Perils of Attacking Iran

By Stephen Lendman

In mid-April, Istanbul or Geneva will host nuclear talks with Iran. America, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany will attend. Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov calls them a “last chance” to avoid war.

Russian diplomats and independent observers expect it after talks designed to fail. Some believe launching it prevents or delays attacking Syria.

Al Quds al Arabi editor Abdel Bari Atwan told Russia Today he expects a package war against Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Perhaps also against Hamas. At issue is when. Washington wants it after November’s elections. Israel wants it sooner.

On March 21, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said he believes Israel will know if Iran moves toward nuclear weapons production when, for example, it’s enriching uranium to 90% purity.

He also said Israeli air power can inflict significant damage, but not without serious repercussions. Iran will counterattack. Hundreds of missiles will strike Israeli cities and strategic facilities, including nuclear ones. Hezbollah and perhaps Hamas will act supportively. So will America.

Middle East conflict may escalate beyond what’s stoppable. The entire region will be embroiled. Netanyahu says Israel’s prepared to strike Iran independently – “not within days, but not within years either.” He also said “Israel has never left its fate in the hands of others, not even in the hands of our best friends.”

On March 19, The New York Times headlined, “US War Game Sees Perils of Israeli Strike Against Iran,” saying:

A “classified war simulation held this month” assessed significant repercussions of Israel attacking Iran. It said doing so assures wider regional war. America could get embroiled. Hundreds of US casualties would result.

US Central Command’s war game tested communication and coordination between its Tampa, FL headquarters and Persian Gulf forces.

Not a dress rehearsal for war, officials said other outcomes were also possible. However, they raised fears that doing so might “be impossible” for America to avoid and with it serious consequences.

When exercises ended, Central Command head General James Mattis was especially troubled. He told aides that “an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for United States forces there.”

The Times called the war game an “Internal Look,” similar to what preceded America’s 2003 Iraq war. Hundreds of thousands died. Millions of refugees resulted. Vast devastation occurred. The cradle of civilization was destroyed. Nine years later, violence wracks Iraq daily. So does poverty, deprivation, contamination, and appalling human suffering.

With a population two and a half times larger, attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities will affect millions catastrophically. If Tehran’s retaliatory strikes inflict serious damage on or destroy Dimona and other Israeli nuclear sites, radiation will contaminate large parts of the region.

War games can’t predict how nations will respond. Some US and Israeli officials think Iran doesn’t want regional war so won’t strike American targets, either Persian Gulf warships of Middle East bases. Others aren’t so sure.

Iran knows Washington and Israel partner in regional wars, especially against common enemies. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warns that Iran will retaliate if attacked, but won’t escalate conflict. He said “(W)e will attack them at the same level as they attack us.”

Given what Israel’s likely to do, that’s plenty. If America and Israeli forces attack jointly, it’s perhaps no holds barred because holding back assures sure defeat.

Strategy means avoiding Iraq’s fate. At issue isn’t Tehran’s nuclear facilities. It’s replacing an independent regime with a pro-Western one. The same scenario’s playing out in Syria. Tactics there involve externally-generated violence, followed by war if Assad survives.

If nuclear strikes don’t dislodge Tehran’s regime, expect full-scale war next, despite potentially enormous risks and hazards. They’ll likely exceed all previous US engagements since WW II, especially if Syria’s attacked and Lebanon’s Hezbollah gets involved.

Imagine the potential consequences. Imagine leaders willing to risk them. The definition of insanity isn’t just repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. It’s risking a likely catastrophic blunder and proceeding anyway.

History will judge Netanyahu and Obama, unless they create a scorched earth wasteland, left for future archaeologists to figure out what went wrong if any remain in future generations to try.

George Clemenceau once said wars are “a series of catastrophes that result in victory.” He also called waging them “too serious a matter to entrust to military men.” Given leaders like Obama, Netanyahu, and others like them, he should have included politicians.

He did say America’s the only nation that went “from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”

America’s permanent war policy proves him right. So does Israel’s rage to wage them. Humanity’s at risk if Iran and Syria are attacked. Yet both countries appear willing to risk it. If that’s not insanity, what is?

