Sunday 12 October 2014

The facade of the new US-led campaign to ‘degrade and destroy’ ISIS/ISIL


The facade of the new US-led campaign to ‘degrade and destroy’ ISIS/ISIL is quickly shaping-up as a joke.

For nearly three years now, 21WIRE has been reporting on how Washington and London, along with the GCC feudal kings, have been busy plotting, planning, funding and doing destabilization in Syria (view our Syria Archives here). Instead, what the public have is a stead stream of tired lies regarding the real US-UK-Turkey-GCC axis motivations in Syria.

If you truly want to know how ISIS came to infest Syria (or Iraq for that matter) just ask Hillary Clinton about her little project called, ‘Friends of Syria’. Funny how she jumped ship from her Secretary of State position just months before the West nearly declared war against Damascus in September 2013. Under Hillary’s nurturing care, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and ISIS – were somehow funded, manned, armed and encouraged to run wild through Syria because the Great and the Good thought they’d help to displace the regime of Syria’s maligned leader Bashar al-Assad.

Few in mainstream media or politics cared to listen – until now. Finally, they are beginning to catch up on the harsh reality of the global imperium’s latest Middle East Mongolian Barbecue.

Granted, both Right and Left will bomb away – no matter what the public think, but each wing of the Establishment has its own unique style of chaos. Sadly, they are still clinging to their 20th century political mythologies…

When Neoconservatives go to war, it’s “bomb now, ask questions later”. Fine, take it or leave, easy to follow, and does what it says on the can. But when liberals get the itch to bomb, things quickly get super-complicated with doublespeak and newspeak, because a liberal, or left-wing Administration in the US just can’t be perceived as as warmongers.

Call it beating around the bush, or just being sneaky, but that’s what happens when Liberals Go to War.
To preserve the Right-Left polarity in the US, the US media normally go to unusual lengths to obscure any obvious geopolitical play, disguising it as a ‘humanitarian’ effort, as the Washington invokes the ‘Right to Protect’ (RTP) moral clause as political cover, which is nothing more than Manifest Destiny in drag. The reason for this is elementary: in America, a Democratic White House cannot risk awakening their Occupy or Code Pink street mobs as to the true nature of their warmongering. That’s why the left needs to twist it.

So, at great pains, President Obama, the man who claims to have slain Osama bin Laden, made an awkward ‘right turn’ by declaring the ISIS Campaign as a grandiose ‘anti-terror operation’ and not a liberal-style humanitarian intervention. “The only language killers like this understand, is the language of force”, said Obama at the UN. For his legal out, Obama could not go so far as to qualify it as a war. On top of all that, Washington is still sticking by their pledge to “arm and train the moderate rebels in Syria”, while most experts are now admitting there are no ‘moderate rebels’. They will also tell you that building a new desert army will not accomplish anything other than lead to emergence of a another new Islamic terror gang sprouting out of the West’s latest paramilitary death squad. No surprise then that the White House and its Sorority State State Department are now tripping over their shoe laces over their non-committal commitment to “stop ISIS in Syria”.

You know the levies of lies are breaking when traditionally left-leaning outlets like Counter Punch start publishing insightful and truthful pieces like the article below – a damning indictment of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain’s bloodbath in Syria. The political fragmentation in the US is serious – even Vice President Joe Biden is distancing himself from his colleagues’ ugly ISIS mess.

The short-sighted failure of Washington agents of change is now laid bare for the whole world to see…


YOU TALKING TO ME? Syrian President Bashar al-Assad being blanked by a failing US Coalition fighting ISIS (Photo: Skeptical Libertarian)

As ISIS Slaughters Kurds in Kobani, the U.S. Bombs Syrian Grain Silos

Ajamu Bakara

The U.S. is conducting a curious humanitarian war against ISIS in SyriaWhile Kobani, the largely Kurdish district that straddles the border with Turkey is being attacked by ISIS forces and facing the very real possibility of mass civilian killings if it falls, U.S. military spokespersons claimed that they are watching the situation in Kobani and have conducted occasional bombing missions but that they are concentrating their anti-ISIS efforts in other parts of Syria.

Those other efforts appear to consist of bombing empty buildings, schools, small oil pumping facilities, an occasional vehicle and grain silos where food is stored to feed the Syrian people. Turkey also seems to be watching as the Kurds of Kobani fight to the death against ISIS.

