AMERICA’S RIDICULOUS POSITION ON SYRIA
John Chuckman
I read that an American Senator, Bob Menendez, wanted “to
vomit” when he was supplied with a copy of Vladimir Putin’s New York Times’
op-ed piece about Syria.
Well, I’m sure it wasn’t just a matter of Sen. Menendez’s
delicate stomach: there have been many times in the past I wanted to vomit over
something in The New York Times.
It is, after all, an impossibly pretentious, often-dishonest
publication faithfully serving America’s military-industrial-intelligence
complex, one which never fails to support America’s countless wars, insurgencies,
dirty tricks, and coups - all this while publicly flattering itself as a
rigorous source of journalism and even a newspaper “of record.” Many regard The Times as simply the most worn-out
key of that thunderous public-relations instrument an ex-Agency official once called
his “mighty Wurlitzer.” Only in the antediluvian political atmosphere of America
could The Times manage to have
something of a reputation for being “liberal.”
Mr. Menendez, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, holds a powerful position, one he has used in lockstep with
President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry to promote illegal war. Like them
he blubbers about rights and democracy and ethics while planning death and
destruction to people who have done nothing against the United States except
disagreeing with it and being hated by that greatest single outside determinant
of American foreign policy, Israel.
Sen. Menendez’s personal anecdote actually provides a perfect
miniature replica of the entire operation of America’s foreign affairs.
American officials never fail to invoke words about democracy or human rights
when addressing their next piece of dirty work or effort to pressure another
people into doing what America wants.
So naturally the Senator might be a bit upset over Putin’s
upstaging the top officials of the United States and proving himself the
superior statesman and rational politician in every detail.
First, every honest, well-read person, not trying to promote
American special interests, knows there is no proof that Assad used chemical
weapons. Absolutely none. Even as I write, an Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports that
the UN inspection team could find no evidence of chemical weapons used in the
place cited by Syria’s rebel army.
A video which made the rounds among American allies and
which purported to show the attack has been declared a fake by the UN. Russia’s
secret services also declared it a fake.
The only other bit of “evidence” worth mentioning is a supposed
recording of Syrian officials provided to American officials by Mossad. Yes,
that’s Mossad, the very people who pride themselves on deception and who have a
long track record of expertly using it, even in several cases successfully
against the United States.
You do not kill thousands of people and destroy a country’s
infrastructure citing rubbish like that.
Again, as I write this, a former British Ambassador, Craig
John Murray, states that the United States has been deceived by Mossad with its
purported recording and that Britain’s super-sensitive listening post in Cyprus,
vastly superior to Israel’s listening assets, had picked up no such
information.
Germany, based on its secret service operations, also has
publicly stated that Assad did not use chemical weapons.
And, of course, after all America’s huffing and blowing and
threatening in recent months, Assad and his senior associates would have to
have been genuinely mad to use them, but there is no sign of madness. Assad
remains a calm and thoughtful person whose voice is largely silenced in the
West by his having been declared arbitrarily not an acceptable head of state.
Second, there is significant proof that ugly elements of the
rebellion – the substantial al Qaeda-like components who hate Assad for his
tolerance towards all religions in Syria - did indeed use limited amounts on
more than one occasion, hoping, undoubtedly to create a provocation for
American entry. The UN has said so and so have other agencies.
We have incidents, reported reliably, of rebel elements
receiving small canisters of chemical weapons, likely from Saudi agents working
on behalf of American policy. We also have an incident of a canister caught by
authorities moving across the Turkish border in the hands of rebel fighters,
the Turkish border having been used extensively since the beginning of the
rebellion as a way to inject weapons and lunatic fighters into Syria and as a
refuge for rebels when corned by Syria’s army. Even the American military
confirms this last event.
Third, we absolutely know that Israel has a stockpile of
this horrible stuff, Sarin, but not a word is said about it. This stockpile has
been confirmed by CIA sources recently. Even before CIA sources, we knew of
Israel’s chemical weapons from the 1992 crash of an El Al cargo plane in
Amsterdam, a plane whose illegal cargo proved to be precursor chemicals for
such weapons.
Now, if you were regarded as an enemy by Israel, the most
ruthless country in the Mideast when simply measured by the number of times it
has attacked its neighbors, wouldn’t you want weapons to counteract theirs?
And, of course, to counteract not just Israel’s chemical weapons but secret
nuclear ones? So it is hardly a terrible thing for Assad’s military to posses
them.
Perhaps most importantly, the United States is in no
position to draw lines or make public judgments about the behavior of anyone
with regard to such weapons.
It stands as likely the greatest user of various chemical
weapons over the last four or five decades. Napalm and Agent Orange were used
on a colossal scale in Vietnam, a true holocaust in which the United States
killed about three million people. The residue from millions of pounds of Agent
Orange still causes horribly mangled babies to be born in Vietnam, and the
United States has never lifted a finger to clean the mess or treat its victims.