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

 

 

 

 

 

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Scoundrel Media Afghan Massacre Cover-Up

By Stephen Lendman


In all US war theaters, troops commit unspeakable atrocities. Trained to dehumanize enemies, their mission involves killing, destruction, and much more.


Afghanistan reflects similar abuses. Cover-up prevents information coming out and prosecutions. Rarely are US forces held accountable. Commanders routinely get off scot-free, including ones ordering troops to kill all Iraqi and Afghan men on sight, combatants and civilians.

Rarely ever are soldiers like Jeremy Morlock punished. Others guilty like him get off scot-free, especially commanders. His 5th Stryker Brigade committed countless murders and atrocities. Cover-up involved staging incidents to look like defensive actions against attacks. Pentagon apologies ring hollow. Soldiers are trained to kill reflexively.

US history reflects atrocities. Native Americans were slaughtered, starved, neglected, exposed to deadly pathogens, and virtually exterminated.

In 1995, Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 39 (PDD-39). It authorized extraordinary rendition for interrogations and torture.

Atrocities included torturing and burying combatants alive. In the Korean War, mass indiscriminate killings of civilians were commonplace. Entire towns and villages were incinerated and their populations exterminated, including women and children.

Combatants and civilians were buried alive, burned, drowned, shot, stabbed, or beaten to death. Women had their breasts, legs, and arms cut off. Others were beheaded. Thousands of civilians were brutally tortured. One family of six was hanged upside down from a tree and burned alive. Another civilian was skinned alive, then burned to death.

Others were murdered with bats, spears, stones, sticks, clubs, flails, and pickaxes. Women were assaulted and raped. US forces massacred tens of thousands of civilians systematically, ruthlessly, and brutally. Some were disemboweled alive.

Vietnam was similar. Atrocities were widespread and commonplace. They included massacres, rapes, torture, mutilations, wanton mass destruction, use of chemical and biological weapons, and much more.

Throughout the Iraq and Afghan wars, Special Forces death squads murdered thousands of targeted subjects and others indiscriminately. Daily killing field slaughter continues.

International and US laws are clear and unequivocal. So are US military standards, including Army Field Manual 27-10. It incorporates Nuremberg and Law of Land Warfare (1956) principles.

It prohibits any military or civilian personnel to the highest levels from committing crimes under international and US laws. It also requires disobeying illegal orders.

Nonetheless, mass murder, torture, and other atrocities are committed like sport virtually daily. They define all US wars.

Major Media Scoundrels: Guilt by Complicity

An Afghan parliamentary investigation team contradicts Pentagon lies. Two days were spent collecting eyewitness accounts, including from survivors. Investigator Hamizai Lali told Afghan News:

He believes up to 20 soldiers were involved. Half their victims were children aged two through 12. He appealed for international help to disclose the truth and assure those responsible are punished in Afghan, not US, courts.

Investigatory team head Sayed Ishaq Gillani said witnesses reported seeing helicopters dropping chaff during the attack to hide targets from ground attacks.

One surviving family member said:

“I don’t want any compensation. I don’t want money. I don’t want a trip to Mecca. I don’t want a house. I want nothing. But what I absolutely want is the punishment of the Americans. This is my demand, my demand, my demand and my demand.”

His brother died in the slaughter. The Pentagon named one gunman, now identified as Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. He was whisked out of Afghanistan, flown to Kwait, then to army prison at Fort Leavenworth, KS Friday.

In fact, he like other death squad members are cold-blooded killers. The Post also quoted Bales commenting on his participation in a 2007 Iraq battle, saying:

“We discriminated between the bad guys and the noncombatants and then afterward we ended up helping the people that three or four hours before were trying to kill us. I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy, someone who puts his family in harm’s way like that.”

The Post suppressed evidence that up to 20 US soldiers were involved, or that numerous other atrocities like this occur regularly.

The New York Times was just as shameless. Cover-up and denial suppressed vital truths. Bales alone was mentioned. The article said he was injured twice in previous deployments and cited his lawyer calling his military record exemplary.

How much more blood has he on his hands? For sure plenty, but this was the first time he got caught. Moreover, The Times, like the Post, characterizes him as heroic, not villainous.

