A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria

[Adele Edisen]

Zbigniew Brzezinski on Syria:
US Engaging In "Mass Propaganda", "Who's Fighting for Democracy?"

2 Minute Video

The west is absolutely engaging in mass propaganda by portraying the Syrian conflict
as a fight for democracy when many of the rebels want anything but.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e35299.htm [http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=mryjmknab.0....35299.htm]

[Magda Hassan]

Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria

World Exclusive: US urges UK and France to join in supplying arms to Syrian rebels as MPs fear that UK will be drawn into growing conflict

Robert Fisk


Sunday 16 June 2013






Washington's decision to arm Syria's Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.
For the first time, all of America's friends' in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama's rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.
The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran even before last week's presidential election to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad's forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad's regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic's security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new Syrian' front on the Golan Heights against Israel.
In years to come, historians will ask how America after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed's wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between "Papists and Protestants".
America's alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle. Up to 3,000 American advisers' are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria no-fly zone' opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries will turn a crisis into a hot' war. So much for America's friends'.
Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America liberated' from Saddam Hussein's Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has against all US predictions itself now largely fallen under Tehran's influence and power. Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad's forces.
Washington's excuse for its new Middle East adventure that it must arm Assad's enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them convinces no-one in the Middle East. Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush's claim that Saddam's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria's Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad. The Damascus regime's victory this month in the central Syrian town of Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power. Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf not to be sustained. Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.
In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army. The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy. They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.
From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus - every war crime committed by the rebels - will be regarded in the region as Washington's responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2011 who are America's greatest enemies as well as Russia's are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin's adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism. His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian and his belief that Russia's old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia's naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.
For the Russians, of course, the Middle East' is not in the east' at all, but to the south of Moscow; and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier. Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim. Six of the Soviet Union's communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni. And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims. For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.
Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah's overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon with the maintenance of the militia's intelligence' teams inside Syria Iran's support for Damascus will grow rather than wither. They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran's help in withdrawing from Afghanistan. The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran's active assistance. One of the sources claimed not without some mirth -- that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran's help.
It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel's security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria. Indeed, Israel's policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.
Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad's rule. One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as "Israel's man in Damascus". Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator. In vain.
If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians. The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or viable'. Peace' envoy Tony Blair's attempts to create such a state have been laughable. A future Palestine' would be a Sunni nation. But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.
Another of the region's supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the super-terrorists' of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs' desire to crush Assad. Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.
In Arab eyes, Israel's 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West's support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive. Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...60358.html

[David Guyatt]

In years to come, historians will ask how America after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed.

No need to wait for historians of the future to comment, as the answer is already clear as clear can be.

It's oil silly.

The strategy is: divide and conquer, sow and reap, make war not peace - war is profitable, oil is wanted, and global hegemony is the name of the game. Keep the folks back home looking afar and not around them.

And remember: Russia's Putin has agreed to rent to NATO a military base deep inside Russia. Russia is part of the G8. And most importantly of all, Russian is Christian not Muslim.

[Jan Klimkowski]

In years to come, historians will ask how America after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed.

No need to wait for historians of the future to comment, as the answer is already clear as clear can be.

It's oil silly.

The strategy is: divide and conquer, sow and reap, make war not peace - war is profitable, oil is wanted, and global hegemony is the name of the game. Keep the folks back home looking afar and not around them.

And remember: Russia's Putin has agreed to rent to NATO a military base deep inside Russia. Russia is part of the G8. And most importantly of all, Russian is Christian not Muslim.

I was watching what passes for debate on Sky News late last night, and the anchor asked his interviewee, an editor or deputy editor at a national broadsheet newspaper, whether we should cut through the rhetoric and simply acknowledge that (I paraphrase) "the real reason for Putin's position is that Russia wants to keep a port in the Mediterranean". The editor/deputy editor nodded in sage agreement, and responded "that is absolutely the reason for Russia's position".

However, if the anchor had asked "isn't the real reason for the American/British/French position oil and control of the Middle East?", I have little doubt that the editor/deputy editor would have responded in mock outrage "absolutely not, you shouldn't be peddling 'conspiracy theories', I'm sure our position is based on humanitarian and democratic principles".

It's all garbage.

[David Guyatt]

In years to come, historians will ask how America after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed.

No need to wait for historians of the future to comment, as the answer is already clear as clear can be.

It's oil silly.

The strategy is: divide and conquer, sow and reap, make war not peace - war is profitable, oil is wanted, and global hegemony is the name of the game. Keep the folks back home looking afar and not around them.

