A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria

[David Guyatt]

From The Consortium:

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]

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[Magda Hassan]

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[TD="class: arttitle"] Street Scenes from a Damascus Neighborhood[/TD]
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Barzeh neighborhood, Damascus

Changes are underway in Damascus's suburban neighborhoods. In some of these neighborhoods there are few families' leftonly fighters. But in others, residents are trickling back in (or in some cases never even left) despite the danger. Here in these areas, those who have chosen the armed opposition route fall are grouped roughly in the following percentiles: 70% FSA, 25% Al Nursa, and, as of now, relatively few, Da'ish (IS).

During meetings with young men from the Barzeh neighborhood, an area maybe five blocks by eight blocks, this observer learned of approximately 700 FSA fighters in the neighborhood, 110 from al Nursa, compared with only 7 or 8 Da'ish fighters. The latter do not appear very active in community matters, but reportedly keep their eyes peeled watching what the other militia are up to. Even so, Dai'sh still recruits and sends applicants to other locations for military training, this while promising that within two months the Islamic State will attack central Damascus.

At the same time, desertions among the rebels are reportedly on the upswing in these areas, and some of the FSA and al-Nusra fighters are splitting off to join Da'ish. It seems that some of these young militia memberspretty much like youngsters everywheresimply want to play for a winning team' or in the big leagues,' and Da'ish is still a strong magnet for tryouts.' Al-Nusra and Da'ish fighters both claim they are eager to fight Hezbollahand Western forceswho they believe will show up sooner or later. And many of them exhibit an attitude similar to that of a European jihadist who recently remarked to this observer, "Let's get it on. And the world will itself judge who are the best fighters, we who believe in Allah or the kuffers (disbelievers)."

Another disturbing attitude, all too frequently expressed in Damascene neighborhoods, is the desire of many of these young men, many of them from "good" families, to sacrifice themselves and become martyrs to their various causes. Residents report that some of the most promising studentsmajoring in subjects like medicine, law, engineering, computer science, business and other professionsare disaffected and see no future for themselves. And while many are deeply religious, a surprising number appear not to be.

Overwhelmingly the rebels come from areas where outsiders are few. This observer's friend of more than three years, whose name I withhold for his security, has lived most of his life in Barzeh and knows many of the militia guys. He reports that currently there are only two foreign fighters in Barzeh, one from Algeria and the other from Saudi Arabia. And he expressed shock to me that a friend of his from childhoodwho joined al-Nusra 18 months ago and had since become one of its local leadershad suddenly disappeared. A few days later, my friend got a what's up' message from Turkey and learned that his friend had shaved his beard, changed his style of clothing, and left Barzeh without telling anyone. Now he reports that he wears shorts and swims during the day on the Turkish coast and no longer has any desire to fight anyone.

Many among al Nusra and other rebel groups, it seems, are trying to leave Syria and go somewhere, anywhere, that might offer them a positive future of some sortbecause they see the war in Syria as being a long one. And in this respect they are no different from the war-weary, exhausted, traumatized Syrian population in general. With very few jobs and nearly ten million displaced from their homesand with some 3 million living as refugees in neighboring countrieswhat one finds here on the one hand is a growing desire to get out, to establish, sadly, a new life elsewhere, in a land other than the one they most love. Yet on the other, significant numbers of fairly hard-core al-Nusra fighters, as noted above, are quitting that militia in order to join the winning teamDa'ish. It is a combination of social factors pointing to what the Iranians have already made note of: that Obama's strategy of trying to fight Da'ish and the Syrian government at the same time is probably doomed to failure.

Some Syrian analysts, whose views this observer credits, identify two trends that appear to be developing in Syrian neighborhoods controlled by violent militia. One is the growing resistance by the local population to being intimidated and abused by the occupying gunmenwhile another is the role the Syrian government is playing in engaging in dialog, usually privately, with the rebels, and offering what some locals here refer to as "contracts." These are proposals of ceasefires of varying scope in order to help give some hope and help to the increasingly besieged population.

