Thursday 23 May 2013
Behind Syria Peace Talks Proposal, US Prepares Regional War
While ostensibly touring
the Middle East to discuss a joint US-Russian proposal for peace talks
between the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and
Western-backed “rebels,” Secretary of State John Kerry met with US
allies to prepare for region-wide war.
Stopping first in Oman, Kerry held talks with the
ruling Sultan, one of the string of monarchical dictators that
constitute, together with Israel, the foundation of US influence in the
Middle East. The secretary of state’s visit coincided with the signing
of a $2.1 billion deal between the absolute monarchy and Raytheon Corp.
for the sale of advanced weapons systems, including Avenger fire units,
Stinger missiles, and Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, part of
a ring of steel that Washington has sought to erect around Iran.
From there, he flew to Amman, Jordan for a meeting
Wednesday of the “Friends of Syria,” a US-led “coalition of the willing”
that is fomenting the war for regime change in Syria. It consists of
Washington, its European NATO allies, led by Britain, Turkey, Egypt and
the various sheikhdoms and sultanates of the Persian Gulf, including the
major arms suppliers to the anti-Assad militias: Saudi Arabia, Qatar
and the United Arab Emirates.
As the conference was convening Wednesday, Syria’s
ambassador to Jordan held a press conference to denounce it as “a
meeting of Syria’s enemies”
“Those who want to end the tragedy in Syria need to
stop arming and training terrorist gangs in Syria. The war on Syria is
unprecedented,” said the ambassador, Bahjat Suleiman.
Representatives of the Syrian National Coalition,
the anti-Assad front cobbled together by the US State Department, were
invited to the meeting only at the last minute. It appears there was
some doubt if an agreement could be reached on whom the “rebels” would
accept as their representative.
The US has promoted Ghassan Hitto, a Texas-based
businessman linked to the Muslim Brotherhood who has lived in the US for
over 30 years, as the “premier” of a transitional government. There
have been increasing reports, however, that his role is strongly opposed
by the Sunni sectarian militias that are fighting in Syria. It was
reported that the coalition’s “acting chief,” George Sabra, a former
member of the Stalinist Syrian Communist Party, would stand in for the
“rebels.”
While the State Department claims that Kerry’s role
in this gathering is to prepare for Syrian peace talks—dubbed Geneva
2—which Washington and Moscow have publicly agreed to support, it is
evident that the real agenda occupying the US and its allies is how to
salvage the war for regime change, under conditions in which the Syrian
government is inflicting strategic reverses on the Western-backed
forces.
This has emerged most clearly in the Syrian army’s
overrunning of the city of Qusayr in western Syria, just eight miles
from the Lebanese border. The town, which had fallen under control of
the Western-backed militias, has served as a key pipeline for arms and
foreign fighters crossing the Lebanese border. “Rebel” control of the
surrounding region also threatened to separate the Syrian capital of
Damascus from the city of Aleppo as well as the Syrian coast.
Speaking at a news conference in Amman at the
opening of the “Friends of Syria” meeting, Kerry warned that if the
Assad regime failed to negotiate a political solution, Washington would
consider “growing support for the opposition in order to continue to
fight for the freedom of their country.” With US officials demanding
Assad’s ouster as a condition for any settlement, it appears that the
proposed talks will be turned into a pretext for escalating the US
intervention.
Kerry’s remark came just one day after the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee approved by a 15-to-3 vote a proposal for
Washington to directly arm the opposition militias. The CIA is already
coordinating the arms flows from the Gulf states and has reportedly
organized large shipments from Eastern Europe through third parties.
Kerry blamed the reversals suffered by Washington’s
proxy forces in the battle for Qusayr on the role played by fighters of
Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based party and militia that is aligned with the
Assad government, as well as on alleged Iranian backing for the regime.
“Just last week, obviously, Hezbollah intervened
very, very significantly,” said Kerry. “There are several thousands of
Hezbollah militia forces on the ground in Syria who are contributing to
this violence and we condemn that.”
Hezbollah has acknowledged that its fighters are in
Syria, but has denied reports that they are playing any decisive role in
the fighting, insisting rather that they are training Lebanese in
Syrian border towns to defend themselves.
The Western media has also focused on Hezbollah’s
role, while ignoring the fact that large numbers of Sunni Islamist
fighters have also come across the Lebanese border to fight against the
Assad regime.
The threat that this conflict will spill over the
region’s borders into a full-scale regional war grows daily. In the
northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, at least 11 people have died,
including at least two Lebanese army soldiers, in clashes between Sunni
militias and Lebanese Alawite supporters of Assad. The clashes have seen
exchanges of mortar fire and rocket-propelled grenades, bringing
schools, businesses and other activities to a standstill.
The State Department issued a statement denouncing
Hezbollah’s role in Syria, charging that it serves to “exacerbate and
inflame regional sectarian tensions.” No such denunciations were
forthcoming when the Islamist forces overran Qusayr, decapitating and
shooting members of the substantial Alawite and Christian minority
populations in the area and forcing thousands to flee their homes.
In one measure of the opposition’s desperation,
acting National Coalition chief Sabra issued a statement on the eve of
the Amman conference calling for the US and its allies to “open a
humanitarian corridor” to Qusayr—in other words, to launch a direct
Western military intervention on Syrian soil.
In a conference call on Tuesday, a senior State
Department official acknowledged, “One of the things we’ll be talking
about here in Amman tomorrow is what else needs to be done with respect
to the military balance on the ground.”
In advancing its militarist agenda, Washington has
stepped up a propaganda campaign charging that Iran is likewise
responsible for the reverses suffered by the anti-Assad forces in Syria.
A senior State Department official told the Washington Post that
Iranian forces are fighting in Syria, repeating totally unsubstantiated
allegations by the “rebels” as fact.
As the Post pointed out, “The US official’s
allegation was a tacit acknowledgment that the two-year Syrian conflict
has become a regional war and a de facto US proxy fight with Iran.”
The Post ’s columnist David Ignatius noted that
while there is public talk of a peace conference in Geneva by next
month, “the battling on the ground is so intense, and the demand for
additional weapons [from the opposition] so vocal, that a skeptical
person should ask whether the Geneva talks will take place at all.”
Washington’s ostensible agreement with Moscow on
peace talks is merely another tactic to advance its strategic aims in
the region, which have been prosecuted through the wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria. Behind the crocodile tears about
Syrian civilian casualties, its objective remains the same as that which
underlay the eruption of American militarism 12 years ago: the
assertion by military means of hegemonic control over strategic energy
reserves coveted by its rivals, particularly in China and Russia.
As the evolution of the proxy war in Syria
demonstrates, this predatory US intervention points directly toward a
far wider and catastrophic conflagration that threatens not only war
against Iran, but confrontation with Russia and China as well.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/23/syri-m23.html
Posted @ 13:01
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