The Empire of Chaos is in a Jam

NATO is desperate. The Pentagon is desperate. Imagine waking up one day in Washington and Brussels just to realize Russia has the ability to electronically jam -- detect, trace, disable, destroy -- NATO electronics within a 600 km range across Syria (and southern Turkey).

Imagine the nightmare of row after row of Russian Richag-AV radar and sonar jamming systems mounted on helicopters and ships jamming everything in sight and finding every available source of electromagnetic radiation. Not only in Syria but also in Ukraine.

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army units in Europe, was even forced to qualify Russian electronic warfare capabilities in Ukraine as "eye-watering."

For their part, caught in the crossfire as sitting ducks or headless chickens, that mighty ideological aircraft carrier known as the USS Think Tankland was left dabbling with the four options left for Washington to "achieve its goals" in Syria.

The first option is containment -- which is exactly what the Obama administration has been doing. The recipe was proposed in full by the Brookings Institution; "containing their activities within failed or near-failing states is the best option for the foreseeable future."

But that, Think Tankland argues, would "crush the popular opposition" in Syria. There is no "popular opposition" in Syria; it's either the government in Damascus or a future under the ISIS/ISIL/Daesh Salafi-jihadi goons.

The second option is the favorite among US neocons and neoliberalcons; to weaponize the already weaponized opposition. This opposition ranges from the YPG Kurds -- who actually fight on the ground against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh -- to Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria and its Salafi-jihadi cohorts. Al-Nusra of course has been rebranded in the Beltway as "moderate rebels"; so this option means in practice the House of Saud weaponizing al-Qaeda while they fight under the cover of US air strikes.

Pure Ionesco-style theatre of the absurd. Compounded by the fact those apocalyptic nut jobs who pass as "clerics" in Saudi Arabia, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, have duly declared jihad against Russia.

The third option will go nowhere; Washington allying with "Assad just go" and Iran -- not to mention Russia -- in a real fight-to-the-finish against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Obama boxed himself in a long time ago with "Assad must go," so he remains immobilized by a self-inflicted ippon.

The fourth option is the neocon wet dream; regime change, achieved, in theory, by what I call the Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO), as in the NATO-GCC embrace, with a Turkish starring role and attached US air strikes, plus all those thousands of CIA-trained "moderate rebels" slouching all the way to Damascus. As if the Russian campaign did not exist.

In fact, for US corporate media, it's as if the overwhelming Russian massacre -- and not "containment" -- of "Caliphate" assets these past three weeks is not happening at all. Hubris has metamorphosed into huge embarrassment and finally into total omission.

The Obama administration's "Assad must go" diktat has also metamorphosed into a wacky version of a non-denial denial. It's plain obvious now that the Russia air campaign, way beyond ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, has destroyed the whole imperial game across "Syraq"; that same old mix of regime change, Balkanization, creating and keeping failed states, "isolating" Russia.

Moreover, and contrary to all the current rehash of Afghan mythology -- where, incidentally, the Taliban continue to win in America's Longest War -- Syria won't be a revisited USSR quagmire. On the contrary; while in Afghanistan in the 1980s the proverbial imperial game of using Salafi-jihadis against a secular government worked, as it worked in NATO turning Libya into a failed state, now Moscow reverse-engineered the process, smashing the Salafi-jihadis on the ground in conjunction with secular governments.