Al-Akhbar | September 6, 2013
The United States on Friday said it evacuated its embassy in Beirut of “non-emergency personnel” because of alleged “threats” against it, and urged all the US citizens in the country to leave.
“On September 6 2013, the Department of State drew down non-emergency personnel and family members from Embassy Beirut due to threats to US mission facilities and personnel,” a statement on the embassy website said.
It gave no details on the threats, but added that “US citizens concerned for their safety should consider making plans to depart.”
“Those who remain should prepare to depart at short notice.”
The move comes following two weeks of US threats to strike Syria in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack near Damascus on August 21 that Washington blamed on the Syrian government.
Activists in Lebanon have called for a rally outside the US Embassy Saturday at 5:00 pm against a US assault on Syria.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
Al-Manar | September 6, 2013
The deactivation of the Lebanese public institution, the deterioration of the socio-economic and security conditions in Lebanon as well as the regional challenges that threaten the local stability topped the agenda of the meeting that was held by the Loyalty to Resistance parliamentary bloc.
The bloc asserted, in a statement, the importance of taking the necessary measures to cope with the consequences of the Dahiyeh and Tripoli blasts and to reduce the economic loads that overburden all the Lebanese.
“The paralysis and the recession that strikes the Lebanese public institutions seriously endangers Lebanon as March 14 forces have decided to deactivate the government and the parliament, betting on regional changes to subdue the national partners,” the statement read.
“Rejecting the national dialogue and the harmony among the main factors of the strategic equation that protects Lebanon-the army, the people and the resistance struck the Lebanese security and stability as the sectarian language is publicly used,” the statement added.
Loyalty to Resistance also condemned the arrogant US threats against Syria and all the Arab countries.
“The American aggression against Syria represents an organized terrorism that threatens the regional as well as the international stability and aims at strengthening the Zionist arm and the colonial grip to control the whole region.
The direct involvement of the American administration asserts that the crisis in Syria is an international conspiracy whose target is the foreign dominance over the region,” the statement read by the bloc member, MP Hassan Fadlallah, underlined.
By Craig Murray | August 31, 2013
The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence cooperation. The communications intercept agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US, share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6). Troodos is valued enormously by the NSA. It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus. Even almost all landline telephone communication in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos.
Troodos is highly effective – the jewel in the crown of British intelligence. Its capacity and efficiency, as well as its reach, is staggering. The US do not have their own comparable facility for the Middle East. I should state that I have actually been inside all of this facility and been fully briefed on its operations and capabilities, while I was head of the FCO Cyprus Section in the early 1990s. This is fact, not speculation.
It is therefore very strange, to say the least, that John Kerry claims to have access to communications intercepts of Syrian military and officials organising chemical weapons attacks, which intercepts were not available to the British Joint Intelligence Committee.
On one level the explanation is simple. The intercept evidence was provided to the USA by Mossad, according to my own well placed source in the Washington intelligence community. Intelligence provided by a third party is not automatically shared with the UK, and indeed Israel specifies it should not be.
But the inescapable question is this. Mossad have nothing comparable to the Troodos operation. The reported content of the conversations fits exactly with key tasking for Troodos, and would have tripped all the triggers. How can Troodos have missed this if Mossad got it? The only remote possibility is that all the conversations went on a purely landline route, on which Mossad have a physical wire tap, but that is very unlikely in a number of ways – not least nowadays the purely landline route.
Israel has repeatedly been involved in the Syrian civil war, carrying out a number of illegal bombings and missile strikes over many months. This absolutely illegal activity by Israel- which has killed a great many civilians, including children – has brought no condemnation at all from the West. Israel has now provided “intelligence” to the United States designed to allow the United States to join in with Israel’s bombing and missile campaign.
The answer to the Troodos Conundrum is simple. Troodos did not pick up the intercepts because they do not exist. Mossad fabricated them. John Kerry’s “evidence” is the shabbiest of tricks. More children may now be blown to pieces by massive American missile blasts. It is nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. It is, yet again, the USA acting at the behest of Israel.
By Ibrahim al-Amin | Al-Akhbar | September 2, 2013
Commentators in the West will surely declare that it was their democratic systems of government that forced US President Barack Obama to back down on attacking Syria. But the events that led up to Washington’s de-escalation suggest there were other factors at play.
When Obama stepped out into the White House Rose Garden to declare that, though still intent on attacking Syria, he wanted to get Congress’ approval first, the Pentagon must have breathed a sigh of relief, knowing full well that a military strike against Damascus could spark a major confrontation in the Middle East for which they were not adequately prepared.
The story starts shortly before the Israeli-Saudi intelligence operation that engineered the chemical attack near the Syrian capital. The Americans and Europeans had begun negotiating with the Russians and the Iranians for a political settlement, after having failed to remove the regime by force. The West’s only condition was that Bashar al-Assad would not be part of the solution, even proposing to Moscow that they would be willing to allow the Syrian president to pick a successor of his own choosing.
