THE ROVING
EYE Realpolitik blurs US red line on
Syria By Pepe Escobar
Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are
back. It's like we never left Dubya's glory days.
No, they didn't find the non-existent Saddam stash
on eBay. This is about the existent Bashar
al-Assad's. And it's not WMDs as the pretext for
an invasion and occupation, but WMDs as a pretext
for whatever euphemism the Obama administration
comes up with to define "kinetic military
activity".
The whole thing is especially
suspicious considering Damascus has been on the
record stressing it will never use chemical
weapons against the "rebels".
Here's US
President Barack Obama; "A red line for us is [if] we
start seeing a whole
bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being
utilized." [1]
So now even a few mustard
gas containers slightly wobbling inside a depot
may constitute a casus belli. But is it that
clear-cut? Obama said this is "a" red line -
implying there may be unspecified (covert) others.
Obama also stressed Washington's "fears"
of Syria's WMDs "falling into the hands of the
wrong people". Considering the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) is in the business -
alongside Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) stalwarts
Saudi Arabia and Qatar - of weaponizing the myriad
gangs that constitute the Not Exactly Free Syrian
Army (FSA), including hundreds of Salafi-jihadis,
this is a stark admission that in fact they are
the "wrong people". Ergo, the "right people" is
the Assad regime.
Was that an Obama coded
message to Turkey - implying that if you invade
northwest Syria, now practically an autonomous
Kurdish area, you will have to do it alone,
without the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and
without the Pentagon? Was that a message to the
"wrong people", aka the "rebels", that apart from
dubiously effective covert CIA shenanigans, you
are on your own?
These two possibilities
were advanced at the website Moon of Alabama. [2]
Yet it may have finally dawned on the
Obama administration that a possible post-Assad
Syria ruled by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (MB)
- which is infinitely more ruthless and sectarian
than the Egyptian version - is not exactly an
enlightened bet.
The White House and the
State Department are livid over Egyptian President
Mohammed Morsi's purge of the Supreme Council of
the Armed Forces leadership and his upcoming
diplomatic trips to - heaven forbid - Beijing and
the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran.
If the MB in Egypt can pull that off, imagine in
Syria, which was not under Washington's sphere of
influence to begin with.
So why not let
the whole thing drag on in a Lebanonization -
rather Somalization - scenario that pins down the
Syrian army and weakens the central government in
Damascus, thus erasing its "threat" in case the
war-mongering Bibi-Barak duo in Israel goes ahead
with an attack on Iran?
Stuff your
democracy by bombs Let's see how the
situation stands. The Three (Warring) Graces -
Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power -
and their doctrine of R2P ("responsibility to
protect"), applied "successfully" in Libya,
miserably floundered in Syria.
There won't
be any "no-fly zone" - in fact a declaration of
war. There won't be any "humanitarian" bombing; it
has been blocked at the UN Security Council no
less than three times by Russia and China.
On top of it, the whole decade-old "war on
terra" hysteria has proved itself to be an
intergalactic scam; the CIA, alongside the House
of Saud and Qatar, is once again side-by-side with
Salafi-jihadis of the al-Qaeda variety merrily
fighting a secular Arab republic.
The key
Syria question is how Russia and China see Obama's
red line.
Here's the Russian response. [3]
Its bottom line is that the US should respect the
"norms of international law"; no to "democracy by
bombs"; and only the UN Security Council has the
power to authorize an attack on Syria. Once again;
Russia and China, three times already, have said
no to war.
Here's the Chinese response.
Not via diplomacy, as in Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov, but as a Xinhua editorial, which in
the Chinese context means Beijing's official
version. The headline says it all; "Obama's 'red
line' warnings aimed to seek new pretext for Syria
intervention".
Arguably this is the money
quote - a summary of US foreign policy according
to Beijing; "It is not difficult to find that,
under the disguise of humanitarianism, the United
States has always tried to smash governments it
considers as threats to its so-called national
interests and relentlessly replace them with those
that are Washington-friendly."
All the key
players here - the US, Russia and China - know
Damascus won't commit the folly of using (or
"moving") chemical weapons. So no wonder Moscow
and Beijing are extremely suspicious this "red
line" gambit may be yet another Obama deception
maneuver, as in "leading from behind" in Libya
(this is nonsense; in fact the attack on Libya
started with Africom and then was transferred to
NATO).
As Asia Times Online has been
reporting for over a year, once again the big
picture is clear; this is a titanic battle between
NATO-GCC and BRICS members Russia and China. At
stake is nothing less than the rule of
international law, which has been steadily going
down the drain since at least Agent Orange being
sprayed all over Vietnam, through Dubya's invasion
of Iraq in 2003, and with the Libyan "humanitarian
bombing" reaching an abysmal low. Not to mention
Israel daily threatening to bomb Iran - as if this
was a trip to a kosher deli.
Well, one can
always dream of the day a multipolar world will
give a pink slip to those issuers of red lines.
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