A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria

[Lauren Johnson]

http://www.moonofalabama.org/

Is the Syrian National Council of expats that demands war against Syria a western political intelligence operation?
Sure. And if there ever were any doubts about that this piece should bury them.

This is a story about the storytellers: the spokespeople, the "experts on Syria", the "democracy activists". The statement makers. The people who "urge" and "warn" and "call for action". It's a tale about some of the most quoted members of the Syrian opposition and their connection to the Anglo-American opposition creation business.
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As we will see, several of these spokespeople have found support, and in some cases developed long and lucrative relationships with advocates of military intervention on both sides of the Atlantic.
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The piece goes into the well sourced details of years-long western finance for several of the leading SNC functionaries including for one of their main promoters the neocon Michael Weiss who we flagged here half a year ago.
Remember that Turkish jet Syria shot down? Erdogan and his sidekicks were so up in arms about that they ran to their NATO daddies to ask for help. They claimed that the jet was shot down outside of Syrian air space. NATO help was denied because, as I interpreted it, NATO was sure that the jet was shot down within Syrian airspace while it tested the Syrian air defense.
Erdogan is under fire from the Turkish opposition and is now heavily backtracking on his original claim:

There are growing numbers of question marks surrounding last month's downed Turkish plane as the prime minister admitted yesterday that all details from the incident were not yet known as Washington said it knew everything about the downing but was refusing to share the information with the media. The sense of confusion was enhanced by an Air Force general who said the plane, which was downed June 22, might have been hit by a personally operated missile from a Syrian ship rather than a surface-to-air missile. At the same time, the military also altered the way it is has been describing the event, referring to the plane as the jet that "Syria claimed to have shot down" rather than the jet that "Syria shot down."

It seems that Erdogan and his military will soon claim that the jet went down for "technical reasons" or because of a "pilot error".
That news comes as the Washington Post claims that arms deliveries to Syrian rebels are delayed:

Activists give differing interpretations of what they say are shipments of weapons that are not making it across the usual route the Turkish-Syrian border. One leading opposition member attributed the blockage to Turkish anxiety in the wake of Syria's downing of a Turkish jet last month.

Or anxiety about Russia doubling its troops in Armenia near the Turkish border ?

The Lebanese government is reinforcing its troops on the Syrian border to prevent smuggling and cross border fighting.
Jordan is also tightening its border with Syria as it fears infiltration of loyal Syrian troops.

All these steps by Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan may be to just starve off various freelance groups and Salafis fighting in Syria and to channel the guns to groups selected by the CIA and its new friends in the Muslim Brotherhood.

But another interpretation is that they finally found sense and recognized that further fighting in Syria will inevitably deliver serious blowbacks to their countries. They recognize that the U.S. project for regime change in Syria has for now failed and are winding down their part of it.

As I currently read it the second interpretation is a bit more likely one. This does not mean that Washington has stopped the war mongering. But its auxiliaries seem to leave the field or at least have second thoughts.

To instigate war one needs propaganda and here is a very typical piece of such: The Ultimate Assault: Charting Syria's Use of Rape to Terrorize Its People. The piece is simply fake news based on very dubious third hand tales and propagated by one of the U.S. government sponsored fake humanitarian endeavors. In the comments thereto Don Bacon points out that the piece was commissioned by Joe Lieberman, the neocon Senator for Israel.

That fact as well as the trails in the first linked piece tells us where this whole operation against Syria was thought up and is coming from.