The Syria Thread 2011 - Present

[Harvey]

[seemslikeadream]

Assad’s Death Warrant
By Mike Whitney

“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.”

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria, Politico

September 15, 2016 "Information Clearing House" - "Counterpunch" - The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.

The main driver of the conflict is the country that’s toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2. (See: Bill Blum here.) We’re talking about the United States of course.

Washington is the hands-down regime change champion, no one else even comes close. That being the case, one might assume that the American people would notice the pattern of intervention, see through the propaganda and assign blame accordingly. But that never seems to happen and it probably won’t happen here either. No matter how compelling the evidence may be, the brainwashed American people always believe their government is doing the right thing.

But the United States is not doing the right thing in Syria. Arming, training and funding Islamic extremists — that have killed half a million people, displaced 7 million more and turned the country into an uninhabitable wastelands –is not the right thing. It is the wrong thing, the immoral thing. And the US is involved in this conflict for all the wrong reasons, the foremost of which is gas. The US wants to install a puppet regime in Damascus so it can secure pipeline corridors in the East, oversee the transport of vital energy reserves from Qatar to the EU, and make sure that those reserves continue to be denominated in US Dollars that are recycled into US Treasuries and US financial assets. This is the basic recipe for maintaining US dominance in the Middle East and for extending America’s imperial grip on global power into the future.

The war in Syria did not begin when the government of Bashar al Assad cracked down on protestors in the spring of 2011. That version of events is obfuscating hogwash. The war began in 2000, when Assad rejected a Qatari plan to transport gas from Qatar to the EU via Syria. As Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains in his excellent article “Syria: Another pipeline War”:

“The $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey….would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey… The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. ….

In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally….

Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Mid-East and the world…”

Naturally, the Saudis, Qataris, Turks and Americans were furious at Assad, but what could they do? How could they prevent him from choosing his own business partners and using his own sovereign territory to transport gas to market?

What they could do is what any good Mafia Don would do; break a few legs and steal whatever he wanted. In this particular situation, Washington and its scheming allies decided to launch a clandestine proxy-war against Damascus, kill or depose Assad, and make damn sure the western oil giants nabbed the future pipeline contracts and controlled the flow of energy to Europe. That was the plan at least. Here’s more from Kennedy:

“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.

Repeat: “the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline”, he signed his own death warrant. That single act was the catalyst for the US aggression that transformed a bustling, five thousand-year old civilization into a desolate Falluja-like moonscape overflowing with homicidal fanatics that were recruited, groomed and deployed by the various allied intelligence agencies.

But what’s particularly interesting about this story is that the US attempted a nearly-identical plan 60 years earlier during the Eisenhower administration. Here’s another clip from the Kennedy piece:

“During the 1950′s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers … mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism — which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism….

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation…. Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. (so)… the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime…..

(CIA agent Rocky) Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime….

But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government….(Then) Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason.” (Politico)

See how history is repeating itself? It’s like the CIA was too lazy to even write a new script, they just dusted off the old one and hired new actors.

Fortunately, Assad –with the help of Iran, Hezbollah and the Russian Airforce– has fended off the effort to oust him and install a US-stooge. This should not be taken as a ringing endorsement of Assad as a leader, but of the principal that global security depends on basic protections of national sovereignty, and that the cornerstone of international law has to be a rejection of unprovoked aggression whether the hostilities are executed by one’s own military or by armed proxies that are used to achieve the same strategic objectives while invoking plausible deniability. The fact is, there is no difference between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Obama’s invasion of Syria. The moral, ethical and legal issues are the same, the only difference is that Obama has been more successful in confusing the American people about what is really going on.

And what’s going on is regime change: “Assad must go”. That’s been the administration’s mantra from the get go. Obama and Co are trying to overthrow a democratically-elected secular regime that refuses to bow to Washington’s demands to provide access to pipeline corridors that will further strengthen US dominance in the region. That’s what’s really going on behind the ISIS distraction and the “Assad is a brutal dictator” distraction and the “war-weary civilians in Aleppo” distraction. Washington doesn’t care about any of those things. What Washington cares about is oil, power and money. How can anyone be confused about that by now? Kennedy summed it up like this:

“We must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible.”

