Avoiding the Failure of Libya: US Strategy in Syria

Stephen Gowans

Literally rivers of Syrians abandon a nation largely broken up by the imperial assault.

Literally rivers of Syrians stream out of a nation brutally broken up by the imperialist assault. The scenes are simply Dantesque, while in Washington people dance and champagne flows as usual. (Click on image.)

While Washington toppled a resource nationalist in Libya who annoyed US oil companies, it failed to install a successor government in a stable environment in which US interests could be effectively advanced. US policy in Syria emphasizes “an orderly political transition” in which Arab nationalists vacate the Syrian state, yielding to anti-nationalist US marionettes. The political transition is to be brought about by proxies, militant jihadists, who the United States and its allies will strengthen enough to weaken and dispirit the current government in Damascus but not enough to topple it and plunge the country into a Libya-style chaos.

Washington’s strategy in Syria is an implicit admission that its direct military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have failed to bring about its desired foreign policy objectives of establishing stable conditions in which pro-US regimes can carry out policies to advance Wall Street’s economic, and Washington’s interlinked political and military agendas, in those few remaining parts of the world that refuse to submit to US hegemony, alternatively described as the international dictatorship of US business interests .

The Pentagon won’t turn to destroying ISIS until its usefulness in advancing the US agenda of forcing a military stalemate and Assad’s exit through a political settlement has been realized. At that point, and only then, will the hammer come down.

To be sure, the objectives have been partially met. There’s a US-installed regime in Kabul, but the active resistance of the Taliban limits its room to maneuver to advance US goals. Sectarian strife in Iraq, largely the consequence of the divide and rule policies forced upon Iraqis by US occupying forces in the mid-2000s, has produced tension among Iraq’s major ethno-sectarian communities, while Iran competes with Washington for influence in the country. And the US-led (from behind) military operation in Libya—essentially a marriage of NATO air power with al-Qaeda foot soldiers to topple a “resource nationalist” whom US oil companies could no longer abide—has produced a failed state, utter chaos, and no reliable US puppet to take control of the country to reshape it in the interests of corporate USA.

Syrian army soldiers hail the recent victory in Qusayr. Assad still enjoys wide popularity in many sectors of the population, and most Syrians are aware of what awaits them at the hands of NATO proconsuls.

With these failures in mind, Washington has approached the project of purging Damascus of its governing Arab nationalist ideology more judiciously and with greater caution than it approached similar regime change projects in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The strategy is to force a political settlement in which the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his Arab nationalist colleagues step aside, leaving the infrastructure of the Syrian state in place, to be taken over by reliable anti-nationalist US marionettes. The political settlement is to be brought about by forcing a military stalemate between the Syrian government and Islamist rebels. At some point, it’s hoped, the Arab nationalists in Damascus will realize that their situation is hopeless, and sue for a graceful exit.

The key to the strategy is ISIS and other groups of fanatical Islamist militants. They must be allowed to be strong enough to maintain unrelenting military pressure on Damascus but not so strong that they topple the Syrian government. To achieve this delicate balance, ISIS is held in check by a US-led air campaign of containment, while other jihadists are managed through controls on the amount of arms, money and training they receive from their sponsors, the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, and the Gulf oil dictatorships.

The brutal and impudent destruction of Libya has produced a failed state, utter chaos, and no reliable US puppet to take control of the country to reshape it in the interests of corporate USA.

The nature of the US strategy has long been discussed openly in major US newspapers. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have revealed that: “The White House has drawn up elaborate plans for a post-Assad Syria that includes an orderly political transition that keeps the country together and preserves Western interests.” “U.S. officials are hoping for a diplomatic solution to keep national institutions in place.” “The U.S. … wants to keep technocratic elements of the state in place, seeking to avoid a repeat of what happened in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion”. “American policy is not to oust Mr. Assad precipitously, risking an extremist takeover, but to push him to a political settlement.” The United States doesn’t want “wholesale regime change, institution collapse, state collapse (as it) saw in Iraq.” Christine Wormuth, US undersecretary of defense for policy, points to “a political transition that would see Mr. Assad step down while preserving a government structure to avoid chaos.”

Having your cake and eating it, too. Washington created the wave of Jihadists, yet now it claims to be fighting them in the name of human rights and other hypocrisies.

Having your cake and eating it, too. Washington created the latest brand of Jihadists, yet now it claims to be fighting them in the name of human rights and other hypocrisies.

Major U.S. newspapers have also revealed that “The (US) end game requires a very careful calibration that doesn’t tip the meter in an unintended way toward groups that could produce the kind of post-Assad Syria that (the United States isn’t) looking for.” Underscoring this point “The Obama administration doesn’t want to tip the balance in favor of the opposition for fear the outcome may be even worse for U.S. interests”. “The White House wants to strengthen the opposition but doesn’t want it to prevail.”

Significantly, “The CIA’s mission…has been defined by the White House’s desire to seek a political settlement, a scenario that relies on an eventual stalemate among the warring factions rather than a clear victor. As a result…limits on the agency’s authorities enable it to provide enough support to help ensure that … U.S.-supported militias don’t lose but not enough for them to win.” “Gen. Martin Dempsey, (when he was) chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, (was) particularly outspoken with lawmakers about his concerns that weakening Mr. Assad too much could tip the scales in favor of al Qaeda-linked fighters.”

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ashington’s policy of forcing competing forces in Syria to bleed each other into exhaustion is looked upon favorably by the Israelis, who see it as coming straight out of the playbook of setting Arabs against each other, leaving the Zionists free to continue their project of usurping Arab territory as the Arabs descend into a hell of intra-ethnic internecine warfare. This is congenial to the Zionists’ “imperialism by the inch” as novelist Susan Abulhawa terms it. “Israeli officials have told their American counterparts they would be happy to see its enemies Iran, the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and al Qaeda militants fight until they are weakened.” Meanwhile, Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, notes that “This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie. Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no real threat from Syria.”

President Assad retains far more support that the Western media would admit.

A pro-Assad demonstration. If many Syrians did not stand behind him, the regime would have fallen a long time ago.

It seems clear now that US planning for a post-Assad Syria foresees an end to aid to its jihadist allies—the United States “has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years” through a covert CIA program—and an intensification of the US campaign against ISIS, if, and when, a political settlement is reached to purge the Syrian state of its Arab nationalist elements. Obama’s choice of words in declaring war on the self-proclaimed caliphate was not insignificant. The US president said that the Pentagon would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. So far US and allied forces have only degraded the militant group’s capabilities, holding it in check so that it doesn’t grow strong enough to topple the Arab nationalists, while not pressing so hard that ISIS is destroyed. The Pentagon won’t turn to destroying ISIS until its usefulness in advancing the US agenda of forcing a military stalemate and Assad’s exit through a political settlement has been realized. At that point, and only then, will the hammer come down.

The character of the Pentagon’s ISIS campaign is reflected in the complaints of many people, from Assad to Obama’s critics in Washington, that the campaign has been ineffective and seemingly half-hearted. Assad points out correctly that the Syrian Arab Army has borne the brunt of the fight against ISIS, and that the Syrian air force, small by comparison with US coalition forces, flies more missions.

When you follow media reports…you see that the rate of the airstrikes conducted by what they call a coalition against terrorism is sometimes less than 10 strikes a day or a little more…We are talking about a coalition which includes 60 countries, some of which are rich and advanced. On the other hand, the Syrian air force, which is very small in comparison… conducts in a single day many times the number of airstrikes…That’s why we say simply that there is no serious effort to fight (ISIS’s) terrorism, and what is being achieved by Syrian forces on the ground equals in one day what is being achieved by these states in weeks.

Veteran journalist Robert Fisk echoes Assad’s assessment. “I don’t think the U.S. is serious. Very occasionally, you can hear the rumble of American bombs. But they’re certainly not having much effect.”

According to US secretary of state John Kerry, “Our focus remains on destroying ISIL and also on a political settlement with respect to Syria.” US strategy might be more aptly summed up this way: “Our focus remains on destroying ISIL eventually and also on a political settlement with respect to Syria to be brought about, we hope, partly by the pressure ISIS and other jihadists can bring to bear on Damascus.”

