Syria Gearing Up to End Illegal U.S. Presence

By: Kayhan Int’l 

Donald Trump despite his bravado has no other choice but to end the U.S. occupation of the Syrian oil fields as well as the other places in Syria, such as Tanf on the Iraqi border, where the uninvited American troops continue their illegal presence.
In case the U.S. President, pressured by his idiotic advisers, who had opposed his earlier plans to leave Syria, decides further delays, he will be committing a big blunder by making his soldiers the sacrificial goats.
If the events of the past eight years are any proof, there is no military solution to the crisis created in Syria by Washington in complicity with its comrades-in-crimes in Tel Aviv, London, and Riyadh.
Terrorists of all hue and colour, including the macabrely murderous Takfiris (Daesh and its affiliates) have been routed by the Syrian army and its allies, and it is only a matter of time before the remnants of these criminals will be flushed out of Idlib.
This means, the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), made up of the local Kurds in the eastern Euphrates regions, will sooner or later enter into agreement with the government in Damascus, rather than accept the American occupation of their ancestral lands.
This was the message of President Bashar al-Assad in one of his recent interviews with the foreign press, when he said Syrian groups outside the government’s command at present would eventually be persuaded to reconcile with Damascus, which means the U.S. military may find itself entrenched in a new conflict if its troops were not withdrawn.
Dr. Bashar, the elected Head of the Syrian nation who is an ophthalmologist by training, has shown clear perception in defeating the multinational bid to oust him from power.
He held Washington responsible for any consequences in view of its backing of terrorists and of exploiting the oil fields, warning that if the U.S. troops refused to leave, they will face popular resistance and pay the price which Trump – faced with the prospects of impeachment on the threshold of presidential elections – cannot afford.
Although by West Asian standards Syria neither has large oil deposits not does it produce much oil, which in 2010 before the start of the current crisis used to amount to 385,000 barrels of crude per day, accounting for 25 percent of the national revenues, Damascus cannot allow the U.S. or any other country and group, including Turkey, to occupy part of its soil – whether it is the oil fields or the Idlib region, where the terrorists are on their last legs.
Incidentally, in their recent meeting in Kazakhstan, the foreign ministers of Iran, Russia, and Turkey, took note of the presence of terrorist groups in Syria’s Idlib province, and pledged to coordinate actions aimed at eliminating these dangerous militants.
The trilateral talks were also attended by representatives of the Damascus government and the Syrian opposition, indicating that efforts are underway to resolve the crisis, including the thwarting of the illegitimate U.S. initiative for so-called self-rule in favour of its clients.
Reconstruction has already started in Syria with the cooperation of its trusted friends, like Iran and Russia, and thus Damascus cannot afford to tolerate any more the illegal American seizure and stealing of oil revenues, even if the amount is meagre.
As for Tehran and Moscow, in accordance with international laws and the U.N. Charter, they have stood steadfast beside the legal government in Damascus, and will not hesitate to help Syria in standing on its feet and that includes liberating the last remaining parts of its soil under occupation.

US Democrats Cultivated the Barbarism of Isis

by Jonathan Cook 

There is something profoundly deceitful in the Democratic Party and corporate media’s framing of Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.

One does not need to like Trump or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the sudden departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.

The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a “meltdown”. Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the paper writes that “it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East”.

Hang on a minute! Let’s pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to do – that the last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.

Islamic State, or Isis, didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. And I’m not even referring to the mountains of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington, in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.

No, I’m talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington’s local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn’t care.

Overthrow, not regime change

You don’t have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don’t even have to be concerned that these so-called “humanitarian” wars violated each state’s integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as “the supreme war crime”.

The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, these haven’t so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.

The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called “Washington consensus” since 9/11.

The first was Israel’s long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population’s energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region.

The second was the Chicago school’s Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein’s book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable population that would be ripe for a US-controlled “colour revolution”.

The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.

Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted – from Pinochet’s Chile to Yeltsin’s Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning from past errors. As Bush’s senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the “reality-based community”: “We’re an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality.”

The birth of Islamic State

The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region’s finest public health services.