That says it all, don’t you think?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e45472.htm

[Nordic]

Really, nobody has yet entered anything in this thread how the US just butchered 80 Syrian soldiers and wounded 100 more providing air support for ISIS?

This is a big fucking deal. ..

SLaD posted about the incident right above your complaint, son:

"Syria, Russia: Coalition airstrike kills regime forces"

and you're right, this is a big deal, and Samantha Power is a (fill-in) .

~~~

MoA

September 17, 2016
U.S., Israel Launch Airstrikes On Syrian Government Forces - Directly Supporting ISIS And Al-Qaeda

Oh thanks for pointing that out, son.

I think I saw the top headline in her post and missed the 2nd. My apologies for complaining.

So now we know that it was an hour-long attack with planes from the UK, Australia, Denmark, and the good old US.

Mistake my ass.

[American Dream]

September 19, 2015

Baathist truthers

In the course of responding to the amen corner for the past couple of weeks over the Syrian refugee crisis, it dawned on me that it is not only an ethical lapse that we are dealing with but a theoretical one as well. Largely as a function of its narrow focus on US foreign policy and the sort of revelations we associate with Seymour Hersh type investigative reporting, Wikileaks, etc., there is zero interest in how Marxism can relate to events taking place within Syria. The country becomes a kind of black box where reductionism is taken to such an extreme degree that everything is bracketed out except what the CIA or other Western imperialist agencies are up to. Tunnel vision is perfectly suited to Baathist state terrorism.

When the protests erupted in Syria in 2011, I tried to get as much information as possible about the social and economic conditions that spurred people into action. Although I disagreed with Jadaliyya’s Bassam Haddad on some questions, I found his analysis of the agrarian crisis most useful, especially “The Syrian Regime’s Business Backbone” that appeared in the Spring 2012 Middle East Report. It was a reminder that the Baathist state was socialist in name only:

By the late 1990s, the business community that the Asads had created in their own image had transformed Syria from a semi-socialist state into a crony capitalist state par excellence. The economic liberalization that started in 1991 had redounded heavily to the benefit of tycoons who had ties to the state or those who partnered with state officials. The private sector outgrew the public sector, but the most affluent members of the private sector were state officials, politicians and their relatives. The economic growth registered in the mid-1990s was mostly a short-lived bump in consumption, as evidenced by the slump at the end of the century. Growth rates that had been 5-7 percent fell to 1-2 percent from 1997 to 2000 and beyond.

But within the first month of the protests, others were searching for a CIA connection since Syria was perceived as an ally of Russia, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran—four countries that to varying degrees represented an “anti-imperialist” pole of attraction. When I kept urging one old friend to look at websites that took the side of the anti-Assad revolt, he told me that he did not have time for that. Meanwhile, he was obviously keeping track of what Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk and Tariq Ali were writing with no problem. In essence, what you had was a total refusal to examine all sides of a political question because “our obligations were to oppose imperialism”. Basically it was the same kind of intellectual laziness and lack of backbone that allowed most of the left to defend the Moscow Trials in the late 1930s.

As the years and bloodletting wore on, a “truther” mentality set in that was not that different from the “911” type. “False flags” were constantly being referred to as if the USA was planning to invade Syria and impose a sectarian Sunni state in the same way that George W. Bush imposed a sectarian Shiite state in Iraq. Blaming Assad for the Sarin gas attack in East Ghouta was like the WMD propaganda campaign in 2002. Or like 911 since Dubya supposedly needed that as a casus belli.

Even today, you have warnings about “regime change” in places like WSWS.org no matter what Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly I. Churkin stated: “This is something we share now with the U.S. Government: They don’t want the Assad Government to fail. They want to fight ISIL in a way that won’t harm the Syrian government.”

Instead of examining class relations, the left became amateur sleuths anxious to prove once and for all that the USA has been using Syrian rebels as puppets to bring down the Assad dictatorship. Influenced by the musings of ex-CIA agents such as Ray McGovern, there was a search for incriminating evidence that would allow the scales to fall from the public’s eyes and rouse it to pressure politicians to end the “war on Syria”. If only they knew. The dedication to this cause is almost as impressive as what you get from those arguing that burning jet fuel was incapable of bringing down the WTC.

Just as is the case with 911 truthers, the Baathist left shares links to the same articles that get repeated endlessly in places like Jacobin, Mint Press, DissidentVoice or Information Clearing House. I would venture to guess that the items reviewed below have been recycled hundreds of times already by the Baathist left and there is no sign that their shelf life will expire any time soon. And to what end? To justify the killing of countless more Syrians. And how is this possible? The answer: you have to objectify and dehumanize human beings, the function of a left gone mad. As a political response to mass murder, it is exactly the same as how most Israelis view the destruction of Gaza.

What all of these items below have in common is that they are based on some revelation of a top-secret or nearly top-secret memorandum or diplomatic initiative that proves once and for all that the USA was behind the “war on Syria”. Once they are exposed, they are picked up by a myriad of websites dedicated to the Baathist cause. In some ways, the websites that carry out this task are similar to the hired trolls who work in a basement in Moscow on Putin’s behalf. I am not sure whether doing this kind of work for pay is sleazier than doing it for free.

Continues at: https://louisproyect.org/2015/09/19/baathist-truthers/

[Rory]

Really, nobody has yet entered anything in this thread how the US just butchered 80 Syrian soldiers and wounded 100 more providing air support for ISIS?

This is a big fucking deal. ..

SLaD posted about the incident right above your complaint, son:

"Syria, Russia: Coalition airstrike kills regime forces"

and you're right, this is a big deal, and Samantha Power is a (fill-in) .

