ISIS attacks Hezbollah at eastern Lebanon checkpoint
Al-Akhbar | October 5, 2014
Clashes took place in eastern Lebanon on Sunday afternoon, as a group of militants attacked a Hezbollah checkpoint, the Lebanese National News Agency reported.
There were conflicting media reports on Sunday evening over the number of wounded and killed in the attack in the outskirts of Britel, in the Baalbek region.
According to the NNA, there were several casualties on the side of the armed militants.
News channel LBCI, which identified the militant gunmen as members of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group, said there were injuries on both sides, while radio station Sawt Lubnaan said at least two Hezbollah fighters had been killed.
Sawt Lubnaan also reported that the army had not intervened until late, and that the clashes had relatively subsided by 5:00 pm.
The NNA also reported clashes outside of Yuneen, and the sound of rockets or bombs near some villages east of Baalbek.
Official Washington’s Syrian ‘Fantasy’
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | October 1, 2014
What does it say when the capital of the world’s most powerful nation anchors a major decision about war in what every thinking person acknowledges is a “fantasy” – even the principal policymaker and a top advocate for foreign interventions?
It might suggest that the U.S. government has completely lost its bearings or that political opportunism now so overwhelms rationality that shortsighted expediency determines life-or-death military strategies. Either way, it is hard to see how the current U.S. policy toward Iraq, Syria and the larger Middle East can serve American national interests or translate into anything but more misery for the people of the region.
Official Washington’s most treasured “fantasy” today is the notion that a viable “moderate opposition” exists in Syria or could somehow be created. That wish-upon-a-star belief was the centerpiece of congressional action last month on a $500 million plan by President Barack Obama to train and arm these “moderate” rebels to combat Islamic State terrorists who have been plundering large swaths of Syria and Iraq — and also take on the Syrian army.
Yet, as recently as August, President Barack Obama publicly declared that trust in these “moderates” was a “fantasy” that was “never in the cards” as a workable strategy. Then, on Wednesday, David Ignatius, national security columnist for the neoconservative Washington Post and a prominent booster of U.S. interventionism, reported from a rebel staging area in Reyhanli, Turkey, the same reality in nearly the same language.
“The problem is that the ‘moderate opposition’ that the United States is backing is still largely a fantasy,” Ignatius wrote, noting that the greatest challenge would be to coordinate “the ragtag brigades of the Free Syrian Army into a coherent force that can fill the vacuum once the extremists are driven out.”
Ignatius quoted Syrian rebel commander Hamza al-Shamali, a top recipient of American support including anti-tank missiles, as saying, “At some point, the Syrian street lost trust in the Free Syrian Army,” the U.S.-backed rebel force that was the armed wing of the supposedly “moderate opposition” to President Bashar al-Assad. Ignatius added:
“Shamali explains that many rebel commanders aren’t disciplined, their fighters aren’t well-trained and the loose umbrella organization of the FSA lacks command and control. The extremists of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra have filled the vacuum. Now, he says, ‘the question every Syrian has for the opposition is: Are you going to bring chaos or order?’”
According to Ignatius, Shamali said he rejected a proposal to merge the FSA’s disparate brigades because “we refuse to repeat failed experiments.” He argued that an entirely new “Syrian national army” would be needed to fight both the Islamist radicals and Assad’s military.
But even the sympathetic Ignatius recognized that “the FSA’s biggest problem has been internecine feuding. Over the past two years, I’ve interviewed various people who tried to become leaders, such as: Abdul-Jabbar Akaidi, Salim Idriss and Jamal Maarouf. They all talked about unifying the opposition but none succeeded.
“An Arab intelligence source explains: ‘Until now, the FSA is a kind of mafia. … People inside Syria are tired of this mafia. There is no structure. It’s nothing.’ And this from one of the people who have struggled the past three years to organize the resistance.”
In other words, the “moderate” rebels – to the degree that they do exist – are viewed by many Syrians as part of the problem, not part of any solution.
Favoring Al-Qaeda
Another flaw in Obama’s strategy is that the Syrian “moderates” are much more opposed to Assad’s harsh but secular regime than they are to the Sunni jihadists who have emerged as the most effective fighting force against him.
“If U.S. airstrikes and other support are seen to be hitting Muslim fighters only, and strengthening the despised Assad, this strategy for creating a ‘moderate opposition’ will likely fail,” Ignatius concluded.
That complaint has given new hope to Washington’s influential neoconservatives that they can ultimately redirect Obama’s intervention in Syria from bombing the Islamic State terrorists to a full-scale “regime change” war against Assad, much like the neocons helped convince President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons’ Noses Into the Syrian Tent.”]
