[Peace-discuss] US Caught Faking It in Syria

Wed Jan 6 09:55:55 EST 2016

 <http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/12/us-caught-faking-it-in-syria/> US
Caught Faking It in Syria

by  <http://www.counterpunch.org/author/thomas-s-harrington/> Thomas S.
Harrington 

The US and Israelis, have been faking it in Syria for a good long time
now.  And Putin has come along and called their bluff.

Description: Description:
syrian-civil-war-3-years-146000-dead-and-no-end-in-sight

The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square
is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do
might come along and show you up.

This is what has just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of
Russia into the fight against ISIL.

And as is generally the case with posers caught with their pants down, the
US policy elites are not happy about it.

You see, the US strategic goal in Syria is not as your faithful mainstream
media servants (led by that redoubtable channeler of Neo-Con smokescreens at
the NYT Michael Gordon) might have you believe  to  save the Syrian people
from the ravages of the long-standing Assad dictatorship, but rather to
heighten the level of internecine conflict in that country to the point
where it will not be able to serve as a bulwark against Israeli regional
hegemony for at least another generation.

How do we know? Because important protagonists in the Israelo-American
policy planning elite have advertised the fact with a surprising degree of
clarity in documents and public statements issued over the last several
decades.

The key here is learning to listen to what our cultural training has not
prepared us to hear.

In 1982, as the Likud Party (which is to say, the institutional incarnation
of the Revisionist Zionist belief, first articulated by Jabotinsky in the
Iron Wall  that the only way to deal with the Arabs in and around Israel
was through unrelenting force and the inducement of cultural fragmentation)
was consolidating its hold on the foreign policy establishment of Israel, a
journalist named Oded Yinon, who had formerly worked at the Israeli Foreign
Ministry,  published an article in which he outlined the strategic approach
his country needed to take in the coming years.

What follows are some excerpts from
<http://original.antiwar.com/%5C%C3%A2%CB%86%C5%A1http%5C::www.globalresearc
h.ca:greater-israel-the-zionist-plan-for-the-middle-east:5324815> Israel
Shahaks English translation of that text:

Lebanons total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for
the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula
and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later
on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is
Israels primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the
dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary
short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and
religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon
.

Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is
guaranteed as a candidate for Israels targets. Its dissolution is even more
important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the
short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.
An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home
even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us.
Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and
will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into
denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces
along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible.
So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra,
Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the
Sunni and Kurdish north.

If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan, or even the more distant
states will not continue to exist in their present form and will join the
downfall and dissolution of Egypt.

There is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present
structure for a long time, and Israels policy, both in war and in peace,
ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime
and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority.

Yinons vision reappeared in the now infamous
<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm> Clean Break
document from 1996, authored by a consortium of US and Israeli strategic
thinkers that included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David and Meyrav
Wurmser, which was meant to serve as a foreign policy blueprint for the
first administration  of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The text is nothing if not obsessive regarding the need to seriously
debilitate Syrias ability to act in any way is a pole of regional influence
in the in the area .

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and
Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort
can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq  an important
Israeli strategic objective in its own right  as a means of foiling Syrias
regional ambitions.

Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting
diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkeys and Jordans actions
against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross
into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.

And as
<http://original.antiwar.com/dan_sanchez/2015/10/05/seize-the-chaos/> Dan
Sanchez has recently shown, David Wurmser went into even greater detail
about the need to balkanize Israels northeastern neighbor in articles
published in approximately the same time period, talking quite openly in one
essay about expediting the chaotic collapse of Baathist Syria.

Then there is Wesley Clarks  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVYu46W9I0>
famous interview, given in 2007, in which he revealed the true strategic
aims of those running US foreign policy in the wake of the September 11th
attacks.  In it, he tells of a conversation he had at that time with a
Pentagon official who admitted that the real plan was to attack and destroy
the governments in seven countries in five years.

Those countries, according to Clark, were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya,
Somalia, Sudan, and Iraq. In the same speech, he explicitly ties the
hatching of the plan to Richard Perle, head of the cadre of people who wrote
in the Clean Break document of the paramount importance of putting Israel
in position to shape its strategic environment.

On September 5th, 2013, Alon Pinkas, the former Israeli Consul General in
New York and well-connected member of Tel Avivs conservative policy elite
described the Syrian conflict in
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/world/middleeast/israel-backs-limited-str
ike-against-syria.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0> the following terms in the New
York Times:

This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at
least you dont want one to win  well settle for a tie,
.Let them both
bleed, hemorrhage to death: thats the strategic thinking here. As long as
this lingers, theres no real threat from Syria.

I dont think it can get much clearer than that. The US-Israeli plan in
Syria has never been about helping anyone in that country, but rather
insuring its effective dismemberment so as to further the perceived
strategic interests of the Jewish state.

As Tomás Alcoverro, the longtime Mideast correspondent of Barcelonas La
Vanguardia newspaper
<http://www.pressreader.com/spain/la-vanguardia/20151009/281659663869549/Tex
tView> wrote on 9 October 2015, in reference to the combined Russian and
Syrian government attacks carried out during the previous week: If this
joint offensive is successful, the US plan for continuing the war of
attrition until both sides are exhausted will lie in ruins.

Yes, the US and Israelis, have been faking it in Syria for a good long
time now.  And Putin has come along and called their bluff.

And they are not happy about it.   Which is why the ongoing campaign of
demonization against the Russian leader is being ratcheted up  if thats
possible  to still higher levels of intelligence-insulting hyperbole.

Thomas S. Harrington is a professor of Iberian Studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut and the author of the recently released
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/8437092817/counterpunchmaga> Livin
la Vida Barroca: American Culture in a Time of Imperial Orthodoxies. 

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