According to Western dogma, Kerry, along with British foreign secretary Philip Hammond, are champions of democracy, on a moral plane far higher than that on which the Syrian president operates. After all, Assad is a dictator, or so we’re told, whose ‘brutal repression” of “largely” (i.e., not entirely) peaceful demonstrations in 2011 sparked an Islamist rebellion. It’s not clear how a peaceful call for democracy can almost instantly metamorphose into a violent rebellion on behalf of the anti-democratic project of creating a state based on the Quran. But this is not the only reason to question the narrative. The story suffers from another problem.

Islamist rebellions have been an ongoing feature of Syria’s modern history, antedating Bashar al Assad’s presidency. Tensions between secular Arab nationalists on the one hand, and conservative Islamists on the other, have been a staple of Syrian politics. The conflict has often been deliberately stoked by London and Washington, seeking to use political Islam to counter communist and nationalist threats to their domination of the Near East and its immense petroleum resources, no less in Syria than in Egypt (against Nasser), Iraq (against Saddam Hussein) and in Afghanistan (against a leftist, secular, modernizing government committed to eliminating discriminations based on race, sex and property.) Britain and the United States don’t want the populations of Western Asia owning and controling their own natural resources for use in their own interests. As Bernard Lewis put it in a 1992 article in the virtual house organ of the US State Department, Foreign Affairs, the danger to the United States of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was the possibility that it would lead to ”monopolistic control (by Arab nationalists) of (Arab) oil.” Damascus is perhaps the final redoubt of the kind of Arab nationalist thinking that inspired Lewis to call for a rethinking of the Middle East.

Curiously, Kerry and Hammond appear to be able to work themselves up into great fits of outrage over Assad, the “dictator”, who, contrary to the odious appellation Western officials and media have foisted upon him, is not as dictatorial as may be supposed. He was elected in a multi-candidate contest, and Syria has an elected legislature. At the same time, the two Western foreign ministers feel only the warmest regard for Saudi dictator, King Salman, the head of a family of parasites who owes his political position, privileges and immense wealth to hereditary succession and the patronage of his imperialist sponsor, the United States. The West recognizes no limits to its indulgence of the misogynistic, anti-Shia, sectarian, belligerent, democracy-abominating brutes in Riyadh, whose reciprocal indulgence of Western business interests is no less limitless. Apart from facilitating the Western oil industry’s accumulation of profits, the Saudi royal dictatorship uses oil revenues, not to develop the Arab nation as the Arab nationalists would do, but to keep the pipeline of money flowing to New York investment banks and Western weapons companies.

For their services in expanding the wealth of the West’s corporate elite, the Saudi despots get a pass. They can send Canadian-supplied light armored vehicles into Bahrain to violently repress protestors who call for a parliamentary democracy without fear the Canadian government will allow its rhetoric about promoting human rights scuttle future sales of more light armored vehicles to Riyadh. Recently asked to justify his policy of arming a repressive regime, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper could only lamely reply, “They’re our allies.” This was the same lame defense invoked by US State Department spokesman Mark Toner, when asked by a journalist for his reaction to the jaw-dropping news that Saudi Arabia, which has executed more than 100 people this year, mostly by beheading, has been selected to head a key U.N. human rights panel. “I don’t have any comment, don’t have any reaction to it,” said Toner. “I mean, frankly it’s—we would welcome it. We’re close allies.”

The nature of the blatant hypocrisy that indulges a medieval tyranny while seeking to regime-change an elected president was spelled out clearly in the pages of The Washington Post by a senior US official. “The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass. Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.” We need look no further to understand why the United States and its allies are using jihadists to try to force a political settlement in Damascus that would cleanse the Syrian state of a non-cooperative Arab nationalist ideology while giving a pass to the cooperative Saudi dictatorship to behead and crucify, sequester and veil women, prevent them from driving automobiles and subordinate them to male domination, and illegally invade, bomb and blockade Yemen (amply assisted, incidentally, by Washington and London whose high state figures never tire of singing paeans to the rule of law they have no intention of being bound by themselves.)

To return to Kerry and Hammond, the alleged democrats, and Assad, the alleged anti-democrat, which of the following statements reflects the spirit of democracy, and which reflects the spirit of its opposite, rule of a people without representation from abroad, (the very arrangement that American colonists rebelled against King George III over)?

Assad: For us, the president comes through the people and through elections, and if he goes, he goes through the people. He doesn’t go as a result of an American decision, a Security Council decision, the Geneva conference or the Geneva communiqué.

Hammond: “Assad has to go. He can’t be part of Syria’s long-term future.”

Who is Philip Hammond, a member of the British political elite, resident of a country half a world away from Syria, to say who Syrians can and can’t have as their president?

Hammond’s arrogance, as US policy on Syria, is an affront against both geography and democracy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Gowans is a prominent Canadian geopolitical analyst. He is the founding editor of What's left.

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UN Farce: Saudi Arabia to Head Human Rights Council.

Felicity Arbuthnot
An Orwellian obscenity, backed up by the Western powers.
What next? Netanyahu for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Below: One of many beheadings in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is as ready to practice this form of medieval execution as ISIS, which they helped to spawn, anyhow, along with the US and other reactionary players in the Middle East.

TRAVESTY AT THE UN

“All victims of human rights abuses should be able to look to the Human Rights Council as a forum and a springboard for action.” (Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, 12 March 2007, Opening of the 4th Human Rights Council Session.) Article 55 of United Nations Charter includes: “Universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.”

In diametrical opposition to these fine founding aspirations, the UN has appointed Saudi Arabia’s envoy to the United Nations Human Rights Council to head (or should that be “behead”) an influential human rights panel. The appointment was seemingly made in June, but only came to light on 17^th September, due to documents obtained by UN Watch (1.)

“… Mr Faisal Bin Hassan Trad, Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador at the UN in Geneva, was elected as Chair of a panel of independent experts on the UN Human Rights Council.

“As head of a five-strong group of diplomats, the influential role would give Mr Trad the power to select applicants from around the world for scores of expert roles in countries where the UN has a mandate on human rights.

Such experts are often described as the “crown jewels” of the HRC, according to UN Watch.

The “crown jewels” have been handed to a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world. Saudi Arabia will head a Consultative Group of five Ambassadors empowered to select applicants globally for more than seventy seven positions to deal with human rights violations and mandates.

SPECIAL: More on the real face of Saudi barbarism
CLICK ON THE BAR BELOW.

[learn_more] Saudi Arabia beheads man for sodomy (and “murder”)… and then CRUCIFIES his body

Originally published on March 29, 2013 \ The Muslim Issue

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith the farce of a legal system in Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Muslim world – who knows if this man was even guilty of anything at all. He never got a fair trial, never got a proper hearing, may have had no access to a lawyer, and there has been no requirement of actual solid evidence to convict him. The Saudi government is notoriously secretive which makes it even hard for Arabs at times to know what is happening in their own country. Many don’t know how many executions appear in the country at all although some say one day a week is dedicated to an all-day execution feast. If the executioner doesn’t kill ‘for a few days’ they give him a sheep to slaughter.

In Riyadh they perform beheadings at 9am every morning in a downtown public square equipped with a drain the size of a pizza box in its centre, surrounded by tea and coffee stalls and shops. Expatriates call it Chop Chop Square. That means that in Riyadh alone some 300+ beheadings take place a year, other regions not counted. So how can official reports claim that only 76 people got beheaded last year (2012) in Saudi Arabia?

The kingdom’s interior ministry announced the execution, stating that the man had murdered and sodomised another male. Both actions are punishable by death. ‘The Yemeni citizen Mohammed Rashad Khairi Hussain killed a Pakistani, Pashteh Sayed Khan, after he committed sodomy with him,’ said a statement carried by state news agency SPA.

The execution, in the southern city of Jizan, was followed by crucifixion, a punishment used by the ultra-conservative country for serious crimes. Saudi Arabia has been criticised in the international community for their harsh punishments, including executions by beheading and firing squad. Death by beheading has always been a source of tension between Saudi Arabia and the international community.

Human rights campaigners protest against beheadings in Saudi Arabia after eight Bangladeshi men were executed for an alleged murder.

In 2012, they executed 76 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures, while the US-based Human Rights Watch put the number at 69. The oil-rich kingdom follows a strict implementation of Islamic law, or Shariah, under which people convicted of murder, rape or armed robbery can be executed, usually by sword.