Also, neighborhood attitudes toward militia in areas around Damascus are dramatically changing. This observer is advised by fighters from Barzeh that as recently as 12-18 months ago, maybe 80% of the citizens supported the FSA, while some backed al Nusra or other groups. Today militia support is estimated at less than 40%and dwindling. Even those who still back the armed gangs are weaker in their support and no longer respect the militia or defer to them as before. Increasingly neighborhood residents are confronting the rebels on neighborhood streets via citizen committees.' They are showing up at rebel checkpoints or headquarters to complain or demand respect and an end to arbitrary street "justice." Reasons for this include abhorrence of brutality, exhaustion, disillusionment, as well as demonstrable efforts by the Syrian government to increase and maintain services while trying to make important and long overdue changes. Even many rebels are said to credit the government for its willingness to be flexible and to make "contracts" with them to improve the lives of the besieged population.
For example, when families return to their homes after having fled, nearly all find that their flats have been broken into and personal property stolen, and they sometimes discover some of their stolen items being sold in neighborhood jihadist souks.' According to one resident of Barzeh, computers and plasma TV's are among the most commonly stolen property. By contrast, "neighborhood watch" citizen groups seek the return of stolen goods and demand that the militias stop the thievery.

Also people are increasingly calling for a return to Syrian secularism, and they may actually be making some progress on this point. Unlike Da'ish, al Nursa does not insist that people attend a mosque for prayerswhile the FSA is relatively secular. Nursa does require that women wear hijabs in neighborhoods under its control, and the first two times a woman is caught without one she is issued a warning. The third time she risks a public whipping. This observer is advised that many younger women, despite the risks, will remove their head scarves the moment they cross out of rebel-held areas, sometimes in plain view of those manning the checkpoints, leaving the neighborhood at this point, traveling to downtown Damascus for work or other purposes. It's not dissimilar actually to what one finds among many Iranian women, particularly students at Tehran University, who openly admit, often with grins, to giving the local "morality police" a hard time when demandsfor instance to adjust their headscarves so as to reduce the amount of hair visibleare made by roving "purists."

As for the Free Syrian Army, now dubbed by some in the Obama Administration as the "National Coalitionkind of like the National Guard"it is viewed by many here as corrupt, manned to a large extent by lowlifes and thieves. The "Free Syrian Army," as one pithy adage has it, is neither free, nor Syrian, nor an army. And at least in Barzeh, at any rate, it is also viewed as being for sale to the highest bidder. Moreover, the residents here, though increasingly vocal about jihadist militias, seem to hold actually more respect for al-Nusra, despite its Islamist extremism, than for the Western-backed FSA.


Late word just received by this observer from his friend, the aforementioned son of Barzeh: yesterday he, too, snuck across the Syrian-Turkey border in search of a new life-somewhere until peace returns to his beloved Syria.
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[Magda Hassan]

The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria

By Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain @ggreenwald@mazmhussain

Today at 1:11 AM



As the Obama administration prepared to bomb Syria without Congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the "homeland." A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.
The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded "The Khorasan Group." After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat too radical even for Al Qaeda! administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.
The unveiling of this new group was performed in a September 13 article by Associated Press. who cited unnamed U.S. officials to warn of this new shadowy, worse-than-ISIS terror group:

While the Islamic State group is getting the most attention now, another band of extremists in Syria a mix of hardened jihadis from Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Europe poses a more direct and imminent threat to the United States, working with Yemeni bomb-makers to target U.S. aviation, American officials say.
At the center is a cell known as the Khorasan group, a cadre of veteran al-Qaida fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan who traveled to Syria to link up with the al-Qaida affiliate there, the Nusra Front.
But the Khorasan militants did not go to Syria principally to fight the government of President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials say. Instead, they were sent by al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to recruit Europeans and Americans whose passports allow them to board a U.S.-bound airliner with less scrutiny from security officials.

