Lebanese Journalist Names Washington’s Goal Number One in Syria
Sputnik – April 19, 2018
Sputnik spoke to Lebanese journalist and commentator Sharmine Narwani to find out more about situation in Syria and Washington’s goals and actions there.
It has been revealed that US Secretary of Defence, James Mattis, tried to urge US President Donald Trump to obtain congressional approval before launching airstrikes on targets in Syria last weekend. According to reports, President Trump was however set on the use of military force, and overruled the Pentagon chief’s advice. In other developments, Saudi Arabia is reportedly holding talks with the United States and Egypt about sending an Arab coalition force into Syria.
Sputnik: We’re hearing news that the US is in talks with Saudi Arabia to build an Arab force and send it to Syria. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has said that he is in talks with US National Security Advisor John Bolton to plan building this force – what do you make of this, what do you think its purpose is?
Sharmine Narwani: Look Trump wants to clear exit the debacle in Syria and eliminate the need to spend billions of dollars a year in maintaining US forces there and participating in the war. The recent chemical weapons allegations came shortly after Trump vocalised this desire; but the likelihood of an Arab force to physically base themselves in Syria on the Syrian-Iraqi border is virtually nil. We must view this new tactic with some suspicion. The US has always trumpeted ISIS as its main goal in Syria or the elimination of ISIS. If ISIS is gone, then what’s the need to have foreign forces based on that border? It seemed clear all along that containing Iran’s access from Iran to the borders of Palestine has always been the goal. It’s not as though Saudi Arabia and Egypt have stellar or significant nation-building expertise anyway. And they have many differences – the Saudis and the UEA for instance are heavily involved militarily in Yemen and are overextended there. Egypt has shown reluctance to participate in that Arab conflict, let alone another one with a government that it has actually sort of ideologically supported in the Syrian conflict. So it’s not likely to become a reality.
Sputnik: Of course in the lead up to the Western bombing campaign on Syria the US was saying that President Bashar al-Assad had used sarin gas, but we’ve now found out that they did not have sufficient evidence of this at the time. Also, the New York Times has revealed that Defence Secretary Jim Mattis urged Trump to get congressional approval for the strikes, but the president overruled him on that – what does this all tell you about the lead up to the events of last weekend?
Sharmine Narwani: If we look at the recent events leading up to the alleged chemical weapons incident, it took place under cover of two important developments: one was Trump’s declaration of exiting Syria, and removing US troops from there soon. The second would be the Syrian army’s very rapid defeat of terrorists in Eastern Ghouta and the reclamation of that strategically vital territory around Damascus. I think the sort of bringing up Sarin, the nerve gas sarin, it’s always kind of utilised as an emotional trigger, as is the mention of chemical weapons by itself and the general assumption if we’re talking about sarin would be that only states would have access to that particular substance, and not terrorist groups and non-state actors, unlike say with a substance like chlorine that is readily available. So I think it was very deliberately invoked, meaning sarin, to create an emotional response globally.
But Sarin has been used in Iraq by insurgents since at least 2004, in the form of IEDs. Turkey for instance, in May 2013, way later during the Syrian conflict, captured 12 Nusra members, Nusra is the Al-Qaida arm in Syria, they captured 12 Nusra members with significant amounts of Sarin and that was believed to be heading toward Syria. And major US-UK risk analysis firm IHS Conflict Monitor, in 2016, told us in a report that ISIS has used chemical weapons more than 52 times in both Syria and Iraq.
Sputnik: We’ve heard today that US senators are increasingly becoming concerned at the absence of a coherent US strategy in Syria, where do you see things from here?
Sharmine Narwani: Even during Obama’s term, we talked about there being a lack of coherent strategy. I would say that there is maybe a lack of a coherent verbalised strategy, one that was disseminated to the American public and an international one. There was certainly a strategy behind the scenes, one that was not vocalised and actions speak louder than words, so when we look at the arming, training and financing of terrorists when it was clear that there wasn’t enough Syrian support to topple Assad in the way leaders had been toppled in Tunisia and Egypt. We had the arming, training & financing but there was a very clear strategy, and the goal was number one, regime change, and two, to weaken the most important Iranian Arab state ally. So that was the strategy. When people say there wasn’t a coherent one they probably mean there wasn’t a coherent vocalised one. US actions have certainly shown us that regime change and weakening Iran were in fact the strategy in Syria and this is apparent today because the escalation still continues.
Dirty money or dirty politics? UK hypocrisy over ‘Russian oligarchs’
By Neil Clark | RT | April 18, 2018
According to Russia’s Prosecutor General, 61 criminals who stole up to $10 billion in Russia are enjoying life in the UK. Britain claims to be concerned about ‘dirty money,’ but has rejected requests from Moscow for extradition.
It was the financial heist of the century. The looting of Soviet Russia’s wealth by a group of well-connected oligarchs in the 1990s enriched a tiny few, but impoverished vast swathes of the country’s population. The foundations for this massive, reverse-Robin-Hood redistribution of wealth were laid with Gorbachev’s ‘restructuring’ economic reforms of the late 80s. However, the process reached its peak under Boris Yeltsin.
State assets were handed out like confetti to members of Yeltsin’s inner circle. By 1996 the Russian people, who had seen their living standards plummet following the end of communism, had had enough. Yeltsin’s popularity was down to single-figure ratings – with the Communists riding high in the polls. So the President’s oligarch friends – and their Western allies – worked together to make sure the election went the ‘right’ way.
