Assad’s Death Warrant

by Mike Whitney

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“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.”

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria, Politico

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.

The main driver of the conflict is the country that’s toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2.  (See: Bill Blum here.) We’re talking about the United States of course.

Washington is the hands-down regime change champion, no one else even comes close. That being the case, one might assume that the American people would notice the pattern of intervention, see through the propaganda and assign blame accordingly. But that never  seems to happen and it probably won’t happen here either. No matter how compelling the evidence may be, the brainwashed American people always believe their government is doing the right thing.

But the United States is not doing the right thing in Syria. Arming, training and funding Islamic extremists — that have killed half a million people, displaced 7 million more and turned the country into an uninhabitable wastelands –is not the right thing. It is the wrong thing, the immoral thing. And the US is involved in this conflict for all the wrong reasons, the foremost of which is gas. The US wants to install a puppet regime in Damascus so it can secure pipeline corridors in the East, oversee the transport of vital energy reserves from Qatar to the EU, and make sure that those reserves continue to be denominated in US Dollars that are recycled into US Treasuries and US financial assets. This is the basic recipe for maintaining US dominance in the Middle East and for extending America’s imperial grip on global power into the future.

The war in Syria did not begin when the government of Bashar al Assad cracked down on protestors in the spring of 2011. That version of events is obfuscating hogwash.  The war began in 2009, when Assad rejected a Qatari plan to transport gas from Qatar to the EU via Syria. As Robert F Kennedy Jr. explains in his excellent article “Syria: Another pipeline War”:

“The $10 billion, 1,500km pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey….would have linked Qatar directly to European energy markets via distribution terminals in Turkey… The Qatar/Turkey pipeline would have given the Sunni Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world. ….

In 2009, Assad announced that he would refuse to sign the agreement to allow the pipeline to run through Syria “to protect the interests of our Russian ally….

Assad further enraged the Gulf’s Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian approved “Islamic pipeline” running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. The Islamic pipeline would make Shia Iran instead of Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran’s influence in the Mid-East and the world…”

Naturally, the Saudis, Qataris, Turks and Americans were furious at Assad, but what could they do? How could they prevent him from choosing his own business partners and using his own sovereign territory to transport gas to market?

What they could do is what any good Mafia Don would do; break a few legs and steal whatever he wanted. In this particular situation, Washington and its scheming allies decided to launch a clandestine proxy-war against Damascus, kill or depose Assad, and make damn sure the western oil giants nabbed the future pipeline contracts and controlled the flow of energy to Europe. That was the plan at least. Here’s more from Kennedy:

“Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.

Repeat: “the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline”, he signed his own death warrant. That single act was the catalyst for the US aggression that transformed a bustling, five thousand-year old civilization into a desolate Falluja-like moonscape overflowing with homicidal fanatics that were recruited, groomed and deployed by the various allied intelligence agencies.

But what’s particularly interesting about this story is that the US attempted a nearly-identical plan 60 years earlier during the Eisenhower administration. Here’s another clip from the Kennedy piece:

“During the 1950′s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers … mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism — which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism….

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949 — barely a year after the agency’s creation…. Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. (so)… the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime…..

(CIA agent Rocky) Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime….

But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government….(Then) Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason.” (Politico)

See how history is repeating itself? It’s like the CIA was too lazy to even write a new script, they just dusted off the old one and hired new actors.

Fortunately, Assad –with the help of Iran, Hezbollah and the Russian Airforce– has fended off the effort to oust him and install a US-stooge. This should not be taken as a ringing endorsement of Assad as a leader, but of the principal that global security depends on basic protections of national sovereignty, and that the cornerstone of international law has to be a rejection of unprovoked aggression whether the hostilities are executed by one’s own military or by armed proxies that are used to achieve the same strategic objectives while invoking  plausible deniability. The fact is, there is no difference between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Obama’s invasion of Syria. The moral, ethical and legal issues are the same, the only difference is that Obama has been more successful in confusing the American people about what is really going on.

And what’s going on is regime change: “Assad must go”. That’s been the administration’s mantra from the get go. Obama and Co are trying to overthrow a democratically-elected secular regime that refuses to bow to Washington’s demands to provide access to pipeline corridors that will further strengthen US dominance in the region.  That’s what’s really going on behind the ISIS distraction and the “Assad is a brutal dictator” distraction and the “war-weary civilians in Aleppo” distraction. Washington doesn’t care about any of those things. What Washington cares about is oil, power and money. How can anyone be confused about that by now?  Kennedy summed it up like this:

“We must recognize the Syrian conflict is a war over control of resources indistinguishable from the myriad clandestine and undeclared oil wars we have been fighting in the Mid-East for 65 years. And only when we see this conflict as a proxy war over a pipeline do events become comprehensible.”

That says it all, don’t you think?

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

ISIS and a global agenda

Quashing rumours about his death, terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared in a video clip released by the ISIS – the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The terror incorporate is also known as IS or Islamic State, implying that its reach is global.  In the video message, al-Baghdadi was heard to say that the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka were a revenge for the group’s defeat in Syria’s Baghouz region, the fall of which ended the so-called ISIS-caliphate which he declared in 2014. 