And remember: Russia's Putin has agreed to rent to NATO a military base deep inside Russia. Russia is part of the G8. And most importantly of all, Russian is Christian not Muslim.

I was watching what passes for debate on Sky News late last night, and the anchor asked his interviewee, an editor or deputy editor at a national broadsheet newspaper, whether we should cut through the rhetoric and simply acknowledge that (I paraphrase) "the real reason for Putin's position is that Russia wants to keep a port in the Mediterranean". The editor/deputy editor nodded in sage agreement, and responded "that is absolutely the reason for Russia's position".

However, if the anchor had asked "isn't the real reason for the American/British/Russian position oil and control of the Middle East?", I have little doubt that the editor/deputy editor would have responded in mock outrage "absolutely not, you shouldn't be peddling 'conspiracy theories', I'm sure our position is based on humanitarian and democratic principles".

It's all garbage.

Aye. Garbage. Frame the discussion and keep framing it.

[Magda Hassan]

So, it has nothing to do with Assad.

Former French Foreign Minister: The War against Syria was Planned Two years before "The Arab Spring"

By Gearóid Ó Colmáin

June 17, 2013 "Information Clearing House - In an interview with the French TV station LCP, former French minister for Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas said:

' I'm going to tell you something. I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria.

This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate.

Naturally, I refused, I said I'm French, that doesn't interest me.''

Dumas went on give the audience a quick lesson on the real reason for the war that has now claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people.

'This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned… in the region it is important to know that this Syrian regime has a very anti-Israeli stance.

Consequently, everything that moves in the region- and I have this from the former Israeli prime minister who told me we'll try to get on with our neighbours but those who don't agree with us will be destroyed.

It's a type of politics, a view of history, why not after all. But one should know about it.''

Dumas is a retired French foreign minister who is obliged to use discretion when revealing secrets which could affect French foreign policy. That is why he made the statement I am French, that doesn't interest me'. He could not reveal France's role in the British plan as he would be exposing himself to prosecution for revealing state secrets.

There have been many disinformation agents in the British and French press, many of them well known leftist' war correspondents and commentators, who have tried to pretend that Israel secretly supports Assad. Those who make such arguments are either stupid, ignorant or deliberate disinformation agents of NATO and Israel.

Israel's support for Al Qaeda militants in Syria has even been admitted by the mainstream press. For example, Germany's Die Welt newspaper published a report on June 12[SUP]th[/SUP] on Israel's medical treatment of the Al Qaeda fighters.

Israel planned this war of annihilation years ago in accordance with the Yinon Plan, which advocates balkanization of all states that pose a threat to Israel. The Zionist entity is using Britain and France to goad the reluctant Obama administration into sending more American troops to their death in Syria on behalf of Tel Aviv.

Of all the aggressor states against Syria, Israel has been the quietest from the start. That is because Laurent Fabius, Francois Holland, William Hague and David Cameron are doing their bidding by attempting to drag Israel's American Leviathan into another ruinous war so that Israel can get control of the Middle East's energy reserves, eventually replacing the United States as the ruling state in the world. It has also been necessary for Tel Aviv to remain silent so as not to expose their role in the revolutions', given the fact that the Jihadist fanatics don't realize they are fighting for Israel.

This is the ideology of Zionism which cares no more for Jews than it does for its perceived enemies. The Jewish colony is determined to become a ruling state in the Middle East in the insane delusion that this will enable it to replace the United States as a global hegemon, once the US collapses fighting Israel's wars.

Israeli Prime Minister once told American talk show host Bill Maher that the reason why Israel always wins short conflicts, while the United States gets bogged down in endless wars. ' The secret is that we have America'', he said.

But Israel is itself slowly collapsing. If one excludes the enslaved Palestinian population, the Jewish state still has the highest level of poverty in the developed world with more and more Jews choosing to leave the promised' land, a garrison state led by mad men, an anti-Semitic entity threatening to engulf the world in war and destruction. Israel cares no more about its own working class Jews than any other ethnic community.

In fact, if the Likudnik crooks running the Israeli colony get their way, working class Israelis will be among the first to pay as they are conscripted to fight terrorists created by their own government. With orthodox Jews protesting in the streets of New York against Israel and Haredi Jewish minority opposing Israel's rampant militarism, Zionism is coming under increased attack from Jewish religious authorities and non-Zionist Jews both inside and outside of the occupied territories.

This is not the first time that Roland Dumas has spoken out against wars of aggression waged by successive French regimes. In 2011 he revealed that he had been asked by the United States when he was foreign minister in the Mitterrand administration to organize the bombing of Libya. On that occasion the French refused to cooperate. Dumas, a lawyer by profession, offered to defend Colonel Gaddafi, at the International Criminal Court in the event of his arrest by Nato.