AP warned Americans that "the fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights." It explained that although ISIS has received most of the attention, the Khorasan Group "is considered the more immediate threat."
The genesis of the name was itself scary: "Khorasan refers to a province under the Islamic caliphate, or religious empire, of old that included parts of Afghanistan." AP depicted the U.S. officials who were feeding them the narrative as engaging in some sort of act of brave, unauthorized truth-telling: "many U.S. officials interviewed for this story would not be quoted by name talking about what they said was highly classified intelligence."
On the morning of September 18, CBS News broadcast a segment that is as pure war propaganda as it gets: directly linking the soon-to-arrive U.S. bombing campaign in Syria to the need to protect Americans from being exploded in civilian jets by Khorasan. With ominous voice tones, the host narrated:

This morning we are learning of a new and growing terror threat coming out of Syria. It's an Al Qaeda cell you probably never heard of. Nearly everything about them is classified. Bob Orr is in Washington with new information on a group some consider more dangerous than ISIS.

Orr then announced that while ISIS is "dominating headlines and terrorist propaganda," Orr's "sources" warn of "a more immediate threat to the U.S. Homeland." As Orr spoke, CBS flashed alternating video showing scary Muslims in Syria and innocent westerners waiting in line at airports, as he intoned that U.S. officials have ordered "enhanced screening" for "hidden explosives." This is all coming, Orr explained, from "an emerging threat in Syria" where "hardened terrorists" are building "hard to detect bombs."
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The U.S. government, Orr explained, is trying to keep this all a secret; they won't even mention the group's name in public out of security concerns! But, Orr was there to reveal the truth, as his "sources confirm the Al Qaeda cell goes by the name Khorasan." And they're "developing fresh plots to attack U.S. aviation."
Later that day, Obama administration officials began publicly touting the group, when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned starkly: "in terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State." Then followed an avalanche of uncritical media reports detailing this Supreme Threat, excitingly citing anonymous officials as though they had uncovered a big secret the government was trying to conceal.
On September 20, the New York Times devoted a long article to strongly hyping the Khorasan Group. Headlined "U.S. Suspects More Direct Threats Beyond ISIS," the article began by announcing that U.S. officials believe a different group other than ISIS "posed a more direct threat to America and Europe." Specifically:

American officials said that the group called Khorasan had emerged in the past year as the cell in Syria that may be the most intent on hitting the United States or its installations overseas with a terror attack. The officials said that the group is led by Muhsin al-Fadhli, a senior Qaeda operative who, according to the State Department, was so close to Bin Laden that he was among a small group of people who knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks before they were launched.

Again, the threat they posed reached all the way to the U.S.: "Members of the cell are said to be particularly interested in devising terror plots using concealed explosives."
This Khorasan-attacking-Americans alarmspread quickly and explosively in the landscape of U.S. national security reporting. The Daily Beasts Eli Lake warned on September 23 - the day after the first U.S. bombs fell in Syria - that "American analysts had pieced together detailed information on a pending attack from an outfit that informally called itself the Khorasan Group' to use hard-to-detect explosives on American and European airliners." He added even more ominously: "The planning from the Khorasan Group … suggests at least an aspiration to launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001″ (days later, Lake, along with Josh Rogin, actually claimed that "Iran has long been harboring senior al Qaeda, al Nusra, and so-called Khorasan Group leaders as part of its complicated strategy to influence the region").
On the day of the bombing campaign, NBC News' Richard Engel tweeted this:

That tweet linked to an NBC Nightly News report in which anchor Brian Williams introduced Khorasan with a graphic declaring it "The New Enemy," and Engel went on to explain that the group is "considered a threat to the U.S. because, U.S. intelligence officials say, it wants to bring down airplanes with explosives."

Once the bombing campaign was underway, ISIS the original theme of the attack largely faded into the background, as Obama officials and media allies aggressively touted attacks on Khorasan leaders and the disruption of its American-targeting plots. On the first day of the bombing, the Washington Post announced that "the United States also pounded a little-known but well-resourced al-Qaeda cell that some American officials fear could pose a direct threat to the United States." It explained:

The Pentagon said in a statement early Tuesday that the United States conducted eight strikes west of Aleppo against the cell, called the Khorasan Group, targeting its "training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communications building and command and control facilities."

