War Council Pawns meet in Israel

By BILL van AUKEN | GLOBAL RESEARCH | MARCH 21, 2013

Starting a two-day visit to Israel on Wednesday, US President Barack Obama issued bellicose threats against both Syria and Iran. The visit, which plainly has the character of a US-Israeli war council, makes clear that ten years after the US invasion of Iraq, US imperialism is preparing even greater crimes in the Middle East.

The Democratic president threatened the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad that it would “be held accountable for the use of chemical weapons or their transfer to terrorists,” adding that if evidence showed that such a weapon had been used it would be a “game-changer.”

On Iran, Obama repeated his vow “to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon” and that “all options are on the table,” while recognizing Israel’s “right” to take unilateral action against Iran. There “is not a lot of daylight” between the US and Israel on Iran, he said.

Obama’s remarks came one day after the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. No speeches or ceremonies were organized by the Obama administration or the US Congress Tuesday to mark the onset of a war to which 1.5 million Americans were sent, and where nearly 4,500 died and hundreds of thousands suffered either physical or psychological wounds.

Silence, in this case, denotes guilt. Both political parties, every branch of government, the media and the US corporations were directly complicit in what unquestionably stands as the greatest war crime of the 21st century: an unprovoked war, launched on the basis of lies, against a virtually defenseless nation, claiming some one million lives and leaving an entire society in ruins.

America’s ruling elite is now pressing for even greater and more destructive conflicts, in the face of mass public opposition to war. In Orwellian fashion, familiar and discredited pretexts of “weapons of mass destruction,” terrorism and the promotion of “democracy” are being recycled, this time to justify war against Syria.

On Capitol Hill there was a drumbeat of calls for new Middle East wars. Adm. James Stavridis, the chief of the Pentagon’s European Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday on extensive planning by NATO for intervention in Syria. “We are looking at a wide range of operations, and we are prepared if called upon to be engaged as we were in Libya,” he said.

Under serious consideration, according to Stavridis, is the establishment of a “no-fly zone.” Calls for such a no-fly zone in Libya, approved by the United Nations Security Council in March 2011, led to a US-NATO bombing campaign and war for regime change.

The committee’s chairman, Senator Carl Levin, (Democrat, Michigan) led the questioning. The day before, he had spoken at the Council on Foreign Relations, calling for the establishment of “a protected zone along the Turkish-Syrian border” and the use of military force to “go after some Syrian air defenses and after some of the Syrian air power.”

Resolutions were introduced in both the House and the Senate calling for stepped-up arming and training of Western-backed “rebels” fighting to overthrow Assad.

Meanwhile, the apparent use of a chemical weapon that claimed the lives of over 30 Syrians Tuesday prompted renewed demands for direct US intervention on Capitol Hill.

The Syrian government charged that the Western-backed fighters fired the rocket carrying the chemical warhead. By all accounts, the device hit a government-controlled village outside of Aleppo. Opposition sources said that most of the victims were Syrian government soldiers, while sources in Syria described them as Alawite civilians, a population that largely supports Assad.

Lawmakers invoked Obama’s earlier threats that the use of chemical weapons in Syria represented a “red line” that would prompt US intervention. “If today’s reports are substantiated, the President’s red line has been crossed, and we would urge him to take immediate action to impose the consequences he has promised,” Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain said in a joint statement.

Graham went further in an interview, calling for sending US ground troops into Syria to secure its chemical weapons, an operation that the Pentagon estimated would require 75,000 soldiers and Marines.

The twisted logic of this campaign is that the two-year-old sectarian civil war that the US and its allies in Europe, Turkey and the Persian Gulf monarchies have fomented, funded and armed has weakened the Assad regime to such an extent that its chemical weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists.

However, these terrorists, such as the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra and other jihadist militias, are the principal shock troops of the Western-backed war for regime change.

As for the claim that Washington is promoting “democracy” in Syria, there could be no more telling refutation than the “election” Monday of the prime minister for a new “interim government” to be installed on Syrian territory seized by the so-called rebels. The winner, chosen by barely 35 members of a Syrian National Council formed under the tutelage of the US State Department, was Ghassan Hitto. A US citizen and Texas-based IT executive, he left Syria as a 17-year-old over 30 years ago.

