[News] NATO dreams of civil war in Syria

[Anti-Imperialist News]

NATO dreams of civil war in Syria
By Pepe Escobar

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ML15Ak03.html

Every grain of sand in the Syrian desert now knows there won't be a 
"responsibility to protect"-enabled North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization (NATO) "humanitarian" intervention to provoke regime 
change in Damascus. A protracted war like in Libya is not feasible - 
even though those faultless democratic practitioners, the House of 
Saud, have offered to pay for it, lavishly.

Yet the fog of near war remains impenetrable. What is NATO really up 
to in Syria?

It was already established (see 
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ML02Ak01.html>The shadow 
war in Syria Asia Times Online, December 2, 2011) that NATO had set 
up a command and control center in Turkey's southern Hatay province - 
where British commandos and French intelligence are training the 
dodgy Free Syria Army (FSA). The target: to foment a civil war 
engulfing northern Syria.

Now comes the confirmation, via the website of former United States 
Federal Bureau of Investigation whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, that a 
pincer movement may be in effect, involving Jordan. [1]

Edmonds quotes local sources according to whom "hundreds of soldiers 
who speak languages other than Arabic" have been "moving back and 
forth ... between the King Hussein air base in al-Mafraq" and 
"Jordanian villages adjacent to the Syrian border".

Edmonds sustains none of this is being reported by US media because 
of a gag order from above that in theory expired this Tuesday. And 
don't try asking King Abdullah of Jordan about it.

The base at al-Mafraq is virtually across the border from Dar'a. A 
lot of action has been going on in Dar'a recently - an epicenter of 
the anti-President Bashar al-Assad movement. As far as the Syrian 
news agency Sana is concerned, security forces have been routinely 
killed by "terrorist gangs". As far as the "rebels" are concerned, 
these are patriotic army defectors attacking military supply lines.

Let's hit plan B
By adopting this pincer movement, NATO in Syria is now actively 
diversifying into an Iraq-in-the-1990s strategy; to submit Syria to a 
prolonged state of siege before eventually going for the kill.

Yet as much as NATO would pray to Allah for the contrary, Syria is 
not Libya. It's much smaller and compact, but more populated and with 
a real, battle-tested army. On top of being immensely estranged from 
each other by the current eurodrama, the Brits and former colonial 
power France have calculated they have everything to lose 
economically if they engage in the folly of a conventional war.

As for the Syrian opposition stalwarts - the Syrian National Council 
(SNC) - they are a joke. Most are Muslim Brotherhood, with a 
sprinkling of Kurds. The leader, Burhan Ghalioun, is an opportunist 
Paris exile with zero credibility (for the average Syrian) although 
in a recent Wall Street Journal interview he made all the right 
noises to appease the Israel lobby (no more ties with Iran, no more 
support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza).

The FSA claims 15,000 army defectors. But it's infected with 
mercenaries and what scores of Syrian civilians describe as armed 
gangs. The SNC, in thesis, is anti-guerrilla. But that's exactly what 
the FSA is actively practicing, attacking Syrian soldiers and Ba'ath 
party offices.

The SNC key tactic for now is to sell Western public opinion the 
Libya-style "potential" nightmare of an imminent massacre in Homs. 
Not many are buying it - apart from the usual, strident, corporate 
media suspects. Although both are based in Istanbul, the SNC and the 
FSA can't seem to get their act together; they look like a lethal 
version of The Three Stooges.

Then there is the Arab League, which is now controlled by The Eight 
Stooges; the six GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council, aka Gulf 
Counter-revolution Club) monarchies plus "invited" GCC members 
Morocco and Jordan. The stooges are subcontractors of NATO's Greater 
Middle East on (humanitarian) steroids. Nobody, though, is asking 
where were the stooges were when Beirut and southern Lebanon were 
destroyed in 2006, and when Gaza was destroyed in 2008 - in both 
instances by Israel. The stooges don't dare question the divine 
rights of the US/Israel axis.

NATO's tactics in Syria have been crystal clear for a while now. 
France, under neo-Napoleonic liberator of Libya President Nicolas 
Sarkozy, concentrates on turbo-charging escalation. A the same time, 
Paris is trying to position the rise and rise of the Muslim 
Brotherhood all across the Arab world as a strategic Western interest 
- as in curbing Iranian influence.

Then there's the ongoing economic blockade - impossible without 
cooperation from Iraq (it won't happen), Lebanon (it won't happen) 
and Jordan (it could, but to Jordan's detriment).

But NATO's wet dream is really to push Turkey to do the dirty work. 
Irretrievably broke as they are, NATO countries - including the US - 
simply cannot launch yet another Middle East war that would send oil 
prices through the roof.

What NATO cannot fathom is the possibility of a sectarian 
Sunni-Shi'ite war re-exploding in Iraq. In this case, the only safe 
haven would be Iraqi Kurdistan. And that would strengthen Kurdish 
unity - from Iraq to Syria, from Turkey to Iran. Turkey in this case 
would have more pertinent fish to fry than to get embroiled in a war in Syria.

Turkey's double game
Still, the great imponderable in this complex chessboard is Turkey - 
as in what precisely happened to their much-lauded foreign policy of 
"zero problems with our neighbors", devised by Foreign Minister Ahmet 
Davutoglu.

Faced with Riyadh's impotence, and Cairo in turmoil, Ankara seems to 
have monopolized the mantle of Sunni leadership - or guardian of 
Sunni orthodoxy facing those Shi'ite heretics, mostly from Iran (but 
also Iraq, Alawis in Syria and Hezbollah).

At the same time, to please NATO and the US, Ankara allows the 
deployment of missile defense in its territory - which is directed 
not only against Iran but most of all against Russia. Not to mention 
Ankara harbors the secret - forbidden - desire to "solve" the Kurdish 
question for good by establishing an autonomous zone in Syrian territory.

And Ankara also wants to make money; winners in Libya were British 
and French oil interests, while losers were the Italians and the 
Turks. But so far Turkey is also losing, especially in Hatay province 
near the Syrian border, as a free-trade agreement between both 
countries has been canceled.

To the West's despair, the Assad regime is far from being strangled. 
To counteract the hefty package of Arab League/Turkish sanctions, the 
regime has accelerated trade with China - by bartering and bypassing 
the international financial system.

No wonder Washington is taking the long-haul approach. It has 
deployed back to Damascus its ambassador Robert Ford - a former 
assistant to the sinister former destabilizer of Nicaragua John 
Negroponte when he was ambassador in Baghdad, and a current 
enthusiast of the House of Saud counter-revolution.

Ford will have plenty of time to exchange e-mails with a Syrian 
opposition totally in bed with former colonial power France. Talk 
about a stooge festival; this one is bound to carve its own niche in 
the annals of Middle East infamy.

Note
1. The report is 
<http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/12/11/bfp-exclusive-developing-story-hundreds-of-us-nato-soldiers-arrive-begin-operations-on-the-jordan-syria-border/>here. 
An interview with Syrian journalist Nizar Nayouf is 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v1h1bUfCVc>here.

Pepe Escobar is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0978813820/simpleproduction/ref=nosim>Globalistan: 
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 
2007) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/Red-Zone-Blues-snapshot-Baghdad/dp/0978813898>Red 
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, 
just out, is 
<http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Does-Globalistan-Pepe-Escobar/dp/1934840831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233698286&sr=8-1>Obama 
does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com.



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