US End Game in Syria is Just the Beginning for
Wider Regional War
By Tony Cartalucci
October 17, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - The Syrian conflict is
profoundly misrepresented across the entirety of the Western press.
To call it a civil war is a gross
mischaracterization. The entire conflict was engineered and fueled
from beyond Syria’s borders. And while there are a significant
number of Syrians collaborating with this criminal conspiracy, the
principle agents driving the conflict are foreigners. They include
special interests in the United States, across the Atlantic in
Europe, and regional players including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
and Israel.Syria is far from an isolated conflict. America’s
interest in dividing and destroying Syria is part of a much larger
agenda serving its aspirations both in the region and globally. The
division and destruction of Syria as a functioning, sovereign
nation-state is admittedly meant to set the stage for the conquest
of Iran next.
Reuters recently
published an op-ed titled, “Syria’s
one hope may be as dim as Bosnia’s once was,” which argues that
the only way the US can cooperate with Russia regarding Syria is if
all players agree to a weakened, fragmented Syria.
If this scheme sounds
familiar, that is because this op-ed was authored by Michael
O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution – a
corporate-financier funded think-tank that has in part helped
engineer the chaos now consuming the Middle East and North Africa
(MENA). O’Hanlon previously published a paper titled, “Deconstructing
Syria: A new strategy for America’s most hopeless war,” in which
he also calls for the division and destruction of Syria.
In it, O’Hanlon calls
for the establishment of “safe zones,” the invasion and occupation
of Syrian territory by US, European, and Persian Gulf special
forces, the relaxing of criteria used to openly fund what would
essentially be terrorists operating in Syria, and openly making the
ousting of the Syrian government a priority on par with the alleged
US fight against the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS/ISIL).
“Relaxing” criteria
regarding who the US can openly fund and provide direct military
support for, is nothing less than tacit support for terrorism and
terrorists themselves.
But none of these treacherous methods should be
shocking. That is because O’Hanlon is also a co-author of the 2009
Brookings Institution report titled, “Which
Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran”.
In this signed and dated criminal conspiracy, methods for covertly
overthrowing the Iranian government with US-backed mobs augmented
with armed militants, the use of US listed foreign terrorist
organizations to wage a proxy war against Iran, the provocation of
open war with Iran, and the use of Israel to unilaterally attack
Iran first, before bringing America inevitably into the war shortly
after are all described in great detail throughout the 156 page
report.
While some have tried to dismiss this report as a
mere theoretical exercise, suggestions like having terrorist
organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) removed from the US State
Department’s foreign terrorist organization list so that the US
could openly arm and fund it in a proxy war against Iran, has
since come to pass. The report was written in 2009, MEK
was de-listed in 2012.
Additionally, the report also suggests luring Iran to the
negotiating table where the United States would place before it
a deal so irresistible that when Iran either rejected it or
accepted it and then appeared to violate it, subsequent US
military intervention would be seen by the world as a reluctant
option of last resort that Iran brought upon itself. This has
since manifested itself as the much lauded “nuclear deal.”
And almost to the letter, every criminal
conspiracy laid out in this report meant for Tehran, has been
each in turn used against Syria. The report noted that Syria and
Lebanon’s Hezbollah would be significant obstacles to dividing
and destroying Iran and that each must be dealt with first. The
report was written in 2009, the war in Syria began in earnest in
2011.
Understanding that
Syria is not an isolated crisis, but is tied to US designs aimed
at Iran and beyond, illustrates why O’Hanlon and other Western
policymakers’ proposals for a “political transition” or the
partitioning of Syria are unacceptable. It will not be the end
of regional conflict, but rather the end of just the beginning.
The successful destruction of Syria will portend war with Iran
and beyond.
Solving
Syria at the Source
Putin’s
real goal in Syria is almost surely not to fight ISIL. His
more plausible aim, as reflected in his military’s initial
bombing targets, is to bolster President Bashar al-Assad’s
shaky regime by attacking insurgent groups close to ISIL
strongholds — even if they are relatively moderate and
unaffiliated with ISIL or al-Nusra, an al Qaeda offshoot.
Putin wants to protect his own proxies, retain Russian
access to the naval facility along the Mediterranean coast
at Tartus and embarrass the United States while
demonstrating Russia’s global reach.
Surely that is
what O’Hanlon expects most Reuters readers to believe, but he
unlikely believes it himself. Russia’s involvement in Syria is
tied to self-preservation. Moscow likely understands that a
“settlement” in Syria is a misnomer, and that the collapse of
Syria as a functioning nation-state will be only one of several
events in a chain reaction that will effect first those along
Russia’s borders, then everything within its borders.
O’Hanlon’s op-ed
is chilling. In it he claims:
Assad is responsible for killing most of
the 250,000 Syrians who have died in the civil war to date —
and caused most of the massive displacement and refugee
flows as well.
It is chilling because readers must remember that
O’Hanlon himself signed and dated the Brookings paper “Which
Path to Persia?” where he and his colleagues at Brookings
deliberately engineered the very chaos that has consumed Syria
and cost so many people their lives. Syrian President Bashar Al
Assad is only guilty of holding power when those who underwrote
Brookings’ criminal designs had them aimed at the nation of
Syria and executed.