When the Russians – after extensive discussions with their allies – told Washington that it was difficult to accept such a condition, the West turned to Plan B, which was to raise the level of military support for the opposition and reorganize the armed groups fighting against the regime, allowing Saudi Arabia to take the lead in mobilizing them to up the ante on Damascus.
The goal was to squeeze Assad by launching major offensives from both the north and the south of the country, in addition to wreaking havoc on Hezbollah on its home ground and providing more appealing incentives for Syrian army officers to defect.
In the meantime, the regime and its allies were already in the process of consolidating military gains on a number of fronts by expanding the area under government control, particularly in the area around Damascus. One such operation was to be launched on the eve of the chemical attack on August 20 against opposition forces to the south and east of the capital.
After the opposition was quickly routed in the north as it tried to sweep through the coastal Latakia region, many of their regional and international backers understood that the only way to bring about a qualitative change on the ground was by drawing the West into a direct foreign military intervention in Syria – but a justification was necessary to prompt Washington to act.
It was for this reason that the “chemical massacre” in the Ghouta area around Damascus was carried out, most likely at the hands of the Saudi and Israeli intelligence. Barely an hour had passed before the orchestrated media campaign to get Assad was in full swing, followed by condemnations and threats from Western capitals.
Washington rushed to cash in on what they insisted was an imminent military attack by sending envoys to both Russia and Iran, giving the two countries a last opportunity to stand down before unleashing their missiles on Syria. But all the sabre-rattling was not enough to force any political concessions – even Assad informed his allies that he had chosen to take a stand.
The Americans tried to respond to this by showing that they were serious about a strike, moving additional naval vessels into the eastern Mediterranean, as well as increasing the number of fighter planes in bases around Syria. But again, Russia and Iran were unmoved, refusing to give Washington any guarantees that its limited strike would not turn into a broader, prolonged war, with devastating consequences for the region as a whole.
They backed their words with action, as Russia, Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah put their forces on high alert, ordering them to make preparations for a military confrontation. Most notably, Hezbollah directed its fighters to return to their bases, as it set up an operations room in coordination with Damascus to make effective use of their combined arsenal of rockets.
The first to buckle was that old hand at such affairs, the United Kingdom, whose parliament gave Prime Minister James Cameron a way out, putting their ally Washington in the uncomfortable position of going it alone. Suddenly, Obama, too, felt the need to consult the American public and seek the approval of their representatives in Congress.
Nevertheless, Obama – having lost the initiative – has but two choices before him: He either retreats and seeks out a political settlement, or enters into a military adventure, whose outcome he cannot control. The results of round one of this global confrontation in Syria provide yet another indicator that the days when the US can call the shots, without regard for the rest of the world, are on their way to becoming a relic of history.
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | August 29, 2013
The twin crises in Syria and Egypt have marked the emergence of a new superpower coalition in the Middle East, the odd-couple alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia, with Jordon serving as an intermediary and the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms playing a supporting role.
The potential impact of this new coalition can barely be overstated, with Israel bringing to the table its remarkable propaganda skills and its unparalleled influence over U.S. foreign policy and Saudi Arabia tapping into its vast reservoir of petrodollars and exploiting its global financial networks. Together the two countries are now shaping international responses to the conflicts in Syria and Egypt, but that may only be the start.
Though Israel and Saudi Arabia have had historic differences – one a Jewish religious state and the other embracing the ultraconservative Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam – the two countries have found, more recently, that their interests intersect.
Both see Iran, with its Shiite rulers, as their principal regional rival. Both are leery of the populist Islamic movements unleashed by the Arab Spring. Both sided with the Egyptian military in its coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government, and both are pleased to see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad facing a possible military assault from the United States.
While the two countries could be accused of riding the whirlwind of chaos across the Middle East – inviting a possibility that the sectarian divisions and the political violence will redound negatively to their long-term interests – there can be little doubt that they are enjoying at least short-term gains.
In recent months, Israel has seen its strategic position enhanced by the overthrow of Egypt’s populist Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi, a political change that has further isolated the Hamas-led Palestinians in Gaza. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, the Shiite movement of Hezbollah has come under increasing military and political pressure after sending militants into Syria to support the embattled Assad regime.
Assad is an Alawite, a branch of Shiite Islam, and has been a longtime benefactor of Hezbollah, the political-military movement that drove Israeli forces out of southern Lebanon and has remained a thorn in Israel’s side. The growing sectarian nature of the Syrian civil war, with Sunnis leading the fight against Assad, also served to drive a wedge between Hamas, a Sunni movement, and two of its key benefactors, the Syrian government and its Iranian allies.
In other words, Israel is benefiting from the Sunni-Shiite divisions ripping apart the Islamic world as well as from the Egyptian coup which further weakened Hamas by re-imposing the Gaza blockade. Now, Israel has a freer hand to dictate a political solution to the already-weak Palestinian Authority on the West Bank when peace talks resume.
