Russia-gate is empowering Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu to strong-arm President Trump into
escalating the Syrian war by abandoning a recent
cease-fire and challenging Iran and Russia,
reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
July 18,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
A weakened, even
desperate President Donald Trump must decide
whether to stand up to Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu or to repudiate the Syrian
partial ceasefire, which Trump
hammered out
with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 7.
Whether
intentionally or not, this crossroads is where
the months of Russia-gate hysteria have led the
United States, making Trump even more vulnerable
to Israeli and neoconservative pressure and
making any cooperation with Russia more
dangerous for him politically.
After meeting with French President Emmanuel
Macron in Paris on Sunday, Netanyahu
declared that
Israel was totally opposed to the Trump-Putin
cease-fire deal in southern Syria because it
perpetuates Iranian presence in Syria in support
of the Syrian government of President Bashar
al-Assad.
Netanyahu’s position increases pressure on Trump
to escalate U.S. military involvement in Syria
and possibly move toward war against Iran and
even Russia. The American neocons, who generally
move in sync with Netanyahu’s wishes, already
have as
their list of current goals “regime changes”
in Damascus, Tehran and Moscow – regardless of
the dangers to the Middle East and indeed the
world.
At the
G-20 summit on July 7, Trump met for several
hours with Putin coming away with an agreed-upon
cease-fire for southwestern Syria, an accord
that has proven more successful than previous
efforts to reduce the violence that has torn the
country apart since 2011.
But that limited peace could mean failure for
the proxy war that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey
and other regional players helped launch six
years ago with the goal of removing Assad from
power and
shattering the so-called “Shiite crescent”
from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut. Instead,
that “crescent” appears more firmly in place,
with Assad’s military bolstered by Shiite
militia forces from Iran and Lebanon’s
Hezbollah.
In
other words, the “regime change” gambit against
Assad’s government would have backfired, with
Iranian and Hezbollah forces arrayed along
Israel’s border with Syria. And instead of
accepting that reversal and seeking some modus
vivendi with Iran, Netanyahu and his Sunni-Arab
allies (most notably the Saudi monarchy) have
decided to go in the other direction (a wider
war) and to bring President Trump along with
them.
Neophyte
Trump
Trump –
a relative neophyte in global intrigue – has
been slow to comprehend how his outreach to
Netanyahu and Saudi King Salman runs counter to
his collaboration with Putin on efforts to
defeat the Sunni jihadist groups, including Al
Qaeda and Islamic State, which have served as
the point of the spear in the war to overthrow
Assad.
Al Qaeda and Islamic State have
received direct and indirect support
from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey,
Israel and even the Obama administration, albeit
sometimes unwittingly. To block Assad’s
overthrow – and the likely victory by these
terror groups – Russia, Iran and Hezbollah came
to Assad’s defense, helping to turn the tide of
the war since 2015.
In his
nearly half year in office, Trump has maintained
an open hostility toward Iran – sharing a
position held by Washington’s neocons as well as
Netanyahu and Salman – but the U.S. President
also has advocated cooperation with Russia to
crush Islamic State and Al Qaeda inside Syria.
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Collaboration with Russia – and indirectly with
Iran and the Syrian military – makes sense for
most U.S. interests, i.e., stabilizing Syria,
reversing the refugee flow that has destabilized
Europe, and denying Al Qaeda and Islamic State a
base for launching terror strikes against
Western targets.
But the
same collaboration would be a bitter defeat for
Netanyahu and Salman who have invested heavily
in this and other “regime change” projects that
require major U.S. investments in terms of
diplomacy, money and military manpower.
So, in last weekend’s trip to Paris, Netanyahu
chose to raise the stakes on Trump at a time
when Democrats and the U.S. mainstream media are
pounding him daily with the Russia-gate scandal,
even raising the possibility that his son,
Donald Trump Jr., might be prosecuted and
imprisoned for having
a meeting in
June 2016 with a Russian lawyer.
If
Trump wants the Russia-gate pain to lessen, he
will be tempted to give Netanyahu what he wants
and count on the savvy Israeli leader to
intervene with the influential neocons of
Official Washington to pull back on the
scandal-mongering.
The
problem, however, would be that Netanyahu really
wants the U.S. military to complete the “regime
change” project in Syria – much as it did in
Iraq and Libya – meaning more American dead,
more American treasure expended and a likely
wider war, extending to Iran and possibly
nuclear-armed Russia.
That
might fulfill the neocon current menu of “regime
change” schemes but it runs the risk of
unleashing a nuclear conflagration on the world.
In that way, liberals and even some progressives
– who have embraced Russia-gate as a way to
remove the hated Donald Trump from office – may
end up contributing to the end of human
civilization as well.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many
of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his
latest book,
America’s Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an
e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com).
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