Dumas was also vocal in condemning France's brutal neo-colonial bombing of the Ivory Coast earlier in 2011, were death squads and terrorists similar to those later deployed in Libya and Syria were unleashed upon the Ivoirian population in order to install a IMF puppet dictator Alassane Quattara in power. Gbagbo was described as one of the greatest African leaders of the past 20 years by Jean Ziegler, sociologist and former member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council.

Gbagbo had plans to nationalize banks and wrest control of the country's currency from the colonial finance institutions in Paris. He also wanted to roll back many of the worst effects of IMF restructuring by nationalizing industries and creating a functioning, universal free health service. All of this threatened the interests of French corporations in the former French colony. So, the Parisian oligarchy went to work to find a suitable replacement as caretaker of their Ivoirian colony.

They sent in armed terrorist gangs, or rebel's in the doublespeak of imperialism, who murdered all before them while the French media blamed president Gbagbo for the violence that ensued. Gbagbo and Gaddafi had opposed Africom, the Pentagon's plan to recolonize Africa. That was another reason for the 2011 bombing of their two African countries.

The formula is always the same. Imperialism backs rebels', whenever its interests are threatened by regimes that love their country more than foreign corporations. One should not forgot that during the Spanish Civil War of 1936, General Franco and his cronies were also rebels' and they, like their counterparts in Libya in 2011, were bombed to power by foreign powers, replacing a progressive, republican administration with fascism.

There are pro-Israeli fanatics in France who have used the analogy of the Spanish Civil War as justification for intervention in Libya and Syria. The pseudo-philosopher Henry Bernard Levy is one of them. Of course, the ignoramus Levy doesn't realize that the reason France, England and the USA did not officially intervene in the Spanish Civil War is because they were covertly helping the rebels' from the start. They enabled arms shipments to the Francoist rebels' while preventing arms deliveries to the Spanish government, who, like Syria today, were helped by Moscow. Anyone who has studied the Spanish Civil War knows that all the imperialist countries wanted Franco as a bulwark against communism.

There is nothing imperialism loves more than a rebel without a cause. What imperialism hates, however, are revolutionaries. That is why the rebels' which imperialism sends into other countries to colonize them on behalf of foreign banks and corporations, have to be marketed as revolutionaries' in order to assure the support of the Monty Python brigade of petty-bourgeois, leftist' dupes such as Democracy Now! and their ilk.

Dumas is not the only top French official to denounce the New World Order. Former French ambassador to Syria Michel Raimbaud wrote a book in 2012 entitled Le Soudan dans tous les états', where he revealed how Israel planned and instigated a civil war in South Sudan in order to balkanize a country led by a pro-Palestinian government. He also exposed the pro-Israeli media groups and human rights' NGOS who created the humanitarian' narrative calling for military intervention by the United States in the conflict.

The subject was covered extensively by African investigative journalist Charles Onana in his 2009 book, Al-Bashir & Darfour LA CONTRE ENQUÊTE.

There are many more retired French officials who are speaking out about the ruinous policies of this French government, including the former head of French domestic intelligence Yves Bonnet. There have also been reports of dissent in the French armed forces and intelligence apparatus.

After the assassination of Colonel Gaddafi in October 2011, the former French ambassador to Libya Christian Graeff told French radio station France Culture that it was responsible for the diffusion of lies and war propaganda on behalf of Nato throughout the war. Graeff also warned the broadcasters that such disinformation could only work on the minds of serfs but not in a country of free minds.

The power of the Israeli lobby in France is a subject rarely discussed in polite circles. In France there is a law against questioning or denial of the holocaust. However, denial of the Korean holocaust, Guatemalan holocaust, Palestinian holocaust, Indonesian holocaust and the dozens of other US/Israeli supported genocides is not only perfectly legal but is the respectable norm.

The same lobby which introduced the Loi Gayssot in 1990, effectively ending freedom of expression in France, would also like to ban any independent investigations of genocides whose narratives they have written, such as the Rwanda genocide, where Israel played a key role in supporting the rebels' led by Paul Kagame, who invaded Rwanda from Uganda from 1991 to 1994, leading to the genocide of both Tutus and Tutsis. Many serious scholars have written about the Rwandan genocide, which the Israel lobby repeatedly uses as a case study to justify humanitarian' intervention by Western powers. The Zionist thought police would like to see such authors prosecuted for negating' imperialism's disgusting lies on African conflicts.