The same day, CNN claimed that "among the targets of U.S. strikes across Syria early Tuesday was the Khorasan Group." The bombing campaign in Syria was thus magically transformed into an act of pure self-defense, given that "the group was actively plotting against a U.S. homeland target and Western targets, a senior U.S. official told CNN on Tuesday." The bevvy of anonymous sources cited by CNN had a hard time keep their stories straight:

The official said the group posed an "imminent" threat. Another U.S. official later said the threat was not imminent in the sense that there were no known targets or attacks expected in the next few weeks.
The plots were believed to be in an advanced stage, the second U.S. official said. There were indications that the militants had obtained materials and were working on new improvised explosive devices that would be hard to detect, including common hand-held electronic devices and airplane carry-on items such as toiletries.

Nonetheless, what was clear was that this group had to be bombed in Syria to save American lives, as the terrorist group even planned to conceal explosive devices in toothpaste or flammable clothing as a means to target U.S. airliners. The day following the first bombings, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed: "We hit them last night out of a concern that they were getting close to an execution date of some of the plans that we have seen."
CNN's supremely stenographic Pentagon reporter, Barbara Starr, went on air as videos of shiny new American fighter jets and the Syria bombing were shown and explained that this was all necessary to stop a Khorasan attack very close to being carried out against the west:

What we are hearing from a senior US official is the reason they struck Khorasan right now is they had intelligence that the group of Al Qaeda veterans was in the stages of planning an attack against the US homeland and/or an attack against a target in Europe, and the information indicated Khorasan was well on its way perhaps in its final stages of planning that attack.

All of that laid the fear-producing groundwork for President Obama to claim self-defense when he announced the bombing campaign on September 23 with this boast: "Once again, it must be clear to anyone who would plot against America and try to do Americans harm that we will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people."

The very next day, a Pentagon official claimed a U.S. airstrike killed "the Khorasan leader," and just a few days after that, U.S. media outlets celebrated what they said was the admission by jihadi social media accounts that "the leader of the al Qaeda-linked Khorasan group was killed in a U.S. air strike in Syria."
But once it served its purpose of justifying the start of the bombing campaign in Syria, the Khorasan narrative simply evaporated as quickly as it materialized. Foreign Policys Shane Harris, with two other writers, was one of the first to question whether the "threat" was anywhere near what it had been depicted to be:

But according to the top U.S. counterterrorism official, as well as Obama himself, there is "no credible information" that the militants of the Islamic State were planning to attack inside the United States. Although the group could pose a domestic terrorism threat if left unchecked, any plot it tried launching today would be "limited in scope" and "nothing like a 9/11-scale attack," Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in remarks at the Brookings Institution earlier this month. That would suggest that Khorasan doesn't have the capability either, even if it's working to develop it.
"Khorasan has the desire to attack, though we're not sure their capabilities match their desire," a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told Foreign Policy.

On September 25, the New York Times just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland wrote that "the group's evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden." And the Paper of Record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland:

American officials have given differing accounts about just how close the group was to mounting an attack, and about what chance any plot had of success. One senior American official on Wednesday described the Khorasan plotting as "aspirational" and said that there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works.

Literally within a matter of days, we went from "perhaps in its final stages of planning its attack" (CNN) to "plotting as aspirational'" and "there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works" (NYT).
Late last week, Associated Press' Ken Dilanian the first to unveil the new Khorasan Product in mid-September published a new story explaining that just days after bombing "Khorasan" targets in Syria, high-ranking U.S. officials seemingly backed off all their previous claims of an "imminent" threat from the group. Headlined "U.S. Officials Offer More Nuanced Take on Khorasan Threat," it noted that "several U.S. officials told reporters this week that the group was in the final stages of planning an attack on the West, leaving the impression that such an attack was about to happen." But now:

Senior U.S. officials offered a more nuanced picture Thursday of the threat they believe is posed by an al-Qaida cell in Syria targeted in military strikes this week, even as they defended the decision to attack the militants.
James Comey, the FBI director, and Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, each acknowledged that the U.S. did not have precise intelligence about where or when the cell, known as the Khorasan Group, would attempt to strike a Western target. . . .
Kirby, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, said, "I don't know that we can pin that down to a day or month or week or six months….We can have this debate about whether it was valid to hit them or not, or whether it was too soon or too late…We hit them. And I don't think we need to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes."

