Quote:Blocking a Realist' Strategy on the Mideast

September 19, 2014

Exclusive: Official Washington's influential neocons appear back in the driver's seat steering U.S. policy in the Middle East toward a wider conflict in Syria and away from a "realist" alternative that sought a Putin-Obama collaboration to resolve the region's crises more peacefully, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Just last month President Barack Obama dismissed the idea of arming "moderate" rebels in Syria as a "fantasy" that was "never in the cards" as a workable strategy, but now this scheme has been dealt back into the middle of the U.S. war against the Islamic State, winning approval from solid majorities in Congress.
Perhaps the only explanation for this apparent folly is that this implausible notion retains overwhelming support among Washington's political/pundit class because it creates the appearance of being "tough" and "doing something" allowing politicians to pretend to address a problem even if the approach might make matters much worse.

President Barack Obama talks with President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker following a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office, Sept. 18, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

There's also the other finicky little problem that the action of arming and training rebels and unleashing them against a sovereign state is an act of aggression (if not terrorism depending on what they do), similar to what U.S. officials have piously condemned the Russians of doing in Ukraine.
But this hypocrisy is never acknowledged either by U.S. policymakers or the mainstream U.S. press, which has gone into Cold War hysterics over Moscow's alleged support for embattled ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine on Russia's border while demanding that Obama expand support for Syrian rebels halfway around the world, even though many of those "moderates" have allied themselves with al-Qaeda terrorists.
In a sense, this hypocrisy is nothing new. During much of Syria's three-year civil war, the Obama administration has been covertly supporting the rebels with light weapons and military training while other U.S. allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf states, have funneled huge sums of money to the cause of overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad's relatively secular government. Assad has been a longtime "regime change" target of American neoconservatives and Israel.
Though it's been known for quite awhile that the Syrian civil war had degenerated into a sectarian conflict with mostly Sunni rebels battling the Alawites, Shiites, Christians and other minorities who form the base of support for Assad, the fiction has been maintained in Washington that a viable and secular "moderate opposition" to Assad still exists.
The reality on the ground says otherwise. For instance, in Friday's New York Times, an article by correspondent Ben Hubbard described the supposed Syrian "moderates" who are receiving CIA support as "a beleaguered lot, far from becoming a force that can take on the fanatical and seasoned fighters of the Islamic State."
But the situation is arguably worse than just the weakness of these "moderates." According to Hubbard's reporting, some of these U.S.-backed fighters "acknowledge that battlefield necessity had put them in the trenches with the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, an issue of obvious concern for the United States. …
"Lt. Col. Fares al-Bayyoush, the former aviation engineer who now heads the Fursan al-Haq Brigade, acknowledged that his men had fought alongside the Nusra Front because they needed all the help they could get.
"Sometimes, he said, that help comes in forms only a jihadi group can provide. He cited the rebel takeover of the northern town of Khan Sheikhoun, saying that the rebels were unable to take out one government position until the Nusra Front sent a suicide bomber to blow it up. In another town nearby, Nusra sent four bombers, including an American citizen.
"We encourage them actually,' Mr. Bayyoush said with a laugh. And if they need vehicles, we provide them'."
[B]An Al-Qaeda Victory?[/B]
[B]The "moderate" rebels also don't share President Obama's priority of carrying the fight to the Islamic State militants, reported Hubbard, "ousting Mr. Assad remains their primary goal."[/B]
[B]This dilemma of the mixed allegiances of the "moderates" has been apparent for at least the past year. Last September, many of the previously hailed Syrian "moderate" rebels unveiled themselves to be Islamists who repudiated the U.S.-backed political opposition and allied themselves with al-Qaeda's al-Nusra Front. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda."][/B]
[B]In other words, the just-approved congressional action opening the floodgates to hundreds of millions of dollars more in military aid to Syrian "moderates" could actually contribute to al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate gaining control of Syria, which could create a far greater threat to U.S. national security than the consolidation of the Islamic State inside territory of Syria and Iraq.[/B]
[B]While the Islamic State brandishes its brutality as a gruesome tactic for driving Western interests out of the Middle East, it has shown no particular interest in taking its battle into the West. By contrast, al-Qaeda follows a conscious strategy of inflicting terrorist attacks on the West as part of a long-term plan to wreck the economies of the United States and Europe.[/B]
[B]Thus, Obama's hastily approved strategy for investing more in Syrian "moderates" if it allows a continued spillover of U.S. military equipment to al-Nusra could increase the chances of creating a base for international terrorism in Damascus at the heart of the Middle East. That would surely prompt demands for a reintroduction of U.S. ground troops into the region.[/B]
[B]There are also obvious alternatives to following such a self-destructive course, although they would require Obama and much of Official Washington to climb down from their collective high horses and deal with such demonized leaders as Syria's Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin, not to mention Iran.[/B]
[B]A "realist" strategy would seek out a realistic political solution to the Syrian conflict, which would mean accepting the continuation of Assad's rule, at least for the near term, as part of a coalition government that would offer stronger Sunni representation. This unity government could then focus on eliminating remaining pockets of al-Qaeda and Islamic State resistance before holding new elections across as much of the country as possible.[/B]