One can argue about the initial causes of the uprising against Assad that erupted in Syria in 2011. Did it start as a popular struggle for liberation from the Assad government’s authoritarianism? Or was it a sectarian insurgency by those who wished to replace Shia minority rule with Sunni majority rule? Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate change led to repeated crop failures? Or are all these factors relevant to some degree?

Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture I want to address.

The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be found and that served as the pretext for Bush’s campaign of Shock and Awe.

The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing, flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.

A dark US vanity project

As Rove and Cheney played around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington’s policy had engineered.

The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.

This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west’s chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria.

Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.

The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.

From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.

A giant red herring

Trump is now ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly only temporarily – he is closing a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East, one intimately tied to Islamic State.

What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place? They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.

But their claims that Trump has “no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East” is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.

First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.

Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.

With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. Its state-building rationale is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. It will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.

Doomed Great Game

The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With the US departure, and the Kurds too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time risks sucking in the Turkish army, which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.

The Syrian Kurds’ predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad’s protection to foil Turkish ambition. The best hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army’s return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.

That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.

Nancy Pelosi’s purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump’s Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against the head-chopping extremists?

Pelosi and the Democratic leadership’s bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party’s only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.

Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don’t care about Syria, or its population’s welfare. They don’t care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them.

Economic war on Iran is war on Eurasia integration

US sanctions on Iran should be interpreted as a piece in a much larger chessboard, says Brazilian analyst Pepe Escobar in his investigative article for Asia Times, titled: “Economic war on Iran is war on Eurasia integration”.

Hysteria reigned supreme after the first round of US sanctions were reinstated against Iran over the past week, yet the key aspect of the economic war unleashed by the Trump administration has been overlooked.

The US sanctions offensive, launched after Washington’s unilateral pullout from the Iran nuclear deal, should be interpreted as an advance gambit in the New Great Game at whose center lies China’s New Silk Road – arguably the most important infrastructure project of the 21st century — and overall Eurasia integration.

The Trump administration’s maneuvers are a testament to how China’s New Silk Road, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), worry the US establishment.

On closer look we find Eurasian integration on the rise. Eurasian integration is on display in Astana, where Russia, Iran and Turkey are deciding the fate of Syria, in coordination with Damascus.

Iran’s strategic depth in post-war Syria simply won’t vanish. The challenge of Syrian reconstruction will be met largely by President Bashar al-Assad’s allies: China, Russia and Iran.

Echoing the Ancient Silk Road, Syria will be configured as an important BRI node, key to Eurasia integration.

In parallel, the Russia-China strategic partnership – from the intersection between the BRI and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) to the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the solidifying of BRICS Plus — has immense economic stakes in the stability of Iran.

The complex interconnection of Iran with both Russia (via the EAEU and the International North-South Transportation Corridor) and China (via BRI and oil/gas supplies) is even tighter than in the case of Syria in the past seven years of civil war.

Iran is absolutely essential for Russia-China for the partnership to allow any “surgical strike” — as floated in Syria — or worse, hot war initiated by Washington.

A case could be made that with his recent overture to President Putin, President Trump is trying to negotiate some sort of freeze in the current configuration — a remixed Sykes-Picot for the 21st century.

But that assumes Trump’s decision-making is not being dictated or co-opted by the US neocon cabal that pressed for the 2003 war in Iraq.

If the situation turns volcanic when the US oil sanctions on Iran kick in by early November, an actual remix of the recent North Korea scenario would be in the cards. Washington simultaneously sent three carrier battle groups to terrify North Korea. That failed – and Trump ended up having to chat with Kim Jong-un.

Despite the US record around the world — endless threats of a Venezuela invasion with the only tangible result an amateurish, failed drone attack; 17 years of endless war in Afghanistan, with the Taliban still as immovable as the Hindu Kush peaks; the “4+1” – Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, plus Lebanon’s Hezbollah – winning the war in Syria — US neocons scream and shout about striking Iran.

As with North Korea, Russia and China will send unmistakable signs that Iran is in their closely coordinated Eurasian sphere of influence, and any attack on Iran will be considered an attack on the whole Eurasian sphere.