Regarding claims that an attack was "imminent," Comey said: "I don't know exactly what that word means…'imminent'" a rather consequential admission given that said imminence was used as the justification for launching military action in the first place.
Even more remarkable, it turns out the very existence of an actual "Khorasan Group" was to some degree an invention of the American government. NBC's Engel, the day after he reported on the U.S. Government's claims about the group for Nightly News, seemed to have serious second thoughts about the group's existence, tweeting:

Indeed, a NEXIS search for the group found almost no mentions of its name prior to the September 13 AP article based on anonymous officials. There was one oblique reference to it in a July 31 CNN op-ed by Peter Bergen. The other mention was an article in the LA Times from two weeks earlier about Pakistan which mentioned the group's name as something quite different than how it's being used now: as "the intelligence wing of the powerful Pakistani Taliban faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur." Tim Shorrock noted that the name appears in a 2011 hacked Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks, referencing a Dawn article that depicts them as a Pakistan-based group which was fighting against and "expelled by" (not "led by") Bahadur.
There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, told Time: "I'd certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency," while Obama's former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: "We used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don't know where it came from….All I know is that they don't call themselves that." As the Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that the group was a scam: "You haven't heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn't one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it."
What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.
So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaedaâ„¢, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISISâ„¢. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of "hardened terrorists," posed an "imminent" threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the "final stages" of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could "launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.""
As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets eager, as always, to justify American wars - spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. Government was trying not to talk about all of this too secret! but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous "sources." Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerged only when it's impotent.


https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/...ing-syria/

[Magda Hassan]

Eyes Finally Open to Syrian Realities

October 3, 2014

Exclusive: For the past three years, Official Washington has viewed the Syrian civil war as "white-hatted" rebels against "black-hatted" President Assad, but finally some of the "gray-hatted" reality is breaking through, though perhaps too late, Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
In late summer 2013, Official Washington was rushing to the judgment that the "evil" Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had launched a barrage of missiles tipped with Sarin gas to slaughter hundreds of civilians in rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus.
It was inconceivable to virtually every person who "mattered" in Washington that there was any other interpretation of the events on Aug. 21, 2013. Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius even explained the "big picture" reason why President Barack Obama needed to launch punitive bomb strikes against Assad's government for crossing Obama's "red line" against using chemical weapons.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

