From Brazilian Pepe Escobar in
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NL22Ak03.html
ust as once in a
while I go back to my favorite Hemingway passages,
lately I've been going back to some footage I shot
years ago of the Aleppo souk - the most
extraordinary of all Middle Eastern souks. It's
like being shot in the back; I was as fond of the
souk's architecture as of its people and traders.
Weeks ago, most of the souk - the living pulse of
Aleppo for centuries - was set on fire and
destroyed by the "rebels" of the so-called
Free
Syrian Army (FSA).
In this Syrian tragedy,
there is no Hemingway young hero, no Robert Jordan
in the International Brigades fighting alongside
Republican guerrillas
against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
In the Syrian civil war, the international
brigades are mostly of the mercenary,
Salafi-jihadi, beheading and car-bombing type. And
the (few) young Americans in place are basically
high-tech pawns in a game played by the rapacious
NATOGCC club (the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and its Arab puppets of the Gulf
Cooperation Council).
The tragedy
continues. The Syrian state, political and
military security apparatus will maintain its
mini-blitzkriegs - with no second thoughts for
"collateral damage". On the opposing side, "rebel"
commanders will be betting on a new
Saudi-Qatari-encouraged Supreme Military Council.
The Salafis and Salafi-jihadis of the
al-Nusrah Front - 7th century fanatics, beheading
enthusiasts and car-bombing operatives who do the
bulk of the fighting - were not invited. After
all, the al-Nusrah Front has been branded a
"terrorist organization" by Washington.
Now check the reaction of a Muslim
Brotherhood (MB) bigwig, Hama-born deputy
comptroller general Mohammed Farouk Tayfour; he
said the decision was "too hasty". And check the
reaction of the new Syrian opposition leader,
Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, at a "Friends of Syria"
meeting in Morocco; the decision must be
"reexamined". Virtually all "rebel" outfits
publicly declared their undying love for the
hardcore al-Nusrah.
So with the al-Nusrah
fanatics probably disguising their Islamically
correct beards under a prosaic hoodie, expect
plenty more "rebel" advances on Damascus - despite
two major beatings (last July and then this
month), courtesy of Syrian government
counter-offensives. After all, that lavish
training by US, British and Jordanian Special
Forces has got to yield some results, not to
mention the loads of extra lethal weapons provided
by those paragons of democracy in the Persian
Gulf. By the way, the al-Nusrah Front controls
sections of devastated Aleppo.
Sectarian hatred rules Then
there's the Orwellian, brand new National
Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition
Forces - a Washington-Doha co-production. Meet the
new boss, same as the old (lousy) boss, which was
the Syrian National Council (SNC). It's just
rhetoric; the only thing that matters for the
"National Coalition" is to get more lethal
weapons. And they love al-Nusrah, even if
Washington doesn't.
Qatar unloaded tons of
weapons "like candy" (according to a US arms
dealer) in "liberated" Libya. Only after the
Benghazi blowback did the Pentagon and the State
Department wake up to the fact that weaponizing
the Syrian rebels may be, well, the road to more
blowback. Translation: Qatar will keep unloading
tons of weapons in Syria. The US will keep
"leading from behind".
Expect more
horrible sectarian massacres as the one in Aqrab.
Here
is the most authoritative version of what may have
really happened. This proves once again that what
the NATOGCC "rebels" are actually winning is the
YouTube war. So expect more massive, relentless
waves of spin and propaganda - with Western
corporate media cheerleading of the Syrian
"freedom fighters" putting to shame the 1980s
jihad in Afghanistan.
Expect more major
distortions of context, as when Russian Deputy
Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said, "The
fighting will become even more intense, and
[Syria] will lose tens of thousands and, perhaps,
hundreds of thousands of civilians... If such a
price for the removal of the president seems
acceptable to you, what can we do? We, of course,
consider it absolutely unacceptable."
Ergo, Russia is trying to do everything to
prevent this from happening. And if NATOGCC
"rebels" carry out their threats to attack the
Russian and Ukrainian embassies in Damascus, they
had better trim their beards and run for cover
from the no-nonsense Spetnatz - Russian Special
Forces.
Expect more sectarian hatred, as
in Sunni Sheikh and al-Jazeera star Yusuf
al-Qaradawi casually issuing a
fatwa
legitimizing the killing of millions of Syrians,
be they military or civilian, as long as they are
Alawites or Shi'ites.
Sectarian hatred
will rule, with Qatar in the lead, followed by
Saudis with large pocketbooks and assorted
hardcore Islamists. Agenda; war against Shi'ites,
against Alawites, against secularists, even
against moderates, not only in Syria but all
across the Middle East.
A Patriot vs
Iskander face-offThe new Syrian Army
strategy boils down to a major pull back from
countryside backwaters and bases, concentrating
their troops in cities and towns.
