by Jim W. Dean
May 28. 2013 (TSR) – The competing internal and external Syrian factions have shown more of their cards in the last few days, not only as to their intentions but also their motivations. I don’t know whether to describe it as a circus or a tragic comedy as it overlaps into both.
But I will start with the head clowns, which are the rabble called the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Coalition which seem to be a bunch of freewheeling buccaneers who have been thinking they would ride Western military might into leadership positions (i.e. government corruption) in a post-Assad Syrian government. Time has not been on their side as they originally thought.
While currently meeting in Istanbul and fighting over new leadership positions, they have taken time out to actually challenge the Russian Foreign Ministry’s announcement that the Syrian government has agreed ‘in principle’ to attend the Geneva conference…with a demand for proof.
At the same time, the rebels are demanding international guarantees, particularly from the Russians, that Assad agree in advance to surrender and leave as part of any political resolution. You just can’t make this stuff up folks.
Says SNA’s Louay Safi, “If the Russians will come forward and realize that they are moving against history and siding with the wrong party, then I think we are going to see a meaningful change, and that will save the Syrian people, who have suffered a lot.”
You can add to this the insanity the FSA’s commander General Salim Idris, the guy who only has partial control of his make-believe Abraham Lincoln brigades of foreign fighters. He is demanding that he will not attend the Geneva conference unless the US and its allies provided the rebels with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, including shoulder-fired ones. So these yoyos think they are now holding the conference hostage.
The Arab League has already drafted its proposals which will be run by the big five on the UN Security Council to ‘help the conference succeed via a political solution and the deployment of UN peacekeepers’. I don’t know where these AL people have been, but UN peacekeepers don’t go in while fighting is going on, and they leave when their troops have their heads chopped off and get castrated.
The former ex-SNC head Moaz al-Khatib is proposing that Assad have twenty days to leave with five hundred selected officials and families. That is a very gracious offer from an ex-leader. These people cannot effectively lead their own side but still claim the right to make demands with 100,000 dead Syrians, uncounted numbers wounded and property damage that no one has even attempted to estimate.
The ex-colonizers, Britain and France, responsible for much of the orchestrated long-term geopolitical ‘divide and conquer’ damage in the Middle East, have also self-appointed themselves Neo-Kingmakers. And the Persian Gulf State banditos and their Arab League allies have been only too happy to see Syria bleed. The end prize would be a pipeline through Syria to Mediterranean ports and markets which would then make closing the Straits of Hormuz an Iranian problem in case of a major shooting war.
On the other side you have the Russians and Iranians who have never insisted that Assad must stay, but only that the Syrian people should decide. For this, they are now being painted as aggressors. And with the Syrian Army having finally begun to turn the situation around, this is now spun due to the invisible Iranian army that magically flies around in the ether. In fact, these Iranian tooth fairies do not really exist.
Not reported in the pitiful corporate media is the obvious. The Syrians are operating along shorter interior lines due to the territory they have lost and have the ability to move counteroffensive troops around to attack rebel positions with local superiority and secure resupply lines.
Another thing the media never reports is Syria has a 400,000-man army that is now highly motivated for defending their country against foreign invaders including the Wahabi cannibals and sexual mutilators now on the scene. If I were in the Syrian army, I would not consider surrender a very attractive option.
These Western protestations are nothing but fanny covering for the failed plans of their ‘point of a gun regime change’ game strategy where they thought using low cost proxies was the ticket. Someone has to be blamed for the bad policy, anyone but those really responsible. I wonder whether some kind of deal was made between Obama and Netanyahu that “if you back off on Iran now I will give you Syria instead and we can do some preliminary work there for staging our next moves on Iran.” Why am I so suspicious?
They miscalculated on Russia coming back with their Med fleet. And the stupid nuclear bunker buster attack on Damascus gave the Russians all the cover they needed to make a defensive deployment to protect their long-time ally. Russian satellites are now sitting on top of Syria, Lebanon and Israel, and nothing moves day or night that they do not see. And if there is any aggression toward their fleet, we will see a quick escalation to stage three which will also by a big mistake for someone.
But there is an alternate scenario to the ‘we need to extract ourselves from this mess before it gets worse’ that it seems the Western provocateurs have found themselves. They just may want this mess to go on while pretending they are seeking a political solution that plenty others will gladly wreck any chances of.
Maybe having a big knock-down-drag-out fight between the Wahabi crazies against the Syrian Army and Hezbollah could be a key part of their plan as the more dead on both those sides the merrier. The FSA would have less to contend with down the road when the next civil war gets cranked up.