They lied, saying:

Blaming this incident on a lone gunman suppresses the gravity of what goes on routinely and the responsibility up the chain of command to Joint Chief heads, Defense Secretary Panetta, and Obama.

It also defiles the pain and suffering of surviving family members, relatives, friends, and others victimized by similar incidents.

Nothing compensates for their loss. Afghans want US occupiers out of their country immediately. After over a decade of daily atrocities, they want what no one should endure finally ended.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

NOTES
(1)

South African mercenary question in Iraq
(2004)

Is Iraq a zone of conflict? A war zone? Or is it a peace-building situation? On the answer to these questions rests the fate of more than 1,500 South Africans now working in Iraq. Among them are some of the known assassins and torturers from the apartheid era. Most have been recruited as bodyguards, security consultants or security guards at salaries ranging up to $10,000 a month. The issue came to a head after the bombing of the Shaheen hotel in Baghdad earlier this month, which South African Frans Strydom died and another South African, Deon Gouws, was seriously injured. Gouws, a former policeman, was linked to the notorious South African Vlakplaas death squad. The murderous activities of Vlakplaas were exposed when its commander, Colonel Eugene de Kock, gave full details of the unit. Gouws and others associated with it were exposed and applied for amnesty to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC granted amnesty to Gouws for at least 15 murders and the petrol bombings of the homes of between 40 and 60 anti-apartheid activists. He was discharged from the police force in 1996 as medically unfit and apparently had difficulty finding or settling down to another job. Strydom was a former warrant officer in the Koevoet (‘Crowbar’) counterinsurgency unit that achieved notoriety for being paid bounties for the bodies of ‘terrorists’ in Namibia. They conducted a reign of terror in the northern parts of that country in the years before independence.

 

 

 

 

 

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Madness is Not the Reason for this Massacre

By Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK)

Originally at: The Independent (UK)

I’m getting a bit tired of the “deranged” soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was “deranged”. Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly “deranged” in Kandahar province.

“Apparently deranged”, “probably deranged”, journalists announced, a soldier who “might have suffered some kind of breakdown” (The Guardian), a “rogue US soldier” (Financial Times) whose “rampage” (The New York Times) was “doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness” (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn’t kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?

The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn’t forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army’s top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen’s words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

Allen told his men that “now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday’s riots”. They should, he said, “resist whatever urge they might have to strike back” after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. “There will be moments like this when you’re searching for the meaning of this loss,” Allen continued. “There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are.”

Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to “take vengeance” on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because – however much I dislike generals – I’ve met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings – and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately – in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing – to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday.

Yet it was totally wiped from the memory box by the “experts” when they had to tell us about these killings. No suggestion that General Allen had said these words was allowed into their stories, not a single reference – because, of course, this would have taken our staff sergeant out of the “deranged” bracket and given him a possible motive for his killings. As usual, the journos had got into bed with the military to create a madman rather than a murderous soldier. Poor chap. Off his head. Didn’t know what he was doing. No wonder he was whisked out of Afghanistan at such speed.

We’ve all had our little massacres. There was My Lai, and our very own little My Lai, at a Malayan village called Batang Kali where the Scots Guards – involved in a conflict against ruthless communist insurgents – murdered 24 unarmed rubber workers in 1948. Of course, one can say that the French in Algeria were worse than the Americans in Afghanistan – one French artillery unit is said to have “disappeared” 2,000 Algerians in six months – but that is like saying that we are better than Saddam Hussein. True, but what a baseline for morality. And that’s what it’s about. Discipline. Morality. Courage. The courage not to kill in revenge. But when you are losing a war that you are pretending to win – I am, of course, talking about Afghanistan – I guess that’s too much to hope. General Allen seems to have been wasting his time. 

Copost with Znet: Z Net – The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
   

 

 

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US Afghan strategy unravels in wake of Kandahar massacre (w. VIDEO)

By Bill Van Auken, WSWS/ORG, a socialist organization
16 March 2012

The political reverberations continue to grow from last Sunday’s US massacre of 16 Afghan civilians, the majority of them children, in Kandahar province. Thursday saw the Taliban breaking off talks with Washington and President Hamid Karzai demanding that US-NATO forces withdraw to their main bases. Together, these actions threaten to leave key elements of the Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy in tatters.