~~~

MoA

September 17, 2016
U.S., Israel Launch Airstrikes On Syrian Government Forces - Directly Supporting ISIS And Al-Qaeda

Oh thanks for pointing that out, son.

I think I saw the top headline in her post and missed the 2nd. My apologies for complaining.

So now we know that it was an hour-long attack with planes from the UK, Australia, Denmark, and the good old US.

Mistake my ass.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/09/us ... .html#more

Only the U.S. operates A-10 ground attack planes. Neither the U.K nor Australia own or operate F-16 fighters. While the Danish airforce deployed F-16s to the Middle East theater, those planes were send to only operated in Iraq, not in Syria:

Denmark will send seven F-16 fighter jets to help combat IS militants in Iraq, Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said on Friday.

"I am very pleased that there now is a broad coalition, including countries in the region who want to... contribute," she said at a press conference, adding that the Danish fighter jets would not join US planes in bombing targets in Syria.

Additionally the Syrian military said that the planes came from Erbil in the Kurdish ruled northern part of Iraq. No other nation but the U.S. is known to use the Erbil facilities for fighter flights.

They're not even trying to lie that convincingly

[Wombaticus Rex]

Anyone clear on why Aleppo is currently under heavy fire?

[The Consul]

"Ceasefire" is over. Who's shelling who in the nothing that is left will mostly be propogandized. As the old Arab proverb/riddle says, "Everyman in this Village is a Liar"

[Wombaticus Rex]

"Ceasefire" is over. Who's shelling who in the nothing that is left will mostly be propogandized. As the old Arab proverb/riddle says, "Everyman in this Village is a Liar"

Thank you.

I guess it makes sense that a "cease fire" would turn out to be a strategic break by the superior force.

[The Consul]

"The Rebels" seem to be the primary target, though different players have their own definitions of who that is & from every side it seems collateral damage is not a deciding issue. An unfolding horror worse than anything in Iraq being addressed by the world with the same sense of urgency.

