<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<font size="-1">
<div class="entry-date">October 03, 2012</div>
<div class="subheadlinestyle">Why the US Ambassador Would be Well
Advised Not to Visit</div>
<h1 class="article-title">Syria, the Story So Far</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by WILLIAM BLUM<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/03/syria-the-story-so-far/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/03/syria-the-story-so-far/</a><br>
</div>
<div class="main-text">
<p>“Today, many Americans are asking — indeed I ask myself,” Hillary
Clinton said, “how can this happen? How can this happen in a country we
helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This
question reflects just how complicated, and at times, how confounding
the world can be.”</p>
<p>The Secretary of State was referring to the attack on the American
consulate in Benghazi, Libya September 11 that killed the US ambassador
and three other Americans. US intelligence agencies have now stated
that the attackers had ties to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.</p>
<p>Yes, the world can indeed be complicated and confounding. But we
have learned a few things. The United States began blasting Libya with
missiles with the full knowledge that they were fighting on the same
side as the al-Qaeda types. Benghazi was and is the headquarters for
Muslim fundamentalists of various stripes in North Africa. However,
it’s incorrect to claim that the United States (aka NATO) saved the
city from destruction. The story of the “imminent” invasion of Benghazi
by Moammar Gaddafi’s forces last year was only propaganda to justify
Western intervention. And now the United States is intervening — at
present without actual gunfire, as far as is known — against the
government of Syria, with the full knowledge that they’re again on the
same side as the al-Qaeda types. A rash of suicide bombings against
Syrian government targets is sufficient by itself to dispel any doubts
about that. And once again, the United States is participating in the
overthrow of a secular Mideast government.</p>
<p>At the same time, the Muslim fundamentalists in Syria, as in Libya,
can have no illusions that America loves them. A half century of US
assaults on Mideast countries, the establishment of American military
bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and US support for
dictatorships and for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians
have relieved them of such fanciful thoughts. So why is the United
States looking to forcefully intervene once again? A tale told many
times — world domination, oil, Israel, ideology, etc. Assad of Syria,
like Gaddafi of Libya, has shown little promise as a reliable client
state so vital to the American Empire.</p>
<p>It’s only the barrier set up by Russia and China on the UN Security
Council that keeps NATO (aka the United States) from unleashing
thousands of airborne missiles to ”liberate” Syria as they did Libya.
Russian and Chinese leaders claim that they were misled about Libya by
the United States, that all they had agreed to was enforcing a “no-fly
zone”, not seven months of almost daily missile attacks against the
land and people of Libya. Although it’s very fortunate that the two
powers refuse to give the US another green light, it’s difficult to
believe that they were actually deceived last spring in regard to
Libya. NATO doesn’t do peacekeeping or humanitarian interventions; it
does war; bloody, awful war; and regime change. And they would
undoubtedly be itching to show off their specialty in Syria — perhaps
even without Security Council blessing — except that NATO and the US
always prefer to attack people who are exceptionally defenseless, and
Syria has ballistic missile capabilities and chemical weapons.</p>
<p>It’s likely that the American elections also serve to keep Obama
from expanding the US role in Syria. He may have concluded that there
are more votes in the Democratic Party base for peace this time than
for waging war against his eighth (sic) country.</p>
<p>The propaganda bias in the Western media has been extreme. Day after
day, month after month, we’ve been told of Syrian government attacks,
using horrible means, almost invariably with the victims described as
unarmed civilians; without any proof, often without any logic, that it
was actually the government behind a particular attack, with the
story’s source turning out to be an anti-government organization;
rarely informing us of similar behavior on the part of the rebel
forces. In May, the BBC included pictures of mass graves in Iraq in
their coverage of an alleged Syrian government massacre in Houla,
Syria. The station later apologized for the pictures saying that they
had been submitted to the BBC by a rebel group.</p>
<p>On June 7, Germany’s leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, citing opponents of Assad, reported that the Houla massacre
was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and that the bulk
of the victims were members of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which
have been largely supportive of Assad.</p>
<p>According to a report of Stratfor, the private and conservative
American intelligence firm with high-level connections, many of whose
emails were obtained by Wikileaks: “most of the [Syrian] opposition’s
more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply
untrue.” They claimed “that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a
72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their
weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international
headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a
massacre”, and warned that “opposition forces have an interest in
portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that
propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor then
stated that any suggestions of massacres were unlikely because the
Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a
scenario … that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian
grounds.”</p>
<p>Democracy Now — long a standard of progressive radio-TV news — has
been almost as bad as CNN and al Jazeera (the latter owned by Qatar, an
active military participant in both Libya and Syria). The heavy bias
ofDemocracy Now in this area goes back to the very beginning of the
Arab Spring. The program made some unfortunate choices in its mideast
news correspondents, seemingly only because they spoke Arabic and/or
had contacts in the region. Where have you gone Amy Goodman? RT (Russia
Today) has stood almost alone amongst English-language television news
sources in offering an alternative to the official Western line.</p>
<p>Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research, notes that “Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria are but a sequence of stops on a
global roadmap of permanent war that also swings through Iran. Russia
and China are the terminal targets.” When the Syrian government is
overthrown — and in all likelihood the Western forces will not relent
until that happens — the al Qaeda types will be dominant in the Syrian
version of Benghazi. The American ambassador would be well advised to
not visit.</p>
<p><em><strong>William Blum</strong> is the author of <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512526/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Killing
Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II</a>, <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567511945/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Rogue
State: a guide to the World’s Only Super Power</a> and <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1887128727/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">West-Bloc
Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir</a>. He can be reached at: <a
href="mailto:%20BBlum6@aol.com">BBlum6@aol.com</a></em></p>
</div>
</font>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>