couple of reads
1st read
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/aug20 ... -a03.shtml
The CIA proxy war in Syria and the pro-imperialist “left”
3 August 2012
Reports that US intelligence is giving covert assistance to “rebel” militias in Syria mark the latest stage in an escalating US campaign for an out-and-out takeover of the country.
Yesterday, as videos emerged showing Syrian “rebels” carrying out mass executions of soldiers captured in Aleppo, it was reported that US President Barack Obama had signed an order earlier this year authorizing US intelligence to aid anti-Assad forces. Washington is also helping to distribute weapons and money donated by its right-wing Middle East allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
These powers are not waging a struggle for democracy as part of the “Arab Spring”—the wave of revolutionary working class uprisings that toppled US-backed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt last year and terrified Washington and its Middle East allies. They are fighting a reactionary war to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and install a pro-US puppet regime in Damascus.
Washington has set up a “nerve center” for the Syrian insurgency in Adana, Turkey, the site of Incirlik Air Base, a major US military and intelligence installation only 60 miles north of the Syrian border. This region of southern Turkey is now a key transit point for weapons and pro-US foreign fighters traveling to fight in Syria.
The Syrian “rebels” largely act on operational instructions from Washington. US forces communicate regularly through their allies with “rebel” forces inside Syria, providing them with reports on Syrian troop movements to guide them on the ground.
Islamist fighters are pouring in to join the fighting in Syria from around the Middle East, including US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and the Islamist US puppet regime in Libya, as well as Algeria, Chechnya and Pakistan. Former US Special Operations officials told the press that many arrive with help from Al Qaeda in Syria, which relies on the services of “traffickers—some ideologically aligned, some motivated by the money.”
In the Orwellian world of the American media, no attempt is made to reconcile Washington’s claims that it is occupying Afghanistan simply to wage a “war on terror” against Al Qaeda with its de facto alliance with Al Qaeda in Syria.
Obama’s reassurance that the US is providing only “non-lethal assistance” to anti-Assad forces is a cynical lie. The US is waging a brutal civil war by proxy that has already cost tens of thousands of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Its goal is to install a US puppet regime in Damascus to isolate and prepare for war against Iran, remove a potential enemy of Israel, and advance a broader agenda of complete dominance of the Middle East by US imperialism. This agenda—pursued in the course of a decade of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and intensified after last year’s mass uprisings in North Africa with wars in Libya and Syria—is deeply unpopular in the working class in the United States and internationally.
Washington’s covert backing for the Syrian “rebels” lays bare the role of pro-imperialist pseudo-left groups—like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the US, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain and the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) in France—which have promoted the war in Syria. Their “leftism” amounts to nothing more than giving “left” justifications for the crimes of American and European imperialism.
The ISO openly declares its support for intervention. In an article by Yusuf Khalil and Lee Sustar in its Socialist Worker publication, it writes: “The increasing role of the armed struggle raises the question whether to accept arms and support from the West … While many in the Syrian revolutionary movement are opposed to US and Western intervention, they will take whatever help they can get.”
Such arguments, which never analyze the forces referred to as “revolutionary,” are stunningly cynical. When did the CIA, Islamic fundamentalism and the Turkish army brass become forces for liberation? In writing this way, the ISO makes clear that it speaks for the pro-imperialist faction of the “left” petty-bourgeoisie.
Its attempts to posture as a left-wing organization descend into absurdity. The main concern it raises about US intervention in Syria is that “US support will be aimed at promoting their people and marginalizing others, even if it means fragmenting the revolutionary forces.”
What “revolutionary forces” is Sustar talking about? They are a collection of militias including the CIA’s “people,” as he calls them, various Al Qaeda operatives, and the flotsam and jetsam of Syrian society that these forces have attracted to themselves. In seeking to conceal the reactionary character of these forces under the mantle of revolution, Sustar functions simply as one of the State Department’s more left-talking operatives.
