PETER'S NEW YORK, Wednesday, June 5, 2013--During an interview yesterday on the radio program "Fresh Air," Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group clued us in as to how the Obama Administration intends to paint the Syrian conflict in order to justify intervention. The Syrian war will be pitched as a Sunnni-Shiite driven conflict that has nothing to do with U.S. hegemonic aspirations in the region. It will be sold as a conflict that transcends national boundaries. It is spreading to include Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, and regional non-state actors such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah.
The implication of the second point is, if a conflict transcends national boundaries and has to be addressed through military intervention, there is no need to recognize national boundaries as part of the picture. That one or another country is involved is no longer the point. No declaration of war need be given, because war declarations reference nation states, and as national boundaries are not important, and one is fighting a borderless war, no declaration of war need be made. That a nation is a member of the United Nations, and falls under the protection of U.N. treaties against invasion and interference in a country's internal affairs, will mean nothing.
Regarding the first point--that the nature of the conflict as being a religious war between two factions of Islam--it is a smokescreen for a smokescreen.
In the first place, Sunni and Shiite live side by side peacefully in many instances. Second, it is likely NATO and the United States that have engineered the conflict in Syria in order to further their geopolitical goals. Blaming the conflict on interreligious rivalry is a thin disguise. Malley himself admitted that there are many geopolitical objectives, such as neutering Russian and Iranian influence in the Middle East, that might be achieved by U.S. involvement in the Syrian conflict. By doing so, Malley revealed the true agenda behind calls for U.S. intervention, along with his own masquerade.
###
1
1
1