The US got the IMF to give Russia a $10.2-billion loan so that state salaries, which had been unpaid for months, could finally be paid. With the media under government or oligarch control, a massive propaganda offensive was launched. When the vote came in the second round, Yeltsin was declared the winner with 54 percent of the vote. There were widespread accusations of election fraud, but the West didn’t care. “Yanks to the rescue; The Secret story of how US advisers helped Yeltsin win,” proclaimed Time magazine on its front cover. “Bill (Clinton) would pick up the hotline and talk to Yeltsin. He would tell him what commercials to run, where to campaign, what positions to take, he (the US president), basically became Yeltsin‘s political consultant,” admitted Dick Morris, a Clinton campaign manager.
The events of 1996 are well worth remembering when we hear unproven allegations about how Russia ‘fixed’ the 2016 US presidential election for Trump. With Yeltsin back in power, the oligarchs popped the champagne corks and prepared to make even more money on the backs of the Russian people.
“We hired First Deputy Chubais. We invested huge sums of money. We guaranteed Yeltsin’s re-election. Now we have the right to occupy government posts and use the fruits of our victory,” boasted Boris Berezovsky, the so-called ‘Godfather of the Kremlin’ to the Financial Times in 1997.
The 90s were a decade ordinary Russians would prefer to forget. Things only started to improve for them when the first moves were made to re-introduce some law and order into the system. The process started under Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, but accelerated under Vladimir Putin.
A seminal moment came with the arrest, in 2003, of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was believed to be the richest man in Russia. In fact, the current ‘Cold War 2.0’ against Russia, waged by Western neocons, can be traced back to this event. At the time of his arrest, Khodorkovsky had been holding talks with US oil companies over a merger with his conglomerate Yukos. The West, as I explained in the New Statesman, had seen the oligarchs as a way they could gain control over Russia. “Now with their man in Moscow behind bars, it is time for the neoconservative propaganda war against Putin to go into overdrive. Richard Perle was first out of the blocks, calling for Russia’s expulsion from the G8 and its exclusion from any postwar Iraq oil contracts, and accusing it of collusion with Iran’s nuclear-power program,” I noted.
The Khodorkovsky case became a cause celebre, while Boris Berezovsky was also lionized by the sections of the establishment when he failed to return to Russia – where he was facing criminal charges – and was granted political asylum in Britain.
An Interpol Red Warrant for his arrest was ignored. The controversial oligarch, now rebranded as a ‘pro-democracy campaigner’ wined and dined UK media figures and was even invited on to the BBC television program Question Time to give his thoughts on ‘democracy.’
There was no, or little, concern about ‘dirty’ Russian money in London at this time. The more rich Russians who flocked to London, the better. But all that has hanged in recent months. The deliberate ramping up of Cold War 2.0 tensions, because of frustration with Russia’s role in thwarting ‘regime change’ plans for Syria, has meant that wealthy Russians living in Britain are now in the line of fire.
“Russians in Britain told to reveal their riches,” declared a headline of the neocon Times newspaper.
Security Minister Ben Wallace, as quoted by ITV, said that the “full force of government” would be brought to bear on foreign criminals and corrupt politicians who use Britain as a haven. His reference to the TV series McMafia – about Russian oligarchs – made it clear which ‘foreign criminals‘ he had in mind.
Unexplained Wealth Orders will be used to ask people with lots of money where they got their fortunes from. But only certain people.
Clearly, the system is open to abuse. Rich Russians who hate Putin and say the right things about the Russian government probably have no reason to be afraid. But those who aren’t personae non grata in Moscow will find things more difficult.
In January, the Daily Telegraph reported that Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich, who hasn’t fallen out with the Russian government, was for the first time included on “a list of officials and oligarchs” which could serve as “a basis for future Russian sanctions.”
Abramovich was also included in a Times ‘hit-list’ on March 18 on “Putin’s oligarch pals with billions in British assets,” when we were told that the UK government could draw on the list published by the US in January.
I think we can all see the way things are going. Wealthy Russians living in Britain will have to disassociate themselves from the Kremlin, if they’re to be left in peace. The key issue will not be ‘Where did you get your money?’ but ‘Who do you support?’
Some are already getting cold feet.
In March, in the aftermath of the Salisbury case, Sergei Kapchuk, a Russian businessman living in Britain, fled the country saying he was in fear of the British security services – having been pressured to make an appeal to Putin by an ‘intelligence-officer-looking’ man before a television interview.
The anti-Russian witch-hunt has even led to the absurd spectacle of ‘rights activist’ Peter Tatchell calling for the children of Russian “regime officials and families” to be expelled from schools.
In The Independent last week, a Russian woman living in Britain wrote: “I quickly realized that acknowledging you’re a Russian in the UK is like admitting that you have a deadly disease and you only have a few weeks to live.”
The fact that she felt obliged to write the piece under the pseudonym “Valerie Stark” shows us how bad the situation has become.
It’s clear what’s underpinning the UK government’s so-called ‘fight’ against ‘dirty money‘ is not morality (how can it be, from a government that has imposed harsh austerity measures on the British public), but geopolitics. It has to be seen in its wider context as part of the warmongering elite’s Russophobic campaign. “They were not concerned before because they approved of the wholesale theft of Russia‘s wealth back then, and the Yeltsin regime which facilitated it,” George Galloway recently told RT.
Now though, with Russia getting in the way of neocon hegemonic aspirations in the Middle East, it’s a very different story.
War, Abuse and Other Peoples: A Personal Account
By Tim Anderson | American Herald Tribune | April 17, 2018
Why support other peoples, especially during conflict? Some explanation seems necessary because wartime debates often degenerate into simplistic clichés, personal abuse and confusion. I am one of many who have been subject to this abuse. Even the sanity of the critics of war is attacked, in attempts to disqualify opposing voices. Confusion is sown through the extreme nature of war propaganda, and its invented pretexts.