A Method to Neocon Madness
Giving Israel this upper hand has long been the goal of American neoconservatives, although they surely could not have predicted the precise course of recent history. The idea of “regime change” in Iraq in 2003 was part of a neocon strategy of making a “clean break” with frustrating negotiations in which Israel was urged to trade land for peace with the Palestinians.
The plan to dump negotiations in favor of confrontations was outlined in a 1996 policy paper, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” and prepared by prominent neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, for Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign for prime minister.
In the document, the neocons wrote: “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]
The neocons failed to persuade President Bill Clinton to invade Iraq in the late 1990s, but their hopes brightened when George W. Bush became president in 2001 and when the American people were whipped into a state of hysteria by the 9/11 attacks.
Still, it appears that the neocons believed their own propaganda about the Iraqis welcoming American troops as liberators and accepting a U.S. puppet as their new leader. That, in turn, supposedly was to lead Iraq to establish friendly ties with Israel and give the U.S. military bases for promoting “regime change” in Syria and Iran.
In 2002, as President Bush was winding up to deliver his haymaker against Saddam Hussein, neocons passed around a favorite joke about where to go next after conquering Iraq. Should it be Syria or Iran, Damascus or Tehran? The punch line was: “Real men go to Tehran!”
However, the Iraq War didn’t work out exactly as planned. Bush did succeed in ousting Hussein from power and enjoyed watching him marched to the gallows, dropped through a trapdoor and hanged by the neck until dead. But the U.S. occupation touched off a sectarian bloodbath with Hussein’s Sunni minority repressed by the newly empowered Shiite majority. Sunni extremists flocked to Iraq from around the Middle East to kill both Iraqi Shiites and Americans.
The end result of the Iraq War was to transform Iraq from a Sunni-ruled authoritarian state into a Shiite-ruled authoritarian state, albeit still a place where sectarian bombings are nearly a daily occurrence. Yet, one of the principal beneficiaries of the Iraq War was Iran with its Shiite theocratic government unexpectedly finding itself with a new Shiite ally replacing a longtime Sunni enemy, Saddam Hussein, all thanks to the United States.
Widening Violence
But the Iraq War had another consequence. It exacerbated sectarian tensions across the region. Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oil states that had supported Hussein in his war with Iran in the 1980s, were shocked to see Iran now have a “Shiite crescent” of influence extending through Iraq and Syria to the Shiite enclaves in Lebanon.
The Saudi monarchy was shaken, too, by the popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime Saudi ally, was ousted and replaced by a democratically elected government led by the populist Muslim Brotherhood.
Though the Muslim Brotherhood was Sunni, too, the movement represented a mix of Islam and democratization, which posed a threat to the Saudi princes who live pampered lives of unimaginable wealth and privilege. On a personal level, these playboys confine their wives to humiliating conditions out of the Middle Ages while the men sample the pleasures of lavish European resorts or fly in Scandinavian prostitutes for parties.
Yet, while the Arab Spring sent shivers down the spines of the oil sheiks of the Persian Gulf – and even brought a Saudi military intervention to put down a Shiite-led democratic uprising in Bahrain – the political upheavals also presented an opportunity to Saudi geopolitical strategists, the likes of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to the United States and now head of Saudi intelligence.
By supporting rebels and militants in Syria, for instance, the Saudis and the other oil sheiks saw a chance to reverse Iran’s geopolitical gains. And, by funneling billions of dollars to the Egyptian generals, the Persian Gulf monarchists countered any pressure for restraint from the United States.
Increasingly, too, the interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel began crisscrossing, sparking a relationship that the Jordanian monarchy helped broker and encourage. Jordan has strong security ties to Israel and is dependent on the largesse of the Persian Gulf royals, making it a perfect matchmaker for this unlikely hook-up.
According to intelligence sources, Jordan has been the principal site for bilateral contacts between Israelis and Saudis, a behind-the-scenes alliance that finally went public with their joint support for the Egyptian coup. While Saudi Arabia arranged the finances for Egypt’s new military regime, Israel deployed its potent lobby in Washington to dissuade President Barack Obama from labeling the coup a coup, which would have forced a shutoff of U.S. military aid.
New Superpower
Now, this new powerhouse combo is teaming up on Syria, where the Saudis and other Persian Gulf states have been financing the rebels seeking to destabilize and possibly overthrow the Assad government, while the Israelis have been deploying their political and propaganda assets to increase international pressure on Assad.
Both the Saudis and the Israelis stand to benefit from having Assad’s regime bled over time into either a weakened state or its demise. For Saudi Arabia, regime change in Syria that would mark a strategic victory against its chief rival Iran.
