‘US seeks to target Syrian govt.’

Sep 24, 2014, Press TV

Washington and its allies have now crossed a dangerous Rubicon, setting the stage for an all-out war on Syria under the guise of “defeating extremism.”

The absurd contradictions and deceptions of this latest US-led war in the Middle East should be brazenly obvious for anyone not brainwashed by Western “news” propaganda. The extremists that Washington is supposedly hunting now down are the progeny of American covert war in Syria that the Syrian government has been battling against for the past three years. The Saudi and Qatari allies now joining US warplanes to pound Syria are the financiers and weapons suppliers of the very terrorist networks that they are claiming to attack.

Meanwhile, as Washington and its assortment of Arab stooge regimes were attacking their sponsored extremist militants in the north of Syria, a Syrian armed forces warplane going after the same extremists in the southern Golan Heights was shot down by an Israeli missile. It was the first such shoot-down incident in nearly 30 years of stand-off between Syria and Israel.

The opening of this US-led blitzkrieg on Syria is an illegal act of aggression regardless of whether Washington informed the Syrian government minutes before the strikes took place, and regardless of the appearance of an “international coalition” of states carrying out the attacks.

It’s just another cynical public relations ploy under the cover of “humanitarian intervention” with Washington dressing up its actions in the garb of “Arab cooperation.” Five states were reported to have joined in the American salvos on Syria on Tuesday night: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

All of these unelected kingdoms have openly expressed hostility toward the Syrian government over the past three years. Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular – with their brand of extremist Wahhabi cult religion – have gone even further to endorse regime change against Assad, an important regional ally of Shia Iran.

The Persian Gulf monarchies have funneled over $10 billion into arming the mercenary networks that have descended on Syria since March 2011, according to a Financial Times report. These mercenaries typically espouse the same kind of Wahhabi fundamentalism of their Arab sponsors, and view other Muslims and Christians as “infidels” to be slaughtered.

The barbarism of the terror groups ISIS (or IS, ISIL) and al-Nusra stems directly from their sponsorship by the Saudi and Qatari despots. These extremist outfits would not have gained the prominence and terror presence in Syria or Iraq if it were not for the covert support from Washington and the Arab monarchs in their obsession to get rid of Assad.

In the latest US-led air attacks on Syria, the New York Times reported the operations “unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from air and sea.” The targets were said to be bases near the northern Syrian cities of Raqqa and Idlib held by the
al-Qaeda-linked ISIS and Al-Nusra Front.

For three years, the US and its NATO and regional Arab allies were constrained by legal and political reasons to limit themselves to fuelling a dirty covert war against Syria. That criminal conspiracy involved flooding Syria with mercenaries for the desired purpose of regime change against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

But the US-led covert war has turned out to be an abject failure, racking up a death toll of nearly 200,000 and millions of refugees. The Assad government has remained intact, with the president re-elected in June this year with a massive popular vote and turnout, verified by international observers. The Syrian army has also recaptured most of the territory lost earlier to the foreign-backed militants, which are now confined to remote northern and eastern areas.

This is the necessary context for why the US-led regime-change game plan has shifted a gear to open war.

Weeks of Western media highlighting beheadings and other atrocities carried out by ISIS in Iraq and Syria has primed the Western public to give its consent to belated US-led military intervention. The Baghdad government may have consented to foreign air strikes against the extremists in Iraq. But the Syrian government has not. Even though Damascus appears to have been notified hours before the latest strikes on its territory, the New York Times reported that they “occurred without the approval of President Bashar al-Assad.”

Apart from the absurd contradictions of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition, there are other evident anomalies pointing to the complete fraudulence of the agenda.

As the NYT noted in another article this week, the US-led bombing campaign that began last month in Iraq has failed to quash the terror network in that country. Yet, suddenly, the unfeasible war front has opened up in neighboring Syria.

“After six weeks of American airstrikes, the Iraqi government’s forces have scarcely budged the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State from their hold on more than a quarter of the country,” reported the Times.

So if the salvos have not worked in Iraq, why are they being expanded now into remoter Syria where there is even less chance of supposed success? That is predicated on the false assumption of defeating ISIS.

Also, the strikes come days before the United Nations Security Council was due to meet this week to discuss a draft anti-ISIS resolution. It was expected that Russia would have insisted that any air attacks carried out by the US-led coalition had to be conducted with the strict consent of the Syrian government and within the parameters of international law. Otherwise, any military action would have been vetoed.

That resolution has now been pre-empted by the US-NATO-Arab bomber squadron launching its blitzkrieg.

Washington has already said that its bombing campaign in Syria is in no way aimed at helping the Syrian government in its war against the (Western-sponsored) mercenaries.  “We don’t plan to make it easy for Assad to reclaim territory,” an Obama official told media.

That clearly means preventing the Syrian government reclaiming its own sovereign territory against the new cohort of US and Arab-trained “moderate” extremists under the $500-million package Obama pushed through Congress last week. It also anticipates that the next move for the US-led coalition will be the targeting of Syrian government forces “to prevent them reclaiming territory.”

Saudi, Qatari, Jordanian warplanes striking the Syrian capital, Damascus, alongside American Tomahawks and Israeli missiles is the nefarious logical conclusion.

The overt US-led war on Syria has begun despite its flagrant criminality and fraudulence. Thanks to the Western and Arab-sponsored terror networks in Syria and latterly Iraq, and the mendacity of Western media not highlighting this connection but rather saturating the airwaves with barbaric scare stories, the criminal US-led war on Syria is being conducted with a grotesque image of “humanitarianism and lawfulness.”