In the most recent half dozen Middle East wars, all driven by Washington and its minions, it has become common to dismiss dissenters as ‘apologists’ for this or that enemy. In reality, whatever the virtues or flaws of these ‘regimes’, they are all independent, and targeted precisely for their independence. For this same reason they are branded ‘dictatorships’. Consequently the loyal western corporate and state media, on a war footing, replaces reasonable discussion with abuse and shows little interest in respect for other peoples under attack.
The clichés and abuse replicate the aggression of war mentality. People abandon their normal rules of verbal engagement, reducing discussion to combative point scoring. Having been subject to some of these attacks in recent years, mainly for my defence of Syria, here is a personal account of motives and some of that abuse.
As I see it, human society is founded on cooperation and reinforced by communities determining their own affairs and building their own social structures. We are social beings and our natural human urge is to help others. Social dysfunction comes after social cooperation, and the most toxic of all such dysfunctions is imperialism. Those outside interventions are always disastrous, destructive and tainted with the ambitions of the interveners. That is why uninvited interventions are rightly banned, these days, under international law.
I believe that support for popular self-determination, and the defence of peoples under attack, is an essentially human urge. In my opinion this comes before the pathological drive to dominate. The natural sense of support for other human communities must especially include support for formerly colonised peoples. That is consistent with human values such as respect for others, and not putting one’s voice in the place of others.
At any rate, that is the thinking behind my support for independent peoples under threat or attack. In my experience of recent decades this has included support for the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Syria. However I have refused to be part of the multi-billion dollar aid industry, remaining an independent writer, academic and volunteer.
This is not only altruism. Engaging with other peoples in this way is a rewarding learning experience, indeed a privilege. I believe in and remain open to learning from other cultures.
Yet imperial pathology is also a reality. Its demands, the refusal to listen, domineering, interventions and outright war represent a fundamentally anti-social mentality. From that perspective I came to see the wars of the 21st century – propaganda, economic and real wars – as a continuation of the older politics of imperialism, while often adopting the contemporary language of ‘human rights’.
I saw such abuses in my own country’s intervention in neighbouring East Timor, in 2006. There an internal conflict attracted Australian intervention, largely on false pretexts. Australian state media gave prominence to claims that East Timor’s then Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri had killed dozens of political opponents (Jackson 2006). The Prime Minister was deposed, the journalists involved were given awards; but the claims turned out to be quite false (Anderson 2006).
I spent years defending Cuba and Venezuela from a barrage of fake ‘human rights’ propaganda, including from supposedly independent agencies such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (Anderson 2005; Anderson 2010, Anderson 2013).
Amnesty International, for example, attacked Cuba in 2003 for arresting several dozen US-paid agents (dubbed ‘dissidents’ in the US media), just as Havana anticipated that the mad emperor George W. Bush, having just invaded Iraq, was about to invade Cuba (Amnesty 2003). In fact, Cuba had documented US payments to these people as part of a Washington program to overthrow the Cuban government and its constitution (Elizalde and Baez 2003). There is virtually no state in the world that would not criminalise such activity.
Yet these agents became the ‘Cuban dissidents’ of Amnesty, which used ‘human rights’ as the pretext to back US aggression against its island neighbour (Barahona 2005; Anderson 2008; Lamrani 2014). That same human rights group took several years to say anything about the torture prison President Bush established at an illegally occupied part of Cuba, in Guantanamo Bay (Anderson 2009). The prisoners there (unlike the US agents in Cuba) faced no charges or trial, abuses that used to be the substance of Amnesty International’s activity.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), for its part, made repeated savage political attacks on Venezuela and Cuba, while saying next to nothing about the appalling human rights violations by Washington and its close allies. Many western liberals went along for the ride, but the partisan nature of HRW was obvious to any serious observer. A group of academics and writers assailed HRW over its heavily politicised reports on Venezuela (NACLA 2009). Later several Nobel Prize winners condemned HRW for its refusal to cut ties with the US Government (Alternet 2014).
So when this ‘human rights’ industry (Anderson 2018) turned on Libya and Syria I was half-prepared. I had already written on my own country’s shameful involvement in the aggressions against Afghanistan and Iraq, detailing Australian involvement in war crimes in both countries (Anderson 2005b; Kampmark 2008; Doran and Anderson 2011). [I would go on to document Australian war crimes against Syria (Anderson 2017a).]
However in early 2011 I did not have detailed knowledge about Libya or Syria. In March 2011 I had to look on a map to find Daraa, the border town where the violence in Syria began (Anderson 2013a). Further, I did not then know that the petro-monarchy Qatar – owner of the successful Al Jazeera media network – was funding and arming sectarian Islamist terrorists in both Benghazi (Libya) and Daraa (Syria) (Khalaf and Smith 2013; Dickinson 2014).
Once President Gaddafi was murdered and the state was destroyed, Amnesty International (France) would admit that most of the claims they had made against the Libyan President were baseless (Cockburn 2011). US analysts confirmed the fakery (Kuperman 2015).
The violence in both countries deserved scrutiny, especially when Washington, the main aggressor in the world, was urging ‘regime change’, and most independent countries were urging caution. I wrote a dozen articles against the war on Libya, over the NATO ‘double speak’, ‘regime change’ motives and NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ missile attacks (Anderson 2011a, 2011b). Yet that little country, with the highest living standards in Africa, was rapidly destroyed.
My first article on Syria in May 2011, ‘Understanding the Syrian Violence’, simply urged people to read more widely. The conflict was clearly not just ‘demonstrators v. police’ (Anderson 2011). After that I searched on a wider range of sources, of course including Syrian sources. I began to document the ‘propaganda war’, the deceptive doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’, the failures of the western ‘left’, and ‘the lies that fuel regime change’. I shared a detailed list of sources for ‘Reading Syria’ and began to explore several ‘false flag’ massacres (Anderson 2011c, 2012, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c).
