Last week, after reading a Time article titled "Why Bashar Assad Won’t Fight ISIS [7]" written by a journalist whose recent work includes "The YouTube War [8]", and who sourced two unnamed, anonymous sources to reach the conclusion that Syria's president Assad is in cahoots with ISIS, we made a simple conclusion: "The Stage Is Set For The Syrian Invasion [9]." Barely a week has gone by and the wheels for the Syrian invasion are indeed turning: earlier today, US Secretary of State John Kerry (who one hopes doesn't use kerryemails.com as a work email server) who is on a trip to Saudi Arabia unveiled the next steps when he said that "military pressure may be needed to oust Syria's President Bashar al-Assad."
[10]
US Secretary of State John Kerry attends a meeting of Gulf foreign ministers at
Riyadh Air Base, on March 5, 2015 in the Saudi capital (AFP Photo/Evan Vucci)
But wait, wasn't Obama's war in Iraq, authorized by Congress, solely a means to fight the stateless Islamic State of Syria and Iraq "scourge"? Or was all of that merely a pretext to do what the US tried once already in 2013 and failed?
AFP quotes Kerry [11]: "He's lost any semblance of legitimacy, but we have no higher priority than disrupting and defeating Daesh and other terror networks", he told reporters, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group which has seized swathes of Syria and Iraq.
Actually, the highest priority is not "Daesh" which is a populist distraction aided by some truly Hollywood-grade video editing and YouTube clips, but who controls the ground under Assad's feet: that all important gateway from the middle east into Turkey, and then, Europe. A gateway that is critical to the one nation that has all the natural gas in the world, and no end market to sell it to: Qatar.
Of course, Assad knows all of this: late last year, Assad told French reporters [12], “let’s be honest: Had Qatar not paid money to those terrorists at that time, and had Turkey not supported them logistically, and had not the West supported them politically, things would have been different. If we in Syria had problems and mistakes before the crisis, which is normal, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the events had internal causes”.
Assad continued, daring to call the staged US spade precisely what it was: he called its air strikes "merely cosmetic" and said that “terrorism cannot be destroyed from the air.” Assad added that “saying that the alliance’s airstrikes are helping us is not true." Which is why Time had to spin an unsourced article to "prove" that there was in fact a connection between the two.
Finally, Syria's president explained that Syria was fighting against “not only gangs”, but also states that support them with “billions of dollars.”
All of that is, of course, irrelevant to the top diplomat of one of these "supporting countries", and fast forwarding to today, Kerry told reporters in Saudi Arabia that "ultimately a combination of diplomacy and pressure will be needed to bring about a political transition. Military pressure particularly may be necessary given President Assad's reluctance to negotiate seriously."
Negotiate what exactly: how to hand himself over to the US? And since the answer doesn't matter, whatever it is what the US wants will have to be achieved in the same way that the staged Syrian war of 2013 was presented to the world: using false flag video clips, which resulted in a near-global confrontation involving Assad's close ally over at the Kremlin.
Which brings us to the most important variable: Russia's response to any "military pressure" applied against Assad. Again.
As RT reports [13], last November, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented on the issue, saying that: “Russia condemns the use of extremist groups in efforts to change the regime [in Syria].” Clear, concise and the the point.
Today Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich added some more insight into how it feels about constant Western efforts to provoke a war with Syria:
#Lukashevich [14]: The “moderate opposition” groups have taken a tougher stand at the talks with Damascus, hoping for external assistance #Syria [15]
— MFA Russia (@mfa_russia) March 5, 2015 [16]
#Lukashevich [14]: This is an alarming and disappointing stance that is obviously aimed at derailing the nascent trend for peace in #Syria [15]
— MFA Russia (@mfa_russia) March 5, 2015 [17]
That last assumes the west is interested in peace in Syria, when the entire point of introducing the ISIS "element" is precisely to destabilize the region and bring it to all out war.
The US-led coalition started air strikes in Syria last September as a part of a joint effort to battle the jihadist group, which had seized Syrian and Iraqi territories. Despite carrying out airstrikes in Syria, Washington has refused to work with the country’s government, stating that it wants to see Bashar Assad ousted.
Turkey backs the position of the US, and in March the two NATO allies began training “moderate” Syrian rebels to battle against the Islamic State militants.
This April, Moscow is set to host a meeting between the Syrian opposition and representatives of the government.
One can be confident that said meeting will achieve nothing, after the US makes it clear that no Moscow-brokered agreement is acceptable. Just as one can be confident that the ISIS "campaign" will continue and get ever closer to Damascus until yet another appropriately-framed YouTube clip appears and leads to another war with Assad. Because when petrodollar interests talk, mere innocent people are always expendable.