After crowning himself as the Khalifah or Caliph of the Muslim world, he urged the Muslims to swear allegiance to him and invited Muslims around the world to migrate to the new state. 
Barring a few, the world over the Muslims denounced him as a dangerous terrorist.  The misguided few, who were taken up by al-Baghdadi’s initial successes, saw him as a modern day Saladin, the legendary Muslim hero during the crusades.  

"Certainly, the ISIS does not represent Islam. Al-Baghdadi and his group have only brought insult to Islam"

In its determination to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the West turned a blind eye when some of its Muslim citizens moved to Syria and joined ISIS and other terror groups. These battle-hardened terrorists, upon their return, pose a major security threat to their native countries, as they are linked up through a cyber-terrorism network. 
Certainly, the ISIS does not represent Islam. Al-Baghdadi and his group have only brought insult to Islam. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s real name is Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri. It was unfortunate, that he sullied the good name of Islam’s first Caliph Abu Bakr to lead his terror group.  Caliph Abu Bakr was a pious ruler and, was credited with presenting Islam’s version of the social contract, centuries before Britain’s Magna Carta in 1215. On the contrary, terror-incarnate al-Baghdadi has chosen to ignore Islam’s humanitarianism.  In Iraq, Syria and other countries, ISIS has killed tens of thousands of Muslims. The group even wanted to destroy the Ka’bah, Islam’s holiest monument in Makkah.  The ISIS is as an enemy to Muslims as it is to the rest of the humanity.  Its evil doctrine attracts only the fanatics and the frustrated people brainwashed by its depressive narratives on the status of the Muslim world and the boast that only ISIS can restore Islam’s glory.

But what is ISIS? The more we ponder on this question, the more we become firmer in the view that it was a mercenary force. 
It did not emerge out of nothing.  The circumstances that led to its emergence were created by the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.  Blame President George W. Bush for creating this evil.  The then Arab League Secretary General Amr Mousa warned Bush that a US war on Iraq would “open the gates of hell”. Open it did. The demons have escaped and are wreaking havoc. But they are cowards, for their victims are often unarmed civilians.  The ISIS came into the scene around 2011 at a time when the US was ending its combat operations in Iraq and Syria was being plunged into a civil war. 
Terror leader al-Baghdadi was born in 1971 in Samara, Iraq. He has a PhD in Islamic studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad. Certain events associated with al-Baghdadi’s life raise serious questions.  He was picked up by US forces in Fallujah in 2004 and sent to heavily guarded prisons as a ‘civilian detainee.’  He was allowed to mingle with hardcore al-Qaeda members. He succeeded in taming the unruly prisoners while he served less than a year in prison. 

After his release, he joined the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006 in a US military operation, the group remained defunct for five year until al-Baghdadi claimed its leadership in 2011. Under his leadership, the AQI emerged stronger, with thousands of Saddam Hussein’s jobless soldiers joining the group. A series of success stories followed. Chief among them was the attack on the heavily guarded Abu Ghraib jail where the crème of the AQI fighters had been detained.  Al-Baghdadi freed them all – about 500 prisoners -- and transported them in pickup trucks to Syria.  Their arrival in Syria changed the ground situation in favour of the AQI. He then urged all Syrian groups to come under his command and warned of attacks if they did not comply. Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, defied the order and complained to the al-Qaeda leadership. Al-Baghdadi broke his ties with al-Qaeda and renamed the organisation as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

"Already in SL, opposition politicians see the danger of foreign troops, under the cover of fighting ISIS terror"

The US and Gulf Arab nations had supplied heavy weapons to various Syrian rebel groups. Soon, they ended up with ISIS. This enabled the group to capture Iraq’s Mosul and surrounding areas. Having captured large Syrian and Iraqi territories, ISIS declared its caliphate in 2014. Yet, the US showed no urgency to deal with the ISIS threat, because the ISIS was fighting the common enemy -- the Assad regime. Besides, the group also enjoyed the covert support of the US allies in the region.
In this international war on ISIS, civilians have become the biggest casualty, as ISIS makee them human shields. Last week, Amnesty International said that in the US attack on ISIS capital, Raqqa, some 1,600 civilians died. 
Middle East analysts have questioned Israel’s role in the Syrian war. Some allege Israel, which, like the West, wants Assad ousted, had acted as ISIS air force, often hitting Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah positions. It is also said the wounded extremists were treated in Israeli hospitals across the border. The ISIS’s lack of interest in the Palestinian freedom cause is also intriguing, these analysts point out.

Al-Baghdadi’s latest video message and warnings of a global jihad give the US the excuse to stay put in the Middle East and expand its military presence to other parts of the world, just as it did after the 9/11 attacks.  Already in Sri Lanka, opposition politicians see the danger of foreign troops, under the cover of fighting ISIS terror, establishing themselves in the country, a strategic location in the Indian Ocean. 

Sri Lanka faces the urgent need to wipe out ISIS terrorism from the country. Our military forces who know the terrain, the people and the cultural and religious sensitivity of the crisis, are capable of dealing with the ISIS threat. They are doing a great job.  We hope other nations prosecuting the global war on terror will be as determined as our soldiers in wiping out ISIS.