In this regard, Obama appears to be the proverbial deer in the headlights. He’s afraid of being called “weak” if he doesn’t go after the Islamic State for its hyper-violent attacks inside Iraq and its brutal executions of American hostages in Syria. Yet, Obama also can’t escape his earlier tough talk that “Assad must go.”
Obama’s core contradiction has been that by providing “covert” assistance to Syrian rebels, he has indirectly strengthened the Sunni extremists who have seized the Free Syrian Army’s weapons depots and won converts from the “moderate” rebels, some of whom were trained, armed and financed by the CIA. Meanwhile, other U.S. allies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have been helping more extreme Syrian rebels, including al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.
A year ago, many of the “moderate” rebels publicly repudiated the Syrian political front that the Obama administration had put together and instead endorsed al-Nusra. According to one source with access to Western intelligence information, some “moderate” rebels – recruited from Muslim communities in Great Britain and other Western countries – have now taken their military skills (and passports) to the Islamic State.
Yet, instead of acknowledging that this strategy of relying on an unreliable “moderate opposition” is indeed a “fantasy,” President Obama and a majority in Congress have chosen to pursue this geopolitical unicorn with another $500 million and much political chest-thumping.
An Alternative Approach
At this late stage, the only practical strategy would be to press the non-extremist Sunni opposition to work out some form of unity government with Assad who retains strong support among Syria’s Alawite, Shiite and Christian minorities. By enlisting Russia and Iran, Obama might be able to secure concessions from Assad, including the possibility of a gradual transition to a post-Assad era.
With such a political settlement in hand, the focus could then be on defeating the Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s Nusra affiliate and restoring some order to Syria. But the problem is that Official Washington’s neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies are so fixated on “regime change” in Syria and are so hostile to Russia and Iran that any pragmatic strategy is effectively ruled out.
Though Obama may be a closet “realist” who would favor such a compromise approach, he has consistently lacked the political courage or the geopolitical foresight to impose this kind of solution on the powers-that-be in Washington. Any suggestion of collaboration with Russia and Iran or acquiescence to continued rule by Assad would touch off a firestorm of outrage in Congress and the mainstream U.S. media.
So, Obama instead has charted a course into what he knows to be a fantasyland, a costly pursuit of the chimerical Syrian “moderates” who – once located – are supposed to defeat both the Sunni extremists and the army of the secularist Assad. This journey is not simply a march of folly but a meandering into illusion.
~
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).
Israel’s false peace
By Iqbal Jassat | Media Review Network | October 2, 2014
What is it about proclamations of “peace” that allows injustice to continue unhindered?
It’s a question applicable to governments, security institutions, media columnists and pro-Israel lobbies who regularly espouse a passion for “peace in the Holy Land”.
While on the surface it appears to be a perfectly normal and laudable aspiration, in the experience of Palestine it is unfortunately riddled with inconsistencies making it alarmingly dishonest.
“Peace” as espoused by Israel’s leaders is no more than a fig leaf for it seeks to conceal the regime’s unremitting repression of Palestinian rights.
Though “peace” is a concept embodying humane values associated with calm and serenity, for Palestinians it has had a devastating opposite effect. Their daily experience whether as refugees awaiting return home or as a collective of Occupied people, points to a life of subjugation which has for decades been exploited by successive governments in Israel.
While the deception inherent in Israel’s so-called desire for “peace” is known and documented quite extensively, it is also known that by leaning on this false notion, the regime has attempted to deflect scrutiny of its unjust conduct towards Palestinians.
Such deliberate and calculated sophistry has assisted Israel and her supporters to bluff the world. By staking its claim as a “peaceful” state whose citizens deserve to live in “peace”, Israel’s social architects expect immunity from censure for any and all forms of oppression and military barbarity.
“Peace” is thus a linguistic political tool without any connection to the noble values it incorporates. Malicious and misleading to the extreme for it implies that to oppose Israel is to oppose “peace”. In other words, anti-Israelism is equated with mindless violence.
This type of faulty rationale is deliberately constructed to demonise opponents of the regime’s colonial status as violent. Thus in the context of contrasting “peace” and “violence”, Israel continues to rally support for its savagery on the basis of an aspiration most people would unhesitatingly subscribe to.
Netanyahu has repeated this trick once again at the United Nations. By casting Israel as a victim of “terrorism” perpetrated by “violent” ideologues of “Islamist radicalism”, he hopes to garner global sympathy and thereby shield his apartheid regime’s catalogue of atrocities.
America’s current bombing spree in cahoots with Britain and France and their respective Arab client-states gives Israel perfect timing and cover. In Iraq and Syria, the US-led “war on terror” has a new enemy in the guise of ISIS commonly referred to as the Islamic State.
Overnight, ISIS has emerged as a new villain threatening the existence of Western civilization. Its dominance over large swathes of Iraq and Syria including key oil fields precipitated what most people currently associate ISIS with: beheadings of Western journalists.
