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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 8/23/12

Realpolitik blurs US red line on Syria

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Cross-posted from Asia Times


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Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are back. It's like we never left Dubya's glory days. No, they didn't find the non-existent Saddam stash on eBay. This is about the existent Bashar al-Assad's. And it's not WMDs as the pretext for an invasion and occupation, but WMDs as a pretext for whatever euphemism the Obama administration comes up with to define "kinetic military activity."

The whole thing is especially suspicious considering Damascus has been on the record stressing it will never use chemical weapons against the "rebels."

Here's US President Barack Obama; "A red line for us is [if] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized."[1]

So now even a few mustard gas containers slightly wobbling inside a depot may constitute a casus belli. But is it that clear-cut? Obama said this is "a" red line -- implying there may be unspecified (covert) others.

Obama also stressed Washington's "fears" of Syria's WMDs "falling into the hands of the wrong people." Considering the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is in the business -- alongside Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) stalwarts Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- of weaponizing the myriad gangs that constitute the Not Exactly Free Syrian Army (FSA), including hundreds of Salafi-jihadis, this is a stark admission that in fact they are the "wrong people." Ergo, the "right people" is the Assad regime.

Was that an Obama coded message to Turkey -- implying that if you invade northwest Syria, now practically an autonomous Kurdish area, you will have to do it alone, without the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and without the Pentagon? Was that a message to the "wrong people," aka the "rebels," that apart from dubiously effective covert CIA shenanigans, you are on your own?

These two possibilities were advanced at the website Moon of Alabama.[2]

Yet it may have finally dawned on the Obama administration that a possible post-Assad Syria ruled by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) -- which is infinitely more ruthless and sectarian than the Egyptian version -- is not exactly an enlightened bet.

The White House and the State Department are livid over Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's purge of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces leadership and his upcoming diplomatic trips to -- heaven forbid -- Beijing and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran. If the MB in Egypt can pull that off, imagine in Syria, which was not under Washington's sphere of influence to begin with.

So why not let the whole thing drag on in a Lebanonization -- rather Somalization -- scenario that pins down the Syrian army and weakens the central government in Damascus, thus erasing its "threat" in case the war-mongering Bibi-Barak duo in Israel goes ahead with an attack on Iran?

Stuff your democracy by bombs

Let's see how the situation stands. The Three (Warring) Graces -- Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power -- and their doctrine of R2P ("responsibility to protect"), applied "successfully" in Libya, miserably floundered in Syria.

There won't be any "no-fly zone" -- in fact a declaration of war. There won't be any "humanitarian" bombing; it has been blocked at the UN Security Council no less than three times by Russia and China.

On top of it, the whole decade-old "war on terra" hysteria has proved itself to be an intergalactic scam; the CIA, alongside the House of Saud and Qatar, is once again side-by-side with Salafi-jihadis of the al-Qaeda variety merrily fighting a secular Arab republic.

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Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia (more...)
 

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