Popular anger over the killings spilled into the streets again Thursday, with thousands marching in the city of Qalat in Zabul province, near Kandahar, where the massacre took place. The demonstrators carried white flags and chanted slogans against the US-led occupation and demanding that the US soldier accused of slaughtering the Afghan civilians be brought before an Afghan court for trial.

__________________________________
The Young Turks show yesterday talking about America’s Afghanistan strategy in light of the massacre of 16 Afghan civilians by a U.S. solider. “They say [the shooter] has a traumatic brain injury,” Hastings says. “But what we see on a weekly basis is…Afghans being killed,” Hastings told host Cenk Uygur. “If he’s insane, he’s a symptom of an insane policy.” Watch the clip:

____________________

Even larger demonstrations are anticipated Friday, a day that has traditionally seen Afghans stage mass protests after leaving mosques after prayers on the Muslim holy day.

The Pentagon has already quietly spirited the 38-year-old staff sergeant, who is said to have confessed to the killings, out of the country. Military sources said that he had been taken to Kuwait, on the pretext that Afghanistan lacks appropriate pre-trial detention facilities. Military officials have refused until now to release publicly the name of the accused killer.

Under a status of forces agreement dictated by Washington to the regime in Kabul, US troops are given “a status equivalent to that accorded to the administrative and technical staff” of the US Embassy under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and are deemed immune from any prosecution under Afghan law. Washington is not about to waive this agreement and allow the massacre’s perpetrator to be tried anywhere outside of a US military court.

It is widely expected that the staff sergeant, an 11-year Army veteran and sniper with three tours in Iraq, will face a court martial at his home base, Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. A civilian lawyer from Seattle, Washington, John Henry Browne, revealed Thursday that he had been asked by the alleged killer to represent him in court. The staff sergeant will also have a military lawyer.

The defense of this US military immunity in the Kandahar massacre case has provoked popular anger in Afghanistan. Afghan legislators Thursday called upon Karzai’s US-backed government to refuse to sign a strategic partnership agreement with Washington unless the sergeant is tried in Afghanistan.

“It was the demand of the families of the martyrs of this incident, the people of Kandahar and the people of Afghanistan to try him publicly in Afghanistan,” said Mohammad Naeem Lalai Hamidzai, a Kandahar legislator who is a member of the parliamentary commission charged with investigating the massacre.

This threat to abort the strategic partnership negotiations, which have been going on for a year now, was joined Thursday by a statement from President Karzai calling for the pullback of all US and NATO forces from Afghan villages and into major base facilities. The demand, which followed immediately upon talks between Karzai and US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, was said to be aimed at halting the escalation in Afghan civilian casualties that has accompanied the US military “surge” initiated by the Obama administration in December 2009.

The US occupation operates as a law unto itself and feels in no way bound by the demands of Karzai, who is its puppet.

A key issue in the negotiations over the strategic partnership agreement is Karzai’s demand that the US military halt special forces night raids, which have caused a disproportionate share of civilian casualties and are seen as a humiliation by Afghans forced to endure the breaking down of their doors and the manhandling of their families in the middle of the night. While continuing to talk, the US military has ignored Karzai’s demand, insisting that the night raids are critical to its strategy of hunting down and killing suspected members of the armed resistance.

Significantly, the sergeant accused in the killings was attached to one of the special forces units engaged in “village stabilization operations,” seen by the US military as critical to Washington’s strategy for drawing down US forces. Its key task is the organization of units of the “Afghan Local Police,” a new category of armed forces created in 2010, essentially village-level militias, often under the direction of local strongmen. These militias are supposed to hold areas cleared of resistance by the US offensive. Human rights groups have charged these armed groups with death squad murders, torture and various forms of criminality.

Acceding to Karzai’s latest demand would effectively spell a halt not only to this project, but to all US combat operations in Afghanistan, just as the Pentagon brass is gearing up for a new military offensive in the eastern part of the country, along the Pakistan border.

