THE ROVING
EYE Syria, the new
Libya By Pepe Escobar
A Kalashnikov in Iraq, until recently,
sold for US$100. Now it's at least $1,000, and
most probably $1,500 (those were the days when
Sunnis joining the resistance in 2003 could buy a
fake Kalashnikov made in Romenia for $20).
Destination of choice of the $1,500
Kalashnikov in 2012: Syria. Network: al-Qaeda in
the Land of the Two Rivers, also known as
AQI. Recipients: infiltrated
jihadis operating side-by-side with the Free
Syrian Army (FSA).
Also shuttling between
Syria and Iraq is car bombing and suicide bombing,
as in two recent bombings in the suburbs of
Damascus and the suicide bombing last Friday in
Aleppo.
Who would have thought that what
the House of Saud wants in Syria - an Islamist
regime - is exactly what al-Qaeda wants in Syria?
Ayman "The Surgeon" al-Zawahiri,
al-Qaeda's number one, in an eight-minute video
titled "Onwards, Lions of Syria", has just called
for the support of Muslims in Iraq, Jordan,
Lebanon and Turkey to topple Bashar al-Assad
"pernicious, cancerous regime". They had been
responding, in kind, even before The Surgeon came
into the picture. Not only those, but especially
transplanted Libyan "freedom fighters", formerly
known as "rebels".
Who would have thought
that what NATOGCC (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization-Gulf Cooperation Council) wants for
Syria is exactly what al-Qaeda wants for Syria?
So when the Assad regime, for all its
ghastly military offensives that essentially
victimize civilians caught in cross fire, says
it's fighting "terrorists", it's not exactly
bending the truth. Even that ubiquitous,
proverbial entity, the unnamed "US official", is
blaming AQI for the recent bombings. Same for
Iraq's Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Assadi;
"We have intelligence information that a number of
Iraqi jihadists went to Syria."
So if
Syria could not be the new Libya in the sense of a
UN resolution authorizing NATO humanitarian
bombing - vetoed by BRICS members Russia and China
- Syria is a new Libya in the sense of unsavory
ties between the "rebels" and hardcore
Salafi-jihadis.
And as the West absolutely
loves a win-win situation, no matter how
prefabricated, that could also turn into the
perfect Pentagon casus belli to intervene -
as in freeing Syria from an "al-Qaeda" which was
never there in the first place. Remember - for all
the hype about the Pentagon/Obama administration's
"pivoting" from the Middle East to East Asia, the
global war on terror (GWOT), rebranded by Obama as
"overseas contingency operations" (OCO), is still
alive and kicking.
Liberate me so I can
kill at ease Last year, Asia Times Online
extensively reported that "liberated" Libya -
"liberated" by the so-called NATO rebels - would
descend into militia hell. That's exactly what's
happening; at least 250 different militias in
Misurata alone, according to Human Rights Watch,
acting as cops on the beat, judges and
exterminators all rolled into one. There's no
Ministry of Justice to speak of in "liberated"
Libya. If you go to jail, you end up dead; and if
you are a sub-Saharan African, you get a bonus of
extensive torture at a liberated resort before
meeting the same fate.
Just as in Libya,
as a matter of strategy, for the House of
Saud/Qatar Sunni axis, any possibility of a real
dialogue between the (armed) insurrection and the
Assad regime has been thwarted. After all; the key
objective is regime change. Thus crude propaganda
- in an Arab media largely controlled either by
Saudis or Qataris - rules.
Example; the
much-lauded Britain-based Syrian Observatory of
Human Rights, which vomits unending,
unsubstantiated statistics on government
"massacres" - and even "genocide" - gets its funds
from a Dubai entity financed by shady Western and
GCC donors.
As a bonus, the non-stop
"opposition" spin totally laser-guides Western
corporate media coverage. CNN attributed the
Aleppo bombing last Friday to "terrorists" - in
quotation marks; imagine the hysteria if this was
the US Green Zone in Iraq bombed by the Sunni
resistance in the mid-2000s. The BBC actually
believed the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood spin
according to which the Syrian government bombed
itself; it would be like the Pentagon bombing
itself in the Green Zone. As for Arab media -
largely controlled by Saudis and Qataris - it has
totally ignored the AQI connection.
The
GCC League - formerly Arab League - after bombing
its own report on Syria because it didn't fit the
prefabricated narrative of an "evil" regime
unilaterally bombing its people, is now peddling a
supposedly humanitarian plan B; a joint Arab/UN
peacekeeping mission to "supervise the execution
of a cease-fire". But no one should be fooled; the
agenda remains regime change.
Prince Saud
al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, has
been making the right noises, ruling out a
humanitarian intervention. At the same time, it's
refreshing to hear the oh so progressive House of
Saud carping about the "lack of commitment of the
Syrian government", and pontificating that " what
Syria is witnessing is not racist, not sectarian,
nor guerrilla war, but a mass purge without any
humanitarian considerations".
Imagine the
House of Saud's "humanitarian considerations"
should a pro-democracy movement emerge in the
Shi'ite majority eastern province (it did; and it
was ruthlessly pre-empted). Better yet; look at
how "humanitarian" they looked in their invasion
of Bahrain.
The NATOGCC agenda remains the
same; regime change, by any means possible. Even
Warrior-in-Chief US President Barack Obama said so
himself. The GCC minions will happily oblige. So
expect an inflation of Kalashnikovs crossing
borders, more car bombings, more suicide bombings,
more civilians caught in cross fire, and the slow,
immensely tragic, fragmentation of Syria.
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