The announcement comes after Amnesty International released the final words of a man sentenced to death by firing squad. He was allegedly forced to confess after the authorities threatened to torture his mother. As well, seven juveniles were arrested and convicted for armed robbery and sentenced to death in the Southern city of Abha after their appeals to the king were rejected. One of the robbers was interviewed by the human rights charity before his death. Families of the men had pleaded to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for clemency but the executions were carried out as planned.

Faisal Bin Hassan Trad, now responsible for selecting the ‘crown jewels’ of the UN Human Rights Council. ITU Pictures under a Creative Commons Licence

One of the condemned men said: ‘I have nine hours left until I die. We found this out through friends and relatives who saw the market square being prepared for the execution. ‘There are now seven spots in the square for seven people to be shot. It’s going to be in public, in the market, in the city of Abha. ‘We don’t know what we are supposed to have done wrong. ‘We were forced to make confessions. We were mistreated by the investigators – they took our clothes and it was winter. They tortured us by suspending us from chains on the wall. ‘They also used psychological torture such as threatening they would bring in our mothers and torture them in front of us. ‘I didn’t kill anyone – we were tried for robbery and we were forced to confess. I hope the execution will be stopped. ‘I wish for it to be stopped and for a fair trial and for a reinvestigation. The trial was totally unjust.’

One of the men told The Associated Press that he was only 15 when he was arrested as part of a ring that stole jewelry in 2004 and 2005. It was also reported that they had no access to lawyers. The south has been marginalized and suffered discrimination by the powerful central Saudi region where the capital, Riyadh, and holy shrines of Mecca and Medina are located. It was reported on March 13 that the execution went ahead despite appeals from human rights charities. There was also an international outcry, including from human rights groups, after a Sri Lankan maid, Rizana Nafeek, was beheaded in public by sword.

Miss Nafeek was sentenced to death aged 17 in 2007 after her Saudi employer accused her of strangling his four-month-old baby two years earlier after a dispute with the child’s mother. A government spokesman said Riyadh: ‘deplores the statements made… about the execution of a Sri Lankan maid who had plotted and killed an infant by suffocating him to death one week after she arrived in the kingdom.’ The case soured the kingdom’s diplomatic relations with Sri Lanka, which recalled its ambassador to Saudi Arabia in protest. The UN’s main human rights body expressed ‘deep dismay’ at the beheading, while the European Union said it had asked Saudi authorities to commute the death penalty. Riyadh, however, rejected the statements as ‘external interference’ in its domestic affairs. The spokesman said: Saudi Arabia ‘respects… all rules and laws and protects the rights of its people and residents, and completely rejects any intervention in its affairs and judicial verdicts, whatever the excuse.’

And yet another case of Saudi brutality is documented below. These are the friends we keep.

“I did not kill. There is no God but God. I did not kill…Haram. Haram. Haram. Haram. I did not kill. I do not forgive you. This is injustice…” Final words of Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim seconds before being beheaded in the public streets of Mecca.

One of Islamic fanaticism’s latest acts of barbarism, is the beheading of a Burmese woman, Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, a resident of Saudi Arabia, who was convicted of the sexual abuse (rape) and murder of her seven-year-old stepdaughter (beaten to death with a rod). The stepdaughter according to some reports was raped with a broomstick.

Basim proclaiming here innocence until the end was dragged through the public streets of Mecca by four police officers, forced down and beheaded. The incident occurred a week ago while the world was focused on the caliphate that has expanded into Europe (not that it would have made a difference).

Raymond Ibrahim: While being held down the woman screamed the Islamic shehada — ‘There is no god but Allah!’ (in an effort to safeguard her life) and the word ‘haram!’ (i.e., it’s a sin to kill her, based on her claim that she is innocent), and ‘You are unforgiven!’ The rest of her constant yells consisted of ‘I did not kill!’ and ‘this is unjust!’

According to human rights activist, Mohammed al-Saeedi, the Saudis normally administer some sort of painkillers (as if that makes their methods more humane?) to numb the prisoners prior to execution but chose not to do the same in this instant. They wanted Basim to suffer.

Independent.co.uk | The Saudi Ministry of the Interior said in a statement that it believed the sentence was warranted due to the severity of the crime…The beheading is part of an alarming trend, which has seen the kingdom execute seven people in the first two weeks of this year. In 2014 the number of executions rose to 87, from 78 in 2013…

Residents of Saudi Arabia such as Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim are forced to convert to Islam. Even worse, many are often accused, convicted and killed of crimes committed by their employers.

A Muslim Issue? (But where do Western liberals get the moral authority to criticize? That’s what a criminal foreign policy does: it destroys all semblance of honesty in a moral judgment. However, as documented here, and elsewhere, some pretty ugly things do occur with horrendous frequency in many countries where Islamic culture predominates. And for a culture that is so stiflingly conservative, some sexual crimes present huge contradictions. Consider:

The rape of young children is not an unusual crime in Saudi Arabia where Muslim men are legally entitled to sodomize their own daughters, even as newborns. There is no crime in Islam for a man to rape, beat or murder his own wife or child. A man may murder his own young child should he suspect the child to not be a virgin. This sounds completely bizarre in the West. But incest is common in Islamic societies, so many young children may not actually be virgins which is revealed through medical exams.

This lenient law that permits incest, sodomy and murder changes if the accusation is made against a foreigner, a foreign worker, or an accusation against (generally) a poor person by a rich person. Then the strictest measure of Sharia law is applied.

Compounding their never-ending acts of barbarism and cruelty, the incident has sparked outrage throughout Saudi Arabia but not because of the beheading of which the Saudis could care less. They are outraged that someone videotaped the execution and then posted it online.

DailyMail.co.uk

Now Saudi authorities have arrested someone for filming the execution, local media reports. But it was not clear what crime he has been arrested for…Many Twitter users protested the video being circulated on the internet because it could be seen by the woman’s family, but did not object to the beheading itself. Basim was one of 10 people beheaded In Saudi Arabia so far this year. Saudi Arabia executed 87 people last year, up from 78 in 2013…

There is not one Muslim or non-Muslim nation where one can’t find [conservative] Muslims within its borders committing horrific acts against women and children.

See also: U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies (New York Times, Sept. 20, 2015)

[/learn_more]

ARTICLE BY MS ARBUTHNOT CONTINUES HERE

In a spectacular new low for even a UN whose former Secretary General, Kofi Annan, took eighteen months to admit publicly that the 2003 invasion of, bombardment and near destruction of Iraq was illegal, UN Watch points out that the UN has chosen: “a country that has beheaded more people this year than ISIS to be head of a key Human Rights panel …” (2)

“Saudi Arabia was also one of the countries which bombed Iraq in 2003, an action now widely accepted as illegal. It is perhaps indicative of their closeness to the US that the bombardment of Yemen is mirror-named from the Pentagon Silly Titles for Killing People lexicon: “Operation Decisive Storm.” Iraq 1991 was of course: “Operation Desert Storm”

In May, just prior to the appointment, the Saudi government advertised for eight extra executioners to: “ … carry out an increasing number of death sentences, which are usually beheadings, carried out in public” (3.)

Seemingly: “no special qualifications are needed.” The main function would be executing, but job description: “also involves performing amputations …”

The advert was posted on the website of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of the Civil Service.

By 15^th June this year executions reached one hundred “far exceeding last year’s tally and putting (the country) on course for a new record” according to The Independent (15^th June.) The paper adds that the Kingdom is set to beat its own grisly, primitive record of one hundred and ninety two executions in 1995.

The paper notes that: “ …the rise in executions can be directly linked to the new King Salman and his recently-appointed inner circle …”

Late King Abdullah and new King Salman.

In August 2014, Human Rights Watch reported nineteen executions in seventeen days – including one for “sorcery.” Adultery and apostasy can also be punished by death.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n a supreme irony, on the death of King Salman’s head chopping predecessor, Salman’s half brother King Abdullah in January (still current decapitation record holder) UK Prime Minister David Cameron ordered flags flown at half mast, including at the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, leading one MP to question: “On the day that flags at Whitehall are flying at half-mast for King Abdullah, how many public executions will there be?”

Cameron apparently had not read his own Foreign and Commonwealth Office Report citing Saudi as “a country of concern.”