Suddenly this new “Islamist bogeyman” emerges to not only distract global attention from Israel’s beheadings of Palestinian families, but also to extend a fresh lifeline to America’s military industrial complex. And, of course, to provide Netanyahu the opportunity to cast resistance movements such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the mould of ISIS.
Such tricks conjure the minds of magicians and keep people enthralled while deceptive policies of dispossession continue uninterrupted.
Netanyahu and his clique of magicians may believe that waving the wand of “peace” will conceal Israel’s bloody carnage and ongoing aggression, but unfortunately for Zionism this illusion won’t last.
If South Africa is used as a yardstick to measure whether Israel’s bag of dirty tricks has worked, it’s pretty clear that Netanyahu has failed dismally.
Here, a sustained campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) led by the ANC as the ruling party and a formidable formation of civil societies, churches and trade unions has demonstrated that it has not been deceived by false notions of “peace”.
The Israel Lobby ‘In Defense of Christians’?
By Maidhc O Cathail • Unz Review • October 2, 2014
Having long since captured the sympathies of America’s evangelical Christians, Israel’s friends have recently been attempting to show empathy for the persecuted Christian churches of the Arab World in what appears to be a concerted effort to garner support for Tel Aviv’s regional aspirations. Only founded earlier this year, a previously obscure non-profit organization called “In Defense of Christians” suddenly attracted international headlines during its inaugural summit (Sept. 9-11). The stated purpose of the three-day Washington, D.C. gathering was to raise awareness about the plight of beleaguered Middle Eastern Christian communities whose continued existence is threatened by the advance of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and other takfiri groups.
Although The Washington Post published a report on the IDC Summit in its Religion section on Sept. 10, it wasn’t until that evening’s gala dinner when keynote speaker Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was reportedly “booed off the stage” for his provocative pro-Israel speech that most people first heard of the Washington-based group. Cruz left little doubt that he was more concerned about defending Israel than the region’s Christians when he began to “loop” ISIS and Al-Qaeda together with Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran (i.e. the latter three forming “the strategic arc” that poses “the greatest danger to Israel,” as Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, has admitted to The Jerusalem Post.) But it wasn’t until the Texas senator asserted that “Christians have no greater ally than the Jewish state” that some of the attendees could take no more of what sounded like an AIPAC-scripted sermon and began to heckle him.
In light of the predictable outrage provoked by Cruz’s paean to Israel, it’s interesting to recall what The Washington Post had been told by IDC executive director Andrew Doran earlier that day:
One Orthodox leader on Tuesday (Sept. 9) declared his opposition to military action to stop the Islamic State militants, a view that is not likely widely shared at the conference, Doran noted. The next day, another called the Arab-Israel conflict the root of Middle Eastern chaos. He doesn’t speak for the IDC nor his brother patriarchs, said Doran.
Yet in a Sept. 11 press release entitled “Clarifying Senator Cruz’s Walk Away from Middle Eastern Christian Summit,” Doran, who previously worked for the US Department of State, still seemed assured that he and his allegedly “non-partisan” organization speak instead for the region’s Christians. After having recounted “in tears” his inspiration for the group’s name from a 1933 letter titled “In Defense of the Jews,” the IDC executive director claimed: “In last night’s Solidarity Gala Dinner, Senator Cruz chose to stand against the small and vocal minority of attendees who disagree with his views on Israel rather than standing with the vast majority of those who attended the gala and support both Israel and the Middle East’s Christians.”
Adding to Doran’s “clarification,” IDC president Toufic Baaklini noted “sadly” that “there was a small but vocal anti-Israel element in the room” who “do not represent the views of IDC.” Fittingly, the IDC press release ended by citing one of the summit’s most active speakers [.pdf] whose support for Israel has rarely, if ever, been in doubt: “As Nina Shea, who introduced Cruz later said, ‘We will not agree on territorial disputes, but we stand united against religious persecution regardless of the religion.’”
A senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute, Shea directs Hudson’s Center for Religious Freedom. A former vice chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which was once led by the pardoned pro-Israel Iran-Contra intriguer Elliott Abrams and currently chaired by a daughter of the late “true blue and white” Israel mouthpiece and infamous interventionist Tom Lantos, the senior Hudson fellow has, as one critical profile puts it, “a long track record of using human rights concerns to promote various foreign interventions favored by neoconservatives.” Significantly, the IDC summit is evidently not the first time concerns about specifically Christian suffering have been used by the neocon interventionist:
In a 2001 article for the Washington Monthly, Joshua Green related how in the mid-1990s Shea teamed up with Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan administration official, in an effort “to put the issue of Christian persecution on the map.” Green reported: “Horowitz, a Jewish neoconservative and a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, detailed the plight of persecuted Christians in Africa and the Middle East. He concluded by calling for intervention. ‘For American Jews, who owe our very lives to the open door of the blessed land,’ he wrote, ‘silence should not be an option in the face of persecutions eerily parallel to those committed by Adolf Hitler.’” According to Green, a favorite Horowitz sound bite at the time was that “Christians are the Jews of the 21st century.”
