibility.

First, we would have to overlook the reality that the Assad government was popular and viewed as legitimate. A case might be made that an overbearing response by a highly unpopular government to a trivial challenge to its authority might have provided the spark that was needed to ignite a popular insurrection, but notwithstanding US president Barack Obama's insistence that Assad lacked legitimacy, there's no evidence that Syria, in March 2011, was a powder keg of popular anti-government resentment ready to explode. As Time's Rania Abouzeid reported on the eve of the Daraa riot, "Even critics concede that Assad is popular" [44] and "no one expects mass uprisings in Syria and, despite a show of dissent every now and then, very few want to participate." [45]

Second, we would have to discount the fact that the Daraa riot involved only hundreds of participants, hardly a mass uprising, and the protests that followed similarly failed to garner a critical mass, as Time's Nicholas Blanford reported.[46] Similarly, the New York Times' Anthony Shadid found no evidence that there was a popular upheaval in Syria, even more than a month after the Daraa riot.[47] What was going on, contrary to Washington-propagated rhetoric about the Arab Spring breaking out in Syria, was that jihadists were engaged in a campaign of guerilla warfare against Syrian security forces, and had, by October, taken the lives of more than a thousand police officers and soldiers.

Third, we would have to close our eyes to the fact that the US government, with its British ally, had drawn up plans in 1956 to provoke a war in Syria by enlisting the Muslim Brotherhood to instigate internal uprisings. [48] The Daraa riot and subsequent armed clashes with police and soldiers resembled the plan which regime change specialist Kermit Roosevelt had prepared. That's not to say that the CIA dusted off Roosevelt's proposal and recycled it for use in 2011; only that the plot showed that Washington and London were capable of planning a destabilization operation involving a Muslim Brotherhood-led insurrection to bring about regime change in Syria.

We would also have to ignore the events of February 1982, when the Muslim Brothers seized control of Hama, Syria's fourth largest city. Hama was the epicenter of Sunni fundamentalism in Syria, and a major base of operations for the jihadist fighters. Galvanized by a false report that Assad had been overthrown, Muslim Brothers went on a gleeful blood-soaked rampage throughout the city, attacking police stations and murdering Ba'ath Party leaders and their families, along with government officials and soldiers. In some cases, victims were decapitated [49] a practice which would be resurrected decades later by Islamic State fighters. Every Ba'athist official in Hama was murdered. [50]

The Hama events of 1982 are usually remembered in the West (if they're remembered at all), not for the atrocities carried out by the Islamists, but for the Syrian army's response, which, as would be expected of any army, involved the use of force to restore sovereign control over the territory seized by the insurrectionists. Thousands of troops were dispatched to take Hama back from the Muslim Brothers. Former US State Department official William R. Polk described the aftermath of the Syrian army assault on Hama as resembling that of the US assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, [51] (the difference, of course, being that the Syrian army was acting legitimately within its own sovereign territory while the US military was acting illegitimately as an occupying force to quell opposition to its occupation.) How many died in the Hama assault, however, remains a matter of dispute. The figures vary. "An early report in Time said that 1,000 were killed. Most observers estimated that 5,000 people died. Israeli sources and the Muslim Brotherhood"—sworn enemies of the secular Arab nationalists who therefore had an interest in exaggerating the casualty toll—"both charged that the death toll passed 20,000." [52] Robert Dreyfus, who has written on the West's collaboration with political Islam, argues that Western sources deliberately exaggerated the death toll in order to demonize the Ba'athists as ruthless killers, and that the Ba'athists went along with the deception in order to intimidate the Muslim Brotherhood. [53]

As the Syrian army sorted through the rubble of Hama in the aftermath of the assault, evidence was found that foreign governments had provided Hama's insurrectionists with money, arms, and communications equipment. Polk writes that:

 "Assad saw foreign troublemakers at work among his people. This, after all, was the emotional and political legacy of colonial rule—a legacy painfully evident in most of the post-colonial world, but one that is almost unnoticed in the Western world. And the legacy is not a myth. It is a reality that, often years after events occur, we can verify with official papers. Hafez al-Assad did not need to wait for leaks of documents: his intelligence services and international journalists turned up dozens of attempts by conservative, oil-rich Arab countries, the United States, and Israel to subvert his government. Most engaged in ‘dirty tricks,' propaganda, or infusions of money, but it was noteworthy that in the 1982 Hama uprising, more than 15,000 foreign-supplied machine guns were captured, along with prisoners including Jordanian- and CIA-trained paramilitary forces (much like the jihadists who appear so much in media accounts of 2013 Syria). And what he saw in Syria was confirmed by what he learned about Western regime-changing elsewhere. He certainly knew of the CIA attempt to murder President Nasser of Egypt and the Anglo-American overthrow of the government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh." [54]

In his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that "the Hama massacre could be understood as, ‘The natural reaction of a modernizing politician in a relatively new nation state trying to stave off retrogressive—in this case, Islamic fundamentalists—elements aiming to undermine everything he has achieved in the way of building Syria into a 20th century secular republic. That is also why," continued Friedman, that "if someone had been able to take an objective opinion poll in Syria after the Hama massacre, Assad's treatment of the rebellion probably would have won substantial approval, even among Sunni Muslims." [55]

The outbreak of a Sunni Islamist jihad against the Syrian government in the 1980s challenges the view that militant Sunni Islam in the Levant is an outcome of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the pro-Shi'a sectarian policies of the US occupation authorities. This view is historically myopic, blind to the decades-long existence of Sunni political Islam as a significant force in Levantine politics. From the moment Syria achieved formal independence from France after World War II, through the decades that followed in the 20th century, and into the next century, the main contending forces in Syria were secular Arab nationalism and political Islam. As journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote in 2016, "the Syrian armed opposition is dominated by Isis, al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham." The "only alternative to (secular Arab nationalist) rule is the Islamists." [56] This has long been the case.

Finally, we would also have to ignore the fact that US strategists had planned since 2003, and possibly as early as 2001, to force Assad and his secular Arab nationalist ideology from power, and was funding the Syrian opposition, including Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups, from 2005. Accordingly, Washington had been driving toward the overthrow of the Assad government with the goal of de-Ba'athifying Syria. An Islamist-led guerilla struggle against Syria's secular Arab nationalists would have unfolded, regardless of whether the Syrian government's response at Daraa was excessive or not. The game was already in play, and a pretext was being sought. Daraa provided it. Thus, the idea that the arrest of two boys in Daraa for painting anti-government graffiti on a wall could provoke a major conflict is as believable as the notion that WWI was caused by nothing more than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Socialist Syria

Socialism can be defined in many ways, but if it is defined as public-ownership of the commanding heights of the economy accompanied by economic planning, then Syria under its 1973 and 2012 constitutions clearly meets the definition of socialism. However, the Syrian Arab Republic had never been a working-class socialist state, of the category Marxists would recognize. It was, instead, an Arab socialist state inspired by the goal of achieving Arab political independence and overcoming the legacy of the Arab nation's underdevelopment. The framers of the constitution saw socialism as a means to achieve national liberation and economic development. "The march toward the establishment of a socialist order," the 1973 constitution's framers wrote, is a "fundamental necessity for mobilizing the potentialities of the Arab masses in their battle with Zionism and imperialism." Marxist socialism concerned itself with the struggle between an exploiting owning class and exploited working class, while Arab socialism addressed the struggle between exploiting and exploited nations. While these two different socialisms operated at different levels of exploitation, the distinctions were of no moment for Westerns banks, corporations and major investors as they cast their gaze across the globe in pursuit of profit. Socialism was against the profit-making interests of US industrial and financial capital, whether it was aimed at ending the exploitation of the working class or overcoming the imperialist oppression of national groups.

Ba'ath socialism had long irritated Washington. The Ba'athist state had exercised considerable influence over the Syrian economy, through ownership of enterprises, subsidies to privately-owned domestic firms, limits on foreign investment, and restrictions on imports. The Ba'athists regarded these measures as necessary economic tools of a post-colonial state trying to wrest its economic life from the grips of former colonial powers and to chart a course of development free from the domination of foreign interests.

Washington's goals, however, were obviously antithetical. It didn't want Syria to nurture its industry and zealously guard its independence, but to serve the interests of the bankers and major investors who truly mattered in the United States, by opening Syrian labor to exploitation and Syria's land and natural resources to foreign ownership. Our agenda, the Obama Administration had declared in 2015, "is focused on lowering tariffs on American products, breaking down barriers to our goods and services, and setting higher standards to level the playing field for American firms."[57] This was hardly a new agenda, but had been the agenda of US foreign policy for decades. Damascus wasn't falling into line behind a Washington that insisted that it could and would "lead the global economy."[58]

Hardliners in Washington had considered Hafez al-Assad an Arab communist, [59] and US officials considered his son, Bashar, an ideologue who couldn't bring himself to abandon the third pillar of the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party's program: socialism. The US State Department complained that Syria had "failed to join an increasingly interconnected global economy," which is to say, had failed to turn over its state-owned enterprises to private investors, among them Wall Street financial interests. The US State Department also expressed dissatisfaction that "ideological reasons" had prevented Assad from liberalizing Syria's economy, that "privatization of government enterprises was still not widespread," and that the economy "remains highly controlled by the government." [60] Clearly, Assad hadn't learned what Washington had dubbed the "lessons of history," namely, that "market economies, not command-and-control economies with the heavy hand of government, are the best." [61] By drafting a constitution that mandated that the government maintain a role in guiding the economy on behalf of Syrian interests, and that the Syrian government would not make Syrians work for the interests of Western banks, corporations, and investors, Assad was asserting Syrian independence against Washington's agenda of "opening markets and leveling the playing field for American .businesses abroad." [62]

On top of this, Assad underscored his allegiance to socialist values against what Washington had once called the "moral imperative" of "economic freedom," [63] by writing social rights into the constitution: security against sickness, disability and old age; access to health care; and free education at all levels. These rights would continue to be placed beyond the easy reach of legislators and politicians who could sacrifice them on the altar of creating a low-tax, foreign-investment-friendly business climate. As a further affront against Washington's pro-business orthodoxy, the constitution committed the state to progressive taxation.

Finally, the Ba'athist leader included in his updated constitution a provision that had been introduced by his father in 1973, a step toward real, genuine democracy—a provision which decision-makers in Washington, with their myriad connections to the banking and corporate worlds, could hardly tolerate. The constitution would require that at minimum half the members of the People's Assembly be drawn from the ranks of peasants and workers.

If Assad was a neo-liberal, he certainly was one of the world's oddest devotees of the ideology.

Drought?