[American Dream]

The uncontrolled demolition of the Truther brain



Over the past five years I have monitored various pro-Assad websites in order to keep track of the amen corner’s latest talking points. At various times I have read Global Research, World Socialist Website and Moon of Alabama towards that end but never simultaneously since that would overload my circulatory and nervous systems to dangerous levels.

About three months ago I began monitoring a new website after one of my FB friends, who disagrees with me on Syria but like so many people is quite good on other questions, posted a link to an article on something called Off-Guardian that is focused on exposing the Guardian newspaper. As you might expect, they serve up articles crossposted from RT.com and other media associated with the “axis of resistance”. Given the generally fact-free environment of Off-Guardian, I am surprised nobody has started something called Off-Off-Guardian.

This month I was mildly surprised to see that they were avid 9/11 Truthers, posting numerous articles about a vast conspiracy that helped the USA launch wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. I say mildly surprised since Off-Guardian relies on conspiratorial “false flag” mumbo-jumbo rather than any kind of class analysis. When I quoted Alexander Cockburn on Trutherism, who certainly would have agreed with them on the need to back Assad, they took great umbrage:

These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx via the small, mostly Trotskyist groupuscules. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse, peripatetic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly “rogue” agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11 “conspiracy”, or “inside job”, is the Summa of all this foolishness.

Continues at: https://louisproyect.org/2016/09/18/the ... her-brain/

[The Consul]

"Ceasefire" is over. Who's shelling who in the nothing that is left will mostly be propogandized. As the old Arab proverb/riddle says, "Everyman in this Village is a Liar"

Thank you.

I guess it makes sense that a "cease fire" would turn out to be a strategic break by the superior force.

The ceasefire apparently is designed like the renting of a video on Amazon. You have to renew it every 48 hours if you want to keep watching it.

[The Consul]

"Ceasefire" is over. Who's shelling who in the nothing that is left will mostly be propogandized. As the old Arab proverb/riddle says, "Everyman in this Village is a Liar"

Thank you.

I guess it makes sense that a "cease fire" would turn out to be a strategic break by the superior force.

The ceasefire it seems works like an Amazon video rental. You have 48 hours to renew or it's over. Not sure there is a superior force.

[American Dream]

Syria and my anti-fascism

I spent the 8 months last year living amongst Syrian refugees based in Turkey, hearing their stories, working side by side in various legal and illegal struggles, and trying to understand what this whole situation meant for my politics as an antifa and a peacebuilder. That time catalyzed and crystallized my understanding of the need for an essay on these topics.

When living 60 km from the Syrian border, on the Turkish side, I was exposed to constant stories of an unfathomable degree of violence. The war had a lot of spillover into our Turkish city, Gaziantep, which was a hotbed for Islamists, foreign intelligence agents, NGOs, Regime opposition, etc. There were several daylight assassinations and bombings right in my area primarily claimed by ISIS/Da3esh. (3) Members of my community were killed. There were streams of kidnappings of Westerners and non-Westerners alike in the border towns. One of my closest friends got emergency evacuated after he started receiving constant death threats from ISIS and other Islamic groups for his anti-ISIS activism and his Haram (against certain Islamic interpretations) marriage. This is not even mentioning the war against Kurds and the PKK by the Turkish government happening across the Southeast, but focused a bit farther east than we were. Nonetheless, Gaziantep was a Kurdish-majority city with a strong Turkish ethnic nationalist movement (also leftist-identified) that would loudly parade the streets at night terrifying civilians and making genocidal statements. One time, I looked out over Syria from the Kilis border mountains and heard the distant gunfire in Azaz. I wept uncontrollably for the next week, starting on the ride on the public bus back to Gaziantep. I didn’t stay to witness the nightly bombings even though a friend did. It felt too wrong.