Expect
the overall strategy of the NATOGCC club to remain
more or less the same; bog down the Syrian Army in
as many areas as possible; demoralize them; and
keep oiling the terrain for a possible North
Atlantic Treaty Organization intervention (the
chemical weapons hype and the relentless carping
over a "humanitarian catastrophe" are part of the
extensive psy ops package).
The Syrian
Army may have the heavy weapons; but when
confronting a tsunami of mercenaries and
Salafi-jihadists fully trained and weaponized by
the NATOGCC club, the whole thing may take years,
Lebanon civil war-style. That leads us to the next
"best" option - which is in fact a spin-off; the
death of the Syrian state by a thousand, make it a
million, cuts.
What's certain is that the
"coalition of the willing" against Syria will have
no trouble unraveling once the endgame is reached.
Washington bets on a post-Assad regime run by the
MB. No wonder King Playstation in Jordan is
freaking out; he knows the MB will also take over
Jordan and expel him to permanently shop at
Harrods.
Those paragons of democracy - the
medieval petro-monarchies in the Persian Gulf -
are also freaking out; they fear the popular
appeal of the MB like the plague. Syrian Kurdistan
- now definitely on its way to total autonomy and
eventually freedom - already keeps Ankara freaking
out. Not to mention the future prospect of a
tsunami of unemployed Salafi-jihadis merrily
ensconced in the Syria-Turkish border and ready to
run amok.
And then there's the complex
Turkey-Iran relationship. Tehran has already
warned Ankara in no uncertain
terms
about the just-to-be-deployed NATO missile
defense system.
That's got to be the
newspeak masterpiece of late 2012. Pentagon
spokesman George Little has been adamant that "the
United States has been supporting Turkey in its
efforts to defend itself... [against Syria]."
Thus the deployment of 400 US troops to
Turkey to run two Patriot missile batteries, to
"defend" Turkey from "potential threats emanating
from Syria".
Translation; this has nothing
to do with Turkey, it's all about the Russian
military in Syria. Moscow has given Damascus not
only very effective, hypersonic Iskander
surface-to-surface missiles (virtually immune to
missile defense systems) but the ground-to-air,
multiple target defense system Pechora 2M, a
nightmare to the Pentagon if ever a no-fly zone is
imposed over Syria.
Welcome to the Patriot
vs Iskander face-off. And right in the line of
fire, we find Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan - an outsized egomaniac harboring a deep
inferiority complex in relation to the Europeans -
left in the cold under NATO's master plan.
Turkey's Achilles heel (apart from the
Kurds) is its self-promoted role of being a
crossroads of energy between East and West. The
problem is Turkey depends on energy supplies from
both Iran and Russia; unwisely, it is antagonizing
both, at the same time, with its muddled Syrian
policy.
All I hear is doom and gloom
How to solve this tragedy? No one seems to
be listening to Syrian Vice President Farouk
Al-Sharaa. In this
interview
with Lebanon's Al-Akhbar, he stresses "the threat
of the current campaign to destroy Syria, its
history, civilization, and people... With every
passing day, the solution gets further away,
militarily and politically. We must be in the
position of defending Syria's existence."
He does not have "a clear answer to what
the solution may be". But he has a road map:
Any settlement, whether starting
with talks or agreements between Arab, regional,
or foreign capitals, cannot exist without a
solid Syrian foundation. The solution has to be
Syrian, but through a historic settlement, which
would include the main regional countries, and
the members of UN Security Council. This
settlement must include stopping all shapes of
violence, and the creation of a national unity
government with wide powers. This should be
accompanied by the resolution of sensitive
dossiers related to the lives of people and
their legitimate demands.
This is not
what the NATOGCC compound wants - even as the US,
Britain, France, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia
are all engaged in their own divergent agendas.
What the NATOGCC war has already accomplished is
one objective - very similar, by the way, to Iraq
in 2003; it has completely torn the fragile Syrian
social fabric to shreds.
That is disaster
capitalism in action, phase I; the terrain is
already prepared for a profitable "reconstruction"
of Syria once a pliable, pro-Western
turbo-capitalism government is installed.
Yet in parallel, blowback also works its
mysterious ways; millions of Syrians who initially
supported the idea of a pro-democracy movement -
from the business classes in Damascus to traders
in Aleppo - now have swelled the government
support base as a counterpunch against the
gruesome ethnic-religious cleansing promoted by
the "rebels" of the al-Nusrah kind.
Yet
with NATOGCC on one side and Iran-Russia on the
other side, ordinary Syrians caught in the
crossfire have nowhere to go. NATOGCC will stop at
nothing to carve - in blood - any dubious entity
ranging from a pro-US emirate to a pro-US
"democracy" run by the MB. It's not hard to see
for whom the bell tolls in Syria; it tolls not for
thee, as in John Donne, but for doom, gloom, death
and destruction.
Pepe Escobar is
the author of Globalistan:
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid
War (Nimble Books, 2007) and
Red
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the
surge. His most recent book is
Obama
does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He
may be reached at pepeasia@xxxxxxxxx
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