"What does the world look like when people begin to doubt the credibility of U.S. power?" Ignatius wrote a week after the Sarin incident. "Unfortunately, we're finding that out in Syria and other nations where leaders have concluded they can defy a war-weary United States without paying a price.
"Using military power to maintain a nation's credibility may sound like an antiquated idea, but it's all too relevant in the real world we inhabit. It has become obvious in recent weeks that President Obama … needs to demonstrate that there are consequences for crossing a U.S. red line.' Otherwise, the coherence of the global system begins to dissolve."
At the time, there were only a few of us raising questions about Official Washington's Sarin-attack "group think," partly because it made no sense for Assad to have invited United Nations inspectors into Syria to examine chemical weapons attacks that he was blaming on the opposition and then to launch a major Sarin attack just miles from where the inspectors were unpacking at their hotel.
I also was hearing from inside U.S. intelligence that some CIA analysts shared those doubts, suspecting that the supposedly high number of Sarin-laden rockets (which represented the strongest evidence against Assad's forces) was wildly overstated and that public panic might have exaggerated the scope of the attack.
But perhaps the strongest reason to doubt Official Washington's hasty conclusion blaming Assad was what had been occurring inside the Syrian rebel movement over the prior two years, i.e., its radicalization into a hyper-violent Sunni jihadist force that was prepared to inflict any brutality on civilians to achieve its goal of ousting the secular Assad and establishing an Islamist state in Damascus.
Blinded by Propaganda
Most Washington's pols and pundits had not noticed this change because of a geopolitical blindness inflicted by neoconservative propaganda, which insisted that the only acceptable way to view the Syrian civil war was to see Assad as the "bad guy" and the rebels as the "good guys."
After all, "regime change" in Syria had long been near the top of the neocon agenda as it was for Israel, which wanted Assad out because he was allied with Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Early in the civil war, Assad's harsh response to what he termed rebel "terrorism" had also rallied the Obama administration's "liberal interventionists" to the side of "regime change."
Thus, the notion that some vicious Syrian rebel group might willfully kill innocent civilians as a provocation to get the U.S. military to attack Assad's defenses and thus pave the way for a rebel victory was outside Official Washington's accepted frame of reference. In August 2013, the rebels were wearing the white hats, as far as U.S. mainstream opinion was concerned.
Over the past year, however, reality has reasserted itself, at least somewhat. The Sarin case against Assad has largely crumbled with a UN report finding Sarin on only one rocket and independent scientists concluding that the one Sarin-laden rocket had a maximum range of only about two kilometers, meaning it could not have come from the suspected Syrian base about nine kilometers away.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh also learned from his well-placed sources that inside the U.S. intelligence community suspicion had shifted toward rebel extremists working with hardliners in Turkish intelligence. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Was Turkey Behind Syria-Sarin Attack?"]
But most "important people" in U.S. officialdom, including New York Times and Washington Post editors, still insisted that Assad must have done the Sarin attack. They even report it as flat fact. They are, after all, not the sort of folks who easily admit error.
A Shift in the Paradigm
However, over the past year, the paradigm for understanding the Syrian conflict has begun shifting. In September 2013, many Syrian rebel forces repudiated the political opposition that the Obama administration had organized and instead embraced al-Qaeda's al-Nusra Front, an aggressive jihadist force which had emerged as the most effective fighters against Assad.
Then, in February 2014, al-Qaeda's leadership disavowed an even more brutal jihadist force known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The Islamic State promoted a strategy of unspeakable brutality as a way of intimidating its rivals and driving Westerners from the Middle East.
ISIS got its start after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi organized "al-Qaeda in Iraq," a hyper-violent Sunni militia that targeted Iraq's Shiites and destroyed their mosques, touching off a vicious sectarian war across Iraq.
After Zarqawi's death in 2006 and the alienation of less-extreme Iraqi Sunnis al-Qaeda in Iraq faded from view before reemerging in Syria's civil war, refashioned as the Islamic State and crossing back into Iraq with a major offensive last summer.
Amid reports of the Islamic State massacring captives and beheading American and British hostages, it no longer seemed so far-fetched that some Syrian rebel group would be ruthless enough to obtain Sarin and launch an attack near Damascus, killing innocents and hoping that the Assad regime would be blamed.
Even the Post's Ignatius is looking more skeptically at the Syrian rebel movement and the various U.S.-allied intelligence agencies that have been supplying money, weapons and training even to fighters associated with the most extreme militias.
Opening the Door