There was very little western critical discussion of the conflict in Syria so, in 2012, a number of us, mainly Syrian-Australians, formed the group ‘Hands Off Syria’. Later that year I wrote of a ‘malignant consensus’ which had been created over Syria, one which supported a foreign-backed insurgency and a drive to wider war (Anderson 2012d). It was clear to me that a campaign of lies was afoot, just as there had been with the attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
The official war narrative – from Washington and its minions – was that ‘peaceful protestors’ were being slaughtered by the forces of a ‘brutal dictator’ intent on ‘killing his own people’. This was said to be a ‘civil war’, with no foreign aggression (see Anderson 2016: Chapter 3). It was an extraordinary claim, with little reason, but reliance on jihadist-linked sources and repetition of the claims made it effective, at least amongst western populations.
Yet sectarian Islamist insurrections, linked to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, had a long history in Syria. Since the 1950s such violence had always been backed by Syria’s enemies, particularly Washington and Israel. There was virtually no recognition of this in the loyal western media. Their governments demanded an extreme, fabricated story which could serve as a basis for ‘humanitarian’ intervention.
However the ‘peaceful protestor’ lie was contradicted by independent witnesses and fatally undermined by multiple admissions of US Government officials. The witnesses spoke of sectarian violence from the beginning, which drove political reform rallies off the streets. The leaked documents showed that Washington knew, from the beginning, that extremists were fomenting the violence, with the aim of imposing a religious state.
Regardless, Washington, Israel and the former colonial powers Britain and France armed these extremists, both directly and indirectly, through allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar (Anderson 2016: Chapters 2, 4, 6 and 12). The ‘peaceful protestors v regime’ fiction served as the basis for arming terrorists, while imposing a cruel economic blockade on the entire Syrian nation.
In late 2013 I helped organise an Australian delegation to Syria, to meet with government and non-government people to find out more about Syria and to express solidarity with a people under attack. Most of us stayed on after the official tour to meet new friends, exploring Damascus. On our return we were attacked by much of the Australian state and corporate media, in particular for a meeting we had with President Bashar al Assad, the principal target of mindless western demonization (Worthington 2013). I had expected criticism from those who backed the war, but the Murdoch media made some special efforts.
In January 2014 Christian Kerr from The Australian newspaper rang me up for a very brief interview about the trip. It lasted less than one minute. The next day Kerr published a 1,600 front page article ‘Academic with a murky past stirs fresh controversy with trip to Damascus’ (Kerr 2014). This was mainly a personal attack, with little reference to the actual visit. The reporter dishonestly claimed that I was on “a pilgrimage to honour a dictator”. The hit piece says I was an ‘extremist’ for supporting Cuba, Venezuela and Palestine, for opposing Aboriginal deaths in custody and for writing about the destructive role of the World Bank in the Pacific.
The Murdoch paper called on then then Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, to “remind” universities that they “should be partners” to the government in the goal to “build revenue … by growing the international student market … and ensure that their reputations support rather than hinder that ambition”. This meant that universities should distance themselves from controversy. Pyne presented a nice summary of the commercial imperatives placed by successive Australian governments on universities. These days that same commercialisation is regarded by an overwhelming majority (84%) of academics as at the root of a decline in the quality of Australian tertiary education (Evans 2017).
Soon after that the Channel Seven television program Today Tonight invited me into their studio for an interview with presenter Nick Etchells. However, once there, the Chanel Seven people placed me in a separate room of the same building, so that I could not hear Etchells’ introduction, which was a vicious personal attack on me. They had only pretended an interest in the Syria visit. They cut out any answers they did not like. The Australian and Channel Seven personal attacks show how closed the Australian corporate media was to hearing another side to the war in Syria.
Over 2014-2015 I wrote a book ‘The Dirty War on Syria’ (Anderson 2016), to address the western myths and to begin a documented history of the conflict. The book was published in Canada in January 2016 and, over the next two years, was translated into and published in ten languages (English, Arabic, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Bosnian, Swedish, Farsi and Icelandic). Over 2016-2018 I did an average of 4 or 5 interviews per week, from media in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Korea, Italy, China, Canada, Germany, Russia and the USA. I was invited to speak at conferences in Greece, Iraq and Germany. There was less interest in my own country.
After September 2015, when Russia and Iran began a more direct involvement in the conflict, in defence of Syria, the tide of the war began to turn in Syria’s favour. But the propaganda war remained strong. Personal attacks against me and other prominent defenders of Syria became more organised. Dissident voices were seen as a threat to the war’s legitimacy.
Independent journalists Eva Bartlett (Canada) and Vanessa Beeley (England), in particular, attracted hostile attention for helping expose the grossly distorted western media coverage of the liberation of the city of Aleppo, in late 2016. The UK Guardian for example – a strong backer of the ‘humanitarian war’ against Syria – commissioned a long hit piece from a San Francisco based journalist with no experience in the Middle East (Solon 2017). Britain’s Channel 4 (Worrall 2016) and self-appointed ‘fact checkers’ – like the US family business ‘Snopes’ – pretended to debunk the consistent critical reports from Bartlett and Beeley. The would-be gatekeepers backed the Washington-led ‘humanitarian’ war story on Syria: this was a ‘civil war’ in which ‘we’ had to help the people of Syria overthrow their ‘brutal dictator’.
In early 2017 the new US President Donald Trump ordered a missile attack on Syria’s Shayrat airbase, after a chemical weapon provocation had been carried out by terrorist groups in Khan Sheikhoun (Idlib). This happened just as we were preparing an academic conference on the Syrian conflict at the University of Sydney (CCHS 2017). On social media I called Trump, Obama and Bush ‘the masterminds of terrorism in the Middle East’ (Anderson 2017).