A final point on the origins of the violent uprising in 2011: Some social scientists and analysts have drawn on a study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to suggest that "drought played a role in the Syrian unrest." According to this view, drought "caused crop failures that led to the migration of as many as 1.5 million people from rural to urban areas." This, in combination with an influx of refugees from Iraq, intensified competition for scarce jobs in urban areas, making Syria a cauldron of social and economic tension ready to boil over. [64] The argument sounds reasonable, even "scientific," but the phenomenon it seeks to explain—mass upheaval in Syria—never happened. As we've seen, a review of Western press coverage found no reference to mass upheaval. On the contrary, reporters who expected to find a mass upheaval were surprised that they didn't find one. Instead, Western journalists found Syria to be surprisingly quiet. Demonstrations called by organizers of the Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page fizzled. Critics conceded that Assad was popular. Reporters could find no one who believed a revolt was imminent. Even a month after the Daraa incident—which involved only hundreds of protesters, dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Syrians who demonstrated in Damascus in support of the government—the New York Times reporter on the ground, Anthony Shadid, could find no sign in Syria of the mass upheavals of Tunisia and Egypt. In early February 2011, "Omar Nashabe, a long-time Syria watcher and correspondent for the Beirut-based Arabic daily Al-Ahkbar" told Time that "Syrians may be afflicted by poverty that stalks 14% of its population combined with an estimated 20% unemployment rate, but Assad still has his credibility." [65]

That the government commanded popular support was affirmed when the British survey firm YouGov published a poll in late 2011 showing that 55 percent of Syrians wanted Assad to stay. The poll received almost no mention in the Western media, prompting the British journalist Jonathan Steele to ask: "Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that most Syrians are in favor of Bashar al-Assad remaining as president, would that not be major news?" Steele described the poll findings as "inconvenient facts" which were" suppressed "because Western media coverage of the events in Syria had ceased "to be fair" and had turned into "a propaganda weapon."[66]

Sloganeering in Lieu of Politics and Analysis

Draitser can be faulted, not only for propagating an argument made by assertion, based on no evidence, but for substituting slogans for politics and analysis. In his October 20 Counterpunch article, Syria and the Left: Time to Break the Silence, he argues that the defining goals of Leftism ought to be the pursuit of peace and justice, as if these are two inseparable qualities, which are never in opposition. That peace and justice may, at times, be antithetical, is illustrated in the following conversation between Australian journalist Richard Carleton and Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer, novelist and revolutionary. [67]

 C: ‘Why won't your organization engage in peace talks with the Israelis?'

 K: ‘You don't mean exactly "peace talks". You mean capitulation. Surrendering.

 C: ‘Why not just talk?'

 K: ‘Talk to whom?'

 C: ‘Talk to the Israeli leaders.'

 K: ‘That is kind of a conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean?'

 C: ‘Well, if there are no swords and no guns in the room, you could still talk.'

 K: ‘No. I have never seen any talk between a colonialist and a national liberation movement.'

 C: ‘But despite this, why not talk?'

 K: ‘Talk about what?'

 C: ‘Talk about the possibility of not fighting.'

 K: ‘Not fighting for what?'

 C: ‘No fighting at all. No matter what for.'

 K: ‘People usually fight for something. And they stop fighting for something. So you can't even tell me why we should speak about what. Why should we talk about stopping to fight?'

 C: ‘Talk to stop fighting to stop the death and the misery, the destruction and the pain.'

 K: ‘The misery and the destruction the pain and the death of whom?'

 C: ‘Of Palestinians. Of Israelis. Of Arabs.'

 K: ‘Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, thrown in the camps, living in starvation, killed for twenty years and forbidden to use even the name "Palestinians"?'

 C: ‘They are better that way than dead though.'

 K: ‘Maybe to you. But to us, it's not. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights is something as essential as life itself.

To which values the US Left should devote itself when peace and justice are in conflict, Draitser doesn't say. His invocation of the slogan "peace and justice" as the desired defining mission of the US Left seems to be nothing more than an invitation for Leftists to abandon politics in favor of embarking on a mission of becoming beautiful souls, above the sordid conflicts which plague humanity—never taking a side, except that of the angels. His assertion that "no state or group has the best interests of Syrians at heart" is almost too silly to warrant comment. How would he know? One can't help but get the impression that he believes that he, and the US Left, alone among the groups and states of the world, know what's best for the "Syrian people." Which may be why he opines that the responsibility of the US Left, "is to the people of Syria," as if the people of Syria are an undifferentiated mass with uniform interests and agendas. Syrians en masse include both secularists and political Islamists, who have irreconcilable views of how the state ought to be organized, who have been locked in a death feud for more than half a century—one helped along, on the Islamist side, by his own government. Syrians en masse include those who favor integration into the US Empire, and those who are against it; those who collaborate with US imperialists and those who refuse to. In this perspective, what does it mean, to say the US Left has a responsibility to the people of Syria? Which people of Syria?

I would have thought that the responsibility of the US Left is to working people of the United States, not the people of Syria. And I would have imagined, as well, that the US Left would regard its responsibilities to include disseminating a rigorous, evidence-based political analysis of how the US economic elite uses the apparatus of the US state to advance its interests at the expense of both domestic and foreign populations. How does Washington's long war on Syria affect the working people of America? That's what Draitser ought to be talking about.

My book Washington's Long War on Syria is forthcoming April 2017.

NOTES

1 Aryn Baker, "Syria is not Egypt, but might it one day be Tunisia?," Time, February 4, 2011

2 Rania Abouzeid, "The Syrian style of repression: Thugs and lectures," Time, February 27, 2011

3 Rania Abouzeid, "Sitting pretty in Syria: Why few go backing Bashar," Time, March 6, 2011

4 Rania Abouzeid, "The youth of Syria: the rebels are on pause," Time, March 6, 2011.

5 Rania Abouzeid, "The youth of Syria: the rebels are on pause," Time, March 6, 2011

6 "Officers fire on crowd as Syrian protests grow," The New York Times, March 20, 2011

7 Nicholas Blanford, "Can the Syrian regime divide and conquer its opposition?," Time, April 9, 2011

8 Robert Fisk, "Welcome to Dera'a, Syria's graveyard of terrorists," The Independent, July 6. 2016

9 President Assad to ARD TV: Terrorists breached cessation of hostilities agreement from the very first hour, Syrian Army refrained from retaliating," SANA, March 1, 2016

10 Ibid

11 "Officers fire on crowd as Syrian protests grow," The New York Times, March 20, 2011

12 Rania Abouzeid, "Arab Spring: Is a revolution starting up in Syria?" Time, March 20, 2011; Rania Abouzeid, "Syria's revolt: How graffiti stirred an uprising," Time, March 22, 2011

13 "Officers fire on crowd as Syrian protests grow," The New York Times, March 20, 2011

14 Rania Abouzeid, "Arab Spring: Is a revolution starting up in Syria?," Time, March 20, 2011

15 "Thousands march to protest Syria killings", The New York Times, March 24, 2011

16 Rania Abouzeid, "Assad and reform: Damned if he does, doomed if he doesn't," Time, April 22, 2011

17 "Officers fire on crowd as Syrian protests grow," The New York Times, March 20, 2011

18 Aryn Baker, "Syria is not Egypt, but might it one day be Tunisia?," Time, February 4, 2011

19 Nicholas Blanford, "Can the Syrian regime divide and conquer its opposition?" Time, April 9, 2011.

20 Alfred B. Prados and Jeremy M. Sharp, "Syria: Political Conditions and Relations with the United States After the Iraq War," Congressional Research Service, February 28, 2005

21 Rania Abouzeid, "Syria's Friday of dignity becomes a day of death," Time, March 25, 2011

22 Rania Abouzeid, "Syria's Friday of dignity becomes a day of death," Time, March 25, 2011

23 "Syrie: un autre eclarage du conflict qui dure depuis 5 ans, BeCuriousTV , » May 23, 2016, http://www.globalresearch.ca/syria-aleppo-doctor-demolishes-imperialist-propaganda-and-media-warmongering/5531157

24 Nicholas Blanford, "Can the Syrian regime divide and conquer its opposition?" Time, April 9, 2011

25 Jay Solomon, "To check Syria, U.S. explores bond with Muslim Brothers," The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2007

26 Ibid

27 Liad Porat, "The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and the Asad Regime," Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, December 2010, No. 47

28 Ibid

29 http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf

30 Alfred B. Prados and Jeremy M. Sharp, "Syria: Political Conditions and Relations with the United States After the Iraq War," Congressional Research Service, February 28, 2005.

31 Anthony Shadid, "Security forces kill dozens in uprisings around Syria", The New York Times, April 22, 2011

32 Rania Abouzeid, "Syria's Friday of dignity becomes a day of death," Time, March 25, 2011

33 Fabrice Balanche, "The Alawi Community and the Syria Crisis Middle East Institute, May 14, 2015

34 Anthony Shadid, "Syria broadens deadly crackdown on protesters", The New York Times, May 8, 2011

35 Rania Abouzeid, "Meet the Islamist militants fighting alongside Syria's rebels," Time, July 26, 2012

36 Rania Abouzeid, "Interview with official of Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria's Islamist militia group," Time, Dec 25, 2015

37 Robert Fisk, "Syrian civil war: West failed to factor in Bashar al-Assad's Iranian backers as the conflict developed," The Independent, March 13, 2016

38 Anthony Shadid, "Syria broadens deadly crackdown on protesters", The New York Times, May 8, 2011

39 Nada Bakri, "Syria allows Red Cross officials to visit prison", The New York Times, September 5, 2011

40 Nada Bakri, "Syrian opposition calls for protection from crackdown", The New York Times, October 25, 2011

41 President al-Assad to Portuguese State TV: International system failed to accomplish its duty Western officials have no desire to combat terrorism, SANA, March 5, 2015

42 Patrick Seale, "Syria's long war," Middle East Online, September 26, 2012

43 Ibid

44 Rania Abouzeid, "Sitting pretty in Syria: Why few go backing Bashar," Time, March 6, 2011

45 Rania Abouzeid, "The youth of Syria: the rebels are on pause," Time, March 6, 2011

46 "Can the Syrian regime divide and conquer its opposition?" Time, April 9, 2011

47 Anthony Shadid, "Security forces kill dozens in uprisings around Syria", The New York Times, April 22, 2011

48 Ben Fenton, "Macmillan backed Syria assassination plot," The Guardian, September 27, 2003

49 Robert Fisk, "Conspiracy of silence in the Arab world," The Independent, February 9, 2007

50 Robert Dreyfus, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Fundamentalist Islam, Holt, 2005, p. 205

51 William R. Polk, "Understanding Syria: From pre-civil war to post-Assad," The Atlantic, December 10, 2013

52 Dreyfus

53 Dreyfus

54 William R. Polk, "Understanding Syria: From pre-civil war to post-Assad," The Atlantic, December 10, 2013

55 Quoted in Nikolas Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society under Asad and the Ba'ath Party, I.B. Taurus, 2011

56 Patrick Cockburn, "Confused about the US response to Isis in Syria? Look to the CIA's relationship with Saudi Arabia," The Independent, June 17, 2016

57 National Security Strategy, February 2015

58 Ibid

59 Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, Three Rivers Press, 2003, p. 123

60 US State Department website. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3580.htm#econ. Accessed February 8, 2012

61 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002

62 National Security Strategy, February 2015

63 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006

64 Henry Fountain, "Researchers link Syrian conflict to drought made worse by climate change," The New York Times, March 2, 2015

65 Aryn Baker, "Syria is not Egypt, but might it one day be Tunisia?," Time, February 4, 2011

66 Jonathan Steele, "Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media," The Guardian, January 17, 2012

67 "Full transcript: Classic video interview with Comrade Ghassan Kanafani re-surfaces," PFLP, October 17, 2016, http://pflp.ps/english/2016/10/17/full-transcript-classic-video-interview-with-comrade-ghassan-kanafani-re-surfaces/



 

62
Syria - A Confused Trump Strategy Lets Erdogan U-Turn Again
 Moon of Alabama 
Feb 23

 There are two new developments on the Syrian front. The Islamic State suddenly changed its tactic and the Turkish President Erdogan again changed his policy course.

