Global Research, February
18, 2016
Region: Middle East & North Africa, Russia and FSU
In-depth Report: SYRIA: NATO'S NEXT WAR?
At a press
conference Tuesday following a two-day summit of the Association of South East
Asian Nations (ASEAN) held in California, President Barack Obama was confronted
with a question about his administration’s intentions with regard to the
escalating war in Syria.
Reflecting a growing
drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and sections of the US foreign policy
establishment, the reporter asked whether Obama had been “outfoxed” by Russian
President Vladimir Putin. Noting that Russia’s military intervention in Syria
had helped turn the tide of battle in favor of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
against the Western-backed “rebels,” the reporter asked whether Washington
would “step up military action” in support of the Islamist militias it is
backing if the city of Aleppo fell to the government offensive.
Obama’s reply was a study
in imperialist hypocrisy, deceit and historical falsification. Insisting, “This
is not a contest between me and Putin,” the US president set out to prove that
Putin was not winning.
“The fact that Putin
finally had to send his own troops and his own aircraft and invest this massive
military operation was not a testament to a great strength; it was a testament
to the weakness of Assad’s position,”
Obama insisted.
He continued:
“That if somebody is
strong, then you don’t have to send in your army to prop up your ally. They
have legitimacy in their country and they are able to manage it their self, and
then you have good relations with them. You send in your army when the horse you’re
backing isn’t effective. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”
The result, he further
argued, would be Russia’s finding itself “in a quagmire,” compelled to invest
in “a permanent occupation of Syria,” which would “not be the best thing for
Russia,” given the state of its economy.
One is prompted to ask,
who is Obama to lecture Putin? But in the end, one has to acknowledge that if
anyone knows whereof he speaks on questions of quagmires and permanent
occupations, it is the president of the United States.
Just last October, Obama
reneged on his pledge to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan before the end
of his presidency in January 2017. Ten thousand US soldiers remain deployed
there, nearly 15 years after the US invaded the country in 2001. US commanders
have indicated they may ask for that number to be increased in the face of a
mounting insurgency against the puppet government installed by Washington. The
regime in Kabul, it can truly be said, lacks legitimacy and remains in power
solely thanks to the US troops propping it up.
It is a similar story in
Iraq, which the US invaded in 2003, toppling its government, devastating its
society and causing the deaths of an estimated one million men, women and
children. Roughly 4,000 US troops are back in Iraq following the ignominious
June 2014 collapse of the puppet forces the US armed and trained, at the cost
of some $24 billion, in the face of an offensive by the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria (ISIS). The number of US troops—which does not count another 2,500
deployed across the border in Kuwait and some 7,000 private military
contractors—is expected to climb.
Then there is Libya,
whose secular government Washington and its allies brought down in the US-NATO
war of 2011, killing tens of thousands of civilians, murdering the country’s
leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and leaving Libya in a state of permanent chaos and civil
war. At Tuesday’s press conference, Obama was asked by another reporter whether
another “military intervention in Libya will be necessary.” He did not rule out
the idea, stressing that Washington “will continue to take actions where we’ve
got a clear operation and a clear target in mind.”
If there is a “quagmire”
in the Middle East, it is of Washington’s creation, the product of unending
wars for regime change aimed at imposing US hegemony over the region and its
vast energy resources. Syria is an integral part of this process.
Obama feigned deep
concern over the fate of the Syrian people, insisting that it is their welfare,
not some filthy imperialist intrigue, that motivates Washington’s actions. “The
question is, how can we stop the suffering, stabilize the region, stop this
massive out-migration of refugees who are having such a terrible time, end the
violence, stop the bombing of schools and hospitals and innocent civilians,
stop creating a safe haven for ISIS,” he said.
As Obama was speaking,
there was a report from Syria that a US warplane had struck a bakery in a
Syrian town near the Iraqi border, killing 15 people standing in line for bread
in the early morning. Moscow, meanwhile, has rejected charges that it was
responsible for the bombing of schools and hospitals the day before, while the
Syrian government has charged that an American air strike inflicted the worst
of the casualties.
Whatever the ratio of
civilian deaths caused by US versus Russian airstrikes, the undeniable fact is
that the suffering of the Syrian people is the product of a concerted drive by
the US, NATO and Washington’s Middle East allies to topple the government of
Assad and impose a puppet regime more subservient to Western interests.
To that end, a vast
operation was mounted in which the CIA, working with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and
Turkey, organized the funding and arming of Islamist militias linked to Al
Qaeda and funneled tens of thousands of foreign fighters into Syria to wage a
vicious sectarian war for regime change. The results of this criminal
enterprise are the deaths of some 300,000 Syrians, with another 11 million
turned into homeless refugees.
That Russia may become
trapped in the Middle East quagmire created by decades of US military
aggression is not excluded. The Putin government, representing the interests of
the capitalist oligarchy that arose through the criminal appropriation of state
property following the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union,
is intervening in Syria not out of altruistic concerns for the Syrian people,
but for what it sees as the oligarchy’s own interests.
It fears that the
toppling of Assad by US-backed Islamists will not only deprive Moscow of its
only close ally in the Middle East, but also pave the way for a more concerted
drive to isolate, weaken and ultimately dismember the Russian federation. A US
puppet in Damascus would open the way to pipeline routes for Qatari gas and
Saudi oil bound for Europe, undermining the foundation of the Russian economy.
At the same time, the Islamist forces utilized in Syria could be unleashed on
the North Caucasus, exploiting the resentments of the local population toward
the repression carried out by Moscow.
Obama counseled the
Russian government that it would be “smarter” to “work with the United States
and other parties in the international community to try to broker some sort of
political transition.” In point of fact, the Putin government has sought such
an accommodation, but Washington is intent on using such negotiations to impose
the regime change it has proved unable to accomplish by means of the proxy war,
casting the Islamist militias as a “moderate opposition.”
Meanwhile, the danger of
a full-scale military confrontation in Syria between the US and Russia, the
world’s two major nuclear powers, continues to grow, with Washington’s allies,
Turkey and Saudi Arabia, seeking to provoke such a clash as a means of
furthering their own regional and domestic political interests.
For its part, US
imperialism, whatever the immediate tactical calculations of the Obama
administration, will be driven by the setbacks it has suffered in Syria and,
more fundamentally, the deepening crisis of American capitalism to ever more
brutal and reckless acts of military aggression and violence.
The original source of
this article is World
Socialist Web Site
Copyright © Bill
Van Auken, World
Socialist Web Site, 2016
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