President Assad did what all responsible leaders
have done when faced with a foreign threat endangering the
survival of their nation – stood and fought back. That O’Hanlon
has since repeatedly called for the division and literal
“deconstruction” of Syria but still blames President Assad for
the chaos that entails, only further illustrates the depravity
from which Western foreign policy flows and the dishonesty they
present the results of their criminal conspiring to the public
with.
However, O’Hanlon,
and even Brookings itself are not solely responsible for the
death and destruction Syria now suffers, or Libya, Iraq, and
others have suffered before it, or even those the US plans to
target next will suffer. They are but individual cogs in a much
larger machine. To understand the scope of that machine, one
must look at who underwrites and ultimately directs the work
Brookings does. By doing so, we can understand the very source
of what drives the chaos in Syria, and then go about stopping
it.
The Source
Brookings’ 2014
annual report (.pdf) reveals among others, the following
sponsors from big-finance; JP Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of
America, Goldman Sachs, State Farm, MetLife, and GEICO. From
big-defense there’s; General Electric, Northrop Grumman, and
Raytheon. Big-telecom is represented by; Comcast, Google,
Facebook, AT&T, and Verizon. Big-oil; Exxon, Chevron,
ConocoPhillips, British Petroleum, and Shell. And even consumer
corporations like Pepsi and Coca Cola help underwrite what are
essentially policy papers conspiring to commit crimes against
humanity that have since been systematically carried out at the
cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.
It is the Fortune 500, centered on Wall Street
and London, driving the conflict in Syria and the larger arc of
chaos consuming the MENA region and beyond.
Russian and Syrian
efforts aimed at stemming the flow of weapons and cash over
Syrian borders alone is not going to “solve Syria.” Clearly the
problem is larger than Syria, and even larger than the
geopolitical chaos the US has created arcing over the MENA
region. It is the unwarranted wealth, power, and influence that
drives that chaos that constitutes the ultimate source of the
problem. Disrupting or displacing that power will be difficult,
and the failure thus far to significantly disrupt or displace it
is precisely why this chaos continues.
Multipolarism and Localism
For Moscow’s part, particularly in the wake of
Western sanctions targeting Russia, the search inward to become
more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign imports,
foreign financial institutions and systems, and other features
of Wall Street and Washington’s “international order,” has set
an example for other nations to follow in undermining and
ultimately uprooting this global threat at its very source.
Understanding the premeditated nature of the West’s war on Syria
and the fact that this current conflict serves only as a
stepping stone toward a well-defined strategy to next destroy
Iran explains why “partnering” with the US in any kind of
solution regarding Syria is an impossibility. A “political
settlement” that results in the division of Syria or the removal
of the current government is also entirely unacceptable for this
same reason.
Russia’s decision to defend the sovereign
government of Syria and assist in the elimination of Syria’s
enemies within its borders, as well as the warding off of its
enemies beyond them is the most immediate course of action to
“solve Syria.” Inviting Iran and even China to take take part in
a larger campaign to secure Syria’s borders and assisting in the
restoration of order within the country is a concrete next step.
Expanding this coalition to cover Iraq next will create a
geopolitical “no-meddling-zone” the West will find itself
outside of.However, ultimately, it is
Russia’s concept of a multipolar world displacing the unipolar
international order established by the West – an order that
breeds servile dependency among all drawn into it and which
seeks to destroy all who try to avoid it – that stands the best
chance of not only “solving Syria,” but preventing other nations
from suffering its fate. Multipolarism aims straight at the
source of Western global hegemony – at the corporate-financier,
political, and institutional monopolies which prop it up.
Multipolarism emphasizes national sovereignty and a
decentralized global balance of power.
And
while Russian, Syrian, Hezbollah, Iranian, and Iraqi forces
stand on the front line of the true free world, for the rest of
us, we need to understand that full-spectrum domination pursued
by the West requires full-spectrum resistance from the rest of
humanity. The corporations underwriting Brookings’ abhorrent
work enjoy impunity, immense wealth, and nearly unlimited
influence and power solely because each and every person on
Earth takes their paycheck every month, and renders it to them,
at the shopping mall, at the new car lot, in Starbucks, at
McDonald’s, or at the pump.
A
multipolar world not only means a distribution of global power,
but also a distribution of global responsibility and wealth. And
this extends not only to nations, but also states and provinces,
as well as communities and even individuals. However
insignificant individual efforts may seem to decentralize power
and wealth away from existing monopolies, they are no less
insignificant than the efforts of individual soldiers fighting
and winning in Syria. Indeed their individual contributions
alone are meaningless – but collectively they lead to victory.
Solving Syria truly, means solving the problem
presented to us by the prevailing unipolar order itself. It is
not a battle simply for Syria and its allies to fight within the
borders of Syria, but a battle for all who oppose unipolar
global hegemony to fight. Maybe not with bullets, bombs, and
missiles, but a fight nonetheless.
Tony
Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer,
especially for the online magazine“New
Eastern Outlook”.