In a column on Friday, Ignatius faulted not only Syria's squabbling "moderate opposition" but "the foreign nations such as the United States, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan that have been funding the chaotic melange of fighters inside Syria. These foreign machinations helped open the door for the terrorist Islamic State group to threaten the region."
Ignatius acknowledged that the earlier depiction of the Syrian opposition as simply an indigenous movement of idealistic reformers was misleading. He wrote: "From the beginning of the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Syria has been the scene of a proxy war involving regional powers: Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar all wanted to topple Assad, but they competed with each other as regional rivals, too.
"At various points, all three nations provided Sunni rebel groups with money and weapons that ended up in the hands of extremists. … The United States, Saudi Arabia and Jordan joined forces in 2013 to train and arm moderate rebels at a CIA-backed camp in Jordan. But this program was never strong enough to unify the nearly 1,000 brigades scattered across the country. The resulting disorganization helped discredit the rebel alliance known as the Free Syrian Army.
"Syrian rebel commanders deserve some blame for this ragged structure. But the chaos was worsened by foreign powers that treated Syria as a playground for their intelligence services. This cynical intervention recalled similar meddling that helped ravage Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and Libya during their civil wars. …
"The story of how Syria became a cockpit for rival intelligence services was explained to me by sources here [in Istanbul] and in Reyhanli, a rebel staging area on the Turkey-Syria border. Outside efforts to arm and train the Syrian rebels began more than two years ago in Istanbul, where a military operations center' was created, first in a hotel near the airport.
"A leading figure was a Qatari operative who had helped arm the Libyan rebels who deposed Moammar Gaddafi. Working with the Qataris were senior figures representing Turkish and Saudi intelligence. But unity within the Istanbul operations room frayed when the Turks and Qataris began to support Islamist fighters they thought would be more aggressive.
"These jihadists did emerge as braver, bolder fighters and their success was a magnet for more support. The Turks and Qataris insist they didn't intentionally support the extremist group Jabhat al-Nusra or the Islamic State. But weapons and money sent to more moderate Islamist brigades made their way to these terrorist groups, and the Turks and Qataris turned a blind eye."
Regarding the rise of these radicals, Ignatius quoted one Arab intelligence source who claimed to have "warned a Qatari officer, who answered: I will send weapons to al-Qaeda if it will help' topple Assad. This determination to remove Assad by any means necessary proved dangerous. The Islamist groups got bigger and stronger, and the FSA day by day got weaker,' recalls the Arab intelligence source."
Selling the Sarin Story
Based on such information, the idea of anti-Assad extremists securing Sarin possibly with the help of Turkish intelligence, as Hersh reported and launching a provocative attack with the goal of getting the U.S. military to devastate Assad's army and clear a path for a rebel victory begins to make sense.
After all, back in Washington, the propaganda strategy of blaming Assad could count on the ever-influential neocons who in August 2013 did start pushing the rush-to-war bandwagon and shoved aside any doubters of the Assad-did-it conventional wisdom.
Israel took a similar position on Syria, favoring even the victory of al-Qaeda extremists if necessary to oust Assad and hurt his Iranian allies.
In September 2013, then-Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview that "The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. … We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren't backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran." He said this was the case even if the other "bad guys" were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
So, the danger from the Sunni extremists was played down and the focus remained on ousting Assad. No wonder there was such "surprise" among Official Washington's "group thinkers" when the Islamic State opened a new front inside Iraq and routed the U.S.-trained Iraqi army. Once again, the neocons had made sure that American eyes stayed wide shut to an inconvenient truth.
But the neocons are not through with the Syrian fiasco that they helped create. They are now busy reshaping the narrative accusing Obama of waiting too long to arm the Syrian rebels and insisting that he switch from bombing Islamic State targets inside Syria to destroying the Syrian air force and creating a no-fly zone so the rebels can march on Damascus.
The recklessness of that strategy should now be obvious. Indeed, if Obama had succumbed to the interventionist demands in summer 2013 and devastated Assad's military, we could now be seeing either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in control of Damascus. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Neocons' Noses into the Syrian Tent."]
Obama might be wiser to take this opportunity to declassify the U.S. intelligence on the Sarin gas attack of Aug. 21, 2013, including the dissents from CIA analysts who doubted Assad's responsibility. That information might shed substantial new light on how Turkish and Arab intelligence services with the help of the neocons enabled the rise of the Islamic State.