Israel also would like to see Iran undercut and isolated, but there is the additional benefit of hurting Hezbollah and further alienating the Palestinians from important sources of support, i.e. Iran and Syria. That gets Israel closer to the neocon vision of leaving desperate Palestinians with little choice but to accept whatever “peace” terms that Israel chooses to dictate.
There is, of course, a potential downside for Israel and the West. Since Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are arming some of the most radical Islamists fighting in Syria, including groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, one outcome of the Syrian civil war could be a new haven for Islamic terrorism in the heart of the Middle East. In the 1980s, Saudi Arabia was the principal funder for Osama bin Laden and his jihadists who traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets before turning their hatred and suicidal tactics against the United States.
The emerging Saudi-Israeli alliance also may have serious ramifications for global geopolitics. The combination of Saudi Arabia’s extraordinary financial and economic clout and Israel’s equally extraordinary capacity to pull political and propaganda strings, especially inside the United States, could mean that a new superpower has stepped onto the international stage.
Its arrival may be heralded by whether Saudi Arabia and Israel can jointly yank the United States into the Syrian civil war.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
By Damian Lataan | August 29, 2013
In a recent article in Politico, Anna Palmer pondered the question of why the Israel lobby is silent on Syria. After having spoken with a number of pro-Israel activists representing pro-Israeli organisations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) she reports that most have kept quiet about the events in Syria for two main reasons: one is the uncertainty of what is going on in Syria and, two, not wanting to seem in any way influential about US foreign policy relating to affairs in the Middle East – especially after the disastrous invasion of Iraq which was strongly supported by most Israeli lobby groups on the basis that Saddam supported the Palestinian cause during the Second Intifada and had WMDs likely to be used against Israel.
Meanwhile, at Commentary online magazine, lead neocon propagandist Jonathan Tobin attempts to spin that the pro-Israeli groups in the US, better known as the Israel Lobby (‘so-called’ as Tobin would have it), don’t have a vested interest in the outcome of the Syrian war because, regardless of who wins, it will not, he says, be in Israel’s interests. He denies that the pro-Israeli organisations are not trying to keep a low profile for any nefarious reasons that they could take advantage of or that they are worried about public opinion if they supported intervention against al-Assad.
The reality, which Palmer has ignored and which Tobin would vehemently deny, is that the Israeli Zionists, including the neocons and those in AIPAC, the AJC and the other pro-Israeli organisations are hoping that the war in Syria where al-Assad is supported by Hezbollah and Iran, will spill out into Lebanon which will then provide Israel with an opportunity to attack Hezbollah. Further escalation may then even involve an attack against Iran by either Israel and/or the US.
Israel will play its usual game of provocation such as IDF incursions into Lebanon, drone flights over Lebanon, low level strike jet overflights into Lebanese airspace, shootings of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, etc., in the hope of provoking retaliation from the Palestinians and Hezbollah that would justify a full on attack against both. A US and allied attack against Syria might also provoke retaliatory attacks against Israel that would also justify Israeli action.
But, of course, none of this is likely to be talked about openly by Zionist Israelis or their representative Israel Lobby organisations are they? Hence the silence.
By Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle | August 28, 2013
If there is any comfort in how the Guardian has been reporting the Middle East, especially Libya and Syria, it is that many of its readers, judging from their remarks in ‘Comment is Free’, do not appear to believe or trust it.
The Guardian sells itself as the global beacon of liberal opinion. It is liberal on social issues and alongside the chatterers, it has some excellent political correspondents and commentators, notably Gary Younge and Seamas Milne. As liberals themselves, its readers around the world must think they are on safe ground when quoting from the Guardian but if so, where the Middle East is concerned, they are deluding themselves.
Throughout the crisis in Syria the Guardian has been not so much reporting the conflict as running a propaganda campaign against the government in Damascus, to the benefit of the armed Islamist groups and the outside governments sponsoring them. The wellsprings of its ‘reporting’ have been the unsubstantiated claims of ‘activists’ no matter how wild and improbable. Without any evidence it is now accusing the Syrian government of being responsible for the alleged nerve gas/chemical weapons attack in the Ghouta district around Damascus. The far greater likelihood that the armed groups were responsible for this atrocity scarcely rates a mention. Building on the unsubstantiated claim that it was the Syrian military, Martin Chulov argues in favor of another one, that it was Bashir’s brother Maher who was personally responsible (the same accusation is being made by the Israeli intelligence propaganda outlet Debkafile, from which Chulov may well have taken his lead). This is how propaganda works. Once set in motion it just needs a push to keep it rolling.
Buttressing its editorial and reports, Fawaz Gerges is given space to claim that it is up to the Syrian government to prove that it was not responsible for this atrocity. This is nonsense: if the Syrian government was not responsible for this atrocity, how can it prove what it did not do, especially when anything it says will be dismissed out of hand by the mainstream media and the governments arming, financing and training the ‘rebels’? The onus of proof lies on those making the accusations, and so far neither the Guardian nor the anti-Assad campaigning Kim Sengupta of the Independent (where Robert Fisk has provided balance with some reports giving the perspective of the Syrian government) nor William Hague nor anyone else making this accusation has produced a scrap of evidence that this attack was carried out by the Syrian military.
