******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Contrast this with the supply of anti-aircraft MANPADS. Air power, first his own and then Russian, is the primary reason that Assad has not fallen. If you were intent on toppling a regime and were arming its bloodthirsty sectarian opponents to the teeth, would you not supply them with anti-aircraft weapons as a matter of urgency? Yet these have not been forthcoming, because US policy was, and remains, in the words of Obama’s deputy national security advisor quoted in the New York Times article above, to avoid the ‘transfer of heavier weapons’. The FSA desperately requested anti-aircraft weapons from the US to defend Aleppo in the summer of 2013. None were sent, nor offered. Not only this, but the US actively blocked attempts by Qatar to supply Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft weaponry, as reported in the New York Times article of 13 August 2013, ‘Arms Shipments from Sudan seen to Syria Rebels’. The US administration believed – probably accurately – that such weaponry might be used against American or Israeli interests. If this is an attempt to overthrow the regime, it is a rather poor show.
Contrary to fantasy (based on misinterpretations of low-level intelligence revealed by Wikileaks), and allowing that there have been debates within US ruling circles, and that its strategies have been incompetent and/or incoherent, there is not, and never has been, an American imperial policy to overthrow the Ba’athist regime in Damascus. In December of 2011, by which time Assad’s inability to fully rule the country had become clear, the US recognised the Syrian National Council as the ‘leading and legitimate representative of the Syrian people’ for a period of ‘transition’. But the US preference for this ‘transition’ has always been that it be a ‘managed’ one from within the regime. The model for US policy on Syria was the ‘managed’ – now distinctly unmanageable – transition from the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen to his deputy Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. President Obama reiterated the point in his press conference in October 2015, stating that US policy in Syria was for an outcome that ‘keeps the state intact, that keeps the military intact’. The only difference with Russia was the status of Assad himself. David Petraeus, former US viceroy of Iraq and proponent of a more muscular US policy on Syria – and the man responsible for Sycamore Timber – was explicit to the Kurdish news organisation Rudaw in March 2015 that the priority was not Assad but ‘clearly ISIS because that supports the effort in Iraq’.
full: http://salvage.zone/in-print/disaster-islamism/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