Now, the Israeli Lobby is forcing the (their) French government to prosecute twitter messages which the lobby deems anti-Semitic'. This is one further step towards the creation of a totalitarian state where any criticism of imperialism, foreign wars, racism, oppression, perhaps eventually capitalism itself could fall under the rubric of anti-Semitism'.

These people are sick, and those who cow down to them are sicker. Perhaps the etymology of sickness, a word cognate with the German Sicherheit (security) according to dictionary.com, is not a coincidence. For what is particularly sick about our society is the cult of security, endless surveillance, ubiquitous cameras, the cult of the all seeing eye, the prurient gaze as part of the incessant discourse on terrorism by those who specialize in the training of the very terrorists they claim to be protecting us from. Whether or not the words security and sickness are linguistically related, they are certainly cognate in a philosophical sense.

Roland Dumas and others like him should be highly commended for having to guts to say what so many others are too morally corrupt, too weak and cowardly to admit.

As the French government and its media agencies drum up hysteria for war on Syria, Roland Dumas, now in the twilight of his years, is warning people of the consequences of not understanding where Israel is leading the world. Will enough people heed the warning?

[Magda Hassan]

Huge blast rocks Damascus military airport

Published time: June 16, 2013 20:53
Edited time: June 16, 2013 22:31





A powerful explosion has gone off at a military airport on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus, according to witness reports and local media.
State-owned al-Ikhbariya Television said the explosion "resulted from an attempt to target the Mezze military airport." It has been relating witness testimonies of the blast that was heard throughout most of western Damascus on Sunday.
It took place in the Mezzeh district that is also home to several embassies.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims that approximately 20 of President Bashar Assad's forces have either been killed or wounded.

They reported the source of the blast to be a car bomb detonated at a checkpoint near the airport, which also serves as one of the major government elite force bases. It is often used for transporting supplies and performing military operations against rebels, as well as being a private airport for the Assad family.

Video footage captured by witnesses allegedly showed smoke and flames rising from the area, as ambulances were seen rushing to the scene.
http://rt.com/news/syria-damascus-airport-blast-790/

[Magda Hassan]

IDF not commenting on report Israel attacked Syrian airport

By JPOST.COM STAFF
06/17/2013 12:19

The IDF was not commenting on a report on a Syrian TV station associated with the rebel forces that Israel attacked on Sunday night the military airbase Al-Miza, West of Damascus, Israel Radio reported. The report noted that a rebel organization had taken responsibility for the attack after the explosion to took place on Sunday night.

The TV station reported that Israel bombed advanced weapons and radar systems that were recently brought to the airport, according to Israel Radio.

Eye witnesses said that the explosions were large and that neither the Assad regime nor the rebels had the capability to create explosions of such a magnitude.
http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/IDF-n...ort-316796

[Magda Hassan]

US masses soldiers near Syrian border

Sunday 16 June 2013
by Our Foreign Desk





The US vowed at the weekend to go ahead with provocative war games involving thousands of troops less than 100 miles from Syria.

Operation Eager Lion will see 4,500 US troops, as well as soldiers from 18 other countries including 500 from Britain, engage in manoeuvres in neighbouring Jordan.
And US President Barack Obama confirmed on Saturday that F-16 fighter jets and Patriot missiles will remain in Jordan even after the exercises finish.
Russia angrily condemned the deployment. Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said: "Foreign weapons are being pumped into an explosive region. This is happening very close to Syria, where for two years the flames of a devastating conflict have been burning."
It called for the US to give priority to peace talks that Moscow and Washington are supposed to be brokering in Geneva between Syria's government and opposition.
But days after declaring that it planned to arm Syria's fractious rebel groups directly the US seemed determined to pour fuel on the fire.
US newspapers reported that the CIA would deliver arms to rebels at secret bases in Jordan, escalating the likelihood of the war spilling over Syria's borders.
The country is already a battlefield for international forces, with Islamist rebels linked to al-Qaida pouring in to wage a Sunni "holy war" against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
At the same time the Shi'ite Lebanese militia Hezbollah has piled in to fight for the government.
And unconfirmed reports over the weekend suggested Iran might respond to increasing US belligerence by sending up to 4,000 Revolutionary Guards to join Mr Assad.
Egypt also took sides on Saturday, breaking off diplomatic relations with Damascus and calling for the US to enforce a no-fly zone on the country.
Mr Assad had "no future," Islamist President Mohammed Morsi told crowds.
But Russia, which runs the Tartus naval base in Syria, warned the US that attempting to use its Jordan-based aircraft to enforce a no-fly zone would be illegal under international law.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/...ull/134263

[Adele Edisen]

Thus article by Michel Chossudovsky is very important, but too long to copy. Please do read


http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-forbidd...st/5339004


Adele