In the last 24 hours news announcements about victories against the Islamic state (ISIS) rapidly followed each other:

 The Kurdish U.S. proxy forces in east Syria (SDF) announced that it had reached the northern bank of the Euphrates between Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. This cuts the ISIS communication line between the two cities. Turkish forces and their "Syrian rebel" mercenaries have been attacking Al-Bab east of Aleppo for nearly four month. They made little progress and incurred huge losses. Late yesterday they suddenly broke into the city and today took control of it. Various sources claim that a deal was made between the Turkish forces and ISIS for the later to evacuate Al-Bab unharmed and with its personal weapons. It is not yet known what price Turkey paid in that deal. South of Al-Bab the Syrian Army is moving further east towards the Euphrates and tookseveral villages from ISIS. The Syrian move is largely designed to cut the roads between the Turkish forces around Al-Bab and the Islamic State forces in Raqqa. (This now might become a race.) Further south another Syrian Army group is moving east towards Palmyra. In the eastern city of Deir Ezzor the Syrian army garrison is under siege by Islamic State forces. A few weeks ago the situation there looked very dire. But with reinforcements coming in by helicopter and massive Russian air force interdiction the position held out quite well. In recent days the defenders took several hills from a retreating ISIS. In Iraq the army, police and the various government militia are pushing towards south Mosul. Today the airport south of the city fell into their hands with little fighting. Like everywhere else ISIS had stopped its resistance and pulled back. Only a few rearguards offered tepid resistance.

While ISIS was under pressure everywhere the sudden retreat on all fronts during the last 24 hours is astonishing and suggest some synchronicity. A central order must have been given to pull back to the buildup areas of Raqqa in Syria and south Mosul in Iraq.

But ISIS has nowhere to go from those areas. Mosul is completely surrounded and Raqqa is mostly cut off. After the massacres they committed everywhere ISIS fighters can not expect any mercy. They have made enemies everywhere and aside from a few (Saudi) radical clerics no friends are left to help them. The recent retreats are thereby likely not signs of surrender. ISIS will continue to fight until it is completely destroyed. But for now the ISIS leaders decided to preserve their forces. One wonders what they plan to stage as their last glorious show. A mass atrocity against the civilians in the cities it occupies?

When in late 2016 the defeat of the "Syrian rebels" proxy forces in east-Aleppo city was foreseeable the Turkish President Erdogan switched from supporting the radicals in north-west Syria to a more lenient stand towards Syria and its allies Russia and Iran. The move followed month of on and off prodding from Russia and after several attempts by Erdogan to get more U.S. support had failed. In late December peace talks started between Syria, Russia, Turkey and Iran with the U.S. and the EU excluded.

But after the Trump administration took over the Turkish position changed again. Erdogan is now back to betting on a stronger U.S. intervention in Syria that would favor his original plans of installing in Syria an Islamic government under Turkish control:

 Ankara understands today that Trump is aggressive toward Iran and gave his blessing to Saudi Arabia. Therefore Erdogan is taking a new position: hiding behind Saudi Arabia, mimicking the US hostility towards Iran and, in consequences, declaring himself once more against the Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The new Turkish position was confirmed by Senator John McCain's visit to the Kurdish YPG and U.S. Special Forces in Kobani. McCain came via Turkey. An earlier visits to the YPK by U.S. special envoy Brett McGurk had been condemned by Ankara. Outside of a wider agreement such McCain's antics would not be allowed.

The U.S. is allied with the Kurdish YPK in Syria who are blood-brothers of the Kurdish PKK group in Turkey which the Turkish government has been fighting for decades. The YPG fighters are good and reliable light infantry fighters. They work together with U.S. special forces and are well regarded.

Turkey offers to send its own ground troops together with Saudi forces to liberate Raqqa from ISIS. The expertise the Saudi military shows in Yemen combined with the Turkish military prowess in its "Euphrates Shield" operation in Syria will surely will be welcome by the U.S. military.

But there are bigger strategic issues at stake and some agreement between the U.S., Turkey and the Saudis has been found (adopted machine translation):

 [T]he sudden transformation of the Turkish position occurred after a lengthy conversation conducted with the US president, Donald Trump, and the visit by the head of the U.S. intelligence agency (CIA). A re-shuffling of the cards took place which induced another turn in Ankara on the Syrian file. The new U.S.-Turkish understandings that fixed the bridge between President Erdogan and the old U.S. ally is based on the escalation of hostility to Iran and the (re-)establishment of a "Sunni axis" led by the Turkish president. It includes the establishment of a buffer zone in Syria as a prelude to a partitioning [of Syria] scenario.

This is essentially a fall back to the positions taken by the Obama administration in 2011/12. The lessons learned since will have to be relearned. The signals from the U.S. military now suggest the introduction of additional regular ground troops in support of a U.S. proxy force and an eventual U.S. protected enclave in east-Syria. The YPK is the only reliable proxy force available to the U.S. and it needs heavier weapon support to take on Raqqa. But U.S. boots on ground in the Middle East have never been a solution. They are a guarantee of extended fighting and eventual failure.

The strategic view is contradictory. The U.S. wants to fight the Sunni radical forces that Saudi Arabia grows and pampers. Even while ISIS gets diminished new such forces are already growing in Iraq. Any anti-radical strategy that builds on cooperation with the Saudis will fail.

It is impossible to get Turkey and the YPK/PKK to fight on one side – McCain visit or not. The U.S. would loose its only reliable proxy force in Syria should it make common cause with Erdogan in the fight about Raqqa. Any anti-Kurdish Turkish-U.S. controlled "safe zone" in north Syria will come under fire from all other sides on the ground. Any U.S. base in Syria will be the target of various regular and irregular forces. In the long term the new plans are doomed and Erdogan's latest u-turn is unlikely to be rewarded.

But until then we can expect more bloodshed and more fighting in Syria. As Eljah Magnier comments:

 The US policy in Syria seems frantic and far-fetched without efficient powerful allies on the ground, and is unable to retake cities from ISIS with its Kurdish proxies alone. And the "honeymoon" between Washington and Riyadh will certainly have a substantial negative effect on the war in Syria. This will increase the closeness between Russia and Iran, but the tension between US and Russia is also expected to increase: one side (the US) wants partition and the other (Russia) wants a unified Syria without al-Qaida and ISIS, and without Turkey occupying the north of Syria and a Saudi Arabia return to the Bilad al-Sham. At this stage, it is difficult to speculate on what this clash of incompatible objectives will produce on the ground in Syria.




 

63
Political Insanity: Outgoing President Obama's "Operation Atlantic Resolve" against Russia: US Sends 3,600 Tanks Against Russia - Massive NATO Deployment Underway
 Donbass International News Agency and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, globalresearch.ca 
Jan 5


 Dangerous crossroads: Is Obama intent upon waging a military operation on RussiaÆs border prior to the end of his presidential mandate?

This military onslaught could potentially create a fait accompli.

Are these deployments of US tanks and troops part of ObamaÆs ôact of retributionö against Russia in response to MoscowÆs alleged hacking of the US elections, which according to the director of National Intelligence James Clapper constitute an ôExistential Threatö to the Security of the US.

As we recall Obama on December 29th ôordered a series of retaliatory steps against Russiaö.

Is this a ôfast-trackö procedure on the part of the outgoing president, with the support of US intelligence to create chaos prior to the inception of the Trump administration on January 20th?

According to Donbass International News Agency Service, ôA Massive US military deployment should be ready by January 20.ö

Political Insanity prevails.

And insanity could potentially unleash World War III.

Meanwhile none of this is front page news. The mainstream media is not covering it.

Below is the report of the Donbass International News Agency report.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 5, 2016

* * *

The NATO war preparation against Russia, æOperation Atlantic ResolveÆ, is in full swing. 2,000 US tanks will be sent in coming days from Germany to Eastern Europe, and 1,600 US tanks is deployed to storage facilities in the Netherlands. At the same time, NATO countries are sending thousands of soldiers in to Russian borders.

According to US Army Europe, 4,000 troops and 2,000 tanks will arrive in three US transport ships to Germany next weekend. From Bremerhaven, US troops and huge amount of military material, will be transported to Poland and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

USA is sending to Russian borders 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. Overall, more than 2,500 pieces of cargo are shipped to Germany, where those will be unloaded in the period January 6-8. US military material and troops will continue to Poland by rail and military convoyÆs. Massive US military deployment should be ready by January 20.

ôSome 900 cars with military materiel will be transported by train from Bremerhaven to Poland. There are also about 600 pieces of freight that will be transported by train to Poland from the military training ground at Bergen-Hohne. Nearly 40 vehicles will travel directly by road from Bremerhaven to Poland,ö told Bundeswehr press office.

 ôThree years after the last American tanks left the continent, we need to get them back,ö said Lieutenant General Frederick ôBenö Hodges, commander of US forces in Europe.

He made the statement during a visit to the Logistics School of the Bundeswehr in Garlstedt, Lower Saxony. He told journalists that the measures were a ôresponse to RussiaÆs invasion of Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea.ö

While NATO is preparing for war against Russia, Hodges turned everything upside down and accused Russia of preparing for war. ôThis does not mean that there necessarily has to be a war, none of this is inevitable, but Moscow is preparing for the possibility,ö Hodges said.

In the dangerous escalation against nuclear-armed Russia, which poses the danger of a third world war, the German Bundeswehr is playing a central role. ôWithout the support of the [German] Army, we can go nowhere,ö Hodges said during an appearance at the Joint Support Service of the Bundeswehr.

Germany, which rolled over Eastern Europe in its war of extermination 75 years ago, is preparing to send combat troops to the Baltics. In January, 26 tanks, 100 other vehicles and 120 containers will be transported by train to Lithuania. Germany will send the 122nd Infantry Battalion.