[B]As part of this strategy to weaken these Islamic extremists, the United States and the European Union would have to crack down on the militants' funding sources in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, as touchy as that can be with the Saudis holding such influence over the U.S. economy. But Obama could start the process of facing down Saudi blackmail by declassifying the secret section of the 9/11 Report which reportedly describes Saudi financing of al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks.[/B]
[B]I'm told that U.S. intelligence now has a clear picture of which Saudi princes are providing money to Islamist terrorists. So, instead of simply sending drones and warplanes after youthful jihadist warriors, the Obama administration might find it more useful to shut down these funders, perhaps nominating these princes as candidates for the U.S. "capture or kill list."[/B]
[B][B]Getting Russian Help[/B][/B]
[B][B]To get Assad fully onboard for the necessary concessions to his Sunni opponents, the Russians could prove extremely valuable. According to a source briefed on recent developments, Russian intelligence already has served as a go-between for U.S. intelligence to secure Assad's acceptance of Obama's plan to send warplanes into parts of Syrian territory to attack Islamic State targets.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The Russians also proved helpful a year ago in getting Assad to surrender his chemical weapons arsenal to defuse a U.S. threat to begin bombing Assad's military in retaliation for a Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. Although Assad denied involvement and subsequent evidence pointed more toward a provocation by rebel extremists Putin's intervention gave Obama a major foreign policy success without a U.S. military strike.[/B][/B]
[B][B]That intervention, however, infuriated Syrian rebels who had planned to time a military offensive with the U.S. bombing campaign, hoping to topple Assad's government and take power in Damascus. America's influential neoconservatives and their "liberal interventionist" allies along with Israeli officials were also livid, all eager for another U.S.-backed "regime change" in the Middle East.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Putin thus made himself an inviting neocon target. By the end of last September, American neocons were taking aim at Ukraine as a key vulnerability for Putin. A leading neocon, Carl Gershman, president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, took to the op-ed pages of the neocon Washington Post to identify Ukraine as "the biggest prize" and explain how its targeting could undermine Putin's political standing inside Russia.[/B][/B]
[B][B]"Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents," Gershman wrote. "Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." At the time, Gershman's NED was funding scores of political and media projects inside Ukraine.[/B][/B]
[B][B]What followed in Ukraine had all the earmarks of a U.S. destabilization campaign against Putin's ally, the elected President Viktor Yanukovych. Behind the scenes was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, a neocon holdover who had been an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and who is married to prominent neocon Robert Kagan. Nuland was caught in an intercepted phone conversation with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt handpicking the leaders of the new regime, which took power after Yanukovych was overthrown in a Feb. 22 coup.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Then, with U.S. officialdom and the mainstream U.S. press engaging in an orgy of Cold War-style propaganda, Putin was demonized as a new Hitler expanding territory by force. Anyone who knew the facts recognized that Putin had actually been trying to maintain the status quo, i.e., sustain the Yanukovych government until the next election, and it was the West that had thrown the first punch. But Washington's new "group think" was that Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis so he could reclaim lost territory of the Russian empire.[/B][/B]
[B][B]President Obama seemed caught off-guard by the Ukraine crisis, but was soon swept up in the West's Putin/Russia bashing. He joined in the hysteria despite the damage that the Ukraine confrontation was inflicting on Obama's own hopes of working with Putin to resolve other Middle East problems.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Thus, the initial victory went to the neocons who had astutely recognized that the emerging Putin-Obama collaboration represented a serious threat to their continued plans for "regime change" across the Middle East. Not only had Putin helped Obama head off the military strike on Syria, but Putin assisted in getting Iran to agree to limits on its nuclear program.[/B][/B]
[B][B]That meant the neocon desire for more "shock and awe" bombing in Syria and Iran had to be further postponed. The Putin-Obama cooperation might have presented an even greater threat to neocon plans if the two leaders could have teamed up to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finally reach a reasonable agreement with the Palestinians.[/B][/B]
[B][B]At the center of the neocons' strategy at least since the mid-1990s has been the idea that "regime change" in Middle East governments hostile to Israel would eventually starve Israel's close-in enemies, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah and Palestine's Hamas, of support and free Israel's hand to do what it wanted with the Palestinians. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War."][/B][/B]
[B][B]The Putin-Obama collaboration if allowed to mature could have derailed that core neocon strategy and denied Israel the unilateral power to decide the Palestinians' fate. But the Ukraine crisis and now the plan to pour a half-billion dollars into the Syrian rebels fighting Assad have put the neocon strategy back on track.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The next question is whether Obama and whatever "realists" remain in Official Washington have the will and the determination to reclaim control of the Middle East policy train and take it in a different direction.[/B][/B]
[B][B][B]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). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America's Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.[/B][/B][/B]