Probability points in the direction of the armed groups. The ‘rebels’ are known to have acquired stocks of sarin. They used a chemical weapons compound in their home-made missile attack on a military outpost at Khan al Assal in March that killed dozens of soldiers and civilians. (1) In May this year Carla del Ponte, a member of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria said investigators had evidence that the ‘rebels’ had used sarin gas. (2) In May also Turkish police seized sarin gas along with hand guns, grenades, ammunition and unspecified ‘documents’ from apartments where Jabhat al Nusra members were living in Adana and Mersin. (3) Early in June the Syrian military seized two barrels of sarin gas from a ‘rebel’ hideout in Hama. (4)
On top of all this the armed groups have filmed themselves experimenting with chemical weapons on rabbits. As they have slaughtered thousands of civilians in the most barbaric fashion there is no argument that moral considerations would prevent them from taking this further atrocious step – and it is they who have every reason to take it. They are being ground down across the country and at this stage only direct military intervention is going to save them and save the project to destroy the Syrian government. It is a measure of the desperation of their outside sponsors that Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, was recently in Moscow with an offer from his government to buy $15 billion worth of Russian arms if Russia would just allow the passage of a UN Security Council resolution authorizing a military attack on Syria. Putin said no, and what a coincidence it is that a short time later there is a mass atrocity that gives the western-led collective the pretext it wants to attack Syria without a UNSC resolution behind them.
Clearing positions held by the armed groups a few days after the apparent nerve gas/chemical weapons attack, Syrian soldiers found stocks of chemicals, gas masks, syringes and anti-neurotoxin drugs in tunnels at Jobar, one of the three districts on the outskirts of Damascus, along with Ain Tarma and Zamalka, targeted in the attack. Several soldiers were taken to hospital in critical condition. The official Syrian news agency English-language news site, SANA ran photos of cylinders of chemicals and other material, including syringes, produced by the ‘Qatar-German Company for Pharmaceutical Industries’. There is no company of this name but there is a company called Qatar-German Medical Devices whose QG logo can be seen on a box found in the tunnel marked ‘Flow I.V. Cannula’. The army also found a basement stocked with quantities of chemical agents manufactured in Saudi Arabia and a number of European countries. The material included equipment for making chemical weapons and anti-neurotoxins in case the armed men poisoned themselves.
The discovery of this material was followed by the Medecins Sans Frontieres statement that three of the hospitals it supports in the Damascus governorate had received 3,600 patients displaying neuro-toxic symptoms in three hours on the morning of August 21, of which number 355 had died. While MSF cannot say who was responsible for this atrocity, its statement highlights the complete improbability of the Syrian government carrying out a mass chemical weapons/nerve gas attack on civilians in suburbs only a few kilometers from the center of Damascus, shortly after the arrival of UN chemical weapons inspectors and indeed only several kilometers from where they were staying, killing or wounding thousands and filling its own hospitals with the victims. At face value the accusation is ludicrous, yet such is the propaganda whipped up against the Syrian government over the past three years that some people will believe it to be capable of anything.
Not only do the armed groups, their backers and the media salesmen of their pitch, including the Guardian, want the world to believe that the Syrian government was responsible for this atrocity, they want the world to believe that Bashar is stupid, indeed so stupid that he would have ordered this attack within three days of the arrival of the UN chemical weapons inspectors. This canard is reminiscent of the accusation that the Syrian government arranged the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005. The killing was a master stroke used as a lever to get the remaining Syrian troops out of Lebanon, and to blacken Syria’s name internationally. By the time all the four suspects had been freed and Syria cleared by the UN tribunal of any responsibility the media had moved on. It is a long time since it has shown any interest in who killed Hariri. Like the Hariri killing the first question to be asked in the wake of this latest atrocity is ‘who benefits?’ In both cases the answers are clear: in the first, Israel, the US and their proxies in Lebanon; in the second, the armed groups and the outside governments supporting them, including, of course, Israel, which is now leading the charge for a direct military attack on Syria.
By disseminating the deceit and lies put out by Libyan and then Syrian ‘rebels’ and ‘activists’, Al Jazeera ruined its reputation. The Guardian has run the same line as this mouthpiece of the government of Qatar yet remains protected by its mystique as a beacon of liberal opinion. Many of its readers are clearly confused when all they have to do is see that the emperor has no clothes: far from being the guardian of liberal opinion, this newspaper is the guardian of western, gulf and Israeli interests in the Middle East against Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. Its correspondents are still writing seriously and positively about a Palestinian ‘peace process’ that is a grotesque sham. Israel is playing with the Palestinians, as a cat plays with a mouse. It has Abbas in its pocket and by abandoning Syria and embracing Muhammad Morsi and the deposed ruler of Qatar, Ismail Haniyeh and Khalid Misha’al have found themselves without any backers. Not since its foundation has Israel enjoyed such a good run. If only the governments in Tehran and Damascus could be destroyed and Hezbollah extinguished life would be perfect.