At the same time total of 1,600 US fighting vehicles are due to be stored at a six-warehouse complex in the southeastern village of Eygelshoven, near the Belgian and German borders. The Eygelshoven facility was originally opened in 1985 during the Cold War, when it was used by US troops to practice drills in case of a possible Soviet attack, wrote RT News.

Abrams Tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Paladin artillery have already started arriving in what is part of a $3.4 billion Congress-approved scheme to increase NATO military capability in Europe. Storage sites are also planned to be reopened in Poland, Belgium and Germany.



 

64
Military expert. Mohammed Yassar Yaqub shooters not police

07/01/2017 · by SKWAWKBOX · Bookmark the permalink. · the SKWAWKBOX


Earlier this week, a Huddersfield Muslim man, Mohammed Yassar Yaqub, was shot dead – according to a senior local officer – by a police officer in the performance of his duty. Mr Yaqub was killed during a ‘hard stop’ operation on the Ainley Top slip road off the westbound M62.
The SKWAWKBOX has been contacted by a senior military officer, who suggested that the ‘shooters’ in the operation were not police officers.
The officer, known on this blog as ‘Major X’ has provided evidence to this blog previously about the activities of military personnel masquerading as police officers – and he speaks with considerable expertise on the subject, as he has been responsible for placing those military personnel with police units and reporting on their operations to at least two serving Prime Ministers.
Here’s what he had to say about the Ainley Top operation:
The “police” shooters who killed Yassar Yaqub were described as not wearing identifying numbers or squad details [see here and here for other instances] on their uniforms…and they shot a (roughly) 3-inch group of 3 shots through the windscreen from 6-8 feet while running/jumping onto the bonnet of a car that may have still been moving.
That’s not likely to be actual “police”.
Here is an image of the “3-inch group”:

Some news outlets have reported that the vehicle was ‘riddled’ with bullets through the windscreen and bonnet. This is incorrect. The reports may be referring to objects or marks on the bonnet of Mr Yaqub’s Audi that are hard to identify on most pictures:

However, in one image they can be clearly seen to be car keys – presumably placed there from the various vehicles involved in the ‘hard stop’ and stopped at the scene:

As you can see in this image, the bonnet is unmarked – and while the passenger-side window is shown smashed in some images, there is no indication of bullet-holes anywhere else on the vehicle.
Except for that tight, ‘roughly’ 3-inch grouping that killed Mohammed Yassar Yaqub.
Given that the stop was made at a location which – unusually for a major slip road and roundabout – reportedly had no CCTV and that the officers involved were not wearing bodycams even though these have been in use by West Yorkshire Police, the question must be asked about the identity of the ‘shooters’ and whether they really were bona fide police officers.
Especially when a military expert with long experience of placing military personnel with police suggests they were not.
 

65
British military drones in 2016 Strikes continue as future drone programmes progress

The UK continued to use its current drone fleet while progressing future armed drone programmes during the year.  Here’s a round-up of some of the main news from 2016
UK drones in Iraq and SyriaBritish Reaper drones continued to operate over Iraq and Syria throughout the year as part of US-led Coalition to defeat ISIS. However we are not allowed to know exactly how many of Britain’s fleet are deployed there, or indeed, if any have been deployed elsewhere. In spring 2016 there was a noticeable decline in Reaper missions in Iraq and Syria which could indicate that some of the drones had been deployed elsewhere (perhaps for operations over Libya for example) although this remains speculation without further information.
Figures released during the year showed that the UK is using its armed drones to launch strikes much more than the US.  Around 17% of US strikes against ISIS have been carried out by drones, while over the same period of time 28% of British strikes have been from British drones. Despite the UK insisting its armed drones are used primarily for intelligence and surveillance, the percentage of armed drone sorties in Iraq which launch strikes (24%) is exactly the same for the UK’s dedicated strike aircraft (see table).In June the MoD revealed that 95% of UK strikes against ISIS had been launched under dynamic targeting procedures rather than being pre-planned.  Pre-planned strikes are much less likely to cause civilian casualties than dynamic strikes, which can take place just minutes after a ‘target of opportunity’ is spotted.  The MoD continues to insist that no UK strikes – now numbering around 1,200 – have caused any civilian deaths or even injuries.  Many seriously questioned these claims during the year, with Airwars, the independent group which monitors civilian causalities from Coalition airstrikes, calling on the MoD to commission an independent review of the validity of its civilian casualty assessments.
In September a British Reaper joined US, Australian and Danish aircraft in an attack which killed up to 62 Syrian soldiers mistaking them for IS fighters.  Soon after the attack “RAF Sources” told the Daily Mail that the Syrian government’s claim that its soldiers were killed was ‘a lie as part of a propaganda war’.  However the partial release of a US investigation into the attack in November confirmed an unknown number of Syrian soldiers had in fact been killed in the strike. The MoD responded by saying the attack “was reasonable, supported by the weight of information available at the time, and made in good faith”.  No apology seems to have been contemplated.
In December 2015, Parliament voted to extend UK air strikes against ISIS into Syria. Despite Michael Fallon insisting that it was “morally indefensible” not to bomb ISIS in Syria, the vast majority of UK air strikes in 2016 continued to take place in Iraq.  Latest official figures (up to Sept 2016) show that since the vote authorising the use of force in Syria in December 2015, 177 weapons out of 1,445 launched by British forces against ISIS have been launched in Syria (12%).  Private Eye noted that there seemed to be a remarkable synchronicity between when UK Ministers faced the spotlight to answer questions on the war against ISIS in Syria, and when Syrian strikes occurred.  Even the Defence Select Committee, not noted for challenging the MoD during on-going operations, called for greater information about UK strikes in Syria.
UK drone targeted killing: Policy questions continue
The fallout from the August 2015 British drone targeted killing of Reyaad Khan in Syria continued throughout 2016.  In January David Cameron was visibly annoyed after being questioned about the strike by MPs at the Liaison Committee.   After the meeting Andrew Tyrie, Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which continues to investigate the intelligence aspect of the strike told the Guardian that without further information the Committee “would not be able to do a thorough job.”  Subsequently some sort of deal was apparently struck but it remains to be seen what exactly the Committee will be allowed to see and what it will be allowed to publish. In December the ISC stated on its website that its report had  been handed over to the PM and was going through a “redaction process” with the expectation that a version of the report would be published in the New Year.
Following its own inquiry into the use of drones for targeted killing, the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee (JHRC) argued in its May 2016 report that the Government’s policy in this area was “confused and confusing” and urgently needed clarification. It argued, despite protestations from Ministers, that “it is clear that the Government has a policy to use lethal force abroad outside armed conflict.”  While the Committee argued that there must be proper scrutiny of such killings, Drone Wars argued in a Guardian op-ed piece that the UK must not “fall into the trap of putting in place policies and procedures that normalise and legitimise extrajudicial killing.”   The government response to the JHRC report was poor, with the Committee arguing the government had ducked the central questions raised by its inquiry.   As Jennifer Gibson or Reprieve argued
“When it comes to drone strikes outside warzones, the Government can’t have its cake and it eat it too.  It cannot claim the right to target and kill individuals worldwide, but then refuse to provide even basic answers as to the legal basis for such action. It must provide more. It must answer the very reasonable questions MPs put to then on what their policy – and the legal basis for it – is.”
In August 2016 a new international process aimed at controlling the export and use of armed drones was initiated by the US State Department.  While a number of countries – including the UK – have signed the initial agreement, a negotiating process is due to begin in Spring 2017 (although it is far from clear at this stage what position the Trump administration will take ). Ahead of these negotiations, analysts as well as MPs have called on the British government to publicly clarify its position on the use of armed drones outside of the conventional battlefield.
Progress of future UK drones programmes
Ahead of the Conservative Party Conference in autumn 2015, David Cameron announced that he was doubling the UK drone fleet again and replacing Reapers with the new “Protector” drone. .Despite the attempted re-branding, the MoD confirmed that the new drone will in fact be an updated version of the Predator B (Reaper) drone and a £415 million contract was placed with General Atomics in April 2016. In November the US approved the sale – of up to 26 aircraft – as well as Ground Control Stations and associated equipment.A key difference between these new drones – which are due to enter service in 2020 – and those in current service is that they will be able to fly within European airspace.  In October the RAF confirmed to The Times that the MoD will seek permission to fly the new drones over the UK for training purposes, but that they would also be available to help civil authorities in emergencies.
BAE Systems told reporters in June that they were in discussions with the UK government about a possible further series of test flights for the Taranis drone.  Work on Taranis feeds into, but is separate from, the continuing development of a future Anglo-French drone currently dubbed Future Combat Air System (FCAS).   In March the two countries committed further funding to the £1.54 billion project which is expected to go into development in 2017.
Meanwhile BAE Systems are pushing ahead with developing autonomous weapons delivery from armed drones despite the international push to ban lethal autonomous weapons.   In February the company revealed that it had tested Taranis locating a target autonomously using its sensors, and then simulating the target being engaged autonomously.  According to a Times report, BAE Systems engineers say the future joint Anglo-French drone project is being developed with the capacity to strike autonomously as, though current rules do not permit such strikes, such rules may change in the future.
There was little news on the hi-flying and secretive Zephyr drone during the year.  In February, the UK MoD confirmed it was buying two of high-flying solar drones which can fly for up to 45 days non-stop. In August the contract was increased to £13m as the buy was upped from two to three.  It is believed the drones will be used by Special Forces and (ahem) other agencies, or as the government press release discreetly put it “for use by the UK Armed Forces and other Government Departments.”
 

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Inside the shadowy public relations firm that's lobbying for regime change in Syria
 By Max Blumenthal, Alternet 
Oct 3, 2016


 On September 30, demonstrators gathered in city squares across the West for a "weekend of action" to "stop the bombs" raining down from Syrian government and Russian warplanes on rebel-held eastern Aleppo. Thousands joined the protests, holding signs that read "Topple Assad" and declaring, "Enough With Assad." Few participants likely knew that the actions were organized under the auspices of an opposition-funded public relations company called the Syria Campaign.

By partnering with local groups like the Syrian civil defense workers popularly known as the White Helmets, and through a vast network of connections in media and centers of political influence, The Syria Campaign has played a crucial role in disseminating images and stories of the horrors visited this month on eastern Aleppo. The group is able to operate within the halls of power in Washington and has the power to mobilize thousands of demonstrators into the streets. Despite its outsized role in shaping how the West sees Syria's civil war, which is now in its sixth year and entering one of its grisliest phases, this outfit remains virtually unknown to the general public

http://www.alternet.org/world/inside-shadowy-pr-firm-thats-driving-western-opinion-towards-regime-change-syria

Read the in-depth article with extensive weblinked sources at the weblink above.
 