Magda Hassan Wrote:"I acknowledge that I have made a mistake in the past as I imagined that the western and Arab countries as well as Turkey wanted to help Syria and its people,"

Quote: As the foreign-backed insurgency in Syria continues without an end in sight, the US government has boosted its political and military support to T
akfiri extremists.

UN reveals Israeli links with Syrian rebels

Reports by UN observers in the Golan submitted to 15 members of Security Council detail regular contact between IDF officers and armed Syrian opposition figures at the border.

Quote:What is Hezbollah's game in Syria? The view from Jerusalem and Beirut



An Israeli air strike on the Golan Heights has killed six members of the Lebanon-based militant group. So has Jerusalem rightly identified a new threat to its security or is it all about the upcoming Knesset election? Our writers investigate

FERNANDE VAN TETS , BEN LYNFIELD

Monday 19 January 2015

Beirut View, by Fernande van Tets
Thousands of people joined the funeral procession for 25-year-old Hezbollah operative Jihad Moughniyah on Monday as his coffin, draped in the party's flag, was carried through the southern suburbs of Beirut. Members of the crowd sang the praises of the operative, whom they consider to have died as a martyr in the Israel helicopter strike on Sunday afternoon, and proclaimed their support for Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Moughniyah, the son of Imad Moughniyah, the former most senior Hezbollah operative killed in Damascus in 2008, presumably by Israel, was one of six Hezbollah operatives killed when two missiles hit a convoy in the Amal Farms in Quneitra on the Syrian border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, along with a senior commander named Mohammed Issa. It is still not yet known what the operatives were doing in the region, or why Israel hit when it did. Hezbollah has said it was carrying out an inspection in the Golan. Anonymous Israeli intelligence sources said the strike was carried out to foil a major attack on the country.
The strike came days after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a three hour interview to Al Mayadeen, an Arab television network, in which he threatened to retaliate against Israel for strikes carried out in Syria, where the group is fighting alongside its ally, President Bashar al-Assad.
"We consider that any strike against Syria is a strike against the whole of the resistance axis, not just against Syria," he said. "The axis is capable of responding. This can happen any time." He also said that the group has been keeping Iranian Fateh-110 rockets which have a range of 125 miles in its arsenal since 2006, and that the group could reach Galilee.