In a 2012 article entitled “What Will Become of the Middle East’s Christians?”—one of the many pieces in which Doran cites Shea’s work on Christian persecution—the IDC executive director echoes Horowitz’s favorite sound bite:
The exodus of Jews from Yemen, where they had lived for fifteen centuries before the birth of the Prophet, was not an isolated occurrence; it was repeated across the Middle East and North Africa, as these Diaspora Jews made their way, reluctantly in many cases, to Israel. Their fight for survival foreshadowed that of the more than ten million Christians of the Muslim world, who today struggle to maintain a presence and identity in the lands where they have lived for centuries.
Presumably, the reader is expected to infer Muslim persecution of Jews from Doran’s use of the word “reluctantly” as opposed to the Israeli false flag attacks that were required in at least some cases to convince those “Diaspora Jews” to flee to the newly-established “Jewish state” on Palestinian land.
A regular contributor to the neocon National Review Online, Doran also shares Shea’s favored response to the problem of Christian persecution. For instance, in an Aug. 18 op-ed piece entitled “Intervention as Duty,” the IDC executive director writes:
As I argued here last year, the intervention in the former Yugoslavia may serve as a compelling model today for Syria and now perhaps Iraq, but this would call for a willingness to see Iraq and Syria dissolved. For the moment, America clings, as it did at the outset of war in Yugoslavia, to nations that no longer exist.
In Doran’s prescription for the current crisis, one can’t help noticing the similarity with the policy recommendations of Oded Yinon, an Israeli journalist formerly attached to the Foreign Ministry of Israel. In his 1982 essay “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” originally published in Hebrew by the World Zionist Organization journal, Kivunim, Yinon argued that, “The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run….”
However, if the dissolution of Syria, in accordance with Israeli strategic objectives, was indeed one of the ulterior motives behind IDC’s bringing the Middle East’s Christians together in Washington, it appears to have suffered a setback when on the final day of the summit, a delegation of Eastern Christian patriarchs met with President Obama in the White House. According to a report in Al-Akhbar English, Obama surprised his guests by telling them, “We know that President Bashar al-Assad protected Christians in Syria.” Further taken aback by Obama’s use of the term “the Syrian government” instead of “regime,” one of the attendees reportedly challenged the president: “Then you should stop talking about a moderate Syrian opposition.” Ironically, it was in this very same room four months earlier that Obama had met Ahmad Jarba, president of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) who “thanked the US for its aid to opposition rebels.” One month before that, the leader of the so-called “moderate Syrian opposition” reportedly toured the devastated Armenian Christian village of Kassab, Syria which had been attacked and occupied by the Free Syrian Army, the SNC’s armed wing, and their Al-Qaeda affiliates.
Within a week of the historic meeting of President Obama with the leaders of Eastern Christianity, a World Jewish Congress delegation led by WJC president Ronald Lauder paid a Rosh Hashanah visit to Pope Francis at his Vatican residence. As in the White House, the persecution of Christians in the Middle East dominated the discussion. According to a Sept. 18 report in Haaretz, it was the Bishop of Rome’s turn this time to adopt Horowitz’s sound bite:
Lauder and the pope mutually condemned the attacks against Christians around the world, especially in the Middle East. “In the world, there is still great suffering. First it was your turn. Now it’s our turn,” the pope told the delegation…
Strongly agreeing with the Holy Father’s comments, the WJC president extended the Horowitzian analogy:
He showed a paper bearing the Hebrew letter nun, explaining that: “It is the symbol used in Iraq and Syria to identify Christians’ houses as the yellow star was used in the past against European Jewry.”
The head of the “Diplomatic Arm of the Jewish People” concluded with a well-worn albeit spurious hasbara talking point: “The truth is that Israel is the only safe place for Christians in the Middle East.”
As implied by the Haaretz report, the WJC president—not to mention another pro-Israel interventionist par excellence—has been showing an increased concern for his Christian brethren of late. An Aug. 19 Lauder op-ed in The New York Times asks, “Who Will Stand Up for Christians?” Given the gist of the piece, however, a more candid title might have been “Why can’t the world just stop fussing about Israeli war crimes in Palestine and focus their anger instead on Christian suffering in other parts of the Middle East?” As for how to respond to the persecution of his “Christian brothers and sisters,” the self-described “Jewish leader” pointedly reminds his readers that he is writing this call to action “as a citizen of the strongest military power on earth.” Thus, similar to the fervor that preceded the Second World War, “Onward Christian Soldiers” has yet again become the rallying cry for those who seek to embroil the United States and other Western nations in another major conflict—an unnecessary “Clash of Civilizations”—likely to accomplish little beyond further advancing the hegemonic designs of Israel.