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Russia calls U.S. bluff on Syria, Washington rages New Cold War
 By Alexander Mercouris, The Duran 
Sept 25, 2016


 Over the course of the last week, following the collapse of the Kerry – Lavrov agreement and the ceasefire, and with the Syrian army closing in on the Jihadis trapped in eastern Aleppo, the reality of pending defeat in Aleppo has finally struck home with the Western powers.

The result is a round of frantic diplomatic and media activity to try to embarrass the Russians to bring the Syrian army's offensive in Aleppo to a stop.

The reason for this activity is the further advance of the Syrian army in Aleppo since the breakdown of the ceasefire. Having defeated and driven back the Jabhat Al-Nusra led Jihadi offensive against the south west of Aleppo by the first week of September, the Syrian army since the collapse of the ceasefire has consolidated its control of the Castello road by capturing the now deserted area of the Handarat Palestinian refugee camp.

It is also, following intense artillery shelling and bombing, advancing from the area of the Aleppo citadel and from the Ramousseh district into the Jihadi controlled areas of eastern Aleppo, apparently in order to consolidate its control of the suburbs of south western Aleppo and – possibly – so as to cut Jihadi controlled eastern Aleppo in half.

Reports from Aleppo speak of the Syrian military and its allies concentrating substantial forces near or in the city to support the offensive. The Russian marines are still at the Castello road, and there are reports that up to 8,000 Iranian commanded Iraqi Shia militia have also arrived in the city. The main strike force however remains the Syrian army.

It appears that the Russian aerial strike force at Khmeimim air base has also been reinforced. A video released on Saturday 24th September 2016 by Russian Ruptly TV supposedly shows Syrian troops advancing against Jihadi fighters in Lattakia province following the collapse of the ceasefire. The video shows SU25 aircraft providing ground support. Russia deployed SU25 aircraft to Khmeimim air base in September last year. However they were all withdrawn in March. It seems they are now back.

The key point to understand, and which explains all the furious rhetoric of the last few days, is that the Western powers cannot stop the Syrian offensive against the Jihadis trapped in Aleppo.

At a U.S. Senate hearing on Thursday 22nd September 2016, U.S. General Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained why. Pressed by Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker to say if the U.S. could take "decisive action" by imposing a no-fly zone – something which Wicker said he had discussed with the Democrats and which might have bipartisan support – Dunford replied, "For now, for us to control all the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war with Syria and Russia. That's a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I'm not going to make."

Dunford's comment provoked an intervention by Republican Senator John McCain, a perennial war hawk and interventionist who constantly presses for U.S. military action at any and every opportunity and especially so in any conflict involving Russia. McCain tried to get Dunford to say that a no-fly zone was not the same as "total control of the Syrian airspace", which would require war with Russia and Syria.

The reality, as both McCain and Dunford know, is that the U.S. has never imposed a no-fly zone over a country over which it did not have "total control of the airspace". It is inconceivable the U.S. would try to impose a no-fly zone over Syria if it did not have "total control of the airspace". Dunford's admission that "total control of the airspace" cannot be achieved in Syria without going to war with Russia for all practical purposes rules the whole idea of a no-fly zone over Syria out.

Unable to impose a no-fly zone, there is nothing in practical terms that the U.S. can do to change the course of the fighting in Aleppo.

It is this U.S. awareness of its own impotence as its Jihadi proteges in Aleppo face total defeat which accounts for all the angry rhetoric and cranking up of atrocity stories we have been seeing over the last week. These have now culminated in some typically furious denunciations of Russia by U.S. ambassador Samantha Power on 25th September 2016 at the UN Security Council, over the course of which she actually accused Russia of "barbarism".

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, in an unguarded comment for which he is probably already being taken to task, slipped the truth out during a television interview on Sunday 25th September 2016: "If you say to me the West is too impotent, I would have to agree. I would have to agree that, since we took those decisions in 2013, when those red lines were crossed, we have not really had a viable military response, or any kinetic response to what is going on. I don't think there is any real appetite for such a thing."

Johnson then went on to say that the only thing the West could do in this situation is to try to embarrass the Russians into calling a stop. He explained this by saying that "the one thing the Russians respond to is adverse global public opinion."

This explains all the current talk of war crimes, encompassing charges of (the unproved) Russian guilt for the attack on the relief convoy, complaints about the deliberate cutting off of Aleppo's water supply, charges of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas of Aleppo, claims of the use of firebombs there etc. – all things which happen in Syria all the time, and which having been happening continuously there ever since the war started, but which are now being talked about as war crimes.

In the same interview Johnson put it this way: "They [the Russians] are in the dock of the court of international opinion. They are guilty of making the war far more protracted and far more hideous, and yes, when it comes up, the bombing of civilian targets, we should be looking to see if the targeting is done in the knowledge they are wholly innocent civilian targets, [because] that is a war crime."

To Western dismay, the Russians, however, show no sign of bending.

The key point about the events at the UN General Assembly last week was that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, despite coming under intense concerted pressure from the U.S. and its allies, flatly ruled out any more unilateral ceasefires by the Syrian army.

Instead he made it crystal clear that a ceasefire could only happen if the Syrian opposition fighters genuinely committed themselves to it and separated themselves from Jabhat Al-Nusra, as the U.S. promised in February and in the recent Kerry – Lavrov agreement that they would do.

At the UN Security Council meeting on 25th September 2016, Russia's UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the same thing:

The American side de facto signed that it was unable to influence the groups it sponsors and to deliver on the deal as it promised. First of all, to separate those groups from terrorists and mark their positions on the ground accordingly.

The ceasefire can only be salvaged now on a collective basis. It's not us that have to prove something to somebody unilaterally. We have to see proof that there is a genuine desire to separate U.S.-allied rebel groups from the Al-Nusra Front, then destroy the Al-Nusra Front and bring the opposition into a political process. Otherwise our suspicions that this was only meant to shield the Al-Nusra Front would only grow stronger.

Two weeks ago, I said that the likely motivation of the realists in Washington who supported the Kerry-Lavrov agreement was to save the Jihadis in Aleppo and preserve them as a coherent force by evacuating them from the city, where they had become trapped and where their position had become untenable. That was why, as I speculated on the strength of certain comments made by Russian military officials, it appeared that the Kerry-Lavrov agreement made provision for their withdrawal from Aleppo by way of the Castello Road.

As it turns out the Kerry-Lavrov agreement did indeed provide for that. This has now been confirmed by the text of the part of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement the U.S. has disclosed (through the bizarre device of a leak to the Associated Press). This is the specific provision in the text:

"Any Syrians can leave Aleppo via Castello Road, including armed opposition forces with their weapons, with the understanding that no harm will come to them and they can choose their destination. Opposition forces leaving Aleppo with weapons must coordinate ahead of time with UN representatives as to the time they will be using Castello Road and the number of personnel and weapons and military equipment departing.

The document the U.S. has published is only one document of the five which together make up the Kerry-Lavrov agreement. The other documents no doubt go into much greater detail about the separation of the fighters the U.S. supports from Jabhat Al-Nusra. It is likely that these documents specify which fighters were to leave Aleppo via the Castello Road, and what would happen to those who remained.

In the event, the intentions of the realists were defeated because the hardliners in Washington and the Jihadis on the ground in Syria rejected the Kerry-Lavrov agreement. The result was that instead of separating themselves from Jabhat Al-Nusra – as the Kerry-Lavrov agreement required them to do – the Jihadi fighters have remained united with Jabhat Al-Nusra, and tried to exploit the ceasefire to carry out more attacks on the Syrian army.

Following the collapse of the ceasefire, and with the forcible imposition of a no-fly zone for all practical purposes ruled out, the U.S. has found itself left with nothing other than U.S. Secretary of State Kerry's absurd proposal that Russia and Syria impose a no-fly zone on themselves. The moment the Russians rejected this proposal – as they were bound to do – the U.S.'s bluff was effectively called.

It is this awareness on the part of the U.S. that its bluff has been called, and that its impotence to effect militarily the course of the battle of Aleppo has been laid bare, which is behind the furious denunciations we are now hearing from the U.S. and its allies, as they scramble desperately to try to get the Russians to call off the battle of Aleppo so as to save their Jihadi proteges in Aleppo from total defeat, and themselves from the humiliation of the public failure of their strategy.

U.S. admits it has no idea who attacked Aleppo UN humanitarian convoy

By Alexander Mercouris, The Duran, Sept 26, 2016

As top U.S. officials admit, they do not know who attacked the Aleppo relief convoy all prospects of an impartial investigation fade away.

One of the overlooked comments which U.S. General Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made at the Senate hearing on Thursday [Sept 22] concerned the recent attack on the relief convoy near Aleppo, which has recently been so much in the news.

Here is what he said: "I don't have the facts. There is no doubt in my mind that the Russians are responsible."

And here is what U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter said, testifying at the same Senate hearing alongside General Dunford: "The Russians are responsible for this strike whether they conducted it or not."

In other words, despite the tidal wave of claims which have been flowing saying the Russians attacked the convoy, and despite the claims to that effect made by the anonymous U.S. officials who have been prowling behind the scenes through the Western media, the U.S. does not actually know that the Russians attacked the convoy. U.S. General Dunford "doesn't have the facts" and U.S. Defence Secretary Carter cannot say whether the Russians "conducted (the attack) or not".

I presume Dunford and Carter, respectively the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the U.S. Secretary of Defence, are the sort of people who would know if U.S. intelligence was reporting that the Russians carried out the attack. I can see no reason why they would fail to say that the Russians carried out the attack if that is what U.S. intelligence was actually reporting. The fact that they are saying that they don't know must mean that U.S. intelligence – and therefore the U.S. government – doesn't know either.

Basically what the U.S. is saying is: we know it wasn't us; it could only therefore have been the Syrians or the Russians; only the Russians have the necessary technology and two of their SU24s were in the area; therefore it must have been the Russians. This is not knowledge or evidence but a chain of inference.

To confuse matters, judging by a piece in ‘Moon of Alabama', the U.S. story appears to have shifted so that the U.S. is now apparently claiming that both the Syrians and the Russians jointly carried out the attack.

It is sometimes possible to infer the truth of who was behind a particular attack by looking at the evidence, but can it actually be done in this case? The short answer, I would say, is no.

Since the attack is being called by some a war crime, it would seem a basic step first to secure and inspect what in that case would be a crime scene before drawing any inferences and making any accusations. Almost a week after the attack not only has that not been done, but no one seems to be in any hurry to do it.

With the crime scene not secured, the possibility of contamination or outright manipulation of the evidence is very real, especially given the strong incentive to do so of the Jihadi fighters who are in physical control of it. After all that is what many claim the Jihadi fighters did to the scene of the chemical attack on Ghouta in August 2013.