The question is not whether Hezbollah will respond, but how and when, said Muhammed al-Husseini, a Shia cleric. "No one is doubting that the response is coming," he said. Nasrallah has yet to make an official response, although the party's media outlet, Al-Manar, said Israel was "playing with fire".
On Monday night, its website displayed a picture of Nasrallah beside the phrase "prepare your bomb shelters" in Hebrew. Lebanese politicians expressed concern about the country being dragged into another war with Israel, and it is not clear that Hezbollah would seek a reprisal of the 2006 summer war with Israel, which caused significant destruction and left more than a thousand Lebanese dead. The group is also stretched thin by its engagement in Syria, where it has been fighting the Syrian opposition and, lately, Islamic militants.
"It's not in anyone's interest for a front to be opened [with Israel] and for Lebanon to enter a war," Telecoms Minister, Boutros Harb, said. Hezbollah constituents had no such concerns, however. "I feel the opposite of fear for a repeat of 2006," said Siham Hamad, 55, as he joined the funeral procession yesterday. "Before, we weren't ready for the fight, but now we are."
Jerusalem View, by Ben Lynfield

Israel's attention was riveted on its northern frontier on Monday as analysts predicted that both Hezbollah and Iran would feel compelled to respond to a helicopter strike inside Syrian territory that killed Hezbollah commanders and a senior Iranian general.
While the Israeli government and army have declined to confirm or deny responsibility for the strike, the former deputy commander of Israel's northern front, Maj-Gen Eyal Ben-Reuven, suggested that Israel had acted to thwart planned attacks.
"What we saw yesterday was a kind of reconnaisanse containing high-level people from Hezbollah and Iran, including the Iranian general. This tells us something about what they were planning. If Israel has intelligence that an operation is on the way, then it has all the legitimacy to prevent it.''
Another reserve general, Yoav Gallant, suggested that the timing of the attack was linked to the upcoming Israeli election. "From incidents in the past you can learn that there is sometimes timing that is not unrelated to the topic of elections," he said. Mr Gallant, a candidate for the Kulanu party that is competing for votes with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, recanted yesterday after heavy criticism from Likud and its Labour challenger Isaac Herzog. But leading Israeli military commentator Amos Harel, who writes for Haaretz, raised the same point during a radio interview. "There are question marks," said Mr Harel.
Iran's revolutionary guards identified the general as Mohammed Allahdadi, who was serving as an adviser to the Syrian army. Analysts said the expected retaliation from Hezbollah could be imminent or deferred and could take the form of rocket attacks against Israel, ambushes along the Lebanese or Syrian borders or an attack on an Israeli or Jewish targets abroad.
Iranian general Mohammed Allahdadi was also killed
"The fact that Iran announced that the General was killed creates some kind of commitment on their part to respond and their preferred option for doing this is through Hezbollah," said Ephraim Kam of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. "Hezbollah firing rockets is an option. We will have to respond unless it's to vacant places. There could be a major escalation."
In Kiryat Shemona, near the Lebanese border, there were feelings of uneasiness. "There is concern," said municipality spokesman Doron Shnaper. "We know how things can develop. There is no doubt that there is tension but that is how you feel after events across the border. We count on the government and army."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not mention Lebanon or Syria, or the disputed Golan Heights mostly seized from Syria in 1967 yesterday although he convened a meeting of his security cabinet for today to discuss the tensions. He told reporters. "Israel is adamant that it will have the right to defend itself against all those who wish to propagate terror and other attacks against its citizens and against its territory."

Quote:

Disruption of US interests in the Levant

by Thierry Meyssan

While the war against Syria was decided in 2001 to break the "Axis of Resistance" to get its hands on gas reserves and reshape the "Broader Middle East", Washington's priorities have been disrupted. The new goal is to stop the terrorist contagion fueled by all the states involved and which none are able to control. The military-industrial complex, the notables of Washington and the mainstream media now hope for the victory of Syria's Bashar al-Assad.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 9 FEBRUARY 2015 FRANÇAIS ITALIANO ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΆ PORTUGUÊS TÜRKÇE РУССКИЙ فارسى عربي ESPAÑOL