Sustar goes on to praise the ISO as “principled anti-imperialists who have managed to walk and chew gum at the same time—to support the revolutions in Libya and Syria against dictatorial regimes, while at the same time opposing intervention by the US and its imperialist allies.”
This foul comment goes to the heart of the politics of the ISO and the entire petty-bourgeois pseudo-left. For Sustar, the ISO can “walk and chew gum” because it knows how to support imperialist wars while at the same time posturing as “left.”
The class orientation of an organization always finds its clearest expression in its international policy. In Syria, the ISO and its international co-thinkers are nothing less than political agencies of imperialism.
Alex Lantier
2nd read
Zio-Wahhabis plotting against southern Russia
http://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/08/0 ... rn-russia/
Sun Aug 5, 2012
By Wayne Madsen
Using the former Soviet republic of Georgia as a base of operation, NATO, the Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and the Zionist regime of Israel have a plan to carve up southern Russia, including the Caucasus region, into a group of vassal states that will either be under the influence of Georgia, pan-Turkic nationalists, or radical Sunni regimes owing fealty to Riyadh and Doha.
Moreover, the plans for southern Russia are a carbon copy of Nazi Germany’s failed plans for the region.
Current neo-conservative doctrine foresees the fall of the governments of Iran, Belarus, and, ultimately Russia and China, after the fall of Damascus, to the combined forces of NATO and the Saudi- and Qatari-backed Salafist Wahhabis, who make up a large portion of the Syrian rebel movement. Russia has clearly drawn a line in the sand in Syria and does not want to see yet another Arab nation fall into the clutches of neo-con globalists and radical Muslims. Libya constituted proof of the alliance between the neo-con uber-capitalists, Zionists, and Wahhabists. Even if Russia concedes Damascus and the rest of inland Syria to the rebels, it is prepared, through the use of its Navy and naval base at Tartus in the predominantly-Alavi coastal region of Syria, to offer military protection for Bashar al-Assad, his fellow Alavis, and Syrian Christians who have been protected by the Alavis in an independent salient that includes Tartus and Latakia. The complete fall of Syria to Wahhabists and NATO will move the instability of the Middle East closer to the Russian southern frontier.
The stakes for Russia are immense. One only needs to examine Nazi Germany’s “New Order” (Neuordnung) plans for the occupation of the Soviet Union and Persia to understand what the neo-cons and their Israeli and Wahhabist colleagues have in store for southern Russia and Iran.
Just as with the Nazis, the key to control of the Caucasus and Iran is Georgia, where a virtual dictatorship was installed in 2008 under the leadership of the US-educated George Soros puppet Mikhail Saakashvili. After Saakashvili seized control of the autonomous Georgian republic of Adjaria in the Black Sea, making its port of Batumi available to NATO forces, Russia decided that would be the Georgian leader’s last land grab. Russian forces moved in to protect the autonomous republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia after Georgia decided to reimpose Joseph Stalin’s policy that the two regions would be under Georgian sovereignty.
Saakashvili is actually filling the role, envisaged by Adolf Hitler for his designated Reichkommissar for, what the Nazis called, Reichskommissariat Kaukasus. The capital of the German province was to be in Tiflis, in, what is today known as, Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. The Kaukasus province was to be led by Hitler’s designated Reichskommissar, Arno Schickedanz, a Baltic German, and the Saakashvili of his day. Hitler also assigned the Georgian Generalkommissariat control over the three autonomous regions that Georgic claims today: Adjaria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia.
One of Schickedanz’s able lieutenants was Prince Dmitry Shalikashvili of the Georgian Legion, which fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Shalikashvili’s legion was later absorbed into the Waffen-SS Georgien, which would have been the enforcement arm for Schickedanz from his headquarters in Tiflis. Shalikashvili’s son, John, became the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The son of one of the key members of Hitler’s program to control the Caucasus for the Nazis actually commanded NATO troops during campaigns against Serbia and Iraq. It was at the beginning of America’s neo-con global push for military domination and a “New American Century.” The plan was not much different from Hitler’s “New Order.” In fact, neo-cons and globalists refer to their “New World Order” to the present day.