The Guardian has never even attempted to provide balanced coverage of what is going on in Syria. There has been no counterweight – no antidote – to the anti-Assad and pro-rebel reporting and comment of Ian Black and Martin Chulov. The techniques will be familiar to all but the most inert readers. The paper runs headlines which are not justified in the text. The claims of ‘activists’ are given prominence and the claims of the Syrian government minimized, without there ever being any doubt about what the Guardian wants its readers to believe. It has downplayed or ignored the evidence of terrible atrocities by the armed groups (such as the massacres this August of hundreds of villagers in the Lattakia governorate (5) , of more than 100 people in Khan al Assal (6) and the massacre by Jabhat al Nusra of an estimated 450 Kurdish women and children around the Syrian-Turkish border town of Tal Abyad). (7) It has printed the wildest claims without any attempt to substantiate them, such as the allegation by a London-based ‘activist’ that the Syrian government was packing detainees into shipping containers and dumping them at sea. It has allowed ‘activists’ to shift the blame for car and suicide bombings on to the government even when it is government institutions that have been bombed and government employees who have been the victims. It has expected its readers to believe that the Syrian government is exploding bombs in densely populated residential areas in the middle of its own cities. It relies on the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights when it must know that it is a completely tainted source. The only explanation for this can be that this one-man band is saying what the Guardian wants to hear and what it wants its readers to believe.
The strategy of the armed groups has been to destroy infrastructure and terrorize the civilian population. This they have largely succeeded in doing. Syrians are pouring out of the country to get away from them. In the name of a twisted pseudo-revolution these armed men are supported by a collective of foreign governments. The line of the moment following the alleged chemical weapon/nerve gas attack is that ‘all red lines have been crossed’ when these governments crossed all red lines in international law long ago by financing and arming groups such as the brigades of the Free Syrian Army and Jabhat al Nusra. International law prohibits armed intervention in other countries and the use of mercenaries. International law forbids the application of economic sanctions against member states of the UN yet in all these categories the collective bent on the destruction of the Syrian government has shown complete contempt for international law. Of course this is merely standard procedure. International law is for other people, not the ‘international community’ as represented by the UK, France and the US [or Israel] and nowhere have they treated international law with more contempt than in the Middle East.
These governments are making the most strenuous effort in the history of the modern Middle East to destroy an Arab government. The reason has been clear from the beginning: Syria is Iran’s strongest regional ally and is being targeted as a second best option to targeting Iran itself. The takfiris inside Syria, demeaning Islam with their shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ every time they cut a throat, are doing the work of governments that have done nothing but damage to the Middle East for the past century. The prime losers are the Syrian people. About 100,000 have been killed in this conflict and much of their country’s infrastructure has been deliberately torn to shreds. The chief regional beneficiaries are Israel and Saudi Arabia, holding hands under the table. The destruction of the Syrian government would be an unparalleled strategic triumph for Israel and the ‘west’, which is why Russia and China have not budged in their position that it is the Syrian people who must decide their own future and not outside governments and armed gangs and why Russia in particular will be planning its riposte should Barack Obama be talked into launching a Cruise missile strike.
The Guardian’s propaganda cover for the Syrian ‘rebels’ follows its support for the Libyan ‘rebels’ against another dictator. The protest movement in Benghazi was seized upon by Britain, France and the US as the opportunity to intervene and destroy the government in Tripoli. There was no countrywide movement against Muammar al Qadhafi and the ‘rebels’ could not have advanced a yard beyond the city limits of Benghazi without the cover of NATO missiles. Qadhafi was brought down after a seven month blitz by the air forces of three of the most powerful militaries in the world and eventually murdered after several previous attempts to murder him by missile strike had failed, while killing members of his family. Thousands of innocent Libyans were killed during this prolonged aerial assault. This neo-imperialist adventure was fully underwritten by the mainstream media. None of the war crimes committed by NATO forces or ‘rebels’ on the ground had the same impact on editorials and ‘reporting’ as the claims that the Libyan leader was bombing his own people from the air, using black mercenaries and distributing Viagra to his troops. These sensational allegations were later shown to be lies, but by this time they had served their purpose in setting up Qadhafi as someone who deserved to be killed (rather than put on trial, embarrassing in the process Blair, Sarkozy and others who benefitted from Libyan money and oil concessions). With Libya out of the way the same western governments and the same mainstream media flapped on like vultures to Syria and another supposed dictator, leaving the Libyans to clean up the mess they had created as best as they could.