In light of this, photographs which have been circulating which supposedly show the fin of a Russian bomb at the scene of the attack can carry no weight and must be disregarded, especially as the bomb in question appears to be one of the most commonly used in Syria. That would make finding and planting a sample of one at the scene of the attack a relatively straightforward matter.

In the absence of any actual evidence that the Russians carried out the attack, the U.S. and the Western media have fallen back on ridiculing what the Russians have said about it. Unfortunately the clever way this has been done – notably by U.S. Secretary of State Kerry at the UN Security Council – has confused many people, including someone as level headed as the veteran British correspondent Patrick Cockburn.

Briefly, and contrary to the impression given by Kerry and others, the Russians have not said how the convoy was attacked or by whom or how it came to be destroyed. They have merely denied that they or the Syrians did it, and have provided commentaries on what they say is some of the evidence they have or which they have seen.

That evidence includes a video which they say shows armed Jihadis shadowing the convoy in a vehicle equipped with a mortar, information that a U.S. Predator drone was in the area, and analysis of video evidence of opposition activists which they suggest shows that the convoy was set on fire, and was not destroyed as the result of an air strike.

The Russian claims about armed Jihadis near the convoy and the U.S. Predator drone in the area do not look to me like claims that the convoy was attacked because it was being used as cover by the Jihadis, or that the Jihadis blew up the convoy with a mortar, or that the U.S. Predator drone attacked it – all claims I have seen alleged that the Russians have made. The Russians have never made those claims, though others have done so on the strength of the commentary and evidence the Russians have provided.

Rather, these Russian claims seem to me intended to counter U.S. claims that the Russians "must have" attacked the convoy because two of their SU24s were in the area. The point the Russians are making is that if their SU24s were in the area, then so were the Jihadis and the U.S. (in the form of the Predator drone), and to construe that it "must have been" the Russians who attacked the convoy merely because their SU24s happened to be in the area is therefore unwarranted.

As for the analysis of the video evidence that the convoy was set on fire, as the Russians have themselves admitted, that is purely speculative. Without a proper inspection of the scene of the convoy attack one simply cannot know.

In my experience, the invariable response of someone trying to cover up their involvement in a crime is to hit on a single made-up story of how the crime was committed and to stick to it whilst providing an alibi. That this is not what the Russians are doing does not prove them innocent, but it is definitely not the sign of guilt some are taking it for. If anything, it suggests that the Russians genuinely do not know what happened to the convoy, which might be why they are calling for the attack on the convoy to be independently investigated.

All other things being equal, the fact the Russians are calling for an independent investigation also suggests that they are unlikely to have done it. As a general rule, someone who has committed a crime is usually the last person to call for an independent investigation of the crime, especially if the crime scene is not in their control. If the Russians did attack the convoy – or if the Syrians attacked the convoy and the Russians know the Syrians attacked it – then the Russian demand for an investigation looks like a frankly reckless double-bluff.

Again, none of this proves that the Russians are innocent. Moreover, anyone who wants to dispute the commentary or the evidence the Russians have put forward is at liberty to do so, though they do their credibility no favours if they do so by resorting to sarcasm and ridicule. However, it is interesting that so far it is the Russians who are calling for an investigation whilst none of those who are accusing them is doing so.

In the meantime, I do not think it is worthwhile speculating on how the convoy was destroyed or by whom. I do not think anywhere near enough facts are known to make it possible for anyone to say. In the absence of a proper investigation – or even an inspection of the site of the attack – any claim can be no more than a guess. If people like Dunford and Carter don't have the necessary facts, then it is impossible that anyone else commenting on what happened from afar can have either.

Sadly, I must also say that I do not think that how the convoy came to be attacked or by whom will ever be known. Quite simply, those who are in a position to find out the truth are not interested in doing so.

For the U.S., the attack on the convoy came at a very convenient moment, when it was on the defensive following its attack on the Syrian troops defending Deir Al-Zour. Whilst that does not mean it was the U.S. which attacked the convoy or which ordered the attack on the convoy – for the record, I don't think the U.S. did either of those things – it does mean that the U.S. has no incentive to find out the truth of what happened in case that might undermine a story that has served it so well.

With the U.S.'s proxies in control of the scene of the attack that all but guarantees that no proper investigation of this incident will ever take place, which in turn means that the truth of what happened will never become known.




 

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US airstrikes on Syrian troops were intentional, lasted nearly 1 hour, Assad to AP

Syrian President Bashar Assad says that US airstrikes which killed 62 Syrian government troops were “intentional” and they lasted for an hour. He added that the US “does not have the will” to join Russia in fighting terrorists in Syria.

Speaking to the Associated Press in Damascus, the Syrian leader denied that the airstrikes carried out by the US near Deir ez-Zor on September 17 were an accident. Sixty-two Syrian soldiers were killed and over 100 were injured, according to the Syrian military. Assad said they were “intentionally” targeted.

“It was not an accident by one airplane; it was four airplanes which kept attacking the position of the Syrian troops for nearly one hour or maybe a little bit more than one hour,” Assad told AP, adding they were attacking a large area that “constituted of many hills” adjacent to where the Syrian troops were stationed.Assad also questioned how IS was able to launch an attack so quickly after the airstrike.

“The IS troops attacked at the very same time as the American strike. How could they know that America was going to attack that position in order to gather their militants right away and attack it one hour after the strike. It was definitely intentional and not unintentional,” he added.

The Pentagon said the airstrikes on Syrian troops were an accident and that they were aimed at Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists.

Assad also claimed that the US is not interested in fighting terrorists in Syria, saying that Washington “lacks the will” to join Russia in trying to eliminate extremist groups.

“When you have many external factors that you don't control, it's going to drag on and no one in this world can tell you when,” he answered a question about when the war might end.

He also said that the conflict is likely to drag on because the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar keep supporting those opposed to Assad’s rule.

The Syrian president dismissed US claims that Russian or Syrian planes were responsible for a fatal attack on an aid convoy which killed 21 people September 19. He said the American accusations have “no credibility” and they are “just lies.”
 

69

 Libya, David Cameron's "Iraq"? Damning Report Shreds Another War Monger
 Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research
 September 18, 2016
 

 Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron is consistent in just one thing – jumping ship when the going gets tough. He announced his resignation in the immediate wake of the 23rd July referendum in which Britain marginally voted to leave the EU, a referendum which he had fecklessly called to appease right wing "little Englanders", instead of facing them down.

He lost. The result is looming financial catastrophe and the prospect of unraveling forty three years of legislations (Britain joined the then European Economic Community on 1st January 1973.) No structure was put in place for a government Department to address the legal and bureaucratic enormities should the leave vote prevail. There is still none.

Cameron however committed to staying on as an MP until the 2020 general election, vowing grandiosely: "I will do everything I can in future to help this great country succeed", he said of the small island off Europe which he had potentially sunk, now isolated from and derided by swathes of its continental neighbours – with the sound of trading doors metaphorically slamming shut reverberating across the English Channel.

David Cameron has now jumped again, resigning unexpectedly and immediately as an MP on Monday 12th September, giving the impression that he was not in agreement with certain policies of his (unelected) successor, Theresa May. He stated: "Obviously I have my own views about certain issues As a former PM it's very difficult to sit as a back-bencher and not be an enormous diversion and distraction from what the Government is doing. I don't want to be that distraction." What an ego.

Over the decades of course, the House of Parliament has been littered with former Prime Ministers and Deputy Prime Ministers who have remained constituency MPs without being a "distraction."

DEVASTATING INDICTMENT

The following day the real reason for his decision seemed obvious. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee released their devastating findings on Cameron's hand in actions resulting in Libya's near destruction, contributing to the unprecedented migration of those fleeing UK enjoined "liberations", creating more subsequent attacks in the West – and swelling ISIS and other terrorist factions.

"Cameron blamed for rise of ISIS", thundered The Times headline, adding: "Damning Inquiry into Libya points finger at former PM." The Guardian opined: "MPs condemn Cameron over Libya debacle" and: "Errors resulted in country ‘becoming failed state and led to growth of ISIS.' " The Independent owned "I": "Cameron's toxic Libya legacy", with: "Former PM blamed for collapse in to civil war, rise of ISIS and mass migration to Europe in Inquiry's scathing verdict" and "Cameron ignored lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan "

The Independent chose: "Cameron's bloody legacy: Damning Report blames ex-PM for ISIS in Libya."

No wonder he plopped over the side.

The Report is decimating. The Foreign Affairs Select Committee concluding: "Through his decision-making in the National Security Council, former Prime Minister, David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy."

The disasters leading to that final verdict include the UK's intervention being based on "erroneous assumption" an "incomplete understanding" of the situation on the ground, with Cameron leaping from limited intervention to an: "opportunist policy of (entirely illegal) regime change", based on "inadequate intelligence."

Once Gaddafi had been horrendously assassinated, resultant from the assault on his country: " failure to develop a coherent strategy had led to political and economic collapse, internecine warfare, humanitarian crisis and the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in North Africa."

After his death, Gaddafi's body, with that of his son, Mutassim, was laid out on the floor of a meat warehouse in Misrata. ("I", 14th September 2016.)

"We came, we saw, he died", then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton told the media, with a peal of laughter. (1) Just under a year later US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three US officials were murdered in Benghazi. Payback time for her words, taken out on the obvious target?

Muammar Gaddafi, his son Muatassim and his former Defence Minister were reportedly buried in unmarked graves in the desert, secretively, before dawn on 25th October 2011. The shocking series of events speaking volumes for the "New Libya" and the Cameron-led, British government's blood dripping hands in the all.

The UK's meddling hands were involved from the start. France, Lebanon and the UK, supported by the US, proposed UN Security Council Resolution 1973.

Britain was the second country, after France, to call for a "no fly zone" over Libya in order to: "to use all necessary measures" to prevent attacks on civilians. "It neither explicitly authorised the deployment of ground forces nor addressed the question of regime change or of post conflict reconstruction", reminds the Committee.

Moreover: "France led the international community in advancing the case for military intervention in Libya UK policy followed decisions taken in France." Former Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder confirmed to the Committee: "Cameron and Sarkozy were the undisputed leaders in terms of doing something." (Emphasis added.)

The US was then "instrumental in extending the terms of the Resolution" to even a "no drive zone" and "assumed authority to attack the entire Libyan government's command and communications network."

INSTITUTIONAL IGNORANCE

On the 19th March 2011, a nineteen nation "coalition" turned a "no fly zone" into a free fire zone and embarked on a blitzkrieg of a nation of just 6.103 million (2011 figure.)

All this in spite of the revelation to the Committee by former UK Ambassador to Libya Sir Dominic Asquith, that the intelligence base at to what was really happening in the country: " might well have been less than ideal."

Professor George Joffe, renowned expert on the Middle East and North Africa, noted: "the relatively limited understanding of events" and that: "people had not really bothered to monitor closely what was happening."

Analyst Alison Pargeter: ‘expressed her shock at the lack of awareness in Whitehall of the "history and regional complexities" of Libya.'

