"To those Syrians who still support Assad, especially members of the Syrian military: understand that this regime has no future. The longer you carry out its campaign of violence, the more it will stain your honor. But if you refuse to take part in attacks on your fellow citizens, your countrymen will hail you as heroes."
Before she steps down as secretary of state Clinton may well establish a record for demanding foreign heads of state abdicate power - or face the fate of those who don't do so at the snap of her fingers - adding Syria's Bashar Assad to Ivory Coast's President Laurent Gbagbo, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and, practically speaking, Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko last year.
There are fewer and fewer governments in the world unwilling to do Washington's bidding as votes in the United Nations Security Council and Human Rights Council on Syria this year demonstrate. In fact Russia, China, Iran, Belarus, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, members of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela and at times Sudan are all that remain of nations with an independent foreign policy orientation.
Among that shrinking list Russia alone has rough strategic - nuclear - parity with the U.S. and as such is the true last barrier to the U.S. drive for global domination.
The Syrian crisis has dragged on for over fifteen months and has been exploited by the U.S. and its - particularly NATO - allies to isolate, humiliate and confront Russia in the first case and China in the second. Having to various degrees backed Russia down over Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya in recent years, Washington is now mounting a full frontal attack designed to effect not a retreat but a rout.
To believe for a moment that the military superpower that in recent years has laid waste to the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and is conducting lawless and murderous drone missile attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia is in any manner motivated by alleged humanitarian concerns in Syria is either to engage in deliriously wishful thinking or surrender to outright delusion.
On June 9 Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov provided a reality test for, an information antidote to the Western human rights argument:
"[I]n order to justify a foreign intervention they keep talking about the refugees from Syria. However, nobody talks about refugees inside Syria itself.
"This is similar to the former Yugoslavia. Does anybody think about the
refugees from Serbia and Slovenia? [He may have intended Croatia with the latter reference.]
"According to some estimates, there are about a million refugees from Iraq and half a million Palestinians in Syria, and I don't think people talk much about that."
While in Beijing for the twelfth annual heads of state summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at the beginning of the month, the Russian foreign minister emphasized an effective substitute to the West's past 21 years of rampant military aggression, threats, bullying and arrogance in stating that "there is no alternative to the enlargement of the SCO, an interest in which is growing steadily inside and outside of the region."
The six members of the SCO are Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. At the latest summit Afghanistan joined India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan as an observer nation, Turkey joined Belarus and Sri Lanka as a dialogue partner and the president of Turkmenistan delivered a speech. Collectively, the above nations account for well over half the world's population, three members of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and four nuclear powers and are the nucleus of a genuine new 21st century international political and economic approach and structure.
Unless a peaceful, cooperative and multipolar model based on the above and its underlying philosophy emerges soon, the ineluctable destiny the world faces is that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned of on May 17:
"The introduction of all sorts of collective sanctions bypassing international institutions does not improve the situation in the world while reckless military operations in foreign states usually end up with radicals coming to power.
"At some point such actions, which undermine state sovereignty, may well end in a full-blown regional war and even - I'm not trying to spook anyone - the use of nuclear weapons."
In intensifying its progressively more dangerous confrontation with the world's other major nuclear power by threatening it over Syria and expelling it from the Arab world and the Mediterranean while surrounding it with NATO partnerships and a global interceptor missile system, Washington is pushing the world closer to just such a - the ultimate - nightmare scenario.
A wounded beast is often the most vicious and a dying empire doesn't hesitate to destroy a world it cannot dominate.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