NATO’s plans, coupled with the pan-Turkic desires of the Turkish Justice and Development Party and its CIA-linked Fethullah Gulen supporters, and the Wahhabist desires of the Riyadh and Doha regimes, are a mirror of the Nazi plans for the Caucasus and central Asia.
From his opulent palace in Tiflis, Schickedanz would also rule over other areas of the Caucasus through Reichskommissars subservient to him. These sub-commissars would rule over Azerbaijan, Karabakh, and Nakhichevan from Baku, Kuban from Krasnodar, Terek from Stavropol, the Mountain Caucasus (including North Ossetia, Dagestan, Chechnya-Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygei, Karachay, and Cherkessia) from Vladikavkaz, Armenia from Yeervan, and Kalmykia from Astrakhan.
In an alliance with the Turks, Nazi Germany considered granting Turkey sovereignty over all of the Caucasus region, as well as the Turkic republics of Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Tuva, and other Turkic regions. Persia was to become a Nazi puppet state under the primary control of the Germans (as far as oil was concerned), with favorable economic rights, granted to the Axis allies of Italy and Japan. The Nazis would control the Arab lands of Arabia, Palestine, and Iraq through puppets such as former Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and, quite possibly, in an alliance with defecting members of the Saud royal family in Arabia.
Instead of the Nazis, the same game plan is being developed by NATO, Israel, and the Houses of Saud in Riyadh and Al Thani in Doha. Already, the Kurds of northern Syria have announced plans to declare autonomy, joining their brethren across the border in Iraq in becoming virtually independent. Turkey can only be satisfied by being compensated for the Kurdish resurgence by being granted control over the Caucasus, as NATO, Israel, and the Wahhabists train their sights on Russia. The big prize for Ankara, which already has political and religious influence in Gulenist schools from Baku to Bishkek and Almaty to Tashkent, is control over the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Such control was a dream of Kemal Ataturk and the resurgent Turkish nationalists, who have flexed their political muscles in Ankara, whether through the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan or through the right-wing nationalists, who remain loyal to the secularist ideals of Ataturk.
The Saudis and Qataris hope to enlarge their own Wahhabist sphere of influence in Syria, but also among the Sunni majorities of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Sunni minorities of Iran and the Volga region of Russia, especially predominantly-Muslim Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.
Through “Gateway Central Asia,” the NATO-Zionist-Wahhabist alliance has its eyes set on far-flung western China, the restive Uighur Muslim region of the Sinkiang province. The neo-con globalists reason that Russia and China are vulnerable from their Muslim-populated areas.
The future plans of NATO differ from those of the Nazis in only one respect. There is no Asian power like Japan, which the globalist NATO alliance must share with which the spoils of its victory. However, the NATO-Israel-Wahhabist alliance has failed to learn from history. Nazi Germany was defeated when it overreached its military potential and an economically-wracked Europe and North America, along with corrupt allied regimes in Jerusalem (al-Quds), Riyadh, and Doha, will suffer the same fate. The vultures of the steppes of Central Asia will, if NATO continues with its global plans, be picking at the bones of US forces, lying in battlefields from Stavropol, Isfahan, and Dushanbe to Krasnodar, Ashgabat, and Urumqi.
WM/HN
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist, author and columnist specializing in intelligence and international affairs. He is the author of the blog Wayne Madsen Report. In 2002 he suggested to the Guardian newspaper that the United States Navy had aided in an attempted overthrow of Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez. In 2003 he said that he had uncovered information linking the September 11 attacks to the government of Saudi Arabia as well as to Bush administration. In 2005, he wrote than an unidentified former CIA agent claimed that the USS Cole was actually hit by a Popeye cruise missile launched from an Israeli Dolphin-class submarine. More articles by Wayne Madsen