The humanitarian concerns of officials in the U.S. with the plight of Kurds in Kobani could not be more different than what occurred in Iraq when ISIS forces made a push into Kurdish territory. When the Kurdish city of Erbil was under attack by ISIS, U.S. forces unleashed the full power of its air force in tactical coordination with Kurdish forces to push ISIS back.

So what is the difference in the two situations?

The difference and the reason why the Kurds of Kobani are to be sacrificed stems from the fact that they are the wrong kind of Kurds.  Masoud Barzani and the bourgeois Kurds of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) are the “good Kurds” and the predominant force among the Kurds of Iraq.   Their control of almost 45% of Iraqi oil reserves and the booming business that they have been involved in with U.S. oil companies and Israel since their “liberation” with the U.S. invasion makes them a valued asset for the U.S. The same goes for Turkey where despite the historic oppression of Kurds in Turkey, the government does a robust business with the Kurds of Iraq.

The situation is completely different in the Kurdish self-governing zones in Syria. In Kobani, it is the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or Y.P.G., that is linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (P.K.K), a Turkey-based Kurdish independence organization that both the U.S. and Turkey have labeled a “terrorist” organization, that provides the main forces resisting the ISIS attack. Also, the ISIS attack in Kurdish territory neatly converges with the strategic interests of Turkey. Both the U.S. and Turkey saw the control of territory by militant Kurds as a threat. Turkey in particular wanted to undermine the self-governing process among Kurds, Christians and Sunni Arabs in those self-governing zones and turn the territory into a battlefield in order to steal Syrian territory and isolate and attack the “bad” Kurds of the PKK.

Turkey pushed and apparently secured an agreement from the U.S. that it will not oppose it taking parts of Syrian territory. To consolidate that land grab Turkey also wants to establish a “buffer zone” along the Syrian-Turkey border.  This is why U.S. government spokespersons have been floating the idea of a no-fly zone in Northeastern Syria in the U.S. state/corporate media. The zone is being framed as necessary to protect civilians from attacks by the Syrian forces – the humanitarian hustle again.

Yet for the “bad” Kurds of Syria like the “bad” Palestinians of Hamas and Gaza, there will be no humanitarian intervention.

To placate the Turkish government in exchange for its increased cooperation in what is being set-up as a final push on Damascus, the people of Kobani will be delivered to ISIS.

The transparency of Turkey’s plan and the collaboration of the U.S. in the planned massacre of YPG combatants at Kobani could be easily exposed in the U.S. if the news readers in the corporate press were actually able to “see” the world more critically and allowed to question the state sanctioned narratives without running the risk of ending their “careers.” For example, the obvious question regarding a no-fly zone in Northeastern Syria is why is it necessary when the only civilians being attacked in Northeastern Syria are Kurds and they are being attacked by ISIS forces that don’t have an air force, at least not yet.
But those questions are not being asked very often because they don’t comport with the official narrative that the U.S. is compelled to act once again to save the world against an intractable enemy that can only be defeated by U.S. military might. All of this is part of the imperialist hustle that even large segments of the “left” in the U.S. has fallen for.
However, the non-bombing of ISIS at Kobani and the theatrics of bombing fixed, empty buildings confirm what should be obvious based on the history of U.S. interventions – that the real objective of U.S. 

intervention in Iraq and Syria is the reintroduction of direct U.S. military power in the region in order to secure continue control over the oil and natural gas resources of the region, undermine Iran, block the Russian Federation, and break-up cooperative economic and trade agreements between counties in Central Asia and China.  In other words, the objective is to secure U.S. and Western colonial/capitalist hegemony.  The U.S. and its allies just needed a pretext to get back in without alienating large sectors of their domestic populations. ISIS give them what the sarin gas attacks could not – mass acceptance in the West for another war, however limited it is being sold in its first phase.

The militarists in the U.S. political establishment never wanted to abandon their plans for a permanent military presence in Iraq, even in the face of the fact that it was costing the nation an enormous price in blood,  treasure and domestic legitimacy to remain. They concluded that the road back to Bagdad and on to Tehran went through Syria. A position that despite reports to the contrary, Obama signed on to early in his administration.

All Obama wanted was some plausible deniability during the first phase of the plan to destabilize Syria…

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
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