The Murdoch media responded with another personal attack, running front page smears against myself and a colleague. This abuse began with a Daily Telegraph article by Kylar Loussikian (2017), titled ‘Sarin Gasbag: academic claims Trump a terrorist and tyrant Assad didn’t launch chemical attack’, next to a picture of me in Syria. This was a response to my assertions – based on detailed research – that chemical weapons claims against the Syrian Army were baseless (Anderson 2016: Chapter 9). There was not the slightest corporate media interest in evidence over the chemical weapons allegations. When we criticised journalist Loussikian on social media, he ran to university authorities, complaining he was a victim of a ‘personal attack’.
Underlining the absurdity of Trump’s 2017 attack, in 2018 the US Secretary of Defence admitted that, while ‘others’ were saying it, ‘we do not have evidence’ of Syria’s use of sarin gas (Wilkie 2018; Graphic 1). This had been one of the key pretexts for US aggression against Syria, over several years. But war propaganda was never concerned with evidence.
Graphic 1
A similar media attack occurred after I visited North Korea, in July 2017. By this time I had begun studying several countries subject to Washington-led ‘sanctions’. These included Cuba, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea (DPRK). Not that the loyal western media was interested in any such study.
On seeing some social media photos, Murdoch reporter Loussikian penned another smear story, titled ‘Sydney University’s Tim Anderson praises North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a solidarity visit’. An introductory paragraph read:
“A controversial Sydney University lecturer who backed Syria’s murderous al Assad regime has travelled to Pyongyang and pledged “solidarity with the North Korean dictatorship against “aggression” from the west (Loussikian 2017a).
It certainly was a solidarity visit, but the lie behind the headline and its sub-head should have been obvious. There was no quote in Loussikian’s article to justify that claim that I had praised any North Korean leader. I did not even mention them. Nor had I mentioned solidarity with the government (‘dictatorship’). In principle, solidarity is always with peoples.
Further, the night before the article Loussikian had asked me, by email: “It was unclear whether you were expressing concern about warfare … or whether you had a view in supporting the North Korean Government”. Because of his previous dishonesty over Syria I did not reply.
This sort of abuse, mostly launched because of my defence of Syria, also came from some of the western ‘left’; or rather what many of us now call ‘the imperial left’. These are small groups of Trotskyists and Anarchists who swallowed the Washington line that the conflicts in Libya and Syria were popular ‘revolutions’. They repeated the western state and corporate media clichés that the highly internationalised conflict in Syria was a ‘civil war’, and that the fanatical jihadist-terrorists were ‘revolutionaries’ (e.g. Karadjis 2014; and in Norton 2014).
Some of these people – having observed that some extreme right wing figures also questioned the war on Syria, or supported Russia, or opposed Israel – decided to smear me with the lie that I ‘work with’ or am ‘friends’ with fascists. The ‘evidence’ they show for this is that some extremist and right figures attended some of my many public talks; and that those figures and I both attended a funeral wake for the murdered Russian Ambassador to Turkey, at the Russian consulate in Sydney. On that basis I was said to ‘work with Nazis’ (see Graphic 2).
Graphic 2
My first response to this sort of childish abuse was to just ignore it. Now I think there might be some educational value in showing others the worst cases.
Such attacks do not mean much from tiny groups, barely relevant except when they oppose imperial wars. Yet many western liberal-leftists today join with Washington, NATO, the Saudis, Israel – and their fanatical, reactionary mercenaries – against the remaining independent states of the Middle East.
What these left-liberals miss is that the new fascism in the world is precisely that chain of wars aimed at destroying independent African, Arab and other West Asian states. Western cheer squads for these wars are necessary to minimise opposition and keep imperial plans alive.
This century’s military, economic and propaganda wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya and Syria have successfully conscripted western liberals, leftists, NGOs and of course the corporate and state media. Very few question the war narrative; and those who do are abused.
But that is not the future. The world is changing. BRICS and other regional groupings and states, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are on the rise. In my opinion, support and respect is due to all independent peoples. It is not about whether we agree with everything they do. It is about respect for other peoples. Their self-determination is also our human responsibility.