Bahrain sentences nine protestors to life in prison
Al-Akhbar | September 29, 2014
Nine Bahraini protestors have been jailed for life and stripped of their nationality for allegedly smuggling arms to be used in “terrorist acts,” the prosecutor general of the country with the second highest prison population rate per 100,000 amongst Arab states in the West Asian and North African region announced on Monday.
A Manama court also found all nine guilty of having contacted an agent of an unnamed foreign country “to carry out acts hostile to Bahrain,” he said in a statement.
The case dates back to February 2013 when authorities in the country announced they had allegedly dismantled a “terrorist cell” with links to Iran.
This is the latest in a series of convictions that the Bahraini regime has imposed against protesters, including prominent rights activists.
Today, the Saudi-backed Manama regime has the distinction of being the country with the second highest prison population rate per 100,000 amongst Arab states in the West Asian and North African region. Authorities continue to detain over 2,000 Bahrainis who dared to challenge the Khalifa monarchy when the uprising erupted in February 2011.
Indeed, Bahraini authorities are rarely transparent about the actual number of prisoners, going as far as denying that any of the prisoners were arrested over their political stances, and claiming that they were apprehended for “conspiring to overthrow the ruling regime and communicating with foreign entities.”
Due to the fact that the Bahraini regime does not publicly share the total number of prisoners it has nor does it provide an accurate breakdown of the detainees’ crimes, most information regarding Bahrain’s prisons usually come from non-governmental sources.
According to Bahraini activists, there are presently at least 2,000-3,000 “political prisoners” who were arrested when the recent Bahraini uprising erupted in 2011.
They are held among 20 prisons dispersed throughout the archipelago nation, all but two are administered by the Ministry of Interior. Out of the 20, there are four main prisons, one of which is solely for women. They are: al-Qurain Prison, Dry Dock Detention Center, Jaw Prison, and the Isa Town Detention Center for women.
While the number of prisoners may seem inconsequential compared to other countries, for Bahrain – with a small population of 1.2 million, 570,000 of which are Bahraini – it is quite significant.
A report in regards to prisons by the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights released in July says there are over 200 minors held within these prisons, forced to stay side-by-side with adults, and a few have faced torture and sexual abuses.
Similarly, the July report stated, “Children as young as 13 have been sentenced to prison on charges of terrorism in trials that lacked any evidence and despite the fact that the Bahraini law does not define prison punishment for children below the age of 15 in the event of a criminal conviction.”
(Al-Akhbar, AFP)
Yemen´s Houthis and Government Sign Final Peace-deal
teleSUR | September 28, 2014
Yemen’s Houthi movement signed a final peace deal with the government on Saturday, agreeing to disarm and pull back from areas they took in the past months.
The accord, which comes days after the Houthis gained the upper-hand in the capital Sanaa, is part of a comprehensive UN-brokered deal with the pro-government Islah Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen.
Thousands of armed Houthis are stationed in the capital, where they have disarmed government security forces. On Saturday, rebels attacked the Sanaa residency of the national security chief Ali al-Ahmadi.
The deal may put an end to weeks of violence and tension between the Houthis on the one hand and government troops and pro-government factions on the other. According to official estimations, the violence may have killed hundreds.
Last month thousands of Houthis flooded the streets of Sanaa, staging civil disobedience actions and demanding the government step down and fuel subsidies restored.
Earlier this month, in what the Houthis considered a victory, the government and the movement signed an agreement on the formation of a new cabinet of technocrats and the reinstatement of fuel subsidies, whose absence had been a blow to the poor.
Houthis have played a key role in ousting former U.S.-backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh during the mass-uprisings of the Arab Spring.
Coalition of the Clueless
By Sharmine Narwani | RT | September 25, 2014
This US-engineered Coalition is in for some surprises. With few common goals, it has thrust itself into battle against the most determined players in the region and beyond.
The airwaves are still heaving with spin two days after US airstrikes against Syria.
Undoubtedly the attacks were timed to occur on the eve of the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, so ‘Coalition’ partners could cluster behind the decision to bomb a sovereign state, uninvited.
The irony, of course, is that they are doing so at the UN – the global political body that pledges to uphold international law, peace and stability, and the sanctity of the nation-state unit.
The goal this week will be to keep the ‘momentum’ on a ‘narrative’ until it sinks in.
On day one, heads of state from Turkey, Jordan, Qatar, the UK and France were paraded onto the podium to drum in the urgency of American strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Jabhat al-Nusra and other militant groups inside Syria.