The ideological pretexts for a US war in Syria are even less coherent than the ones used to carry out the war in Iraq a decade ago. The real driving forces are the same. What is involved is a predatory war aimed at redrawing the map of the Middle East to suit the interests of US imperialism and assure its hegemony over the region’s energy resources. War for regime change in Syria is part of a broader campaign for war with Iran and carries with it the threat of drawing in Russia and China, as well.

While the American ruling establishment may want to bury the memory of the Iraq war, working people have drawn their own conclusions, with poll after poll showing the overwhelming view that it should never have been fought.

The attempt to foist a new war on the American people, using the same warmed-over lies, comes together with a deepening assault on jobs and living standards and continuous revelations of the criminality of the financial aristocracy, in whose interests these wars are fought. Such a volatile mixture is a recipe for social explosions within the United States and the development of a mass political movement against imperialist wars in Iraq, Syria and beyond.

 

The Daddy State: Obama says people can’t so anything by themselves

“The one thing about being President is after four years you get to be pretty humble”

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | FEBRUARY 26, 2013

But Obama doesn’t really mean that at all. He threatens businesses, doctors and patients with his Obamacare socialist project; he threatens Congress saying he will act alone by signing executive orders if they don’t help him with his petty ideas and he after publicly establishes a window of opportunity to attack Iran in the summer of 2013. Now, the U.S. dictator in chief wants to make American’s feel hopeless and dependent every single minute of their lives and to learn to like it.

Iran’s shuts down nuclear talks with US

By SCOTT PETERSON | CSM | FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Iran‘s supreme leader today rejected the possibility of direct talks with the United States, nixing a proposal by Washington to ease the stalemate over Iran’s nuclear program.

Six world powers – including the US – are due to resume nuclear talks with Iran on Feb. 26 in Kazakhstan, after an eight-month hiatus. Few expect a breakthrough, not least because Iran is preparing for elections in June.

But the words of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – who has the final say on all strategic decisions in Iran, as official holder there of the title “God’s deputy on earth” – appear to have scuppered chances of an immediate direct dialogue with the US.

“You [Americans] are pointing the gun at Iran and say either negotiate or we will shoot. The Iranian nation will not be frightened by the threats,”Ayatollah Khamenei told Air Force commanders in a speech today.

“Some naive people like the idea of negotiating with America [but] negotiations will not solve the problems,” Khamenei said in the remarks, which were posted on his website. “If some people want American rule to be established again in Iran, the nation will rise up to face them.”

US Vice President Joe Biden said on Feb. 2, that Washington was ready for one-on-one talks “when the Iranian leadership, supreme leader, is serious.” And in recent days, both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s foreign minister issued cautious, but explicit and positive, signals about possible direct contact with the US.

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Syria working on retaliation against Israel and its allies

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | FEBRUARY 4, 2013

Syria and its allies warned on Sunday that Israel’s attack against a military complex on the outskirts of Damascus will not go unanswered and that it is working on a way to respond through the use of force.

Beset by an internal revolt that has lasted almost two years and has claimed 60,000 lives, the Syrian President Bashar Assad accused Israel of wanting to destabilize his country and assured the public that, even with an internal conflict, his country is able to “respond to any aggression against Syrian citizens.”

Iran, an ally of Damascus, also said that there is the possibility of retaliation for that attack.

Meantime, Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, called the act of “state terrorism”.

“Israel’s aggression against the Jamariya Research Center shows the true position of Israel, working with foreign enemy forces and Syrian factions on the ground to try to destabilize and weaken Syria,” said Assad, after holding a meeting with Iran’s Secretary of National Security, Saeed Jalili, who was visiting Damascus on Sunday.

Several Iranian officials and military personnel also promised that Israel’s attack will not go unanswered. Corps Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, said at a public event that “resistance and retaliation are the only possible way” to deal with Israel after the attack on Syrian territory, as reported by Iran’s official media. In his meeting with Assad, Jalili said that cooperation between Iran and Syria is crucial to curb “plots and foreign missions aimed at destabilizing security in the region.”