Reacting to a swathe of criticism, a spokesperson for Westminster Abbey responded: “For us not to fly at half-mast would be to make a noticeably aggressive comment on the death of the King of a country to which the UK is allied in the fight against Islamic terrorism.” (sic)

The Abbey’s representative appears to have been either breathtakingly ignorant or stunningly uninformed. In December 2009 in a US Embassy cable (4) the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton wrote that:

“While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.”

Moreover: “ … donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide … engagement is needed to … encourage the Saudi government to take more steps to stem the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia-based sources to terrorists and extremists worldwide.”

At home women are forbidden: “from obtaining a passport, marrying, traveling, accessing higher education without the approval of a male guardian.” (HRW Report, 2014.) Saudi Arabia is also of course, the only country in the world where women are forbidden to drive.

The country is currently preparing to behead twenty-one year old Ali Mohammed al-Nimr. He was arrested aged seventeen for participating in anti-government protests and possessing firearms – the latter charge has been consistently denied. Human rights groups are appalled at the sentence and the flimsy case against him, but pointing out that neither “factors are unusual in today’s Saudi Arabia.” (Rule by intimidation, terrorising the population, is common in autocratic and fascistic societies.—Editors)

Following the beheading, al-Nimr’s headless body will be allegedly mounted: “on to a crucifix for public viewing.”(5)

What was that mantra issued unceasingly from US and UK government Departments in justification for blitzkriegs, invasions and slaughters in countries who “kill their own people”?

Numerous Reports cite torture as being widespread, despite the Saudis having subscribed to the UN Convention Against Torture.

There are protests at Saudi embassies across the world highlighting the case of blogger Raif Badawi, sentenced to a thousand lashes – fifty lashes a week after Friday prayers – and ten years in prison for blogging about free speech.

Since March, Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen – with no UN mandate – destroying schools, hospitals, homes, a hotel, public buildings, an Internally Displaced Persons camp, historical jewels, generating: “a trail of civilian death and destruction” which may have amounted to war crimes, according to Amnesty International. “Unlawful airstrikes” have failed to distinguish between military targets and civilian objects. “Nowhere safe for civilians”, states Amnesty (6, pdf.)

Further, the conflict … has killed close to 4,000 people, half of them civilians including hundreds of children, and displaced over one million since 25 March 2015.” There has been: “ … a flagrant disregard for civilian lives and fundamental principles of international humanitarian law (killing and injuring) hundreds of civilians not involved in the conflict, many of them children and women, in unlawful (disproportionate and indiscriminate) ground and air attacks.”

It is alleged that US-supplied cluster bombs have also been used. One hundred and seventeen States have joined the Convention to ban these lethal, indiscriminate munitions since December 2008. Saudi Arabia, of course, is not amongst them.

Saudi Arabia was also one of the countries which bombed Iraq in 2003, an action now widely accepted as illegal. It is perhaps indicative of their closeness to the US that the bombardment of Yemen is mirror-named from the Pentagon Silly Titles for Killing People lexicon: “Operation Decisive Storm.” Iraq 1991 was of course: “Operation Desert Storm”?

Saudi Arabia is also ranked 164th out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index. All in all the Saudis leading the Human Rights Council at the UN is straight out of another of George Orwell’s most nightmarish political fantasies.

Oh, and of course we are told that nineteen of the hijackers of the ‘plane that hit the World Trade Centre were Saudis – for which swathes of Afghanistan and region, Middle East and North Africa are still paying the bloodiest, genocidal price for the “War on Terror”– whilst Saudi’s representatives stroll in to the sunlight of the UN Human Rights body.

On the UN Human Right’s Council’s website is stated: “The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) represents the world’s commitment to universal ideals of human dignity. We have a unique mandate from the international community to promote and protect all human rights.” Way to go, folks.

About the author

Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist specialising in social and environmental issues with special knowledge of Iraq, a country which she has visited thirty times since the 1991 Gulf war. Iraq, she describes as: ‘sliding from the impossible, to the apocalyptic.’

With former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Co-ordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, she was senior Iraq researcher for John Pilger’s Award winning documentary: “Paying the Price – Killing the Children of Iraq” (Carlton/ITV March 2000), which has been aired worldwide and sent shockwaves through Washington and Whitehall. Arbuthnot has been nominated for a number of Awards for her coverage of Iraq, including the (EC) Lorenzo Natali Award for Human Rights Journalism, the Millenium Prize for Women; the Courage of Conscience Award and an Amnesty International Media Award.

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Vladimir Putin’s Foreign-Policy Objectives, & His Desire for U.S. to Be an Ally

putin-conferenceTable-photolenta_big_photo-2

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n September 4th, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin restated, as he has many times before, that he seeks a U.S.-Russian alliance to overcome the global Islamic jihad movement, in Syria, Iraq, and everywhere.

Then, on Tuesday September 8th, Yahoo News bannered, “Austria joins growing voices that say Assad must be part of Syrian solution,” and reported that Austria’s Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said: “In my opinion the priority is the fight against terror. This will not be possible without powers such as Russia and Iran.” German Economic News noted then that, “Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo had already called on Monday for negotiations with Assad to end the war.”

Eric Zuesse, crosspost with strategic-culture.org (first iteration).

However, the U.S. government is strongly opposed to accepting Putin’s offer of an alliance to overcome Islamic jihad.

Putin’s foreign-policy objectives are consistent; and his latest turn fits with all that has preceded, which has been his single-minded focus, ever since he first became Russia’s leader in 2000: to defeat the global threat of Islamic jihad, which has been the chief military concern for Russia itself, ever since the First Chechen War, during 1994-96, radicalized the predominantly Sunni (Saudi-based) Muslim Chechen Republic, to separate themselves from the predominantly Orthodox Catholic Russia. By the time of Putin’s contest for the Presidency in 2000, Putin’s hard line against religious separatism became a leading factor in his electoral victory.

On 11 February 2004, this is how the pro-Western Moscow Times, which wikipedia refers to as “the first Western daily to be published in Russia,” described “Putin and the Chechen War: Together Forever”:

, Putin launched an “anti-terrorist operation” in Chechnya. Suddenly Putin was the No. 1 politician in the country. …

The Chechen fighters were operating on the assumption that the Kremlin would not tolerate substantial losses on the eve of the election. This is why Chechen detachments flouted military logic and remained in Grozny after it was surrounded, continuing to offer fierce resistance.

June 2000 Putin’s support would have evaporated. This concern probably explains Yeltsin’s decision to step down early, bringing the election forward by several months.

I [Alexander Golts] doubt that any Russian politician today would have the nerve to remind Putin of the promises he made back in 2000. He vowed “to crush the terrorist scum’.”

However, Simon Shuster, who likewise is anti-Putin, had this to say about Chechnya, in the cover story of TIME, eleven years later, on 22 June 2015:

Chechnya has undergone a striking transformation. Its cities have been rebuilt with money from Moscow. All traces of its separatist rebellion have been suppressed. And most importantly, a new generation has been raised to respect—at times even to worship—the Russian leader and his local proxies. With no clear memories of the wars for independence, the young people of Chechnya are now the best guarantee that Russia’s hold over the region will persist.

Putin might not have “crushed the terrorist scum,” but he has held it at bay for long enough a time to reestablish relative peace in Chechnya, along with a previously unparallelled degree of prosperity.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he International Crisis Group, a pro-Western and anti-Russian NGO, and an affiliate of NATO’s Atlantic Council, vigorously criticizes the authoritarianism and cult of personality that Putin has imposed in Chechnya, even while reluctantly acknowledging that:

The number of Chechens in the insurgency has been steadily decreasing. With their centuries-long record of being ready to die for their independence, Chechens do not seem very susceptible to the suicidal ideology of a global jihad. Many who are have joined the conflict in Syria, which has significantly drained the human resources of the North Caucasus insurgency overall, but especially in Chechnya. A Chechen interior ministry source estimated in 2013 that 200-500 Chechens were fighting in Syria.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Islamic jihadists are more comfortable in, and more accepted by the residents of, the anti-Assad, pro-Sunni, areas of Syria, doing war against Shiia Muslims, and against the Russian-supported secular Shiia President Assad, than they are back home in their native land (Chechnya in Russia). Even Putin’s enemies acknowledge Putin’s successes against the Saudi-based Sunni international Islamic jihad movement. Putin has become an experienced specialist in the war against Islamic terrorism.