Sources:
Alternet (2014) ‘Nobel Peace Laureates Slam Human Rights Watch’s Refusal to Cut Ties to U.S. Government’, 8 July, online: https://www.alternet.org/world/nobel-peace-laureates-slam-human-rights-watchs-refusal-cut-ties-us-government
Amnesty International (2003) ‘Cuba: Massive crackdown on dissent’, April, AMR 25/008/2003, online: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/104000/amr250082003en.pdf
Anderson, Tim (2005) ‘Contesting ‘Transition’: the US plan for a Free Cuba’, Latin American Perspectives, Vol 32, No 6, November, pp.28-46
Anderson, Tim (2005a) ‘Cuba: the propaganda offensive’, Online Opinion, 15 March, online: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3243&page=0
Anderson, Tim (2005b) ‘Indictment and prosecution of John Winston Howard’, The Guardian, Sydney, 17 August, p.2, online: http://www.cpa.org.au/guardian-pdf/2005/Guardian1241_17-08-2005_screen.pdf
Anderson, Tim (2006) ‘Timor Leste: the second Australian intervention’, Journal of Australian Political Economy, December, pp.62-93
Anderson, Tim (2008) ‘Cuba and the ‘independent journalists’, Green Left Weekly, 24 May, online: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/cuba-and-independent-journalists
Anderson, Tim (2009) ‘Hypocrisy over Cuba’s ‘political prisoners’, Green left Weekly, 19 September, online: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/hypocrisy-over-cubas-political-prisoners
Anderson, Tim (2010) ‘How Credible Is Human Rights Watch on Cuba?’, MRonline, 16 February, online: https://mronline.org/2010/02/16/how-credible-is-human-rights-watch-on-cuba/
Anderson, Tim (2011) ‘Understanding the Syrian violence – check your sources’, 7 May, Facebook, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/understanding-the-syrian-violence-check-your-sources/10150186018711234
Anderson, Tim (2011a) ‘The Double Speak on Libya: conflict resolution or regime change?’, Facebook, March 19, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/the-double-speak-on-libya-conflict-resolution-or-regime-change/10150125374666234
Anderson, Tim (2011b) ‘Humanitarian attack on Libya – first volley, 112 tomahawk missiles hit two cities’, Facebook, 20 March, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/humanitarian-attack-on-libya-first-volley-112-tomahawk-misiles-hit-two-cities/10150126117161234
Anderson, Tim (2011c) ‘Propaganda war rages over Syrian violence’, Facebook, 8 August, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/propaganda-war-rages-over-syrian-violence/10150273915031234
Anderson, Tim (2012) ‘Humanitarian Intervention and the Left in Imperial Cultures’, Facebook, 1 March, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/humanitarian-intervention-and-the-left-in-imperial-cultures/10150603967576234
Anderson, Tim (2012a) ‘The lies that fuel intervention and ‘regime change’ – Iraq, Timor Leste, Libya, Syria’, Facebook, 8 May, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/the-lies-that-fuel-intervention-and-regime-change-iraq-timor-leste-libya-syria-/10150806025926234
Anderson, Tim (2012b) ‘Reading Syria’, Facebook, 24 May, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/reading-syria/10150862173381234
Anderson, Tim (2012c) ‘Massacres in Syria: the awful truth’, Facebook, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/massacres-in-syria-the-awful-truth/10150895942696234
Anderson, Tim (2012d) ‘The malignant consensus on Syria’, The Conversation, 19 September, online: https://theconversation.com/the-malignant-consensus-on-syria-9565
Anderson, Tim (2013) ‘Hugo Chávez, Venezuela and the Corporate Media’, Online Opinion, 9 April, online: http://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14882&page=0
Anderson, Tim (2013a) ‘Syria: how the violence began, in Daraa’, OpEd Opinion, 13 May, online: https://www.opednews.com/articles/Syria-how-the-violence-be-by-Tim-Anderson-130513-875.html
Anderson, Tim (2016) The Dirty war on Syria, Global Research, Montreal
Anderson, Tim (2017) ‘Masterminds of terrorism in the Middle East.’, Twitter, 7 April, online: https://twitter.com/timand2037/status/850516689036861440
Anderson, Tim (2017a) ‘Implausible Denials: The Crime at Jabal al Tharda. US-led Air Raid on Behalf of ISIS-Daesh Against Syrian Forces’, Global Research, 17 December, online: https://www.globalresearch.ca/implausible-denials-the-crime-at-jabal-al-tharda-us-led-air-raid-on-behalf-of-isis-daesh-against-syrian-forces/5623056
Anderson, Tim (2018) ‘Syria: the human rights industry in ‘humanitarian war’’, Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies, Research Paper 1/18, online: https://counter-hegemonic-studies.net/humanitarian-war-rp-1-18/
Barahona, Diana (2005) ‘Reporters Without Borders Unmasked’, Counter Punch, 17 May, online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2005/05/17/reporters-without-borders-unmasked/
CCHS (2017) ‘Syria Conference 2017’, online: https://counter-hegemonic-studies.net/category/conf/sc-2017/
Cockburn, Patrick (2011) ‘Amnesty questions claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as weapon of war’, The Independent, 23 June, online: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/amnesty-questions-claim-that-gaddafi-ordered-rape-as-weapon-of-war-2302037.html
Dickinson, Elizabeth (2014) ‘The Case Against Qatar’, Foreign Policy, 30 September, online: http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/30/the-case-against-qatar/
Doran, Chris and Tim Anderson (2011) ‘Iraq and the case for Australian war crimes trials’, Crime, Law and Social Change: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23 August, online: http://www.mapw.org.au/files/downloads/doran-anderson-war-crimes-2011%20%282%29.pdf
Elizalde, Rosa Miriam and Luis Baez (2003) “The Dissidents”, Editora Política, La Habana; partially online here: http://www.redandgreen.org/Cuba/Disidents/index.html
Evans, Michael (2017) ‘State of the Uni Survey: Thousands of uni staff have their say’, NTEU Advocate, online: https://www.nteu.org.au/article/State-of-the-Uni-Survey%3A-Thousands-of-uni-staff-have-their-say-%28Advocate-24-03%29-20157
Jackson, Elizabeth (2006b) ‘E Timor Prime Minister denies new ‘hit squad’ claims’, ABC
Radio, AM, 10 June, online: http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1660023.htm
Kampmark, Binoy (2008) ‘John Howard and War Crimes’, CounterPunch, 26 June, online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/06/26/john-howard-and-war-crimes-2/
Karadjis, Michael (2014) ‘Why the Syrian rebels oppose U.S. air strikes’, Socialist Worker, 6 October, online: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105044008/https://socialistworker.org/2014/10/06/why-syrian-rebels-oppose-us-air-strikes
Kerr, Christian (2014) ‘Academic with a murky past stirs fresh controversy with trip to Damascus’, The Australian, 4 Jan 2014
Khalaf, Roula and Abigail Fielding Smith (2013) ‘Qatar bankrolls Syrian revolt with cash and arms’, FT, 16 May, online: http://ig-legacy.ft.com/content/86e3f28e-be3a-11e2-bb35-00144feab7de#axzz5BBZYAcu2