Franklin Lamb has been on the ground in the Homs area and met some of the Salafis on their way to al-Qusayr as that is the fulcrum of the war now. The rebels need it for supplies and so does Damascus to get what the Russians are sending.
The current operational plan seems to be securing the southern border with Jordan and Lebanon, and blocking the Israelis from sticking their noses in with an S-300 defense ring on the ground and the S-400’s and Iskanders on the Russian fleet boats. I will not be surprised to see a no-fly zone at some point for the Israelis north of their own border, and the same for their navy. I fear the Israelis might try to play some card now before this is all in place as it will be harder, and more costly to try to do afterward.
From brother Lamb we have: “Contrary to the shock and anger expressed by Senator Paul, American policy in Syria is to de facto assist allies of al Qaeda including the US “terrorist-listed” Al-Nusra Front as well as anti-Iran, anti-Shia and anti-Hezbollah groups gathering near al-Qusayr. These groups currently include, but not limited to, Ahl al-Athr Brigade, Ahrar al-Sham, Basha’ir al-Nasr Brigades, Commandos Brigades, Fajr al-Islam Brigades, Independent Farouq Brigades, Khalid bin al-Waleed Brigade, Liwa al-Haq, Liwa al-Sadiq, Al-Nour Brigade, Al-Qusayr Brigade, Suqur al-Fatah, Al-Wadi Brigades, Al-Waleed Brigades and the 77th Brigade among the scores of other Jihadist cells currently operating in, near, or rushing to, al-Qusayr.”
Suspicious me, my question to all of this news is who is setting a trap for whom? Who is going to supply all these brigades when they are behind enemy lines? I doubt that the Syrians are going to provide them safe escort to al-Quayr by falling for the old ‘I am on a religious holiday’ ruse. And I expect by now all the weapons and ammo caches there have been rounded up. So yours truly will not be surprised to see a June Geneva conference going on during a major offensive as a backdrop. It sounds crazy but the motions are in play.
Bibi did not do well in his talks with Putin. I can tell because Bibi is back to his Iran threat whipping doll with a dual approach. He is blaming the US for the failed sanctions, and pitching doom and gloom on Iran’s nuclear progress.
But there is one big hole in his fear mongering. Everything the Iranians are doing is permitted under the IAEA whereas the Israelis will not let them set foot in Israel to look at anything. Israel’s Iranian nuclear bogeyman routine as a pre-emptive strike trigger is an empty gun with the Russian fleet cruising off shore. If the Israelis launched a strike, there would be no bases to come home to. Israel lives in an ‘assured destruction’ new world now, one it is not used to or ready for.
The US is not ready for that either, and world opinion has had a big shift against the phony democracy spreading game. When the West’s ‘defending its interests’ is eventually interpreted by everyone else as a smokescreen for open military and commercial aggression, it will just push the rest of the world into an open alliance against it.
And suspicious me…that may be exactly what some evil empire wants as then the defense contractors would have the new big Cold War plus some warmer shooting wars to keep making their trips to the bank. Satellites, missile technology and robotic warfare will dominate any next big shooting war, but the West will have no advantage there unless they bring what they have been hiding out of the closet.
Big nukes cannot be used as everybody knows the poison will spread all over the world with huge consequences to all. Whoever uses them will find themselves at war with the entire world and never able to leave their own country again. What the West really fears is losing their mini-nuke advantage where those can be mounted on the huge numbers of top grade missiles that their intended targets have that are in the pipeline.
I predict that when we look back on this, the Israelis using one on Damascus with US permission will be a turning point mistake. Such munitions leave a very telltale fingerprint that even satellites from the late 80’s could pick up. Somebody screwed up big time, and they are scrambling now…which makes them very dangerous as one mistake can often be followed by another. I have seen it more than I care to remember.
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Jim W. Dean comes from an old military family dating back to the American Revolution. His father was a WWII P-40 and later P-51 Mustang fighter pilot. Jim’s mother was a WWII widow at 16, her first husband killed with all 580 aboard when the SS Paul Hamilton, an ammunition ship with 7000 tons of explosives aboard, was torpedoed off the coast of Algiers. He has appeared on PBS most recently on the Looking for Lincoln documentary with Prof. Henry Lewis Gates and lectured at the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Gordon. His current writing focus is on national security, intelligence, black and psyops, military/Intel history including personal video archives, and the current wars. Jim Dean is the managing editor of Veterans Today.
First published in Press TV.