While two days of consultations were recently held in Moscow, under the chairmanship of Sergei Lavrov, between the Syrian government and 32 leaders of the opposition, almost everyone in Washington wishes for a victory of Bashar al-Assad. Only parties that support the principle of the fight against the jihadists will be able to participate in the future government of national unity.The situation in the Levant is likely to evolve quickly on the one hand due to the crisis of authority in Washington and partly because of the accession of Prince Salman to the Saudi throne. This could be facilitated by political change in Israel.First, the crisis of authority that paralyzes the US continues to mobilize the ruling class. After the call from the honorary chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for President Obama to surround himself with experienced personalities from both sides [1], the New York Times published an editorial [2] devoted to a report published in October by the Rand Corporation [3].The main think tank dedicated to military matters has made a 180 ° turnaround in one year. According to it, the victory of the Syrian Arab Republic is now "the most desirable option" for the US, while its fall would be "the worst of outcomes." Armed groups have lost support among the urban population, the defections have stopped for over a year and the Syrian army continues its liberation. Moreover, Rand continues, a Syrian victory will not benefit Iran as long as Daesh remains present in Iraq. The institute predicts that states that have so far supplied the jihadists will stop doing so. Indeed, they cannot hope to defeat Syria in this way and now fear that the jihadists will turn against them. Therefore, concluded the Rand, there will be no negotiated solution with the sponsor states, but a clear victory of the "regime" to which the United States should be associated.One can observe the radical change of position on the part of the military-industrial complex. A year ago, the Rand advocated bombing Syria like Libya, and conducting limited action on the ground by creating protected areas administered by the "revolutionaries". Today, it implicitly admits that there has never been a revolution in Syria and, after a long moment of hesitation on its future, the Sunni majority again supports the secular Republic.The atmosphere in Washington today resembles that of early 2006, when the Army was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld was trying to hide the defeat. At the time, Congress created the Baker-Hamilton Commission. This, after eight months of work, concluded that US forces would not be able to stabilize the countries they occupied without the help of Iran and Syria. The picture of the military situation was so scary that the Americans sanctioned George W. Bush in the midterm elections. The President then sacrificed Rumsfeld and replaced him with a member of the Commission, Robert Gates. The new Secretary of Defense concluded field agreements with Tehran and Damascus, bought the main groups of the Iraqi Resistance (the carrot) and increased the number of troops there (the stick) to stabilize the situation.Secondly, in Arabia, the new king Salman first tried to sack all former supporters of his predecessor, even going as far as to dismiss Prince Miteb and the Secretary General of the palace two hours after the death of King Abdullah. Then he retracted his decisions after receiving the condolences of his US sovereign. Ultimately, Miteb will be the only survivor of the previous era, while Prince Bandar was fired. But Bandar maintained Daesh with the help of the CIA, in order to put pressure on King Abdullah in the interest of the Saudi clan.His ouster, demanded by President Obama, probably marks the end of Saudi predominance in international terrorism. This time -the fourth, should be right one:
In 2010, the prince had been banned for trying to organize a coup, but was returned for war against Syria;
In 2012, he had been the victim of an attack in retaliation for the killing of members of the Syrian National Security Council, but he was back to business a year later, weak and obsessive;
In 2014, John Kerry again demanded his dismissal, but he returned stage center for the Egyptian crisis;
He has just been sacrificed by his own clan which leaves him no prospect of return in the short or medium term.Third, the Israeli attack on Hezbollah followed by the response of Hezbollah against Israel paradoxically highlights the weakness of Benjamin Netanyahu in an election period. The outgoing Prime Minister hoped that the Lebanese resistance would be unable to respond to the attack and that he would come out fresh from the confrontation. His miscalculation could cost him his job, to the delight of the White House which has long ceased concealing its exasperation at his fanaticism.From developments in Washington, in Riyadh and perhaps soon in Tel Aviv, it is reasonable to conclude that in the coming months, the US will focus its efforts to exclude Daesh from the Levant and throw it out of its area influence against Russia and China. For its part, Saudi Arabia should try both to save its authority in neighboring Bahrain and Yemen, while providing assistance to the big loser in the war against Syria, President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, whom the US has decided to drop. This development will be shorter or longer depending on the election results in Tel Aviv. While the jihadists have become a threat to the stability of all states in the Levant, including Israel, Netanyahu could continue to put his aviation and hospitals at their service. But it is hard to imagine that he would persist when all other states in the region fight them. On the contrary, if the Prime Minister lost the election, his successor would immediately lend a hand to the United States against the jihadists.Once again, Damascus, the oldest inhabited city in the world, will have survived the barbarians who wanted to destroy it.