Having shed the shackles of balanced journalism in Libya and Syria, the Guardian is now defending media ethics and responsibility in the Edward Snowden- Glenn Greenwald affair. Greenwald has been revealing secrets from Snowden’s store of official documents. David Miranda, his partner, was detained for nine hours by British intelligence while in transit through London. If the purpose was to shut Greenwald up by putting pressure on his relationship, his scarcely repressed fury is an indication that it will not work. Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, had been having private conversations with British intelligence and only decided to take action, by destroying material the Guardian had on hard drives, when threatened with legal action. This was a significant exercise of the power of the surveillance state which had to be challenged, but how much more significant is media support for mass death and destruction delivered to Syria by groups of men financed, armed and trained by outside governments?
The Guardian does not actually call for war. It leaves that to other people. It merely sets the stage. It runs an editorial based on the assumption that this chemical weapons attack was the work of the Syrian government. The possibility that the armed groups might have done it is not even taken into account. It observes that ‘choosing between bad options is even more complex [supporting armed groups responsible for one atrocity after another is obviously not considered a bad option] … this paper has resisted the calls for military intervention in Syria [as if there is not already military intervention in Syria] … but we do appear to be coming ever closer to a tipping point with difficult judgments ahead.’ Without calling for war itself, this beacon of liberal opinion then quotes with approval the arch conservative William Hague, who talks of civilized values while pushing for a war that would bury them in further great mounds of bodies.
Behind the mask of asinine geniality Hague is a warmonger. He has wanted ‘intervention’ in Syria – a war kicked off with the declaration of a no-fly zone and now possibly a Cruise missile strike – for years and now sees it in his grasp. The Guardian should have been on to his smiling duplicity and double-speak like a terrier on to a rat. Instead it is joining the chorus line for war. That is the reality behind its own double-speak. The Syrian government agreed to allow UN inspectors into the districts targeted in this apparent nerve gas/chemical weapons attack but as soon they approached these districts, they were shot at by snipers. If it can be proven that it is the armed groups that carried out this attack it is a safe bet that we will hear no more talk of red lines being crossed. Obama said he would not take a decision until he had proof but now we are being told by an unnamed US official that the on the spot inquiry is too little and, not even a week after the event, too late. The British media is talking of a military attack being launched within days.
The US media is much more reserved: after all, their country is being pushed into the front line by governments that would never have the guts to attack by themselves but will only run in from behind once the US takes the lead. Obama is still holding back and has the intelligence and sense not to fall for this if, unfortunately, not necessarily the strength of character to resist the pressure being applied to him. Britain, France and Israel want to strike now, while the propaganda is running hot and strong and before the UN inspectors ruin their rush to war by concluding that this attack around Damascus either was or might have been the work of the armed groups.
This will not be Libya. This never was Libya. This will not begin and end with a few Cruise missiles fired at Syria from warships in the eastern Mediterranean. This may well spark a major war involving Turkey, Iran, Israel, Hezbollah and Russia for which those pushing for war must be held responsible right now and not just afterwards. If the decision is taken the Guardian will wring its hands about the horrors of war but it will still justify it on humanitarian grounds and the ‘responsibility to protect’. Amidst the smoke and carnage, the question of who fired the chemical weapons around Damascus will soon be forgotten.
– Jeremy Salt is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history and politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
Notes:
1. See ‘Russia’s UN envoy says Syria rebels used chemical weapons’, Los Angeles Times,July 9,2013, reporting the statement by Russian UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin that armed groups had used sarin gas in the attack at Khan Assal on March 15, killing 26 people, including 16 military personnel, and wounding 86.
2. See ‘UN’s Del Ponte says evidence Syrian rebels ‘used sarin’. BBC News Middle East, May 6, 2013.
3. See ‘Adana’da El Kaide operasonyu:12 gozalti ( Al Qaida operation at Adana: 12 arrested), Zaman, May 28, 2013.
4. ‘Syrian army seized sarin cylinders from militants in Hama’, Press TV, June 2, 2013.
5. See ‘Massacre in Latakia, August 2013. A documentary report on Al Nusra massacre in Lattakia’, Sham Times, August 8, 2013. Translated by Australians for Reconciliation in Syria.
6. See ‘UN rights chief calls for investigation into Syrian massacre’, Reuters.com., reporting on the ‘apparent’ massacre ‘carried out by Syrian opposition forces in the town’.
7. See ‘Defend the Kurds in Syria from massacre and ethnic cleansing’, Kurdistan Times, August 8,2013, reporting the massacre of 120 children and 330 women by Jabhat al Nusra at Tal Abyad on August 5. While the numbers have not been independently verified, the massacre triggered off an exodus of tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds into northern Iraq. Syrian Kurds have given details of massacres of Kurds carried out by Jabhat al Nusra across northern Syria.