Stranger things have happened, but it’s hard to see any rational actors in Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh wishing to have Beijing and Moscow — simultaneously — as lethal enemies.

All across Southwest Asia, there are no doubts the official Trump administration – and in fact, the whole Beltway – policy on Iran is change of government, as if the Islamic Republic is a pushover.

So from now on, short of hot war, the new rules of the game spell out stepped-up cyber-warfare.

From Washington’s point of view, in terms of return on investment that’s a relative bargain; cyber-warfare keeps the Russia-China partnership away from direct involvement while in theory digging deeper into what they envisage the economic collapse of Iran, heavily advertised as imminent by Trump administration officials.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry could not be more explicit on the US effort to re-impose sanctions on Iran. It said: “China’s commercial cooperation with Iran is open and transparent, reasonable, fair and lawful, not violating any United Nations Security Council resolutions.”

That echoes the Russian Foreign Ministry on the US sanctions: “This is a graphic example of Washington’s continued violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 and trampling upon the norms of international law.”

Trump for his part has resorted to threats, saying any nation that violates the sanctions against Iran will not do business with the US.

Good luck with having support from Turkey or Qatar – completely dependent on Iran for food, use of civilian airspace and sharing gas exploration in South Pars. Not to mention Russia-China assuring Tehran’s back on all fronts.

The die is cast. China not only will continue but also will increase its purchase of Iranian oil and gas. The Chinese auto industry – currently with 10% of the Iranian market – will simply take over as the French leave. Chinese companies are already responsible for 50% of auto parts imported into Iran.

Russia for its part has pledged to invest as much as $50 billion in Iranian oil and natural gas. Moscow is very much aware of the Trump administration’s next possible step; imposing sanctions on Russian companies investing in Iran.

Washington simply can’t “not do business” with China. The entire US defense industry is dependent on China for rare earth materials. Since the 1980s, US multinationals set up their export supply chains in China with direct encouragement of the US government.

The EU for its part has enforced a Blocking Statute – never used before, although in existence for already two decades — to protect European companies, even coming to the point of imposing fines on businesses that pull out of Iran because of plain fear.

In theory, that shows some guts. And yet, as EU diplomats in Brussels told Asia Times, there’s a major conditional: US satrapies/vassals abound across the EU, so quite a few EU-based companies, as in the case of Total and Renault, in the end, will simply roll over.

Meanwhile, what Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said about US unilateralism – the world “is sick and tired” of it – keeps echoing all across the Global South.

This means any wrong move by the US to take military action will result in the unleashing of the ‘Mother of All Financial Hurricanes’.

Those clamoring for war with Iran cannot possibly understand that the nightmare scenario of a Strait of Hormuz/Persian Gulf energy transit closure – the choke point for 22 million barrels of oil a day – would represent, ultimately, the death of the petrodollar.

The Strait of Hormuz can be configured as the Achilles heel of the entire West/US economic power; a closure would detonate the mother of all hurricanes in the quadrillion-dollar derivatives market.

Unless China does not buy Iranian energy, US sanctions — as a geo-economic tool — are essentially meaningless.

Certainly not, of course, for the “Iranian people” so dear to the Beltway, as more day-to-day financial grief is already setting in, side by side with a sense of national cohesiveness in the face, once again, of an external threat.

China and Russia have already pledged to continue to implement the JCPOA, alongside the EU-3; after all, this is an UN-endorsed multilateral treaty.

Beijing has already informed Washington in no uncertain terms that it will continue to do business with Iran. So the ball is now in Washington’s court. It will be up to the Trump administration to decide whether to sanction China for its unwillingness to stop trading with Iran.

It’s not exactly a wise move to threaten China – especially with Beijing on an irresistible historical ascendancy. India’s Jawaharlal Nehru threatened China and lost a big chunk of Arunachal Pradesh to Chairman Mao. Brezhnev threatened China and faced the wrath of the PLA on the banks of the Ussuri River.

China is able to cut the US off in a minute from its rare earth exports, creating a US national security catastrophe. Now that’s when a trade war will enter real incandescent territory.