Though Israel does not admit publicly the nature of the attacks occurred on Wednesday, the defense minister of that country, Ehud Barak, claimed responsibility for the attack while participating in the Munich Security Conference. Barak said that although he can not “add anything to what people read in the newspapers about what happened in Syria,” the bombing “is further proof that when Israel promises something, it delivers.”

The bombing took place on Wednesday morning, when the Israeli Air Force attacked a nearby military research area near Damascus. U.S. intelligence sources believe that the target was a convoy loaded with missiles from Lebanon and en route to the Syrian capital, where it would be received by the Shiite militia Hezbollah, along with Iran, which is the main ally of Assad in the area .

Two days before the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had told a delegation of U.S. lawmakers that their choices regarding Syria are “between bad and worse.” Israel has spent months warning of the possibility that the stockpiles of missiles and chemical weapons falling into the hands of Syrian Al Qaeda or Hezbollah.

The U.S. and Israel have claimed for months that Assad has deposits of sarin, mustard gas and cyanide and that he is prepared to use them against his own people, which the U.S. said would be the red line on the sand that would lead to a military intervention.

The Munich conference highlighted the gap that still separates Moscow and Washington over the Syrian conflict. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Assad a “tyrant” and attempted to predict his fall. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, said that the demand that Assad go is the reason why the negotiations are going nowhere. However, Moscow has also shown signs of opening up to the Syrian opposition, after Lavrov himself met in Munich for the first time with Syrian opposition leader, Moaz Al Khatib.

The Iranian Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in the Bavarian capital that Western intervention in Syria would “extend the flames of conflict throughout the region.” Only on Saturday, about 150 people were killed during clashes between government forces and rebels who are openly supported by Western allies of Israel.

Given the volatility of the situation in Syria, Israel has mobilized a battery of missile shield known as the Iron Dome to the city of Haifa, in northern Israel, which is 140 kilometers from Damascus. Haifa, with 268,000 inhabitants, was just one of the cities where more missiles fell during the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

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Netanyahu has lost steam in last week before elections

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | JANUARY 21, 2013

With less than 24 hours before Israeli elections, the latest polls only bring bad news for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although his victory is not in question.

Unless a political cataclysm occurs, Netanyahu will get the most votes Tuesday. But what polls announced Friday is perhaps not going to help when putting in place a stable coalition government in which his ‘mastery’ will be allowed to do and undo at will.

If polls are correct, his success will depend more on partners in the Executive, which, according to experts, could be formed by the extreme right and religious parties. The inclusion of center-left parties in the coalition becomes more palatable to the world, something that Netanyahu does not rule out.

The polls released on Friday agreed that the center-left block greatly shortened the distance with respect to the right. That is possible, in part, because the alliance led by Netanyahu has plummeted, to the point of losing up to 10 seats compared to its current strength in the Knesset parliament.

With about 15% undecided, the sum of the support that all the parties of the right and extreme right would receive is comparable to that projected for the left.

The difference is that the right in principle also counts on the votes of the ultra-orthodox formations, while it is highly unlikely that the left chooses to cooperate with the Arab parties, traditionally subjected to ostracism in the Knesset. So Netanyahu’s victory is not in doubt, but his strength and his coalition government are.

“The question is not whether I will win the elections, but whether there will be a stable direction behind the wheel. There are people here and there that say, ‘We also want to drive the wheel’, but when there are too many hands, the car could overturn, “Netanyahu said in an interview that the Maariv newspaper.

Analysts emphasize the political wallop posed to the Prime Minister this year, especially if you consider that it was Netanyahu himself who decided to call for early elections in January, with the aim of strengthening its comfortable majority and, so that once he consolidated his power, he could engage in complicated missions as a possible offensive against Iran or the extent of the challenge to the international community because of the construction in the settlements.

Proof of the Prime Minister’s anxiety is his unusual openness to the press. Netanyahu gives interviews these days to multiple local media. The idea is to stop the bleeding of votes and a desperate attempt to recover the migrated to the far right.

Netanyahu presumes that “there is a strong representation of settlers in the Likud”, his party, and anticipates that “the days when the bulldozers destroyed settlements are far behind.” Finally he warned voters that a vote splitting on the right could lead to the arrival of left leaning parties in government.

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