The thing about war is that all of the worst sides of humanity come out to play. It’s not just the killing. It’s the rapes. It’s the torture and kidnapping. It’s the systematic disenfranchisement and forced migration. It’s the incomprehensible loss of trust. It’s the families and communities being torn apart. It’s not being able to bury, much less mourn, your dead because the violence is so constant. One of the strangest aspects is the way that life just goes on and people get used to horrible things and keep moving. Many of the younger generation of anitfas have not had to witness the level of violence that the older generation did on the front lines, even if the new generations carry in their hearts the stories of their parents and grandparents and have fought bravely and been injured in their own contexts. This is not to say that antifas across the world are not experiencing a rapid resurgence of far right violence against them, because of course there is; it’s just that, in most places it is not all-out warfare as it has been and still is in some areas such as the Middle East.

I fear I’ll be haunted by some of my darker memories of that time for the rest of my life (much of it was quite beautiful as well of course) even as my own experiences pale in comparison to those of my friends who lived amidst barrel bombs and the like. Being so exposed, even if largely indirectly, had contradictory effects on my politics around violence and confronting extremist right groups. On the one hand, it firmly implanted the understanding in my mind that the state will not protect us and that large military forces can spring from small pockets of fascist ideology quite rapidly, so, therefore, we must actively and constantly resist using the means available to us. On the other hand, it made me incredibly gun shy about violence and insurrectionary anarchisms because the complexities of war are such that no military force leaves without having done horrible things. Furthermore, I’ve seen how things can quickly accelerate and then become protracted to the point where most people aren’t even fighting for their ideals anymore but just to survive or to help their closest ones survive. Warfare is a constant state of disillusionment and tragedy that aggregates into complex-PTSD. The spirals become contracted as revenge begets revenge and trauma obscures potential pathways for even temporary cease-fires. Then everything gets hijacked by international power players who use the fighters and dead bodies as pawns in a geopolitical project. I think people in the antifa movement, at least in the U.S., don’t realize how all of this carnage can happen, even in the United States. My Syrian friends mostly never saw a war in Syria coming. It always made sense to them for other places like Egypt or Tunisia but they somehow felt like it would never happen to them, until, of course, it did.

More at: https://emmibe.wordpress.com/2016/09/16 ... i-fascism/

[American Dream]

The diverse will of the people of Syria is irrelevant to the majority of global actors actually in a position to determine their fate. It’s a hideous paradox. This is a failure not just of human ethics but also of strategy. The U.S./Iran/Russia/Saudi/Qatar etc. (global military-industrial complex) clusters of influence are pushing civilians into the line of fire and increasingly into the recruitment pool of violently hegemonic, anti-statist states such as Da3esh who recognize only one true people of Allah: ultra-conservative and unquestioning Salaafi’s and well-trained former (secular) Baathist fighters and military elites (Weiss & Hassan, 2015). Da3esh also does not acknowledge borders, such as those established by the Sykes-Picot treaty, as they were often drawn by colonial powers. This hatred of colonialism is all the more ironic placed beside the fact that IS is predominantly a non-Syrian occupying force, albeit one with a rhetoric of pan-Arabism and pan-Muslim ideology taking in the tradition and many of the practices of the fairly recent Ottoman empire. This whole situation is rife with contradictions and strange bedfellows.

https://emmibe.wordpress.com/2016/04/05 ... tionships/

[Nordic]

Syrian soldiers who survived the Deir eZorr massacre. Translation by Hanin Elias via Vanessa Beeley. - 'We first thought the aircraft are support to us after the first 2 shots, but we quickly found out that they are targeting our forces aggressively, while we were fighting IS terrorists. The aircraft used cluster bombs against us. - A day before the airstrikes, the drones were flying and scanning all the area - The US airstikes destroyed all our equipment and defense points. - IS fighters attacked us immediately after and during the US strikes. Some of them were laughing - US drones and helicopters opened fire from machine guns on our retreated forces - It for sure wasn't a mistake, they targeted us intentionally to help IS. - America is ISIS itself.'