http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/02/28/the-syrian-back-door-to-war-with-iran/
Iranian officials had expressed similar optimism about the talks, calling them a major turning point and saying that for basically the first time in years of talks Western nations seem interested in serious negotiations and making an actual deal, as opposed to just threatening invasion and railing on about their demands.
The chief sponsors of the resolution are Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
The Syrian Back Door to War With Iran
Arming the Syrian rebels is a very bad idea whose time may have come
by Justin Raimondo, March 01, 2013
Secretary of State John Kerry has long urged increased US support for Syria’s Islamist rebels, and now he has his wish: shortly after being confirmed, he announced the US would now directly aid rebel groups, rather than "indirectly," as we’ve supposedly been doing. Not only that, but the definition of "non-lethal" aid is being stretched to includearmored vehicles and body armor: in addition, US "advisors" will be sent to the region – an ominous development that historians of the Vietnam war will observe with a high degree of skepticism. That’s another war that started with sending American "advisors," you’ll recall.
The war propaganda we’ve heard on this subject is all about "the children," the alleged atrocities committed by the Syrian government – "Assad is killing his own people!" (where have we heard that one before? – and how it’s our "humanitarian" duty to help the bloodthirsty jihadists fighting to overthrow the regime. Although no one doubts the brutality of the Ba’athists, a lot of this is utter hogwash: the Syrian opposition has been launching one hoax after another to shame the West into intervening more directly, but their clumsiness in arranging a verifiable incident hasn’t helped their cause.
Up until this point, President Barack Obama has resisted calls by many on the "progressive" left, as well as the usual suspects on the neocon right, to plunge head first into the Syrian maelstrom. Kerry’s announcement may augur the beginning of a new phase of US involvement in this dirty war – and that’s bad news for America.
It’s worse news for the Syrians, who have seen their society destroyed by fanatics in league with al Qaeda – the real fighting forces who dominate the rebel "army." Initially domiciled in Turkey, and having taken over a good part of the country, seasoned jihadists from all over the Middle East and points beyond are imposingsharia law wherever they gain a foothold, destroying centuries-old churches and slaughtering any "infidels" unlucky enough to be in their path. These are the West’s vaunted "allies" in this latest "humanitarian" war – the very same people who brought down the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon on 9/11.
So why in the name of all that’s holy are we allying with and arming these monsters?
In a word: Iran. The Western alliance with the Syrian sons of Osama bin Laden is a cold geopolitical calculation. We’re out to show the mullahs of Tehran that we mean business. Syria could wind up opening an oh-so-convenient back door to war with Iran.
If a Western attack on Iran – the top item on the War Party’s agenda – will meanWorld War III in the Middle East, then the Syrian conflict is the War Party’s Spain, the prelude to a wider slaughter. In this reenactment of World War II, Assad is playing the role of Franco, while the rebels take the part of the "Loyalists." As for Hitler – he lives in Tehran, or so the Israelis and their American amen corner would have us believe. And while historical analogies are never models of precision, we can take this one further by noting that, like the Spanish Loyalists, the Syrian rebels, too, have their Western "progressive" sympathizers and fellow-travelers, including the American Secretary of State.
With (mostly sketchy) reports of Iranian Revolutionary Guards already in Syria aiding government forces, the West (and its Sunni allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar) is putting their own proxy army in the field. But that army consists primarily of two Salafist groups, al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, the former linked to al Qaeda and the latter to rich sheikhs in Kuwait. These groups are carrying out car-bombings against civilian targets, murdering Christians and Alawites, and waging a ruthless terrorist campaignthat has wreaked havoc in all major cities and killed many. The irony is that the West is now pointing to the success of these groups as a reason to intervene: we cannot permit them to gain a foothold in "post-Assad Syria."
That’s a classic example of creating a problem and then solving it with more of the same misguided policies: aid has been flowing to these Islamist groups via our Sunni allies for over a year. Yet now we claim we must intervene more directly in order to ensure that the consequences of our past policies don’t ensure a victory for "extremists."
The problem with that is there are no "moderates" with any significant military or political clout in Syria: the jihadists are in near total control of the military component of the rebel groups. Politically the supposedly "secular" moderates are nearly invisible, with more support in the capitals of the West than inside the country itself. The overriding fact of the matter is that the fighting forces of the rebel army are solidly Salafist-"extremist."
Interventionists argue we should have listened to John McCain and Lindsey Graham (and Anne-Marie Slaughter), and armed the rebels much earlier, but this fails to take into account the fact that war requires the sort of fanaticism embodied by al-Nusra and its Islamist allies in the Syrian rebel army. The "moderates" never were all that numerous or effective: they never are in any conflict, and especially not in a civil war with heavily religious-sectarian overtones.
In seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist dictatorship in Iraq, the US and its allies played the Shi’ite card, enlisting –with various degrees of success – the various Shi’ite opposition groups, such as the Da’wa Party of Nouri al-Maliki (now Prime Minister of "liberated" Iraq), while other groups (such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) stayed close to Tehran. Together with the CIA-created "Iraqi National Congress" of Ahmed "Hero in Error" Chalabi, these groups united in common cause against Saddam. It was, however, a short-lived Popular Front.
In Iraq, the alleged "democrats" – held up by Bush administration as the vanguard of their so-called Global Democratic Revolution – evaporated right after the "liberation." Chalabi, for his part, joined up with the militantly anti-American Sadrists. Baghdad and Tehran grew closer, forging economic and ideological links. It was time for a new turn by our brilliant policymakers, who were playing it by ear all along: in short, it was time for the Sunni turn.