By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett | Going to Tehran | August 27th, 2013
As the Obama administration manufactures its “case” for military aggression against Syria in the coming days or weeks, we want to highlight an interview that Hillary did with Zeinab al-Saffar when we were in Beirut earlier this summer; the interview is now available on Al Mayadeen’s Web site, see here. Hillary’s account of how the United States self-servingly demonizes non-Western countries that get in its way seems highly applicable to the current discussion—it hardly merits the label “debate”—about attacking something in Syria, ostensibly because of claims that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against civilians last week in Ghouta, an eastern suburb of Damascus. The frame for such demonization, Hillary notes, is inevitably driven by and bound up with
“the United States’ way of going to war. The United States doesn’t go to war, it says, to protect its interests. The United States says it’s going to war to ‘liberate’ peoples—whether they’re liberating people in Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, and prospectively Iran. And the way the American people is conditioned to accept it (and, essentially, world opinion as well) is that American experts put out a narrative about these various countries—whether it’s Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, or now Iran—they put out a narrative about how repressive that society is, how illegitimate its government is in terms of its domestic politics, and how irrational it is in its foreign policy. We’ve seen this in country after country that the United States has invaded or tried to invade to overthrow its government.”
Of course, no one anticipates that President Obama is about to order a U.S.-led invasion of Syria. But, since Obama’s foolish declaration in August 2011 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “must go,” the United States has been committed to the Syrian government’s overthrow. And the demonization of Syria’s government as repressive, illegitimate, and irrational has proceeded apace, exactly along the lines described by Hillary. Now the demonization focuses on unsubstantiated allegations of the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons as a justification for the United States to use military force against it—just as concocted claims about Saddam Husayn’s weapons of mass destruction were central to building the case for invading Iraq in 2003.
Make no mistake, U.S. military action against Syria will be fragrantly illegal (not that President Obama’s senior advisors, most members of Congress, or much of the American public will care). Nevertheless, the Obama administration is gearing up for precisely such action—and for entirely self-generated reasons. It was Obama who declared that Assad “must go.” It was Obama who declared that chemical weapons use was a “red line.” It was Obama who put himself in a position where he can’t entertain the possibility that Syrian oppositionists used chemical weapons, because that would destroy his administration’s Syria policy. And because Obama took these ill-considered and illegal positions, he must now use American military power to preserve his “credibility.”
Obama took these positions, the “credibility” of which he must now defend by engaging in overt aggression, in no small part because American foreign policy elites believe that bringing down the Assad government will undermine the Islamic Republic of Iran. In her interview for Al Mayadeen, Hillary discusses the evolution of our own thinking about the Islamic Republic, how America should engage it, and what are the real obstacles to a more realistic and effective American posture toward Tehran.
In particular, she charts the progress from our earlier advocacy of a U.S.-Iranian “grand bargain” (whereby America would “talk Iran into agreeing with American positions on Hizballah, on the nuclear issue, on the Palestinian issue, on a range of things”) to our recognition that “something much more profound and deep” is required—that the United States needs “to come to terms with and accept” a fiercely independent Islamic Republic, in much the same way that President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger came to terms with and accepted the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s. She also recounts the attacks we have faced—first from the right, when we were criticizing President George W. Bush’s handling of Iran policy, followed by much of the left, when we began making the same criticisms of Obama’s posture toward Iran. In this context, Hillary argues that our biggest offense has been to challenge the deeply held American myth “that Iranians were demanding to be liberated by the United States, but not liberated by an American tank, but by the great American ideas and great American values, that everyone wants, deep in their heart, to be secular liberals…if you questioned that in the United States, as we did, you really were vilified.”
Our experience strongly suggests that the biggest obstacles to genuine revision of U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic are some fundamental aspects of American political culture. As Hillary points out, “to accept an Islamist political order, [the United States] would have to give up the pursuit of hegemony, the pursuit of dominance. This idea that we can use the excuse of what’s called American exceptionalism—that the United States is a unique force for good in the world—to invade other countries to ‘liberate’ them, we’d have to give that up, because we’d have to recognize that there is some legitimacy to other political orders, particularly ones that are Islamist. And that’s especially relevant in the Middle East that is so important in geostrategic terms.”
The problem, though, is that “hegemony may be nice in theory—if you could get it, if you could rule the world, that might be a nice idea for some Americans in theory—but you cannot get it in the Middle East, because you are up against Islam. You cannot do it; you cannot defeat that. For the United States to have any strategic influence in this vital part of the world, we argue in our book, we have to come to terms with that—just as we could not defeat one billion people in China who wanted to have their independence. It’s a very similar situation.”
But it seems that United States is not yet ready to come to terms with this reality. And so, in another vain attempt to get at the Islamic Republic of Iran, America is about to engage in illegal aggression against one of the Middle East’s most avowedly secular governments—a government that, like the Islamic Republic, actually fights the kind of violent (and anti-American), al Qaida-affiliated extremism that some U.S. “allies” work so hard to promote.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 