Every American official – past and present – in the White House rolodex was hooked up to a microphone to deliver canned sound bites and drive home those ‘messages.’ In between, video-game-quality footage of US strikes hitting their targets was aired on the hour; clips of sleek fighter jets refueling midair and the lone Arab female fighter pilot were dropped calculatingly into social media networks.
The global crew of journalists that descends annually on the UN for this star-studded political event, enthused over US President Barak Obama’s ability to forge a coalition that included five Arab Sunni states – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain and the UAE.
Few mentioned that these partners are a mere fig leaf for Obama, providing his Syria campaign with Arab and Muslim legitimacy where he otherwise would have none. Not that any of these five monarchies enjoy ‘legitimacy’ in their own kingdoms – kings and emirs aren’t elected after all – and two of these Wahhabi states are directly responsible for the growth and proliferation of the Wahhabi-style extremism targeted by US missiles.
Even fewer spent time dissecting the legality of US attacks on Syria or on details of the US ‘mission’ – as in, “what next?”
But with a mission this crippled at the outset, it didn’t take long for an alternative view to peek through the thick media fog.
On the ground in Syria, dead civilians – some of them children killed by US bombs – muddied the perfect script. Confused Syrian rebels – many who had called for foreign intervention to help crush the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – demanded to know how these airstrikes were meant to help them.
Sunni Arabs would be radicalized by these strikes, they warned, as ideologically sympathetic citizens of the Arab coalition states took to their information channels and swore revenge for airstrikes against ISIL and al-Nusra.
The Syrian government, for the most part, remained mute – whether to save face or because they could ‘smell’ the gains coming. Contrary to Washington’s prevailing narrative, privately the story was that the US had informed the Assad government of both the timing and targets of the attacks in advance.
Sources say that the US even provided ‘guarantees’ that no Syrian military or government interests would be targeted. A Reuters exclusive claiming that the US went so far as to provide assurances to Iran, suggests this version is closer to the truth. When US airstrikes against Syria were on the table a year ago, the various parties went through a similar game of footsies. Last September, the Americans backed off – allegedly because of communications from their adversaries that even a single US missile would trigger a warfront against Israel. This time, Washington needed to know that scenario was not going to be activated, and this week they offered the necessary guarantees to ensure it.
Although the Russians and Iranians have publicly lashed out at the illegality of US strikes, they do not seem too worried. Both know – like the Syrian government – that these air attacks could be a net gain for their ‘Axis.’
Firstly, the United States is now doing some useful heavy-lifting for Assad, at no real cost to him. The Syrian armed forces have spent little time on the ISIL threat because their focus has traditionally been on protecting their interests in Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, Hama – and the countryside in these areas – as well as towns and cities around the Lebanese and Jordanian borders. That changed when ISIL staged successful attacks on Mosul and created new geopolitical urgency for Assad’s allies – which triggered some major Syrian strikes against ISIL targets.
But to continue along this path, the Syrians would have to divert energy and resources from key battles, and so the American strikes have provided a convenient solution for the time being.
Secondly, the Syrians have spent three years unsuccessfully pushing their narrative that the terrorism threat they face internally is going to become a regional and global problem. The US campaign is a Godsend in this respect – Obama has managed to get the whole world singing from the same hymn sheet in just two months, including, and this is important, the three states – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – most instrumental in financing, weaponizing and assisting ISIL and other extremist militias inside Syria.
Syria, Iran, Russia, Hezbollah and a host of like-minded emerging powers are pleased about this new laser focus on jihadi terror and for the accompanying resource shift to address the problem.
Thirdly, the US has now been placed in the hot seat and will be expected to match words with action. For three years, Washington has overlooked and even encouraged illegal and dangerous behaviors from its regional Sunni allies – all in service of defeating Assad. With all eyes on America and expectations that Obama will fail in his War on Terror just like his predecessors, the US is going to have to pull some impressive tricks from its sleeves.
Ideally, these would include the shutting down of key border crossings (Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon); punishing financiers of terror and inhibiting the flow of funds and assistance from Washington’s regional allies; cutting off key revenue streams; tightening immigration policies to stem the flow of foreign fighters; disrupting communications networks of targeted terrorist groups; broader intelligence sharing with all regional players; and empowering existing armies and allied militias inside the ‘chaos zone’ to lead and execute ground operations.
Thus far, there are signs that some of these things are already happening, with possibly more to come.
Now for the fun part. The Syrians, Iranians and Russians do not fundamentally trust Washington or its intentions. The suspicion is that the US is on another one of its regime-change missions, displaying its usual rogue-state behavior by violating the territorial integrity of a sovereign state under false pretenses, and that it will shortly revert to targeting the Syrian government.
