Al Qaeda:
Heroes of the Empire
By Ulson
Gunnar
May 22, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "NEO"
-Syrian
President Bashar al Assad would seem like a natural
ally to the United States and the European Union. He
heads a secular government and presides over a
secular nation. It is a nation where extremist
political factions like the Muslim Brotherhood are
outlawed and armed terrorist groups hunted down and
eliminated. There was even a point in history before
the 2011 war began within and along Syria’s borders
that Washington even feigned such an alliance with
Damascus.
The London
Telegraph in its article, “John
Kerry and Bashar al-Assad dined in Damascus,”
reported:
Mr Kerry visited Damascus in February 2009, when
he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee.
He said in a press conference during the visit:
“President Barack Obama’s administration
considers Syria a key player in Washington’s
efforts to revive the stalled Middle East peace
process.
“Syria is an essential player in bringing peace
and stability to the region.”
Mr Kerry met with Mr Assad at
least six times, and on one occasion – seen in
the photographs – dining with the two men’s
wives at the Naranj restaurant in central
Damascus.
Though the US
considered at the time Syria to be a “state sponsor
of terrorism,” that was only because of its support
of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, not Al Qaeda and its
affiliates who the US Army’s own reports indicate
the government was working against even during the
US occupation of Iraq when Syria was used as an
entry point into the country along its southern
borders. Ironically, the US Army’s reports would
indicate that many of the networks now considered
“rebels,” were involved in facilitating Al Qaeda’s
transit through Syrian territory into Iraq to kill
Americans using Saudi cash.
The Enemy of
My Enemy is Me, Myself and I…
Today’s
headlines are surreal to anyone who remembers the
aftermath and hysteria in Washington in the wake of
September 11, 2001. Today, the terms “rebels” and
“Al Nusra” (Al Qaeda in Syria) are used
interchangeably by the US and European press in an
attempt to obscure the obvious fact that the very
“rebels” the US and its European and Persian Gulf
allies are funding, training and arming in Syria are
quite literally the terrorist factions these same
governments have claimed to be fighting for the past
15 years.
Reuters in
a recent article attempting to rhetorically
undermine Iran, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, in
one breath mentions the setbacks Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra
franchise is dealing to Iranian-backed troops in
Syria, and in the next breath points out how Israel
is also picking apart Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah
forces.
Titled, “For
Iran and Hezbollah, a costly week in Syria,” the
article claims:
Reports put the death toll among the Iranian,
Afghani and Lebanese militiamen as high as 80 in
the attack spearheaded by the al Qaeda-linked
Nusra Front.
Then claims:
Israel has not missed the chance to pick off top
Iranian and Hezbollah commanders in Syria over
the past year or more.
Reuters
perhaps hopes readers don’t understand the
implications of the actual events unfolding on the
ground in Syria versus the empty rhetoric repeated
from behind podiums in Jerusalem, Washington,
Riyadh, Brussels and London. Indeed, the US and its
allies, including Israel, are fighting side-by-side
with Al Qaeda in Syria against precisely the same
opponents. In fact, Al Qaeda could not sustain its
military operations without significant
state-sponsorship, state-sponsorship a look at any
map will tell someone is coming from Turkey, Israel,
Jordan and by implication Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the
US and EU.
Perhaps
Reuters expects its readers to believe that despite
the September 11, 2001 attacks and the many other
atrocities attributed to Al Qaeda over the last 15
years are trivial compared to the threat now
allegedly posed by Syria, Iran and Lebanon’s
Hezbollah.
The phrase
“the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” often implies
that the friendship is cynically strategic and
temporary and with little else beyond a common foe
holding the alliance together. In the case of Al
Qaeda, it is not an alliance of convenience, Al
Qaeda itself is an extension of US-European-Persian
Gulf geopolitical ambition. It has been since it was
admittedly created in a joint US-Saudi ploy to evict
Soviet troops from Afghanistan in a proxy war.
It is no
coincidence that Al Qaeda was created to fight proxy
wars in the 1980s, and today we find Al Qaeda in its
various forms in Syria once again fighting a proxy
war.
Reuters and
other news services across the US and Europe are
celebrating what they call setbacks in Syria for
Damascus and its allies, setbacks incurred by Al
Qaeda and setbacks anyone with a conscience could
not consider cause for celebration. This blatant
double game of pretending to fight terrorism while
all along propping it up, had until now served the
US and its allies well. Today, with the alternative
media continuing to expand and challenge such flawed
narratives, continuing on with them has cost the US
credibility it may never reclaim.
With pressure
continuing to mount on the West’s narrative, one can
only hope the impetus to act in Syria’s defense
among those nations willing and able to send
resources to assist will outweigh the impetus the US
and its allies have at home and abroad to double
down on this bankrupted strategy and the unraveling
unsustainable narrative that underpins it.
Ulson Gunnar,
a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer
especially for the online magazine “New
Eastern Outlook”.
See also
Saudi paper: U.S. carried out
9/11 attacks:
Saudi legal expert Katib Al-Shammari, writing in the
London-based Saudi daily Al-Hayat on April 28,
charged that the U.S. carried out the 9/11 attacks
while placing blame on others, beginning with
al-Qaida and the Taliban, then shifting to Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq and now Saudi Arabia. |