Kuperman, Alan J. (2015) ‘Obama’s Libya Debacle’, Foreign Affairs, March/April, online: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/obamas-libya-debacle
Lamrani, Salim (2014) Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality, Monthly review Press, New York
Loussikian, Kylar (2017) ‘Sarin Gasbag: academic claims Trump a terrorist and tyrant Assad didn’t launch chemical attack’, Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 10 April
Loussikian, Kylar (2017a) ‘Sydney University’s Tim Anderson praises North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a solidarity visit’, Daily Telegraph, 4 September
NACLA (2009) ‘Critics Respond to Human Rights Watch’s Defense of Venezuela Report’, North American Congress on Latin America, 13 January, online: https://nacla.org/news/critics-respond-human-rights-watchs-defense-venezuela-report
Norton, Ben (2017) ‘Michael Karadjis whitewashes Syrian al-Qaeda as “decent revolutionaries”’, 10 May, online: https://bennorton.com/michael-karadjis-syrian-al-qaeda-jabhat-al-nusra/
Solon, Olivia (2017) ‘How Syria’s White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine’, The Guardian, 18 September, online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/syria-white-helmets-conspiracy-theories
Wilkie, Ian (2018) ‘Now Mattis admits there was no evidence Assad used poison gas on his people’, Newsweek, 8 February, online: http://www.newsweek.com/now-mattis-admits-there-was-no-evidence-assad-using-poison-gas-his-people-801542
Worrall, Patrick (2016) ‘Eva Bartlett’s claims about Syrian children’, 20 December, 4 News, online: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-eva-bartletts-claims-about-syrian-children
Worthington, Kerri (2013) ‘Australian delegation condemned for Syria visit’, SBS, 2 January, online: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australian-delegation-condemned-for-syria-visit
Dr. Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, human rights and self-determination in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. He has published dozens of articles and chapters in academic journals and books, as well as essays in a range of online journals. His work includes the areas of agriculture and food security, health systems, regional integration and international cooperation.
Reports of Monday night attack on Syrian base blamed on false alarm
RT | April 17, 2018
Several sources in Syria said the overnight deployment of anti-aircraft weapons at a military base was triggered by a false alarm, not an actual missile attack, as previously claimed by some media outlets.
Syrian TV earlier reported a missile attack on Shayrat Airbase in Homs governorate, while a Lebanese media outlet with links to militant group Hezbollah said a separate attack targeted Al-Dumair base northeast of Damascus. Multiple sources now show the reports were inaccurate.
The Syrian news agency SANA cited a military source, who said anti-aircraft missiles were fired overnight after a false intrusion alarm. It was consequently established that no new attacks on Al-Dumair base happened.
A similar report came from a Reuters source in the regional pro-government military alliance. The commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the false alarm was caused by an Israeli-US cyber warfare operation, but didn’t provide any proof.
Meanwhile, a Russian military source told Interfax news agency that there was no night incident at Shayrat Airbase. … Full article
Caught in a lie, US & allies bomb Syria the night before international inspectors arrive
“If there were chemical weapons, we would not be able to stand here”
A Syrian firefighter inside the destroyed Scientific Research Center in Damascus, Syria April 14, 2018 © Omar Sanadiki / Reuters
By Eva Bartlett | RT | April 15, 2018
The US, Britain and France trampled international law to launch missiles against Syria, claiming to have “evidence” of the government’s use of chemical weapons. That evidence is based on terrorist lies.
After a week of outrageous tweets and proclamations by POTUS Trump, which included continued accusations that Syria’s president ordered a chemical weapons attack on civilians in Douma, east of Damascus, with Trump using grotesque and juvenile terminology, such as “animal Assad,” the very evening before chemical weapons inspectors of the OPCW were to visit Douma, America and allies launched illegal bombings against Syria. The illegal bombings included 103 missiles, 71 of which Russia states were intercepted.
For the past week, we were told that the US had ‘evidence’ and the UK had ‘evidence’ that Syria had used chemicals. The ‘evidence’ largely relied on video clips and photos shared on social media, provided by the Western-funded White Helmets (that “rescuer” group that somehow only operates in Al-Qaeda and co-terrorist occupied areas and participates in torture and executions), as well as by Yaser al-Doumani, a man whose allegiance to Jaysh al-Islam is clear from his own Facebook posts, for example of former Jaysh al-Islam leader, Zahran Alloush.
This, we were told, was ‘evidence.’ This and the words of the highly partial, USAID-funded, US State Department allied Syrian American Medical Society, which, like Al-Qaeda’s rescuers, only supports doctors in terrorist-occupied areas.
On April 12, even US Secretary of Defense James Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee that the US government does not have any evidence that sarin or chlorine was used, that he was still looking for evidence.
Syria, finding the claims to be lies and the sources tainted, requested that the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) immediately come to Syria to investigate the claims. Accordingly, the OPCW agreed to send a team—the visas for which Syria granted immediately—which arrived in Damascus on April 14.
President Trump, instead of waiting for an investigation to confirm his ‘evidence,’ chose the very night before this investigative team would arrive in Syria to inspect the allegations, to bomb Syria. The timing of the attacks is more than just a little timely. And the bombings were illegal.
General Mattis tried to dance around the legality, stating, “the president has the authority under Article II of the Constitution to use military force overseas to defend important United States national interests.”
But he is wrong, this does not permit the US to illegally bomb a sovereign nation, and he knows it. So does Russia. In a statement on April 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the attacks as illegal, noting:
“Without the sanction of the Security Council of the United Nations, in violation of the UN Charter, norms and principles of international law, an act of aggression against a sovereign state that is at the forefront of the fight against terrorism has been committed.”
What if chemicals had been at targeted locations?