While they can see clear gains from the current level of US intervention – as distasteful as they find it – they are watching carefully as events unfold.
If there is the slightest deviation from the ‘guarantees’ provided by the US, this trio has plenty of room to maneuver. Iran, for one, has dallied with the Americans in both Iraq and Afghanistan and they know how to cause some pain where it counts. The Russians, for that matter, have many playgrounds in which to thwart US ambitions – most urgently in Ukraine and in Afghanistan, from which the US hopes to withdraw billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment by the end of 2014.
All understand that Washington has just assumed a risky public posture and that many, many things can go wrong. The Sunni Arab fig leaf can disappear in a nano-second if domestic pressures mount or revenge attacks take place internally. Information could leak about continued assistance to terrorist militias from one or more of its coalition partners – a huge embarrassment for Washington and its wobbly Coalition. ISIL will almost certainly act against coalition partner soft-targets, like carrying out further kidnappings and executions. Continued airstrikes will almost definitely result in a growing civilian casualty count, turning those ‘hearts and minds’ to stone. Syrian rebels could swiftly turn against the US intervention and radicalize further. Massive displacement caused by airstrikes could exacerbate the humanitarian crisis. And as in all other past US military War-on-Terror adventures, terrorism could thrive and proliferate in quantum leaps.
As Moscow-based political analyst Vladimir Frolov noted to the Washington Post : “The United States has underestimated the complexity of the situation before, so let’s just wait until they run into problems.”
The idea that US military engagement could continue for the long-term is unlikely given the myriad things that can go wrong fast. Obama is going to be reluctant to have his last two years in office defined by the hazardous Syrian conflict – after all, he was to be the president who extracted America from unessential wars.
But the most compelling reason that this Coalition will not pass the first hurdle is that its key members have entirely different ambitions and strategic targets.
Over a decade ago, these US-engineered coalitions were wealthier, less-burdened and shared common goals. Today, many of the coalition members face domestic economic and political uncertainties – and several states are directly responsible for giving rise to ISIL. How can the Coalition fight ISIL and support it, all at once?
What’s missing is a formula, a strategy, a unified worldview that can be equally as determined as the ideological adversary it faces.
Down the road, we will discover that the only coalition able and willing to fight extremism does indeed come from inside the region, but importantly, from within the conflict zone itself: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. For starters, they are utterly vested in the outcome of their efforts – and would lead with political solutions alongside military ones. Those elusive boots-on-the-ground that everyone is seeking? They live it. Pit that group against Obama’s Coalition-of-the-Clueless any day and you know which side would win handily.
The question is, can this Coalition stomach a solution it is working so hard to avoid? Will it partner with vital regional players that were foes only a few months ago? It is doubtful. That would require a worldview shift that Washington is still too irrational to embrace.
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Obama Unleashes Plan to Support ‘Civil Society’ Groups Across the Globe
teleSUR | September 25, 2014
President Barack Obama announced in a speech on Tuesday that the United States would be aggressively funding and supporting “civil society” groups around the globe, calling it a “national security” issue.
“It is precisely because citizens and civil society can be so powerful — their ability to harness technology and connect and mobilize at this moment so unprecedented — that more and more governments are doing everything in their power to silence them,” said Obama at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual conference in New York.
Obama singled out Venezuela for allegedly “vilifying legitimate dissent” and said that Latin America would host one of the six Regional Civil Society Innovation Centers, a new initiative that seeks to create a global network to create cross-border partnerships. Other regions targeted for these new centers include Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
However, U.S. assistance to so-called civil society groups, especially in Latin America, has been marred in controversy, especially with regards to leftist governments.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the U.S. bodies that funds and supports “civil society” organizations abroad, funded Venezuelan opposition groups responsible for the 2002 coup attempt against the democratically-elected former president Hugo Chavez.
In 2009, according to USAID documents obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the group had also funded local regional governments and municipalities in Bolivia at a time when the government of Evo Morales was dealing with right-wing separatist movements in the eastern part of the country. Morales eventually expelled the agency from the country in 2013, a move followed by Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa later that year. Correa announced in November 2013 that USAID is required to leave the country by the end of this month.
“Partnering and protecting civil society groups around the world is now a mission across the U.S. government,” said Obama.
He ordered, via a presidential memorandum, agencies such as USAID, the Department of State, and Homeland Security, to work more regularly with civil society groups across the globe. … Full article
ISIS is not ‘Blowback’ from Western Foreign Policy; They ARE Western Foreign Policy
Empire Strikes Black | September 24, 2014
Notice that ISIS are sworn enemies of Syria, Hizbu’llah, and Iran. This in itself gives a most obvious clue as to the identity of the group’s benefactors.
A prevalent liberal cliché is the “blowback” theory – the theory that ISIS terror attacks, and indeed the group’s very existence, are somehow in retaliation to US/Western/”Israeli” foreign policy actions.