In the terrible Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, the United States
supplied Iraq – the clear aggressor in the war – with the materials for
chemical weapons which eventually killed many thousands of Iranian soldiers.
In the illegal invasion of Iraq – where the United States
killed upwards of half a million people and created millions of refugees – it
employed white phosphorus (a good substitute for napalm), flame-throwers,
depleted-uranium (cancer-inducing) ammunition, and hideous child-crippling cluster
bombs. The children of Iraq today suffer a plague of cancer caused by breathing
tons of vaporized depleted-uranium the United States dumped there.
In the unnecessary invasion of Afghanistan, the United States
used massive carpet bombing to support the thugs of the Northern Alliance, who
happened to be old enemies of the Taleban, though often being equally horrible
in behavior. This was one of the first instances of the strategy America
employed in Libya and wants to employ in Syria: local rebels on the ground,
supplied with money and intelligence and weapons, are supported by high-tech
hell from the air, yielding the needed results with minimum American
casualties.
Thousands of Taleban prisoners of war were “disappeared’ by
members of the Northern Alliance by sealing them in trucks, driving them out to
the desert to suffocate, and then dumping their bodies in mass graves – all
this while American soldiers looked on and picked their noses.
Nothing which has happened in recent years so horrifyingly
recalls the work of Hitler’s Einsatzkommandos using mobile killing-trucks
before the death camps were built, yet there can be no question that senior
American commanders and the White House were aware of these events.
And of course, the only nation on earth ever to actually use
atomic weapons – twice, and both times on civilian, non-military targets – is
the United States, a country which also seriously planned to use them in Cold
War pre-emptive strikes against Russia and China and later in Vietnam.
The voice of the United States today is shrill with
hypocrisy and dishonesty and self-interest when it is heard condemning Syria,
or anyone else, for using unacceptable weapons. Where was that voice when its
ally, Israel, committed atrocities, as it did in Lebanon and in Gaza and on the
high seas against unarmed humanitarians or when it steals the land of
defenceless occupied people? Indeed, the white phosphorus and cluster bombs
Israel used in some of Israel’s attacks were supplied by the United States, as
were the planes and artillery used to deliver them.
And this brings us to the real cause of the rebellion in
Syria. Israel would like Assad gone and Syria reduced to a broken state the way
Iraq was reduced. It does not want to do this directly because Syria is a serious
military opponent and not easy prey, and Israel’s doing so would arouse new
waves of anger in the Mideast and new difficulties for the United States.
So the United States has had a long-term program of creating
a kind of cordon sanitaire around Israel, breaking all of its potential
opponents for many hundreds of miles around, but doing so always under
contrived circumstances of supporting peoples’ revolts or removing dictators. It
surreptitiously supplies large amounts of money and useful intelligence to the
genuinely disaffected peoples of various states, encouraging them to revolt,
indicating air and other support once things are underway. This is reminiscent
of the dirty work of Henry Kissinger carried out with Iraq’s Kurdish population
in 1975, promising them anything if they revolted but failing to deliver and
leaving them to face a massive slaughter by Saddam Hussein’s troops.
Today’s is a complex black operation using a bizarre
collection of intermediaries and helpers. Events in Benghazi, Libya, never
explained in the United States, were certainly one little corner of this with
the CIA operating there to collect weapons and jihadist types for secret entry
into Syria through Turkey.
Saudi Arabia too plays a large role, surprising as that may
seem to some given that Israel is a major beneficiary. Saudi Arabia’s ruling
family plays the anti-Israel card just enough to keep its own fundamentalist
Wahhabi population from revolting. But in truth, the wealthy Saudi elites have
always had more in common with American and Israeli elites than with popular
leaders in the Mideast.
Those Saudi elites were rendered extremely vulnerable to
American pressures during 9/11. George Bush, always a good friend and
beneficiary of Saudi largess, secretly rounded up a number of them who were in
the United States (at places like Las Vegas casinos) and shipped them back to Saudi
Arabia for their safety. As it proved, the greatest number of perpetrators of
9/11 were Saudi extremists, and it was discovered, though not publicly
announced, that bin Laden’s movement regularly received bribes from the royal
family to keep his operations out of Saudi Arabia. Thus the royal family
financed bin Laden. All this made the Saudis extremely nervous and willing to
be of more conspicuous future assistance in the Mideast.
And so they are, supplying money and weapons through various
routes to the rebels. There is also a report of the Saudis releasing more than
twelve hundred violent prisoners in return for their training and going to
Syria to fight as jihadist volunteers.
American officials know all these things while they stand
and blubber about democratic rebels and “red lines” and other fairy stories.
They want to bomb Syria because the recent success of Assad’s army has begun to
endanger the huge effort to have him overthrown. Just as their planes and
missiles tipped the scales in Libya with a phony zero-fly zone, they want to
repeat that success in Syria.
Now, Putin appears to have upset the plan with admirable
statesmanship, and Sen. Menendez will just have to console himself with
Pepto-Bismol.
But then the Russians have always been great chess players.