In the same Pentagon briefing, General Joseph Dunford specified the US and allies’ targets in Syria, alleging they were “specifically associated with the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons program.” One target, at which 76 missiles were fired, was the Barzeh scientific research centre in heavily-populated Damascus itself, which Dunford claimed was involved in the “development, production and testing of chemical and biological warfare technology.”
This ‘target’ is in the middle of a densely-inhabited area of Damascus. According to Damascus resident Dr. (of business and economy) Mudar Barakat, who knows the area in question, “the establishment consists of a number of buildings. One of them is a teaching institute. They are very close to the homes of the people around.”
Of the strikes, Dunford claimed they “inflicted maximum damage, without unnecessary risk to innocent civilians.”
If one believed the claims to be accurate, would bombing them really save Syrian lives, or to the contrary cause mass deaths? Where is the logic in bombing facilities believed to contain hazardous, toxic chemicals in or near densely populated areas?
Regarding the actual nature of the buildings bombed, Syrian media, SANA, describes the Pharmaceutical and Chemical Industries Research Institute as “centered on preparing the chemical compositions for cancer drugs.” The destruction of this institute is particularly bitter, as, under the criminal western sanctions, cancer medicines sales to Syria are prohibited.
Interviews with one of its employees, Said Said, corroborate SANA’s description of the facility making cancer treatment and other medicinal components. One article includes Said’s logical point: “If there were chemical weapons, we would not be able to stand here. I’ve been here since 5:30 am in full health – I’m not coughing.”
Of the facility, the same SANA article noted that its labs had been visited by the OPCW, which issued two reports negating claims of any chemical weapons activities. This is a point Syria’s Ambassador al-Ja’afari raised in the April 14 UN Security Council meeting, noting that the OPCW “handed to Syria an official document which confirmed that the Barzeh centre was not used for any type of chemical activity” that would be in contravention to Syria’s obligations regarding the OPCW.
Bombings based on Al-Qaeda and Jaysh al-Islam Claims
The entire pretext of the US and allies’ illegal bombings of Syria is immoral and flawed. There is no evidence to the claims that Syria used chemicals in Douma. Numerous analysts have pointed out the obvious: that Syria would not benefit from having used chemical weapons. But America, Israel and allies would benefit from staged attacks.
The website Moon of Alabama noted discrepancies in the videos passed around on social media as “evidence” of Syria’s culpability, including the following:
“The ‘treatment’ by the ‘rebels’, dousing with water and administering some asthma spray, is unprofessional and many of the ‘patients’ seem to have no real problem. It is theater. The real medical personnel are seen in the background working on a real patient.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry has released interviews with two men who were included in the footage alleging a chemical attack has occurred. One of the men, Halil Ajij, said he worked in the hospital in question, they had treated people for smoke poisoning, saying: “We treated them, based on their suffocation,” also noting: “We didn’t see any patient with symptoms of a chemical weapons poisoning,” he said.
In an April 14 interview on Sky News, the former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, argued that the most elementary stage in the accusations game is to allow the actual inspection to occur.
“The evidence that chemical weapons were dropped is non-existent. Let the inspectors go in and possibly within days we will have a verdict but the jury is still out. … I’m totally confident that the inspectors will not produce one shred of evidence to back up the assertions of the Americans. If the Americans had proof, they’d have brought it forward. What they’re saying and what Mrs. May is saying, is just ‘take our word for it, trust us’. There’s not even a dodgy dossier this time.”
Israel and America benefit from the attacks… and are guilty of chemical weapons use
While the world’s eyes have been glazed over by chemical weapons script-reading journalists of corporate media, little notice is given to the ongoing Israeli slaughter and maiming of Palestinian unarmed demonstrators, targeted assassinations that last re-began with the March 30 murders of at least 17 unarmed Palestinians protesting in Gaza’s eastern regions. Israel’s murder of these unarmed youths, women and men got only mild tut-tuts from the UN, and was relegated to “clashes” by slavish corporate media. Israel is literally getting away with murder, as eyes are turned elsewhere.
According to Secretary Mattis, the US-led illegal attack on Syria “demonstrates international resolve to prevent chemical weapons from being used on anyone under any circumstances in contravention of international law.”
The irony? Both America and its close ally Israel have used chemical weapons on civilians. The US has attacked civilians in Vietnam and Iraq, to name but two countries, with chemical weapons.
In 2009, I was living in Gaza and documenting Israel’s war crimes when Israel bombed civilians all over Gaza with white phosphorous. These were civilians with nowhere to run or hide, including civilians who had fled their homes and taken shelter in a UN-recognized school. I myself documented numerous instances of Israel’s use of white phosphorous.
If this doesn’t outrage American citizens, the billions of US taxpayers’ dollars sent to Israel and spent on the bombing of sovereign nations — and not on America’s impoverished, nor on affordable health care — should outrage.
However, as author Jonathan Cook noted, the issue is not merely Trump’s threats to Syria:
“There is bipartisan support for this madness. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic leadership in the US, and much of the parliamentary Labour party in the UK, are fully on board with these actions. In fact, they have been goading Trump into launching attacks.”
By not attacking Russian forces in Syria this time, the US narrowly avoided a direct military confrontation with Russia, one which would have had global ramifications, to say the least.
The question now is: will the regime-change alliance be stupid and cruel enough to support yet another false flag chemical attack in their unending efforts to depose the Syrian president, or will they give up the game and allow Syria’s full return to peace? The US and allies claim their concern for Syrian civilians, but do everything in their power to ensure civilians suffer from terrorism and sanctions.
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From the Archives
Is Israel to blame for the Iraq War?
American Goy | March 10, 2008
I am so tired of this old canard that “Israel had nothing to do with USA’s war with Iraq – in fact, it officially advised America against it”.
Bullshit. … continue
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