Whereas the United States simply spreads Islamic jihad, even while bombing jihadists and creating more martyrs for “the cause” of jihad, Russia has found ways instead to push back effectively against the Saudi-originated movement of Islamic jihad, and to develop, during decades, a peaceful regional diversity, which can encompass even areas where (as in Chechnya) Islamic or sharia law is imposed, and do this even within a predominantly Christian-majority nation (such as Russia, but this also describes the United States).

“The United States opposes Islamic jihad (a monster largely of its own invention), but it opposes Russia more…”

The U.S. never had to deal with the challenge that Russia has, of containing within itself a majority-Muslim state, and especially not containing a state whose majority are Sunni Muslim, the variant of Islam that (unlike Shiia Islam) produces jihadists, people with suicide-belts etc., who seek to impose a global Caliphate, a worldwide regime that imposes strict Islamic law.

The ICG report on Chechnya criticizes today’s Chechnya, by saying that, “Much of the population lives off pensions and welfare payments,” and that corruption and clan-rule are the norm, but all that’s really new in this is actually the peace, and the pensions: corruption and clan-rule have been the rule in Chechnya for centuries, at the very least.

Simon Shuster’s video at TIME, about today’s Chechnya, opens:

The kids growing up in Chechnya these days are a lot luckier than their parents and their grandparents. At least the youngest ones have only known their homeland to be a peaceful and even quite beautiful place, full of enormous mosques, and skyscrapers, and shopping districts, and fast-food joints.

Shuster then refers to the civil war, but he says, “Today, Chechnya is a very different place,” and he acknowledges that the adults there, who remember the wars, are much happier now, that the jihadists are gone, or dead.

Kadyrov: Moscow’s man in Chechnya, but more independent than many think.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]l Jazeera television, which is controlled by gas-rich Qatar’s anti-Russian Sunni royal family, the Thanis, has criticized Putin for his placing in control of Chechnya the anti-jihadist Chechen Muslim, Ramzan Kadyrov. Thanis are also the chief financial backers for the Muslim Brotherhood, and, along with the Saud family (the main financial backers of Al Qaeda), are also among the main financial backers of the Syrian warriors who are fighting to replace the secular Shiite leader, Assad, by a sectarian Sunni Islamic regime in Syria.

The anti-Russian American newspaper, New York Times, headlined on 1 July 2004, “Qatar Court Convicts 2 Russians in Top Chechen’s Death,” and reported:

In U.S.-allied nations generally, anti-Russian jihadists have, to a large extent, been sympathetically received, and favorably reported (as in that cited NYT article).

So: Regardless of Putin’s success at dealing with Islamic jihadists, his invitation to the United States to work together to defeat the Sunni, and mainly Saudi and Thani-funded, international movement for Islamic jihad for a global Caliphate, will probably continue to meet only America’s cold shoulder. The United States opposes Islamic jihad, but it opposes Russia more.

Or, at least, the U.S. Government does. Obama primarily seeks to defeat Russia, not to ally with it — not even against Islamic jihad. And here’s how serious he is about that goal: In order to be able to install a NATO base on Russia’s doorstep in Russia’s neighbor Ukraine, the U.S. on 4 February 2014 selected a new leader for Ukraine, and installed that new leader in a coup three weeks later. This new government was/is rabidly anti-Russian. The U.S. and Russia have, accordingly, reactivated their nuclear-weapons arsenals, for a possible direct war, no longer merely conflicts via proxies. However, Putin still is inviting Obama to switch from being obsessed with defeating Russia, to becoming allied with Russia. He’s, in effect, saying to Obama: “Okay, if NATO is to continue, then let us into it, and let us all agree, together, that the enemy to peace and international progress is the Islamic jihadist movement, and all of the aristocrats who fund it.”

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]owever, Putin probably holds little hope of a favorable response to this. As the great investigative historian William F. Engdahl wrote, on 15 May 2015 at journal-neo.org:

Not long after the CIA and Saudi Intelligence-financed Mujahideen had devastated Afghanistan at the end of the 1980’s, forcing the exit of the Soviet Army in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself some months later, the CIA began to look at possible places in the collapsing Soviet Union where their trained “Afghan Arabs” could be redeployed to further destabilize Russian influence over the post-Soviet Eurasian space.

They were called Afghan Arabs because they had been recruited from ultraconservative Wahhabite Sunni Muslims from Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Arab world where the ultra-strict Wahhabite Islam was practiced. They were brought to Afghanistan in the early 1980’s by a Saudi CIA recruit who had been sent to Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden.

With the former Soviet Union in total chaos and disarray, George H.W. Bush’s Administration decided to “kick ‘em when they’re down,” a sad error. Washington redeployed their Afghan veteran terrorists to bring chaos and destabilize all of Central Asia, even into the Russian Federation itself, then in a deep and traumatic crisis during the economic collapse of the Yeltsin era.

In the early 1990s, Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, had surveyed the offshore oil potentials of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the entire Caspian Sea Basin. They estimated the region to be “another Saudi Arabia” worth several trillion dollars on today’s market. The US and UK were determined to keep that oil bonanza from Russian control by all means.

Engdahl also included this:

Bin Laden brought in another Saudi, Ibn al-Khattab, to become Commander, or Emir of Jihadist Mujahideen in Chechnya (sic!) together with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. No matter that Ibn al-Khattab was a Saudi Arab who spoke barely a word of Chechen, let alone, Russian. He knew what Russian soldiers looked like and how to kill them.

Chechnya then was traditionally a predominantly Sufi society, a mild apolitical branch of Islam. Yet the increasing infiltration of the well-financed and well-trained US-sponsored Mujahideen terrorists preaching Jihad or Holy War against Russians transformed the initially reformist Chechen resistance movement. They spread al-Qaeda’s hardline Islamist ideology across the Caucasus. Under [Richard] Secord’s guidance, Mujahideen terrorist operations had also quickly extended into neighboring Dagestan and Chechnya, turning Baku into a shipping point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia.

From the mid-1990s, bin Laden paid Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab the handsome sum of several million dollars per month, a King’s fortune in economically desolate Chechnya in the 1990s, enabling them to sideline the moderate Chechen majority.21 US intelligence remained deeply involved in the Chechen conflict until the end of the 1990s. According to Yossef Bodansky, then Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Washington was actively involved in “yet another anti-Russian jihad, seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces.” …

Basayev and al-Khattab imported fighters from the Saudi fanatical Wahhabite strain of Sunni Islam into Chechnya. Ibn al-Khattab commanded what were called the “Arab Mujahideen in Chechnya,” his own private army of Arabs, Turks, and other foreign fighters. He was also commissioned to set up paramilitary training camps in the Caucasus Mountains of Chechnya that trained Chechens and Muslims from the North Caucasian Russian republics and from Central Asia.

Enghdahl referred to a 26 April 2015 speech by Putin, which had that history as its background:

A short way into his remarks, the Russian President stated for the first time publicly something that Russian intelligence has known for almost two decades but kept silent until now, most probably in hopes of an era of better normalized Russia-US relations.

Putin stated that the terror in Chechnya and in the Russian Caucasus in the early 1990’s was actively backed by the CIA and western Intelligence services to deliberately weaken Russia. He noted that the Russian FSB foreign intelligence had documentation of the US covert role without giving details.

What Putin, an intelligence professional of the highest order, only hinted at in his remarks, I have documented in detail from non-Russian sources. The report has enormous implications to reveal to the world the long-standing hidden agenda of influential circles in Washington to destroy Russia as a functioning sovereign state, an agenda which includes the neo-nazi coup d’etat in Ukraine and severe financial sanction warfare against Moscow.

Brzezinski

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ot all of this has remained as being secret. There have even been some proud public participants in the American aristocracy’s hatred of Russians. For example: the child of dispossessed Polish nobility who emigrated to the United States and who as an adult was brought by the oil-baron heir David Rockefeller into several U.S. Presidential Administrations, Zbigniew Brzezinski (who co-founded with Rockefeller the Trilateral Commission) was quite proud of his anti-Russian hatred. (He had actually been born near Lviv, in the most pro-Nazi and anti-Russian part of present-day Ukraine. A racist hatred of Russians was intense there.) He was interviewed on page 76 of France’s Le Nouvel Observateur, on 15 January 1998, translated by Bill Blum, posted at Global Research by Michel Chossudovsky:

today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense!

There is even a video-clip, “Brzezinski And The Mujahideen 1979,” which shows Brzezinski in 1979, arriving in Afghanistan and telling the Mujahideen (soon to be called the Taliban), “Your cause is right, and god is on your side.”