[Magda Hassan]

Ex-Opposition Leader Admits Mistake about Syrian Gov't, Says Assad Fighting Terrorists



TEHRAN (FNA)- Former President of the National Coalition for Syrian Opposition Forces Moaz Al-Khatib confessed that his opposition to the Damascus government has been a grave mistake, saying that President Bashar Al-Assad has been fighting against the terrorists.
"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," Turkish news website Ulusal quoted Khatib as saying on his account on a social network.
He wrote that the so-called Friends of Syria are actually the enemies of Syria and terrorists are cooperating with them to destroy Syria.
"I have come to the conclusion that the Syrian government is fighting against the terrorists; it is paying salary to its employees in different parts, supplies electricity and do things that show it is thinking of the people," Khatib said.
Moaz Al-Khatib is a former president of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. He is also a former prayers imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.
Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs and terrorists against both the army and civilians.
The unrest, which took in terrorist groups from across Europe, the Middle-East and North Africa, has transpired as one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history.
As the foreign-backed insurgency in Syria continues without an end in sight, the US government has boosted its political and military support to Takfiri extremists.
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.asp...ign=buffer

[David Guyatt]

"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,"

::coffeesplutter::::::::

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.

::boom::

[Magda Hassan]

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.

Israeli soldiers stand near the border with Syria in the occupied Golan Heights as they prepare to evacuate a wounded Syrian let... / Photo by Reuters By Barak Ravid
Published 06:00 07.12.14
Reports by UN observers in the Golan Heights over the past 18 months reveal the type and extent of cooperation between Israel and Syrian opposition figures. The reports, submitted to the 15 members of the UN Security Council and available on the UN's website, detail regular contacts held on the border between IDF officers and soldiers and Syrian rebels.
The observer force, UNDOF, was established in 1974 as part of the separation of forces agreement between Israel and Syria. The agreement set up a buffer zone several kilometers wide. About 1,000 UN observers supervised the implementation of the agreement until 2013, when the Syrian civil war severely reduced the force's ability to function.
One of the attacks near Damascus yesterday, and Israeli attacks over the past two years, according to foreign reports. / Photo by Sham.fm YouTube channel While Croatia and Austria pulled out and Ireland, Fiji and India agreed to send troops, the increase of attacks on UN forces in recent months caused the force to abandon many of its positions along the front and to transfer its command to the Israeli side of the border.
The observers have continued to file reports to New York, which were relatively mundane; but their content changed in March 2013, when Israel started admitting injured Syrians for medical treatment in Safed and Nahariya hospitals. The Syrian ambassador to the UN complained of widespread cooperation between Israel and Syrian rebels, not only treatment of the wounded but also other aid.
Israel at first asserted the injured were civilians reaching the border of their own initiative and without prior coordination because they could not obtain suitable treatment in Syria. Later, as the numbers increased, Israel said it was coordinating with civilians but not opposition groups. However, the reports reveal direct contact between the IDF and armed opposition members.
According to a report from December 3, 2013, a person wounded on September 15 "was taken by armed members of the opposition across the ceasefire line, where he was transferred to a civilian ambulance escorted by an IDF vehicle." Moreover, from November 9 to 19 the "UNDOF observed at least 10 wounded persons being transferred by armed members of the opposition from the Bravo side across the ceasefire line to IDF."
Further reports indicated similar incidents. However, cooperation between the IDF and Syrian rebels that was revealed in UN observer reports does not just include transferring the wounded. Observers remarked in the report distributed on June 10 that they identified IDF soldiers on the Israeli side handing over two boxes to armed Syrian opposition members on the Syrian side.
The last report distributed to Security Council members, on December 1, described another meeting between IDF soldiers and Syrian opposition members that two UN representatives witnessed on October 27 some three kilometers east of Moshav Yonatan. The observers said they saw two IDF soldiers on the eastern side of the border fence opening the gate and letting two people enter Israel. The report, contrary to previous ones, did not note that the two exiting Syria were injured or why they entered Israel.
This specific event is of particular interest in light of what happened on the Syrian side of the border in the exact same region. According to the report, UN observers stated that tents were set up about 300 meters from the Israeli position for some 70 families of Syrian deserters. The Syrian army sent a letter of complaint to UNDOF in September, claiming this tent camp was a base for "armed terrorists" crossing the border into Israel. The Syrians also warned that if the UN would not evacuate the tent camp, the Syrian army would view it as a legitimate target.
http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premium-1...6AFCEA3D59

[David Guyatt]

Do you call that a smoking gun?

[David Guyatt]

.

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."

[David Guyatt]

A really interesting backgroung on Saudi politics and the ousting of Prince Bandar, plus the ever meandering path of US middle eastern politics -- friends become enemies and then become friends again, until "enemyhood" is reassigned again etc.

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.

From: VoltaireNet