This is a disingenuous theory that is disseminated in order to keep the empire’s citizens on side. Crucially, it distracts from a key truth.
Western and “Israeli” intelligence has historically effected deep infiltration of ‘jihadist’ terror cells throughout the Arab world and the West; these groups are used literally as footsoldiers (see Afghanistan throughout the 1980s) to achieve Western and “Israeli” military and strategic objectives. The “blowback” theory distracts from this key fact.
ISIS aren’t retaliating against Western foreign policy; they are Western foreign policy. These very people were mobilised against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya’s bogus ‘revolution’ of 2011, as with Syria in the same year.
In moving across the Syrian-Iraqi border, ISIS – Zionism’s footsoldiers – underwent a magical media transformation into the ‘bad guys’. The ‘war against ISIS’ is a con, a total scam. It is a pretext for a war against the resistance axis: chiefly Syria, Hizbu’llah, Iran, and the Palestinian resistance. It is a pretext to kick the ‘Yinon plan’ – the plan to balkanise the Arab world to ensure “Israeli” hegemony – into high gear
The WMD lies of 2003 never went away; they simply got re-packaged for the liberal crowd in the post-Bush era.
Nasrallah: “America is the mother of terrorism”
Nasrallah speaks on July 25, 2014, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. (Photo: Al-Akhbar – Haitham Moussawi)
Al-Akhbar | September 23, 2014
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Tuesday said his group could never be a part of an anti-ISIS coalition led by “the source” of all terrorism in the world, the United States.
The international coalition, which began illegal airstrikes in Syria for the first time Tuesday, was created to safeguard the interests of the United States, not to fight terrorism as it claims, Nasrallah said in a televised speech.
“In our opinion, America is the mother of terrorism, the source of terrorism. If there is terrorism anywhere in the world, look at America,” the secretary-general said.
“America provides complete support for the terrorism of the Zionist state. It supports Israel militarily, financially, legally, and even provides it veto in the United Nations Security Council.”
Nasrallah continued: “He who dropped the atomic bomb on the people of Japan, and who killed [relentlessly] in Vietnam and elsewhere, and who stood by [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu in the 50 day war on Gaza … is not qualified ethically or morally to present itself as a leader of a coalition to fight terrorism.”
The comments come as the United States and allied Arab dictatorships began launching unauthorized airstrikes against jihadi targets in Syria, drawing rebukes from Damascus’s allies Iran and Russia.
Nasrallah brushed off criticism that his opposition to the coalition translated into support for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), noting that he has repeatedly denounced the extremists and called for their elimination.
The reality that many of those included in the anti-ISIS coalition have been financing the jihadi militants they are currently fighting in Iraq and Syria forces people of the region to question the motives of their actions, he added, referring to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Lebanon is one of 10 Arab countries that has pledged support to the coalition, a membership that Nasrallah said he opposed.
“Never did [US President Barack Obama] say we are coming to defend minorities or Muslims or Christians …,” Nasrallah said.
“So we will not fight in a coalition that serves US interests and not the interests of the people of the region.”
In Nasrallah’s last speech on August 15, he noted that the United States only decided to get involved in the fight against ISIS when the jihadis approached Iraq’s Kurdish region, which is strategically important to the West. … Full article
Syria slams Israel support for ISIL
Press TV – September 23, 2014
Syria has once again slammed the Israeli regime’s support for the Takfiri ISIL militants operating inside the Arab country.
A Syrian military official, whose name was not mentioned in the reports, made the comments on Tuesday after Tel Aviv said earlier in the day that it had shot down a Syrian warplane as it attempted to fly over the ceasefire line into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
The official confirmed the shooting down and underlined that the move was based on Tel Aviv’s policy of supporting ISIL Takfiris.
The aircraft was apparently a MiG-21 fighter jet which was downed by a surface-to-air Patriot missile, the Army radio said, adding that the wreckage landed on the Syrian side of the plateau.
However, an unnamed Israeli military official identified the downed aircraft as a Sukhoi Su-24 Russian fighter plane.
The development comes amid heavy clashes on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. The Syrian government has been hitting back at the foreign-backed militants there with frequent airstrikes.
Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011.
According to reports, the Western powers and their regional allies — especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — are supporting the Takfiris fighting against the Syrian government.
Golan Heights have been under the Israeli occupation since the 1960s. The Tel Aviv regime captured 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles) of the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War of 1967 and annexed the region in 1981.
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From the Archives
The Forgotten Terrorist Pretext of the Vietnam War
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | February 16, 2023
Since 9/11, terrorism has become the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to pieces, invoking terrorism provides all the cover needed for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check to fight terrorism should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.
Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Anti-terrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War II. … continue
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