In other words: the U.S. aristocracy wants to grab Russia’s natural resources; and the fact that Russia is no longer part of any international communist alliance, the fact that the Cold War is over, is not going to end the war by America’s aristocracy for control of Russia and its resources. All that the end of communism does for America’s aristocrats is remove what had been their excuse for revving up Joseph R. McCarthy, etc., to stir hatred of what had for decades been Russians’ ideology. All that’s left now is the American aristocracy’s own greed, and psychopathy. But Putin still is publicly inviting those people to join with Russia in a global alliance, perhaps an entirely new NATO, to crush the Islamic jihad movement.

The public should know about the invitation, and should know why it has always been (and is being) rejected.

They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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That Summer of 2000 in Croatia | Luciana Bohne on Neoliberalism’s Refugee Crisis

Luciana Bohne

[learn_more]

Image of Drowned Syrian, Aylan Kurdi, 3, Brings Migrant Crisis Into Focus

By ANNE BARNARD and KARAM SHOUMALI, SEPT. 3, 2015
The New York Times.

The father of two Syrian boys, who drowned with their mother as they were trying to reach Greece, spoke before they were laid to rest in the Syrian town of Kobani.

VIDEO BY THE TELEGRAPH (U.K.)

ISTANBUL — The smugglers had promised Abdullah Kurdi a motorboat for the trip from Turkey to Greece, a step on the way to a new life in Canada. Instead, they showed up with a 15-foot rubber raft that flipped in high waves, dumping Mr. Kurdi, his wife and their two small sons into the sea. Mr. Kurdi tried to keep the boys, Aylan and Ghalib, afloat, but one died as he pushed the other to his wife, Rehan, pleading, “Just keep his head above the water!” Only Mr. Kurdi, 40, survived. “Now I don’t want anything,” he said a day later, on Thursday, from Mugla, Turkey, after filling out forms at a morgue to claim the bodies of his family. “Even if you give me all the countries in the world, I don’t want them. What was precious is gone.”

syrian-Aylan-TurkishGendarme-open_turkey-articleLarge

A Turkish police officer carried the body of Aylan Kurdi, who drowned off the coast of Turkey’s Bodrum Peninsula on Wednesday.

It is an image of his youngest son, a lifeless child in a red shirt and dark shorts face down on a Turkish beach, that appears to have galvanized public attention to a crisis that has been building for years. Once again, it is not the sheer size of the catastrophe — millions upon millions forced by war and desperation to leave their homes — but a single tragedy that has clarified the moment. It was 3-year-old Aylan, his round cheek pressed to the sand as if he were sleeping, except for the waves lapping his face.

Rocketing across the world on social media, the photograph has forced Western nations to confront the consequence of a collective failure to help migrants fleeing the Middle East and Africa to Europe in search of hope, opportunity and safety. Aylan, perhaps more even than the anonymous, decomposing corpses found in the back of a truck in Austria that shocked Europe last week, has personalized the tragedy facing the 11 million Syrians displaced by more than four years of war.

The case of this young boy’s doomed journey has landed as a political bombshell across the Middle East and Europe, and even countries as far away as Canada, which has up to now not been a prominent player in the Syria crisis. Canadian officials were under intense pressure to explain why the Kurdi family was unable to get permission to immigrate legally, despite having relatives there who were willing to support and employ them. So far, the government has only cited incomplete documents, an explanation that has done little to quiet the outrage at home and abroad.

Mr. Kurdi, a Syrian Kurdish barber, and his brother Mohammad wanted to immigrate under the sponsorship of their sister, Tima Kurdi, 43, who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. She had invited Mr. Kurdi to live in her basement with his family and work in her hair salon. “They can work with me, doing hair, I can find them a job, and then when they are financially O.K., they can move out and be their own,” she said by phone on Thursday. Mr. Kurdi, too, said his sister had told Canadian authorities that she would be “responsible for our expenses,” but that “they didn’t agree.” In fact, Ms. Kurdi said, she had applied at first only for Mohammad’s family, teaming up with friends and relatives to make bank deposits to prove she could support the family. But in June, she said, Mohammad’s application was rejected for lack of a required document proving he had refugee status. But under Turkish refugee policies, such documents are nearly impossible for Syrians to come by. In any case, the experience persuaded the family that neither brother would ever get a Canadian visa. That, Ms. Kurdi said, was when she offered to help her brothers finance the boat trip — something, she said through tears, “I really regret.” Now, she said, “All what I really need is to stop the war. That’s all. I think the whole world has to step in and help those Syrian people. They are human beings.”

Aylan was named after a cousin, Ms. Kurdi’s son Alan, she said. She had never met Aylan or his brother Ghalib, 5, but saw and talked to them often on video chat. Aylan’s father grew up in Damascus, the Syrian capital, in the neighborhood of Rukineddine, but was originally from the Kurdish city of Kobani near the Turkish border. A year or so ago, he said in a telephone interview, he moved his family to Kobani because of increasing strains in Damascus. But he said it was not safe there either, with the Islamic State increasingly attacking the area. The family eventually moved to Istanbul, but it was difficult for Mr. Kurdi to support himself, and he had to borrow money from his sister for rent. Ms. Kurdi turned to her local member of Parliament, Fin Donnelly, who hand-delivered a letter appealing for help to Chris Alexander, the citizenship and immigration minister.

“Instead of focusing on the real issues, people blame the father for not putting a life jacket on his children,” the official said, noting that Turkish patrols have seen countless similar tragedies pass unnoticed. “Well, I’ll tell you this: Life jackets in sizes that small simply aren’t available here.” Indeed, many refugees buy plastic beach toys for flotation. The voyage started in the middle of the night, around 3 a.m. in five-foot seas, he said. It is the season of the relentless Meltemi winds, when the waves can be 15 feet high. Choking back emotion as he spoke, Mr. Kurdi described how he had flailed about while trying to find his children as his wife held on to the capsized boat. “I started pushing them up to the surface so they could breathe,” he said. “I had to shift from one to another. I think we were in the water for three hours trying to survive.” He watched helplessly as one exhausted child drowned, spitting up a white liquid, he said, then pushed the other toward the mother, “so he could at least keep his head up.” Mr. Kurdi then apologized, saying he could no longer speak, and ended the conversation with one parting message. “What I really want now is for the smuggling to stop, and to find a solution for those people who are paying the blood of their hearts just to leave,” he said. “Yesterday I went to one of the smuggling points and told people trying to get smuggled at least not to take their kids on these boats. I told them my story, and some of them changed their minds.”

Karam Shoumali reported from Istanbul, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by Ceylan Yeginsu from Istanbul; Ben Hubbard, Hwaida Saad and Maher Samaan from Beirut; and Ian Austen from Canada. Bernadette Murphy contributed research.[/learn_more]

That Summer of 2000 in Croatia

By Luciana Bohne

The new wretched of the earth are fleeing the American and European wars and the miserable impoverishment of their countries, rich in resources and lands, by the wars’ mother-ideology—rapacious neoliberalism. A report by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War informs us that, following 9/11, the victims of humanitarian wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone were 1.300.000 people. This body count excludes the victims of the subsequent wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Donbas—as well as Somalia, the symbol of this epochal turn to the balkanization of the world, which also expressed itself in the actual Balkans in the 90s, killing Yugoslavia.

I still remember the shock in the 1980s when I returned to Italy after a five-year absence and saw my first beggar–the first since the war. It’s not that I didn’t already know theoretically that market fundamentalism would have this result. But seeing a mother with a child in one arm and the other stretched out begging in the street of a post-war Italian city felt uncanny. And nothing in the mid-1980s had happened yet–nothing like the monumental misery that followed the West’s peacock strut across the globe after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s I write, 1.2 million people in Yemen are internally displaced; a lorry with seventy-one decomposing corpses of Syrian refugees was found abandoned on an Austrian highway. Vacationers on the Greek island of Kos, sunbathing on the beach throughout August, beheld the surreal emergence from the sea of exhausted “migrants”—and watched behind cold, dark sunglasses, without the wonder or solicitude of a Nausicaa, this new Odysseus shipwrecked by the phony “War on Terror,” collapsing on the beach. On the coast of dismembered Libya, “migrants”—30,000, reported in July– waited in terror on land to escape by terror on sea: fifty asphyxiated bodies found the previous week by Italian sea patrols. “Migrant,” is a legalistic cynicism to avoid using the legally binding term, “refugee,” which requires asylum.

