*The Anti-Empire Report*
*Syria, the story thus far*
/Slightly abridged for SA readers; a link to the original is given below/
*William Blum, The Anti-Empire Report, USA, 2 October 2012*
"Today, many Americans are asking --- indeed I ask myself," Hillary
Clinton said, "how can this happen? How can this happen in a country we
helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This
question reflects just how complicated, and at times, how confounding
the world can be."
The Secretary of State was referring to the attack on the American
consulate in Benghazi, Libya September 11 that killed the US ambassador
and three other Americans. US intelligence agencies have now stated that
the attackers had ties to "Al-Qaeda".
Yes, the world can indeed be complicated and confounding. But we have
learned a few things. The United States began blasting Libya with
missiles with the full knowledge that they were fighting on the same
side as the "al-Qaeda" types. Benghazi was and is the headquarters for
Muslim fundamentalists of various stripes in North Africa. However, it's
incorrect to claim that the United States (aka NATO) saved the city from
destruction. The story of the "imminent" invasion of Benghazi by Moammar
Gaddafi's forces last year was only propaganda to justify Western
intervention. And now the United States is intervening --- at present
without actual gunfire, as far as is known --- against the government of
Syria, with the full knowledge that they're again on the same side as
the "al-Qaeda" types.
And once again, the United States is participating in the overthrow of a
secular Mideast government.
At the same time, the Muslim fundamentalists in Syria, as in Libya, can
have no illusions that America loves them. A half century of US assaults
on Mideast countries, the establishment of American military bases in
the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and US support for dictatorships and for
Israel's genocide against the Palestinians have relieved them of such
fanciful thoughts. So why is the United States looking to forcefully
intervene once again? A tale told many times --- world domination, oil,
Israel, ideology, etc. Assad of Syria, like Gaddafi of Libya, has shown
little promise as a reliable client state so vital to the American Empire.
It's only the barrier set up by Russia and China on the UN Security
Council that keeps NATO (aka the United States) from unleashing
thousands of airborne missiles to "liberate" Syria as they did Libya.
Russian and Chinese leaders claim that they were misled about Libya by
the United States, that all they had agreed to was enforcing a "no-fly
zone", not seven months of almost daily missile attacks against the land
and people of Libya. Although it's very fortunate that the two powers
refuse to give the US another green light, it's difficult to believe
that they were actually deceived last spring in regard to Libya. NATO
doesn't do peacekeeping or humanitarian interventions; it does war;
bloody, awful war; and regime change. And they would undoubtedly be
itching to show off their specialty in Syria --- perhaps even without
Security Council blessing --- except that NATO and the US always prefer
to attack people who are exceptionally defenseless, and Syria has
ballistic missile capabilities and chemical weapons.
It's likely that the American elections also serve to keep Obama from
expanding the US role in Syria. He may have concluded that there are
more votes in the Democratic Party base for peace this time than for
waging war against his eighth (sic) country.
The propaganda bias in the Western media has been extreme. Day after
day, month after month, we've been told of Syrian government attacks,
using horrible means, almost invariably with the victims described as
unarmed civilians; without any proof, often without any logic, that it
was actually the government behind a particular attack, with the story's
source turning out to be an anti-government organization; rarely
informing us of similar behavior on the part of the rebel forces. In
May, the BBC included pictures of mass graves in Iraq in their coverage
of an alleged Syrian government massacre in Houla, Syria. The station
later apologized for the pictures saying that they had been submitted to
the BBC by a rebel group. On June 7, Germany's leading daily, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, citing opponents of Assad, reported that
the Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants,
and that the bulk of the victims were members of the Alawi and Shia
minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad.
According to a report of Stratfor, the private and conservative American
intelligence firm with high-level connections, many of whose emails were
obtained by Wikileaks: "most of the [Syrian] opposition's more serious
claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue." They
claimed "that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline
for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a
potential massacre." That news made international headlines. Stratfor's
investigation, however, found "no signs of a massacre", and warned that
"opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre,
hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military
intervention in Libya." Stratfor then stated that any suggestions of
massacres were unlikely because the Syrian "regime has calibrated its
crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario ... that could lead to an
intervention based on humanitarian grounds."
Democracy Now --- long a standard of progressive radio-TV news /[in the
USA]/ --- has been almost as bad as CNN and al Jazeera (the latter owned
by Qatar, an active military participant in both Libya and Syria). The
heavy bias of Democracy Now in this area goes back to the very beginning
of the Arab Spring. The program made some unfortunate choices in its
mideast news correspondents, seemingly only because they spoke Arabic
and/or had contacts in the region. Where have you gone Amy Goodman? RT
(Russia Today) has stood almost alone amongst English-language
television news sources in offering an alternative to the official
Western line [But RT is also not perfect].
Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research, notes that "Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya and now Syria are but a sequence of stops on a global roadmap of
permanent war that also swings through Iran /[and could swing through
many African countries not excluding South Africa - CU]/. Russia and
China are the terminal targets." When the Syrian government is
overthrown --- and in all likelihood the Western forces will not relent
until that happens --- the "al Qaeda" types will be dominant in the
Syrian version of Benghazi. The American ambassador would be well
advised to not visit.
*The unabridged article, and a lot more good stuff, can be found at:
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer109.html Home Page:
http://killinghope.org/**
*
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