Incredibly Whitehall appeared to have been near totally ignorant as to the extent to which the "rebellion" might have been a relatively small group of Islamic extremists.

Former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Richards was apparently unaware that Abdelhakim Belhadj and other Al Qaeda linked members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group were involved. "It was a grey area", he said. However: "a quorum of respectable Libyans were assuring the Foreign Office" that militant Islam would not benefit from the rebellion. "With the benefit of hindsight, that was wishful thinking at best", concluded his Lordship.

 "The possibility that militant extremist groups would attempt to benefit from the rebellion should not have been the preserve of hindsight. Militant connections with transnational militant extremist groups were know before 201l, because many Libyans had participated in the Iraq insurgency and in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda", commented the Committee. (Emphasis added)

Iraq revisited. Back then it was the "respectable" Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and their ilk selling a pack of lies to the seemingly ever gullible, supremely unworldly Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Much was made by William Hague, Foreign Secretary at the time and by Liam Fox, then Defence Secretary, of Muammar's Gaddafi's threatening rhetoric. The Committee pointed out that: "Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence."

Further, two days before the 19 nation onslaught: ‘On 17 March 2011, Muammar Gaddafi announced to the rebels in Benghazi, "Throw away your weapons, exactly like your brothers in Ajdabiya and other places did. They laid down their arms and they are safe. We never pursued them at all."

Subsequent investigation revealed that when Gaddafi's forces re-took Ajdabiya in February 2011, they did not attack civilians. "Muammar Gaddafi also attempted to appease protesters in Benghazi with an offer of development aid before finally deploying troops."

Professor Joffe agreed that Gaddafi's words were historically at odds with his deeds: "If you go back to the American bombings in the 1980s of Benghazi and Tripoli, rather than trying to remove threats to the regime in the east, in Cyrenaica, Gaddafi spent six months trying to pacify the tribes that were located there. The evidence is that he was well aware of the insecurity of parts of the country and of the unlikelihood (that military assault was the answer.) Therefore, he would have been very careful in the actual response the fear of the massacre of civilians was vastly overstated."

In June 2011 an Amnesty International investigation failed to find corroborative evidence of mass human rights violations by government troops but did find that: "the rebels in Benghazi made false claims and manufactured evidence" and that: "much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events "

CONDEMNATION; AIDING ISIS

The Committee wrote damningly:

 We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya. It may be that the UK Government was unable to analyse the nature of the rebellion in Libya due to incomplete intelligence and insufficient institutional insight and that it was caught up in events as they developed.

 It could not verify the actual threat to civilians posed by the Gaddafi regime; it selectively took elements of Muammar Gaddafi's rhetoric at face value; and it failed to identify the militant Islamist extremist element in the rebellion. UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.

Moreover: "The deployment of coalition air assets shifted the military balance in the Libyan civil war in favour of the rebels", with: "The combat performance of rebel ground forces enhanced by personnel and intelligence provided by States such as the UK, France, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates." Lord Richards informed that the UK "had a few people embedded" with the rebel forces.

Arms and tanks were also provided to the rebels by members of the "coalition" in contravention of Resolution 1973.

Was the aim of the assault regime change or civilian protection? Lord Richard said: "one thing morphed almost ineluctably in to the other."

The Committee summarized: "The UK's intervention in Libya was reactive and did not comprise action in pursuit of a strategic objective. This meant that a limited intervention to protect civilians drifted into a policy of regime change by military means." (Emphasis added.)

The Cameron-led UK government had "focused exclusively on military intervention", under the National Security Council, a Cabinet Committee created by David Cameron.

The Committee's final observation is:

 We note former Prime Minister David Cameron's decisive role when the National Security Council discussed intervention in Libya. We also note that Lord Richards implicitly dissociated himself from that decision in his oral evidence to this inquiry. The Government must commission an independent review of the operation of the NSC It should be informed by the conclusions of the Iraq Inquiry and examine whether the weaknesses in governmental decision-making in relation to the Iraq intervention in 2003 have been addressed by the introduction of the NSC.

Cameron who said he wanted to be "heir to Blair" seems to have ended up as just that, pivotal cheerleader for the butchery of a sovereign leader, most of his family, government and the destruction of a nation.

 Muammar Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa . However, by the time he was assassinated, Libya was unquestionably Africa ‘s most prosperous nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy in Africa and less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands. Libyans did not only enjoy free health care and free education, they also enjoyed free electricity and interest free loans. The price of petrol was around $0.14 per liter and 40 loaves of bread cost just $0.15. Consequently, the UN designated Libya the 53rd highest in the world in human development. (2)

End note: David Cameron jumped ship yet a third time – he refused to give evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.


 

70
News Items / US: Strikes possibly killed Syrian civilians
« on: September 15, 2016, 12:25:37 AM »
US: Strikes possibly killed Syrian civilians
 PressTV 
Sept 14

 The US military has admitted its airstrikes in Syria over the past several days "may have resulted in civilian casualties."

The military's Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement on Tuesday that it launched multiple attacks against Daesh (ISIL) terrorists in Syria during last week.

It said US warplanes may have targeted civilians in their strikes near the cities of Raqqah, Dayr al-Zawr, and Shaddadah.

In the September 10 airstrike "near Raqqah, Syria, a strike against an ISIL target may have resulted in the death of civilians near where the strike occurred," CENTCOM said.

On September 7, a strike near Dayr al-Zawr struck a civilian vehicle that drove into the target area after the weapon was fired from the jet.

CENTCOM added that a similar incident also happened near Shaddadah where a strike against ISIL hit a non-military vehicle.

The CENTCOM statement did not give the number of dead or injured.

Daesh terrorists still control parts of Iraq and Syria. They are engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control. Smoke rises over Syrian town of Kobani after a US airstrike, as seen from the Mursitpinar border crossing on the Turkish-Syrian border in the town of Suruc. (Reuters file photo) A picture taken on April 28, 2016 shows a general view of the damaged Al-Quds hospital building following airstrikes on the neighborhood of Sukkari in the city of Aleppo. (By AFP)

US warplanes have been conducting airstrikes against Daesh in Iraq since August 2014. Some Western states have also participated in some of the strikes in Iraq.

Since September 2014, the US and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out airstrikes against Daesh inside Syria without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate.

The US-led coalition has done little to stop Daesh's advances in Syria and Iraq. Some analysts have criticized the US-led military campaign, saying the strikes are only meant to benefit US weapons manufacturers.

The US-led aerial campaign in Syria has also been criticized for lack of efficiency and high civilian casualties. In July, a US airstrike reportedly killed at least 70 civilians, mostly women and children near Manbij in northern Syria.
 

71
U.S. Arms Build-up Aimed at Reducing Korean Peninsula to Field of Nuclear War
 Rodong Sinmun 
Aug 4


 The service personnel and people of the DPRK will never overlook the U.S. ceaseless arms build-up in south Korea but will clear it and its vicinity of all U.S. military bases for aggression and thus fulfill their historic mission of protecting the peace and security in the region and the rest of the world.

The U.S. is massively introducing its strategic nuclear assets into south Korea and its vicinity.

What should not be overlooked is that the U.S. Air Force recently decided to forward-deploy on Guam B-1B supersonic strategic bombers capable of dropping nuclear bombs.

The prevailing situation indicates that a nuclear war may break out on the Korean peninsula owing to the U.S. ceaseless arms build-up in south Korea.

The U.S. moves to deploy THAAD in south Korea have plunged it into a whirlwind of conflict and discord among big powers. Consequently, there is such danger on the peninsula that it may become a theatre of big powers' fierce scramble again.

The above-said arms build-up in south Korea indicates that the U.S. dreaming of dominating the world through the pursuance of the pivot to Asia-Pacific policy is making no scruple of turning the peninsula, a strategic vantage point, into shambles of a nuclear war to achieve its objective.

The distress-torn history of the last century, which brought so unbearable disgrace to the Korean nation, can never be repeated no matter how much water may flow under the bridge.

Chae Il Chul
 

72
 Opinion: Uncle Sam's hidden agenda behind THAAD deployment
 Xinhua 
BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- With the installation of an anti-missile missile system that can hardly cover Seoul but is able to spy on China and Russia's Far East, the United States aims to defend nobody in East Asia, but its insatiable appetite for hegemony and military advantage.

The hidden agenda of Uncle Sam in deploying the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) on the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula is perfectly based on its excuse of a so-called "missile threat" from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), which is deemed as "rogue state" and "axis of evil" by Washington.

Defending allies from bullying by missiles of a "rogue state" naturally strengthens Washington's moral high ground. Nevertheless, the reality is far less noble than what Uncle Sam portraits.

The fact that THAAD shields all U.S. barracks on the peninsula while leaving Seoul and its surrounding cities housing almost half of the country's population unprotected completely unmasks Uncle Sam's hidden agenda.

For starters, deploying THAAD in South Korea is a crucial step to heal the Achilles heel of Washington's anti-missile missile system in the Asia Pacific, which has long been nagged by its inadequate recognition ability.

With the help of THAAD's X band radar commanding surveillance of an area that extends over 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) from the peninsula, i.e. almost half of China's territory and the southern part of Russia's Far East, the United States can effectively and immediately raise the recognition accuracy.

The second part of Washington's hidden agenda also concerns with the X band radar: If deployed, THAAD could help the U.S. army to collect radar data of warheads and decoys of China and Russia's strategic missiles by monitoring their experiments, thus enable the United States to neutralize their nuclear deterrence.

For all that, deploying THAAD in South Korea to encounter the so-called "missile threat" from a "rogue state" is yet another self-directed and self-acted Hollywood-style drama of Uncle Sam. What lies under the savior's costume is clear and simple -- his strategic anxiety and sateless appetite for supremacy and upper hand.




 

73
China Voice: Washington's THAAD muscle flexing unmasks anxiety over declining hegemony
 Xinhua 
BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua) -- The controversial deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system on the Korean Peninsula yet again betrayed Washington's deep-rooted Cold War mentality and its petty anxiety over the United States' declining global hegemony.


 The Republic of Korea (ROK) last month announced plans for a U.S.-made THAAD battery to be deployed in Seongju County, 300 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year.

Washington claims that THAAD can help defend the ROK against potential security threats from its neighbor, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

But as the missile shield is designed to intercept incoming inter-continental ballistic missiles at relatively high altitudes, the DPRK needs only short-range rockets and conventional arms to launch attacks on its southern neighbor.

This alone renders THAAD a completely ineffective deterrent, and suggest that there is a hidden agenda behind THAAD, an installation that barely covers Seoul but extends its reach to China and Russia's Far East.

With its X band radar commanding surveillance of an area that extends over 1,200 miles from the peninsula, THAAD can be used to collect radar data of warheads and decoys of Chinese and Russian strategic missiles by monitoring their tests, thus enabling the United States to neutralize their nuclear deterrence and put the national security of China and Russia at risk.