Then, there was the Syrian little boy–drowned and washed up on a beach in Turkey.

But all this was preannounced.

Trieste, my city, borders on Croatia and Slovenia—Yugoslavia, once upon a time. In the so-called Cold War, Trieste was where the “Iron Curtain” ended in the south—and a “Cold War” hot spot. Fear of “commonism,” as Eisenhower and LBJ pronounced it, was propagandized by the military allied occupation, which governed the city until 1954. The American military base in Aviano, with nuclear capability, lies today fourteen kilometers from Trieste. From here, the bombers took off, headed for Serbia every day between March and June of 1999 at 7:30 am, my mother told me, shivering as she remembered the roar of the engines overhead.

A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft departs Aviano Air Base, Italy, during a close air support training exercise Dec. 17, 2013. Italy is today a gigantic American aircraft carrier in the middle of the Mediterranean. (USAF photo)

A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft departs Aviano Air Base, Italy, during a close air support training exercise Dec. 17, 2013. Italy today functions as a gigantic American aircraft carrier in the middle of the Mediterranean. (USAF photo)

I had to fight hard in my youth to get from under the induced spectral fear of “commonism.” Coming to New York City, ironically, helped: I realized that the United States, the capital of the “Free World,” was an apartheid society with an impeccable history of aggression, then displaying itself spectacularly with genocidal zeal in Vietnam. But I still held some tiny residue of the erstwhile illusion of a reformed, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, social-democratic Europe—more humane than the United States. The begging mother was, therefore for me, the last corrective sign to false consciousness.

Back in what I still call Yugoslavia in summer of 2000, a few kilometers east of Trieste, I was in Opatjia, on the Gulf of Kvarner, at the northern tip of the Adriatic Sea. Before 1918, Opatjia had been the Riviera of the land-locked Viennese aristocracy and bourgeoisie. After 1945, Opatjia was in Yugoslavia, and after the fratricidal wars of the 1990s, it found itself in Croatia. Sumptuous art nouveau villas perched on white karst rock over the emerald sea; luscious parks and gardens; shaded, wisteria-scented paths winding above lapping waves, the resort town’s beauty seemed both intensified and diminished by a sense of desolation, as though ruing that it no longer belonged to itself, or even to a country, but to something transient and mercenary, calling itself the market. Neo-capitalist entrepreneurs from Zagreb were buying up the villas for a song. I was buying all I could from the street vendors, who were actually beggars–exquisite lace work; artifacts in wood, even Tito’s bust in a junk shop. One woman told me her mother worked all winter to make the lace to sell in Optajia’s streets to feed the children. The lace I bought from her is my loot from the “triumph of the West” over “commonism”–way too cheap for its incomparable skill and beauty, worked in little light and less warmth by old, patient hands somewhere in the hinterlands of Croatia.

Luciana (r)) and a friend, in Istria.

It was a hallucinating summer. Ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a global nightmare was materializing before my very eyes, disorienting because it felt as though the earth had suddenly turned on its axis to move in the opposite direction. A world, as before the war in the bourgeois liberal democracies, full of scrupulous social meanness, xenophobia, farcical politics, racial prejudice, bombastic military adventurism, intellectual bankruptcy—a world now bloated with a triumphant lack of solidarity, smirking at all humanity with the hubris of naked greed. In 2000, this old New World Order had behind it already, to its shameful credit, the bombing of a capital in the heart of Europe: Belgrade; the slow starvation and bombing of Iraq; the invasion of Panama, and the martyrization of Somalia.

One Sunday, I was invited through a friend to the country retreat of one of those Zagreb entrepreneurs who were buying up Opatjia’s post-socialist real estate. The house was a converted farmhouse, overlooking the Gulf of Kvarner, as far as Rjieka, from its lofty height on the rocky hill. It was stuffed with antiques–“from Tuscany.” One large, cool room, as stark and white as a monastic refectory, was set aside for “artist seminars.” The dining room was dominated by a life-size (if such a thing can be anything like life) wooden crucifix. “Freedom,” said our host pointing at it. I thought he would make a good Mephistopheles to Marlowe’s Faust.

We ate under the grape pergola, in the heat of the day, with that emerald sea down below languidly caressing the white fringe of coastal rock–that invaluable Istrian rock which, transported to Venice, shapes its architectural bone structure. We were not the only guests: there was the young son, and his companions–all amiable, all at ease with their Western guests, including, and especially, with the guest of honor, the “retired” American Pentagon man, in his prime, ending his two-year contractor’s tour advising the Croatian military on “how to modernize its army.” Huh, huh. The NATO makeover artist. He read my mind. He was insidiously seductive in his approachable, laid-back posture of unassuming power. In fact, even the boiling heat of the day seemed to calm and cool down around the solid perimeter of his imperturbable self-assurance. Not that his family was all-military, he suggested. I was not to think, he implied, that he was a vulgar “ugly American.” They had a son, of whom they were “very proud,” who taught philosophy at Brooklyn College. He and I, he added with a charming, self-effacing smile, would have much in common. I found this performative vulnerability his most lethal weapon.

Flitting around from guest to guest, like a nectar-sucking bumblebee, rolled the rotund shape of a Brussels financial bureaucrat, scraping and bowing around the military contractor and the Zagreb neo-capitalist. He would have made a good barber of Seville. But when the opportunity arose to agree, behind the American’s back, with some cautious remark critical of the “coarseness of American culture compared to European culture,” the wasp came out of the bumblebee with all the resentment of an opportunistic, frustrated Othello’s Iago.

Seated around the white-clothed table, we were served authentic peasant food: grilled sardines, fresh from the sea; purple malvasia wine; the crusty Istrian bread made from hard, unprocessed flour I loved so much; aged, hard and salty goat cheese; Istrian prosciutto, sliced by hand from the whole ham, as had been the custom in prosperous peasant homes. The Zagreb cosmopolite knew how to pay homage to local culture—and he wanted us to know that he knew it.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut who cooked and prepared the food? That was the former owner of the farmhouse and now a “friend”—Branko. By then, I was hardly steady on my feet, drunk with wine, heat, and the surreal conversation of an unaccustomed cast of characters. I made my tottering way to the back, where Branko was grilling more sardines. My Serbo-Croatian amounts to a barbarous Istrian village dialect. I was under strict orders not to attempt it in public, lest I dishonor the family making such infamous, never-forgotten mistakes as asking an octogenarian lady from Bosnia on a train if she was pregnant when I meant was she well. But the sweet malvasia had worked magic, giving me a reckless linguistic confidence, so I dared ask Branko, “Where you in the wars?” Branko started flinging sardines on the grill at the speed of flying bullets. When he stopped, his face was stained with tears and his words broken, “Brother killing brother . . . it was terrible . . . Tito was dead . . . we fought the Nazis together and then we started killing each other.” Unless he was telling me he was pregnant. I can’t be sure. But, all the same, I thought how intolerably humiliating it must be for a former partisan to be cooking sardines in the house he no longer owned for a military, financial, capitalist troika lounging on the pergola. We both cried, in between a sardine or two and a glass of thick, fleshy, purple wine.

On the pergola, a party of Hungarians had joined the rest. They were staying in one the host’s villas turned hotel. They smiled politely at everyone and everything, like extras without a script. Urged energetically by the host, we dutifully scrambled down the steep, rocky decline in single file to see the host’s cave (he owned the whole mountain, apparently), no doubt a former partisan or arms hideout. As the sun sank red into the sea, inflaming the evening horizon, we all peered down into the cave’s dark mouth from the top. Nothing to see.

Driven home around midnight by the host’s son, I was racked by such fits of nausea that I vomited out the last of my rasping, embittered soul onto the hairpin mountain road at punctuated intervals. Was it the heat, the sardines, the malvasia, Branko’s grief, or this absurd, surreal New Europe, with its beggars in the streets and its rapacious compradores in the hills? I don’t know, but some intimation of the nasty world we live in now occurred there.

Luciana Bohne is a retired teacher.