Karzai himself is in no hurry to see the US and NATO military presence draw to a close. He and his corrupt coterie know that his regime would never survive without the armed protection and funding provided by the US and the other imperialist powers. At the same time, however, he fears that the anger of the Afghanistan people over US war crimes will produce a groundswell of support for the resistance that will also lead to his downfall.

The Obama administration’s so-called “endgame” had been to bleed the armed resistance to US occupation into submission by means of the surge, which brought the US troops deployment in Afghanistan to over 100,000. On that basis, Washington is prepared to draw down occupation forces while working to secure some sort of peace deal, or even a power-sharing agreement, with the Taliban. This would be coupled with a long-term security pact with Kabul that would secure permanent bases in Afghanistan for the US military and the indefinite deployment of thousands of US troops in the guise of “advisers” and “trainers.”

While the administration has pledged to reduce troop levels to 68,000 by September 2012, it has provided no further deadlines for withdrawals between then and the end of 2014, when all “combat forces” are supposed to be out of Afghanistan. The US military high command has opposed setting further reductions, and, as Obama said this week, he is committed to keeping a “robust” force in the country.

Now preliminary talks with the Taliban have apparently broken down, with the Islamist movement issuing a statement saying that “the shaky, erratic and vague standpoint of the Americans” rendered the talks pointless.

The Taliban had set up an office in Qatar and held preliminary meetings with US representatives beginning last January. Talks reportedly centered on a proposed prisoner exchange, which would have traded an American soldier captured in 2009 for Taliban members held at US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Apparently, Washington attempted to impose conditions upon the talks, such as including in the negotiations representatives of the Karzai regime, which the Taliban considers illegitimate.

While there was no mention in the Taliban statement of the massacre in Kandahar, it may well see it as creating more favorable conditions for resisting the occupation.

The Obama administration and the Pentagon have insisted that last Sunday’s massacre was an aberration that, as Obama put it recently, “does not represent our military”. This war crime is seen in Afghanistan, however, as precisely representative of a decade of killings of civilians and other systematic abuses that are the inevitable product of colonial-style occupation.

It comes after a long string of highly-publicized outrages, including the recent trial of a US Army “kill team” that murdered Afghan civilians and cut off body parts for trophies, the video last January of US Marines urinating on the corpses of slain Afghans and last month’s burning of copies of the Koran at a garbage dump, which triggered nationwide riots that killed at least 30, including six American soldiers.

In another event that calls into serious question the Pentagon’s unfailingly positive view of US progress in Afghanistan, the US military was compelled to acknowledge that it had significantly underestimated the seriousness of an incident that took place Wednesday, when a man drove a truck onto the runway at the Camp Bastion airport in Helmand, just as the plane bringing Defense Secretary Panetta was arriving there.

It has since emerged that the individual driving the truck, which had been stolen from an Afghan soldier, was an Afghan interpreter working for the US-led occupation. He died on Thursday from severe burns suffered when he apparently tried to ignite the vehicle. Pentagon officials admitted Thursday that the interpreter was trying to run down a group of US Marines assigned to meet the aircraft.

The incident underscored both the lack of security in an area supposedly secured by the US surge, as well as the continuing proliferation of so-called green-on-blue violence, the term used by the US military to describe attacks against it by Afghan security forces that are supposedly its allies.

 

 

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Pentagon prepares war plans for Syria

By Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization

In testimony before a Senate committee Wednesday, the Pentagon’s civilian and uniformed chiefs confirmed that they are drawing up war plans against Syria at the request of the Obama White House.

The statements by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey came amid mounting evidence that Washington and its key European allies, working in conjunction with the right-wing monarchical regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are escalating a covert intervention aimed at bringing about Syrian regime change.

Much of the media coverage of Wednesday’s hearing focused on the jingoistic intervention of Arizona’s Senator John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate. He is demanding US air strikes against Syria, to carve out “safe havens” in which Western-backed armed groups can prepare military strikes against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“How many additional civilian lives would have to be lost in order to convince you that the military measures of the kind we are proposing necessary to end the killing and force Assad to leave power?” McCain demanded of Panetta.

The defense secretary responded by asserting, “We are not divided here.” He insisted that the Pentagon is “reviewing all possible additional steps that can be taken” to hasten the downfall of the Assad regime, “including potential military options if necessary.”