The great irony of our global "war on terrorism," launched in response to attacks on the United States by fanatic Sunni fundamentalists, is that we have wound up on the same side as bin Laden’s heirs and legatees. The essence of US policy in the Middle East today is ginning up a religious war between the two main branches of Islam, represented in the world of nation-states on the one hand by Iran – the only country where political Shia-ism holds state power – and Saudi Arabia (and the Gulf emirates) on the other, the epicenter of the strict Wahabist version of Islam and the site of Mecca and Medina. Having played the Shi’ite card in Iraq, we are now playing the Sunni card in Syria (and in Libya), even to the extent of supporting the JundullahSunni terrorist group in Iranian Baluchistan.
If bin Laden were reincarnated today, he would be among the frontline fighters of the Syrian "revolution." His likely successor is no doubt arising within its ranks.
We have been here before. Syria isn’t the first place we backed a Sunni fundamantalist rebellion against a secular socialist regime: back in the days of the now-forgotten cold war, American arms and aid went to the Afghan mujahideen, hailed by President Ronald Reagan as "freedom fighters." We are making the same mistake again – but, then again, does anybody in Washington know history, let alone have the smarts to heed its lessons?
Today’s grand strategists think they’re being oh-so-smart by claiming they’ll avoid that kind of "blowback" by making sure the Good Guys are getting the aid, not the Bad Guys who mean us harm. In the real world, however – as opposed to the alternate universe inhabited by Washington’s policymakers and cloistered theoreticians – the difference is most often impossible to discern. Today’s Good Guys have a very bad habit of becoming tomorrow’s Bad Guys. I seem to recall Chairman Mao used to be an "agrarian reformer," and we used to call Stalin "Uncle Joe." Closer to our own time, those Afghan "freedom fighters" didn’t take that long to morph into the villains of the century.
Such dramatic transformations tend to take place with alarming speed these days. Who would be surprised if Syria’s Islamist George Washington ,whoever he may turn out to be, becomes the latest in a series of anti-American demons unleashed by our own too-clever-by-half machinations?
The same hubris that lured us into Iraq is now summoning us for a replay in Syria. The interventionist impulse is energized by the conceit that we can really pull off a feat of social engineering in Syria, a complex collection of religious and ethnic subcultures with ancient roots whose nature we can only observe from a certain cultural distance – no matter how many "boots on the ground" we have in country. It is the same conceit that allows us to believe we can centrally plan the American economy, or even the world economy, and effectively run the lives of people of whom we know – andcan know – really nothing.
It is the hubris of political elites everywhere that is the cause of all the troubles in this world, the worst of these being war. Let us hope the gods punish them for their arrogance sooner, rather than later: in any case, we are all likely to be punished for their sins, of that there can be no doubt.
http://news.antiwar.com/2013/02/28/western-diplomats-iran-talks-made-progress/
Western Diplomats: Iran Talks Made Progress
Israeli Officials Reject Talks, Accuse West of Trying to Avoid War
by Jason Ditz, February 28, 2013
Western diplomats continue to express hope that this week’s Kazakhstan negotiations with Iran will lead to a deal, saying that there were signs of progress but that how much won’t be clear until the next meeting in April.
Iranian officials had expressed similar optimism about the talks, calling them a major turning point and saying that for basically the first time in years of talks Western nations seem interested in serious negotiations and making an actual deal, as opposed to just threatening invasion and railing on about their demands.
All this talk of something other than war isn’t sitting well with Israel’s hawkish leadership, and Avigdor Lieberman chimed in today condemning the progress and accusing the West of “standing down to search for complex diplomatic solutions instead of striving for victory and teaching them a lesson once and for all.”
Israeli officials condemned the talks before they even began, and have been pushing for open military threats instead of talks, with an eye on a summer war with Iran. Despite the progress, the US Senate passed a non-binding resolution vowing to support an Israeli attack on Iran.
http://news.antiwar.com/2013/02/28/senators-push-resolution-committing-us-to-aid-israel-in-attack-on-iran/
Senators Push Resolution Committing US to Aid Israel in Attack on Iran
If Israel attacks Iran in 'self-defense,' the resolution declares, the US must provide diplomatic, military, and economic support
by John Glaser, February 28, 2013
A bipartisan group of US senators is pushing a resolution declaring that if Israel attacks Iran “in self-defense,” the United States will join in the military assault on Israel’s behalf.
The chief sponsors of the resolution are Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
Graham said the resolution will be non-binding and is neither a declaration of war nor an authorization to use military force. Non-binding resolutions are supposed to express the sentiment of Congress, as opposed to actually legislate policy. This one seems tied to placating the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which holds its annual conference in DC this weekend.
Leaving aside the fact that under no reasonable definition of “self-defense” could Israel conceivably justify an attack on Iran, the resolution is both an illustration of Congress’s fealty to Israel, as well as their aggressiveness towards Iran.
The consensus in the US intelligence community, as articulated repeatedly by officials in the highest echelons of the US government for years now, is that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program and has not made the decision to go for nuclear weapons. Iran has done nothing to threaten, rhetorically or militarily, the United States, despite the fact that Washington has had Iran militarily surrounded for the past decade.
If Iran had passed a resolution or ruling anywhere close to how threatening the Menendez-Graham measure is, there would be hysterical uproar in Washington over how reckless and belligerent the Islamic Republic is.
“This could have several negative implications,” Alireza Nader of the RAND Corporation told Ali Gharib at The Daily Beast. “First, it could be interpreted as endorsing an Israeli preventive strike against Iran, which runs counter to US strategy. The US intelligence community judges that Iran has not made the political decision to create nuclear weapons. An Iranian nuclear weapons capability is not imminent, hence an Israeli military strike against Iran at this moment is not necessary or justified.”
The resolution “could also send the message, not only to Iran, but also the wider international community, including major powers like China and Russia, that the United States is not serious about solving the nuclear issue peacefully,” Nader also toldThe Daily Beast.
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