After years of trumpeting the fictional "China threat," Washington is now bringing real, strategic threats to China's doorstep.

Deploying THAAD in the ROK to counter the so-called "missile threat" from a "rogue state" is yet another Hollywood-style drama directed by and starring Uncle Sam as part of the United States' Pivot-to-Asia strategy.

What lies behind the scheme is Washington's insatiable appetite for global hegemony and its vain anxiety toward an imaginary enemy from a rising China.

Such anxiety is both economically and militarily motivated from the U.S. side.

Last week's lower-than-expected U.S. GDP data in the second quarter of 2016 continued to point to a significant loss of momentum that puts the economy at risk of stalling in a country that has seen growing anti-free trade sentiments.

More pertinently, it is the United States' declining military supremacy that constitutes the main driver behind its THAAD muscle flexing.

Deploying THAAD in the ROK is a crucial step to healing the Achilles heel of Washington's anti-missile missile system in the Asia Pacific, which has long been nagged by its inadequate recognition ability.

With the help of THAAD's X band radar, the United States can effectively and immediately raise recognition accuracy.

But this strategic upper hand comes at the cost of the security interests of other nations in northeast Asia.

Already, the DPRK has threatened to take "physical countermeasures" to deal with THAAD, which Pyongyang says would only exacerbate tension in the region, encourage a new arms race and even provoke another Cold War.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang also warned last month that China will take necessary measures to safeguard its own interests if the United States and ROK don't stop the deployment.

The United States is highly advised to stop building its own security at the cost of the security of other countries. The nearsighted actions will only destabilize the strategic balance and stability in northeast Asia, giving Washington more things to worry about.
 

74
Pentagon Bombs Libya Again: Under the Guise of "Fighting Terrorism"
 By Abayomi Azikiwe, globalresearch.ca 
Aug 2

 Even before the ink was dry on the meaningless platform resolutions passed at last week's Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, the administration of President Barack Obama has bombed the North African state of Libya.

This latest attack continues the more than five year war against the people of Libya, once the most prosperous state in Africa, now destroyed at the aegis of U.S. imperialism, NATO and its regional allies. Under the cover of fighting the so-called Islamic State (IS), the White House seeks to further cover-up its culpability in creating the worst humanitarian crisis since the conclusion of World War II.

In 2011, the Obama administration deployed hundreds of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel to facilitate the counter-revolutionary militias that were funded by imperialism to overthrow the Jamahiriya government under the late Col. Muammar Gaddafi. Tens of thousands of people died in the war which relied upon the blanket bombing of the civilian and state institutions reducing the North African state to destitution, impoverishment and the center of destabilization throughout the region.

This latest round of aerial bombardments are being presented to the U.S. and world opinion as a defensive measure against the Islamic extremists who have a base in the embattled country along the western coastal cities including Sirte, the home area of Gaddafi. However, it was the U.S. which created the conditions for the formation of ISIS in their war against Iranian influence in Iraq and the attempts to remove the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

According to the Washington Examiner, "A Pentagon statement says the airstrikes were conducted at the request of the new Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) and were authorized by President Obama acting on the recommendations of Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford. Forces aligned with the new government have already captured territory surrounding the city of Sirte, and the Pentagon said American airstrikes were designed to enable the Libyan government-backed forces ‘to make a decisive, strategic advance.'" (Aug. 1)

The article goes on to say

 "While the U.S. has conducted unilateral strikes aimed at individual Islamic State members, this is the first time the U.S. has provided air cover for Libyan fighters on the ground. The strikes were described as consistent with the U.S. approach to combating the Islamic State by working with ‘capable and motivated local forces.' The Pentagon said it plans more strikes in the coming days."

Nonetheless, as per usual, the administration provides no end-game to the bombings. In 2011, Obama called the U.S. involvement in Libya as "limited" and that the Pentagon was "leading from behind." Yet the deployment of CIA operatives even prior to the beginning of the bombings on March 19, 2011, was revealed in a report published by the New York Times.

The-then NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said of this notion of a limited leading from behind that without the assistance of the Pentagon the mission in Libya could have never been carried out. It is the U.S. that supplies much of the war material such as fighter jets, bombs, intelligence mapping and diplomatic cover in all modern-day wars of regime-change and imperialist conquest.

The Democratic Party and the War Machine

These military actions in Libya are by no means a surprise to those who watched the Democratic National Convention (DNC) during the week of July 25. There was never any acknowledgement from anyone speaking from the podium of the failures of Pentagon and CIA military adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other geo-political regions.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who served in the first administration of Obama voted in favor of the intervention and occupation of Iraq carried out by President George W. Bush, Jr. Although Obama claimed that he opposed the Iraq war when he got into office the war was continued despite the drawing down of thousands of ground troops. However, the redeployment of Pentagon troops and intelligence operatives in Iraq is escalating into the thousands.

It was Obama who accelerated troop deployments in Afghanistan where the war also moves forward with an announcement at the recent NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland that there would be an increase in western troop levels in Central Asia as well as Eastern Europe targeting the Russian Federation in a renewed Cold War. Moreover, Clinton served as the public face of the Pentagon-NATO bombing of Libya to the point of calling for the capturing and killing of Gaddafi, where she joked and laughed in its aftermath on October 20, 2011.

During the week of August 1, it was the Democratic leadership that maintained a posture of support for the families of slain war soldiers. Nevertheless, it has been quite obvious that under the Obama administration the plight of currently serving and discharged military personnel has been far less than adequate. Many Afghan and Iraq war veterans are homeless, incarcerated and suffering from numerous physical and psychological ailments.

Despite the vast funding through the tax dollars of working families and the expropriation of resources of other countries, the services for veterans in many cases are non-existent. Suicide rates among veterans are reported to be as high and over 220 per day in the U.S. This grim set of circumstances involving the economic draft of youth due to the structural unemployment and poverty wages; the deployment to wars aimed exclusively for the acquisition of natural resources, strategic land masses and waterways; combined with blatant disregard towards the needs of the no longer enlisted soldiers has resulted in a human services crisis of monumental proportions.

A Political Economy of Imperialist War

The only rationale for permanent war in the age of imperialism is for economic gain along with maintaining a political advantage over other regional blocs such as the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China, political alliances that have emerged in South America, Central America and the Caribbean and the rival European Union (EU). Even though the EU is a subordinate inter-imperialist rival to the U.S., the recent withdrawal from the EU by the British electorate has sent shockwaves through the world capitalist markets.

Consequently, there is the prospect for a continuation and even expansion in the production of military hardware which will be a source of profit for the defense industry and Wall Street. Declining energy and commodity prices have placed a dent in the profitability margin for the oil industry which reaped a windfall in the aftermath of the above-mentioned wars waged in the Middle East, Central Asia and the African continent. Other avenues of exploitation are needed by the capitalist system and these are the imperatives which are driving the dominant factions within both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Although the capitalist parties in Britain and the U.S. are facing internal rebellions from both the right and the social democratic left, these institutions appear to have outlasted their functionality as instruments for the social containment of the working class and the nationally oppressed. This is why even the semblance of bourgeois or parliamentary democracy are absent within the context of intra-party affairs. Trump can walk in and take over the Republican Party without ever having to hold public office. Clinton with her laundry list of indiscretions and racism towards African Americans and other oppressed peoples is being sold to the electorate as a defender of "diversity" and stability.

The renewed bombing of Libya signals the escalation of war against the peoples of the so-called Global South and those oppressed nations and communities within the imperialist states themselves whether in Europe or North America. To counter these provocations an international anti-imperialist movement must be built. This is the task of the organizations committed to reversing the tide of imperialist war and economic exploitation.

75
News Items / US launches air strikes on ISIS targets in Libya
« on: August 01, 2016, 09:16:49 PM »
US launches air strikes on ISIS targets in Libya
Published time: 1 Aug, 2016 15:25
Edited time: 1 Aug, 2016 17:22
RT

The US military has begun bombing targets around the Libyan city of Sirte, which is controlled by militias associated with Islamic State. The Pentagon says this was the first strike of a new campaign that currently has "no endpoint."


“The presidency council, as the general army commander, has made a request for direct US support to carry out specific airstrikes,” Fayez Serraj, the head of the Libyan presidency council, said in a televised statement broadcast on Monday afternoon, and uploaded to YouTube. “The first strikes started today in positions in Sirte, causing major casualties.”


Serraj added that there would not be a foreign-led operation on the ground. However, US officials told local media sources that the US was preparing to take a greater role in the war-torn country, and said that the Pentagon was preparing for a long-term campaign against Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS/ISIL).


The bombings were personally authorized by US President Barack Obama, following consultations with Defense Secretary Ash Carter and senior military commanders.


Read more

© sabratha.gov.lyUS warplanes strike ISIS camp in Libya, more than 40 reported killed
Pentagon spokesperson Michelle Baldanza said the strikes were "consistent with our approach to combating ISIL by working with capable and motivated local forces.”

Baldanza said the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) has a chance of re-taking control of the country. The GNA is the official ruling body of Libya and has been endorsed by the UN, but much of the country is outside its control, including the capital Tripoli.

“GNA-aligned forces have had success in recapturing territory from ISIL thus far around Sirte, and additional US strikes will continue to target ISIL in Sirte in order to enable the GNA to make a decisive, strategic advance," said Baldanza.

In a press conference, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook explained that the strikes will be aimed at “precision targets” suggested by the GNA that will be “vetted” by US officials. He refused to say whether the US was entitled to hit targets without Libya's approval.

Cook said that there were likely "hundreds" and no more than 1,000 Islamic State fighters in Sirte, and said he had no accurate number for the civilians inside the city, famous as the birthplace of Muammar Gaddafi.

The campaign will intend to drive them out, with Libyan ground forces leading the assault.

“We don’t have an endpoint at this point,” Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook, “but we hope that this doesn’t take a significant period of time.”

A resolution passed by the UN Security Council last December entitles foreign countries to hit ISIS targets in Libya, if the attacks are sanctioned by the local government.

So far, the only previous US strikes in February were limited to eliminating a specific ISIS target – a training camp that housed Noureddine Chouchane, a terrorist thought to be responsible for attacks on a museum and the Sousse beach resort in neighboring Tunisia.

Chouchane was reportedly killed in the air strikes, which also took the lives of two Serbian diplomats who were held hostage by the radicals.

This new campaign will be the biggest since a NATO-led bombing helped rebels to overthrow the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Despite initial celebrations following the removal of the authoritarian Gaddafi, Libya soon collapsed into a civil war, with divisions along tribal and religious lines.

While ISIS holds power in a relatively small coastal segment of the country, Libya Dawn and other Islamists are in charge in Tripoli and the surrounding areas, while parts of the south are ruled by local militias.

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