General Dempsey cautioned that a US intervention in Syria would be more difficult than the NATO war in Libya given the country’s “far different demographic, ethnic, religious mix.” However, he assured the Senate panel, “Should we be called upon to defend US interests, we will be ready.” The Joint Chiefs chairman added that military operations under consideration included the imposition of a “no-fly zone,” the opening up of a “humanitarian corridor,” a naval blockade of the Syrian coastline and air strikes.

Panetta and Dempsey both echoed statements made the day before at a White House press briefing by President Obama, that it would be a “mistake” to “to take military action unilaterally.”

None of them, however, raised a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing use of military force as a pre-condition for US military intervention in Syria.

An unnamed senior Defense Department official made it clear to CNN that the administration does not see a UN resolution—which has so far been blocked by Russia and China, which both wield veto power on the Security Council—as indispensable. “Some kind of mandate from a regional organization” would suffice, the official indicated, or any multi-lateral cover for US intervention, such as the “coalition of the willing” the Bush administration cobbled together before the Iraq war.

Particularly important in this regard is Turkey, which is hosting a conference of the “Friends of Syria” this month. While formally opposing a military intervention by any military force “from outside the region,” Turkey has called for Assad’s downfall and demanded that Syria allow the opening up of “humanitarian aid corridors.”

Similarly, the United Nations has prepared a 90-day “emergency contingency plan” to deliver food aid to Syrian civilians. The US State Department seized on the plan, demanding “immediate, safe and unhindered access” to all “affected areas” in Syria.

In response, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said that his government would resist any foreign intervention. “Humanitarian corridors mean military corridors,” he said. “You can’t have humanitarian corridors without military protection.”

During his testimony, Panetta was asked whether the US would provide “communications equipment” to the armed groups seeking to topple the Assad government. Panetta responded that he would “prefer to discuss that in a closed session,” while allowing that the administration is “considering an array of non-lethal assistance.”

In fact, there are multiple reports indicating that the US administration has already gone well beyond that.

In a report on Tuesday, Foreign Policy cited senior administration officials confirming that a meeting of the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council had already adopted a policy “for expanding US engagement with Syrian activists and providing them with the means to organize themselves.”

“US policy is now aligned with enabling the opposition to overthrow the Assad regime,” one official told the journal. “This codifies a significant change in our Syria policy.”

This official added that steps are being taken to support the military committee formed recently by the Syrian National Council, which Washington sees as a more reliable puppet force than the Free Syrian Army. “There is recognition that lethal assistance to the opposition may be necessary, but not at this time,” he said.

However, an email released by WikiLeaks as part of the internal documents obtained from the private US intelligence firm Stratfor indicates that such “lethal assistance” has been in place for months.

The December 2011 email was from Reva Bhalla, Stratfor’s director of analysis. It recounts a meeting with military intelligence officers at the Pentagon, including one British and one French officer. The officers, part of the US Air Force’s strategic studies group, suggested that “SOF [special operations forces] teams are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] mission and training opposition forces.”

The officers, according to Bhalla, said that the aim of the special forces teams was to “commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.”

The day before Panetta’s and Dempsey’s appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of US Central Command (Centcom) in charge of all US forces in the Middle East, addressed the same panel and gave a candid assessment of US aims in Syria.

“If we were to provide options, whatever they are, to hasten the fall of Assad,” Mattis testified, “it would cause a great deal of concern and discontent in Tehran.”

Declaring Iran “the most significant threat in the region,” Mattis added, “It would be the biggest strategic setback for Iran in 20 years, when Assad falls.”

Behind all of Washington’s posturing about defending civilians in Syria, the real methods and aims of US imperialism begin to emerge clearly. It is waging a terrorist campaign in Syria in preparation for more direct military intervention.

It seeks Assad’s overthrow not out of any interest in human rights or democracy, but rather to advance US strategic interests by weakening Iran, Syria’s ally, which Washington views as the principal obstacle to its bid to assert hegemony over the oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. Thus, contained within the steadily escalating American intervention in Syria are the preparations for a far wider war, with global consequences.

 

 

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