[Peace-discuss] FW: What if Americans Had Known in 2013 that U.S. rejected Syria Deal in 2012?

[David Johnson]

From: David Sladky [mailto:tanstl at hotmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2015 6:38 AM
Subject: What if Americans Had Known in 2013 that U.S. rejected Syria Deal
in 2012?

 

What if Americans Had Known in 2013 that U.S. rejected Syria Deal in 2012?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42867.htm

By David Swanson
September 15, 2015 " <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/> Information
Clearing House" -  In the United States it is considered fashionable to
maintain a steadfast ignorance of rejected peace offers, and to believe that
all the wars launched by the U.S. government are matters of "last resort."
Our schools still don't teach that Spain wanted the matter of the Maine to
go to international arbitration, that Japan wanted peace before Hiroshima,
that the Soviet Union proposed peace negotiations before the Korean War, or
that the U.S. sabotaged peace proposals for Vietnam from the Vietnamese, the
Soviets, and the French. When a Spanish newspaper reported that Saddam
Hussein had offered to leave Iraq before the 2003 invasion, U.S. media took
little interest. When British media reported that the Taliban was willing to
have Osama bin Laden put on trial before the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan,
U.S. journalists yawned. Iran's 2003 offer to negotiate ending its nuclear
energy program wasn't mentioned much during this year's debate over an
agreement with Iran -- which was itself nearly rejected as an impediment to
war.
The Guardian reported
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/15/west-ignored-russian-offer-in-
2012-to-have-syrias-assad-step-aside>  on Tuesday that the former Finnish
president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari, who had been
involved in negotiations in 2012, said that in 2012 Russia had proposed a
process of peace settlement between the Syrian government and its opponents
that would have included President Bashar al-Assad stepping down. But,
according to Ahtisaari, the United States was so confident that Assad would
soon be violently overthrown that it rejected the proposal.
The catastrophic Syrian civil war since 2012 has followed U.S. adherence to
actual U.S. policy in which peaceful compromise is usually the last resort.
Does the U.S. government believe violence tends to produce better results?
The record shows otherwise. More likely it believes that violence will lead
to greater U.S.-control, while satisfying the war industry. The record on
the first part of that is mixed at best.
Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000 Wesley Clark
claims that in 2001, Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld put out a memo
proposing to take over seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. The basic outline of this plan was
confirmed by none other than former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who
in 2010 pinned it on former Vice President Dick Cheney:
"Cheney wanted forcible 'regime change' in all Middle Eastern countries that
he considered hostile to U.S. interests, according to Blair. 'He would have
worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their
surrogates in the course of it - Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,' Blair wrote. 'In
other words, he [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that
after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was
for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.'"
U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks trace U.S. efforts in
Syria to undermine the government back to at least 2006. In 2013, the White
House went public with plans to lob some unspecified number of missiles into
Syria, which was in the midst of a horrible civil war already fueled in part
by U.S. arms and training camps, as well as by wealthy U.S. allies in the
region and fighters emerging from other U.S.-created disasters in the
region.
The excuse for the missiles was an alleged killing of civilians, including
children, with chemical weapons -- a crime that President Barack Obama
claimed to have certain proof had been committed by the Syrian government.
Watch the videos of the dead children, the President said, and support that
horror or support my missile strikes. Those were the only choices,
supposedly. It wasn't a soft sell, but it wasn't a powerful or successful
one either.
The "proof" of responsibility for that use of chemical weapons fell apart,
and public opposition to what we later learned would have been a massive
bombing campaign succeeded. Public opposition succeeded without knowing
about the rejected proposal for peace of 2012. But it succeeded without
follow-through. No new effort was made for peace, and the U.S. went right
ahead inching its way into the war with trainers and weapons and drones.
In January 2015, a scholarly study <http://davidswanson.org/node/4637>
found that the U.S. public believes that whenever the U.S. government
proposes a war, it has already exhausted all other possibilities. When a
sample group was asked if they supported a particular war, and a second
group was asked if they supported that particular war after being told that
all alternatives were no good, and a third group was asked if they supported
that war even though there were good alternatives, the first two groups
registered the same level of support, while support for war dropped off
significantly in the third group. This led the researchers to the conclusion
that if alternatives are not mentioned, people don't assume they exist -
rather, people assume they've already been tried. So, if you mention that
there is a serious alternative, the game is up. You'll have to get your war
on later.
Based on the record of past wars, engaged in and avoided, as it dribbles out
in the years that follow, the general assumption should always be that peace
has been carefully avoided at every turn.

David Swanson is an American activist, blogger and
author.http://davidswanson.org  <http://davidswanson.org/> 

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