The US
“Plan B” for Syria and the threat of world war
By Bill Van Auken
February 14, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
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"WSWS"
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Negotiations
on Syria’s bloody armed conflict were held in Munich
Thursday against the backdrop of a government
offensive, supported by Russian airstrikes, to break
the grip of Western-backed “rebels” over the largely
shattered eastern part of Aleppo.
The talks were convened under the auspices of the
17-member International Syria Support Group, which
includes the US and its regional allies—Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and Qatar—in the war for regime
change in Syria, along with Russia and Iran, which
are allied with and actively aiding the government
of President Bashar al-Assad.
Washington demanded an immediate cease-fire and halt
to Russian airstrikes in Syria. The US, together
with the reactionary Arab monarchies and the regime
in Turkey, fears that without a halt to the
fighting, the Islamist militias that they have
supported, financed and armed for nearly five years
may face irreparable defeat.
Russia, for its part, reportedly proposed a
cease-fire that would begin on March 1, thus
allowing enough time for the Syrian government to
reestablish its control over Aleppo.
Late Thursday night, US Secretary of State John
Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
announced that they had reached a tentative deal
that would see a ceasefire “within a week” along
with expedited humanitarian aid. Kerry allowed that
while the agreement looked good “on paper,” it was
yet to be tested. All of the underlying conflicts
remain unresolved, and both US and Russian military
operations are to continue in the name of the
struggle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
(ISIS).
On the eve of the Munich talks, Kerry, in an
interview with Washington Post columnist David
Ignatius, delivered an unmistakable threat in
connection with the US negotiating strategy in
Munich: “What we’re doing is testing [Russian and
Iranian] seriousness.” he said. “And if they’re not
serious, then there has to be consideration of a
Plan B… You can’t just sit there.”
“Plan B” would consist of a sharp escalation of the
US military intervention in Syria, carried out under
the cover of combating ISIS, but directed at
toppling the Assad government.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar have also reportedly spent
the last several days discussing a “Plan B” that
would involve their participation in direct military
intervention to save the “rebels” that they have
supported. The Saudi-owned news group al-Arabiya has
quoted officials in Riyadh as confirming the House
of Saud’s decision to send troops into Syria in what
would constitute a provocatively hostile invasion.
Responding to the ominous implications of such an
escalation, Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev
told the German daily Handelsblatt Thursday: “The
Americans and our Arab partners must think hard
about this—do they want a permanent war? All sides
must be forced to the negotiating table instead of
sparking a new world war.”
Medvedev’s choice of words was not mere hyperbole. A
military intervention to rescue the “rebels,” which
amounts to a war to save Al Qaeda’s Syrian
affiliate, the Al Nusra Front, the leading force on
the ground in Aleppo province, could quickly bring
the US and its allies into combat with Russia, an
armed confrontation between the world’s two major
nuclear powers.
US officials have spoken in recent days of creating
a “humanitarian corridor” to Aleppo and other rebel
areas under siege by government forces. Presumably
this “corridor” is meant to replace the main supply
route for the “rebels” from Turkey, which has been
cut off by the government offensive, disrupting the
CIA-orchestrated arming of the “rebels” with
stockpiles poured in from Libya, the Gulf oil
kingdoms and beyond. Such a corridor would require a
military force to protect it and enforcement of a
“no-fly zone,” meaning a confrontation not only with
Syrian government forces, but with Russian warplanes
as well.
Turkey, Washington’s NATO ally, is meanwhile
blocking its border to Syrian refugees in order to
create the maximum crisis possible so that it can
pursue its own strategic aims, which include not
only regime change in Damascus, but also the bloody
suppression of the Kurdish minority on both sides of
the frontier.
The Obama administration has issued no warning to
the American people that it is embarking on a policy
in Syria that could pit the US against the Russian
military and potentially trigger a global
catastrophe.
There is no significant popular support for US
military intervention in Syria, which has been
promoted under the false flag of “humanitarianism,”
aided by a whole coterie of pseudo-left
organizations that have specialized in portraying a
bloody sectarian campaign by CIA-backed Islamist
militias as a “Syrian revolution.”
The extent of the catastrophe unleashed upon Syria
through this intervention was spelled out in
shocking terms with the release of a new study by
the Syrian Center for Policy Research, which found
that fully 11.5 per cent of the population inside
Syria has been either killed or injured as a result
of the armed conflict. The death toll from the
war—combined with the systematic destruction of the
country’s social infrastructure and health care
system and a dramatic drop in living standards—has
caused life expectancy to plummet from 70.5 years in
2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015.
The study found further that the country’s
unemployment rate had soared from 14.9 percent in
2011 to 52.9 percent by the end of 2015, and that
the overall poverty rate is estimated at 85.2
percent.
In short, the Obama administration has inflicted
upon Syria a war that is every bit as criminal and
lethal as the war carried out by the Bush
administration against Iraq.
The Syrian people are the victims of a
US-orchestrated war that is driven by the global
strategy of American imperialism to reverse its
economic decline through the use or threat of
military force. Washington sought regime change in
Syria as a means to an end: the weakening of the two
principal allies of Damascus, Russia and Iran, and
the reassertion of a Western stranglehold on the
vast energy resources of the Middle East.
The threat of world war is posed not merely by the
prospect of US and Russian warplanes facing off in
the skies over Syria, but by the entire logic of the
Syrian war for regime change and the broader
strategic aims that it serves. This finds expression
in NATO’s escalation of the military encirclement of
Russia and the increasingly provocative anti-Chinese
policy being pursued by the Pentagon in the South
China Sea.
The US drive for global hegemony was articulated in
the strategic maxim enunciated by the Pentagon
nearly a quarter of a century ago that Washington
must prevent the emergence of any power capable of
challenging the dominance of American capitalism on
a global or even regional scale. This “grand
strategy” has led to unceasing US wars of aggression
since and now poses the real threat of a third,
nuclear, world war.
Against this barbaric strategy of the US ruling
establishment, the American and international
working class must advance its own independent
strategy, fighting for the withdrawal of US and all
foreign military forces from Syria, Iraq and the
entire Middle East and for the unity of the working
class across all national, religious and ethnic
boundaries in a common struggle to put an end to
capitalism, the source of militarism and war.
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