John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MIKE WHITNEY IN THE UNZ REVIEW
"The one insurmountable obstacle to peace in Syria is the US occupation.”
Well, yes, but the very reason US troops are in Syria is to prevent Syria from achieving peace and normality.
And why is that? Because Israel does not want Syria to return to peace and normality, especially under its existing government, a government the majority of Syrians support and a government that has always protected minority religious rights in that diverse country but a government Israel has always hated.
Israel does not like independent-minded countries in its region, ones which do not toe the American policy line, something certainly true of Syria, and it likes them even less if they are fairly well run and strong.
The entire American effort in Syria has been an effort to repeat what was done in Iraq on Israel’s behalf, but without a big invasion by America's military, an event which had some unpleasant side-effects. The new effort was disguised as a civil war and used proxy forces, and it and was supported by several covert "helpers" - Saudi Arabia, Israel, Britain, France, and originally Turkey.
The Neocon Wars, including direct warfare and proxy efforts, have been an effort to pave over societies within hundreds of miles of Israel, a giant urban renewal project, if you will, at the cost of a good two million lives and the creation of tens of millions of desperate refugees. “The birth of a new Middle East,” as Condoleezza Rice fondly put it.
Israel had motives for gain in the Syrian proxy war, too. It wanted to cement its ownership of occupied Golan – an occupation that Syria’s President Assad has rightly never accepted and tirelessly speaks against - and it wanted yet another slice of Syrian territory it termed a “buffer” for Golan. Israel lost when the main part of the proxy war was lost to Syria and its ally Russia.
But Israel secretly pushed a plan for some form of Kurdish rump state to be created in the northeast, an oil-producing region, to weaken largely victorious Syria and make reconstruction harder without oil revenues. That is what the US has been supporting.
All the stuff recently about loving to steal oil is just silliness Trump uses to cover what he really is doing, which is doing what Israel wants him to do. Just like Lindsey Graham, many Washington politicians try to avoid sounding as though they are serving Israel’s interests as often as they are. Maybe if they spoke honestly more often, American public support for wars on behalf of Israel would melt away. American voters have no concept of the unholy price they’ve paid for this project.
That was never really a viable idea, a Kurd rump state, given the realities of Turkey and its view of armed Kurdish groups like the YPG near its borders.
Trump decided to withdraw after talks with Erdogan, thinking he had done enough for Israel that he wouldn’t hear from them on this, but he was wrong. When Trump said he was withdrawing troops, he heard about it, and quickly, especially from Israel’s loudest lobbyists in Congress, folks like Lindsey Graham, although they are careful to phrase their words (“Letting down brave allies like the Kurds!”) so they don’t sound as though they are what they are actually doing, special pleading for Israel.
ISIS today serves mainly as an excuse for the US to remain in certain Syrian locations (illegally, of course) under the positive-sounding phrase of "fighting terror," something they really aren’t doing at all. The US has never really fought terror in Syria, although here and there it has had fights with elements of its various ragtag proxy armies. That’s just how it is when you use collections of such cutthroats and thugs.
ISIS also has served as an excuse to bomb Syria at certain times and places. The US and Britain have served almost as an air force for ISIS by destroying Syrian infrastructure and at times directly attacking Syrian forces.
So, ISIS is and always has been an American policy tool, not a genuine enemy. And just so, too ,other groups like al Nusra (described as Syria’s al Qaeda) and the YPG Kurds in the northeast.
Note that ISIS or al Nusra has never attacked the targets you would naturally expect a jihadi terror group to attack - the fat, corrupt Saudi Princes and Israel. Never once.
ISIS has always attacked what Israel (and thereby, the US) dislikes – Syria and, at an earlier point, elements in Iraq.
After the murder of Gadhafi and the turning of once well-run Libya into a set of ruins by America and its allies, Hillary Clinton's State Department started a program of picking up some of the immense number of weapons left scattered around and picking up gangs of cutthroats and sending them covertly to Syria via Turkey.
That's what the Benghazi mess, Hillary was so afraid of addressing later, was part of. Things went wrong and some of the thugs they were dealing with found the best available target to be the American Ambassador working on the collection project.
We even know, at one point, Clinton shipped a wee bit of the dead Gadhafi’s Sarin nerve gas stocks to Syria (stuff he kept as a counter to Israel’s secret nuclear weapons) via Turkey. It was an effort to create a violation of Obama’s self-declared “red line” in Syria so the US could begin bombing the crap out of Syria, just the way it did Libya.
Putin’s remarkable statesmanship saved the day, of course giving Clinton one more reason later to regard Russia as her source of all evils.
Just an additional note, the names of the countries destroyed in the Neocon Wars were long ago on a list of seven countries that were to be toppled in the future. The list was seen by General Wesley Clark at the Pentagon not long after 9/11. It was part of a project under leading Neocon Paul Wolfowitz. Syria was on the list, as was Iran.