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The Fake War on ISIS: US and Turkey Escalate in Syria

ERIC DRAITSER

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been long coddled and lionized by the US media. It is via utterly corrupt, ambitious politicians like Erdogan that the empire often attains its criminal ends. Erdogan has been party to Washington’s war against Assad from the beginning.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is late July 2015, and the media is abuzz with the news that Turkey will allow US jets to use its bases to bomb Islamic State (ISIS) targets in Syria. There is much talk about how this development is a “game-changer,” and how this is a clear escalation of the much ballyhooed, but more fictional than real, US war on ISIS: the terror organization that US intelligence welcomed as a positive development in 2012 in their continued attempts to instigate regime change against the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad.

The western public is told that “This is a significant shift…It’s a big deal,” as a US military official told the Wall Street Journal. What the corporate media fail to mention, however, is the fact that Turkey has been, and continues to be, a central actor in the war in Syria and, consequently, in the development and maintenance of ISIS. So, while Washington waxes poetic about stepping up the fight against the terror group, and lauds the participation of its allies in Ankara, the barely concealed fact is that Turkey is merely further entrenching itself in a war that it has fomented.

Of equal importance is the simple fact that a “war on ISIS” is merely a pretext for Turkey’s military engagement in Syria and throughout the region. Not only does Turkey’s neo-Ottoman revanchist President Erdogan want to flex his military muscles in order to further the regime change agenda in Syria, he also is using recent tragic events as political and diplomatic cover for waging a new aggressive war against the region’s Kurds, especially Turkey’s longtime foe the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).

In this way, Turkey’s recent moves should be seen as merely a new phase of its engagement in the regional war that it has helped foment. Contrary to western corporate media talking points, Turkey has not just recently become actively engaged in the conflict; Ankara has merely shifted its strategy and its tactics, moving from covert engagement to overt participation.

Same War, New Phase

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he immediate justification for the launching of renewed airstrikes by Turkey and the US is the expansion of the war against ISIS. In the wake of the bombing in Turkey’s majority Kurdish town of Suruç, which killed 32 youth activists, the Turkish government has allegedly struck hard against both ISIS and PKK targets. It is against this backdrop that any analysis of the new phase of this war must be presented.

First and foremost is the fact that even if one were to accept the Turkish government’s official story – the suicide bomber was linked to the Islamic State (ISIS) – not at all a certainty, the question of ultimate responsibility becomes central. While Ankara would have the world believe that its hands are clean, and that it is the innocent victim of international terrorism, the reality is that Turkey has done everything to foster and promote the growth of ISIS from the very beginning. As such, it is the Turkish government who must shoulder much of the blame for the Suruç bombing.

Since at least 2012, Turkey has been the principal conduit for weapons flowing into Syria. In June of that year, the NY Times confirmed that the CIA was smuggling weapons to anti-Assad forces from the Turkish side of the border using agents of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, long-time assets of US intelligence. Also in 2012, Reuters revealed that Turkey had “set up a secret base with allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar to direct vital military and communications aid to Syria’s rebels from a city near the border… ‘It’s the Turks who are militarily controlling it. Turkey is the main coordinator/facilitator. Think of a triangle, with Turkey at the top and Saudi Arabia and Qatar at the bottom,’ said a Doha-based source.”

“Since at least 2012, Turkey has been the principal conduit for weapons flowing into Syria. In June of that year, the NY Times confirmed that the CIA was smuggling weapons to anti-Assad forces from the Turkish side of the border…”

It is now also documented fact that Turkish intelligence (MIT) has been an active player in the ongoing campaign to arm and resupply the terror groups such as the al Nusra Front and others. The evidence of this fact was made public by the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet which published video footage along with transcripts from wiretaps confirming what many eyewitnesses have stated: Turkish security forces have been directly involved in shelling and support operations for Nusra front and other jihadi groups in and around Kassab, Syria, among other sites. Many of the very same terrorists who have been armed and supported by the Turkish government are today being held up as enemies of Turkey, and rationalization of the need for Turkish military intervention.

One of Erdogan’s murder machines in action.

So, with the inescapable understanding that Turkey’s government is the primary supporter and sponsor of terrorist groups in Syria, the justification for war becomes flimsy at best. But, if it’s not about fighting terror, then what exactly is Ankara’s objective? What does it hope to gain?

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the top of Erdogan’s agenda is using ISIS as a pretext for effecting the regime change in Syria that he has failed to bring about for these past four years. Despite providing weapons and cash, training sites and political cover, Turkey’s terror proxies have been roundly defeated by the Syrian Arab Army, Hezbollah, and allied forces. As such, Erdogan now needs to provide the overwhelming military superiority required to get the job done. This means air support and a “No Fly Zone” along the Turkey-Syria border, one which ostensibly will allow Turkey to fight ISIS, but in actuality is a means of securing territory for the terrorists who otherwise have been unable to do so. It is a de facto military intervention into Syria. Perhaps not even de facto, but outright declaration of war – a clear war crime.

The Kurds—betrayed by almost all parties, most recently the supreme betrayer, Obama himself—will now be at the mercy of the Turkish military. This however creates another de facto ally for Syria, and the Kurds are tough, highly motivated fighters.

Secondly, the alleged war on ISIS is a politically expedient cover for Erdogan to wage a full-scale war on the Kurds, and the PKK specifically. Within hours of announcing the new phase of the war, Turkish forces were bombing Kurdish targets in Syria and Iraq, effectively declaring war on both countries, in blatant violation of international law, to whatever extent such a thing still exists. Indeed, Erdogan made his position quite clear when he stated, “It is not possible for us to continue the peace process with those who threaten our national unity and brotherhood.” Essentially, Erdogan has declared war on all Kurds of the region.

Perhaps most important, and almost never discussed in the West, is the simple fact that Turkey is perpetuating an outright myth in their supposed strategy to create “Islamic State-free zones” along the border; Turkey plans to work with “moderate opposition” and “Free Syrian Army” in this endeavor. However, the fact remains that there is really no such thing as the “moderates,” and those terrorists that had at one time been labeled such have all either gone home, fled the country, gone over to the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, or are now fighting under the ISIS banner. And so, by stating such a plan, Erdogan is unwittingly admitting what this author has already reported numerous times – Turkey acts as military muscle for ISIS and al Qaeda in Syria and now Iraq.

But of course, were Turkey the only relevant party, these developments would not be of nearly the same global significance. Rather, it is the participation and collusion of the US and NATO that makes this troubling escalation far more dangerous.

Making Overt the Covert War

As of writing, NATO has not yet been convened to discuss Turkey’s war on Syria and the Kurds, though Ankara has called for the meeting under Article 4 of the NATO treaty which provides for consultation, but not necessarily collaborative military action. However, regardless of how the meeting proceeds, Turkey has been given overt support in its war by the US, which is, in effect, NATO.

Although the US feigns concern for the Kurds and the expansion of the war, Washington has in fact endorsed Turkey’s policy. White House spokesman Alistair Baskey noted that the US “strongly condemns” recent attacks by the PKK, reiterating the fact that Turkey is an important US and NATO ally. As Obama’s close adviser on national security matters Ben Rhodes stated, “The US, of course, recognises the PKK specifically as a terrorist organisation. And, so, again Turkey has a right to take action related to terrorist targets.”

While it would appear that Washington is taking a measured approach, cautiously supporting Turkey while trying to limit the scope of the operation, that illusion is merely for appearance’s sake. In fact, the Brookings Institution just last month issued a policy paper entitled Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country, which brazenly laid out a plan to, as political analyst Tony Cartalucci astutely pointed out, “divide, destroy, then incrementally occupy” Syria using the pretext of ISIS and terrorism. And that is precisely what we’re witnessing now.

But neither Cartalucci, nor this author, nor any other colleagues who have predicted this turn of events are clairvoyant. Rather, this development was very much expected. As noted above, those terrorists who now provide the rationale for a new war were the very same ones openly supported by the countries now waging the war. It was clear at the time that this would be their ultimate role. Sadly, the world has not effectively mobilized to stop this imperialist war thus far.

The question remains: will Syria survive? The answer depends on the continued resolve of the Syrian Arab Army and its allies, and on the global Resistance’s capacity to organize itself to effectively oppose the Empire in Syria and beyond.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT.com. Tis piece first appeared on NEO (New Eastern Outlook): http://journal-neo.org/2015/08/02/the-fake-war-on-isis-us-and-turkey-escalate-in-syria/

FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD, HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO. EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS.

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