How long can Erdogan defy the Empire?

It should be obvious by now that America and the NATO me-too states are spoiling for a regional war in a last desperate attempt to have their way with Assad, and insofar as it is an "independent" proto-state (of which I'm not convinced) Islamic State as well. Unfortunately, the Coalition of the Courageous is determined to have others fight that war on their behalf.

That's proving to be a problem. The Washington warmongers can't at this point be seen to give Assad a reprieve in his fight with Isis. The next most effective anti-ISIS forces are the Shia, who will always have more allegiance to Iran. The Kurds are next up, but they have proven ineffective and are themselves waiting for a NATO intervention to save them from the NATO-created Islamic State.

That leaves Turkey. Having been pressured to take a leading role in the creation of ISIS, Erdogan is in no rush to be pushed into providing the boots for America's ground war in Syria. The utterly pathetic hypocrisy Biden voiced when he accused Turkey of creating ISIS recently didn't go over well. This blog speculated two years ago that Assad could very well outlast Erdogan, a result that seems even likelier today.

The news that Turkey's thirty-year war on its Kurds has become a hot war again can only hasten Erdogan's demise. The propaganda organs of the Empire have lavished a lot of fawning attention on the Kurds for the past couple of years. They're the people in the neighbourhood who Israel can work with, so they're obviously the good guys, although we have by some oversight neglected erasing them from our ever-fickle "terror" lists.

So, Erdogan gets begonced, a more pliable leadership will be installed, and voila, America's regional war will have its boots on the ground!

And NATO will be spared the incongruity of a member state in the crusader alliance governed by the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Our" Syrian rebels abandon ship

Here's a story that's got to have hearts sinking at the Pentagon.

After everything we've done for them, after all the promises made by Hillary and then reaffirmed by Mr. Kerry, the good guys among the Syrian rebels have decided to join the bad guys among the Syrian rebels.

It's not a happy day for the America firsters.

After all the sweat and tears Hillary put into crafting this nice America-friendly Syrian opposition, the ingrates on the ground have decided to throw their lot in with the aQ crowd.

Now what?

How the coming war on Syria and Iran will unfold

The supposed "missile test" of 3 September offers an insight into the strategy of egregious provocation that will, sooner or later, trigger the calamity that the war-hawks in Israel and Washington have been clamoring for.

In the event, the provocation passed, but the tensions remain. The evil Assad has gassed his own people, just like Saddam Hussein did. We didn't stand for it then, and we won't now.

How or why it has become the duty of the US to impose Israel's agenda on the Middle East is not a topic that our mainstream media dwell on. It's taken for granted. They are "the only democracy in the Middle East" after all.

The fiction that a limited cruise missile strike on Syria will not result in a massive and immediate escalation is just that; a fiction. If "missile tests" fail to attract a response from Syria, an actual missile attack surely will, and that will serve up the excuse for the US/Likud axis to go big.

Once that happens, and it will take mere minutes, we'll find out just how many Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah missiles are pointed at Israel. IAF strikes may take out some of them, a lot of them, even most of them.

They won't take out all of them, not by a long shot. Nor will the vaunted Iron Dome offer any protection after the first few barrages of incoming. The damage to civil society in Israel will be catastrophic. This will be the first war in Israel's history wherein its civilian population will bear the brunt of the retaliation.

That will prompt desperate politicians to take desperate measures. This conflict that Netanyahu and Obama are toying with has the potential to go nuclear. Then what?

Even after devastating attacks on every Israeli city, the IDF will have the capability of visiting annihilation on every Arab capital deemed hostile. Once that happens, whatever doubts may linger about US/Israeli policy constituting a "war on Islam" will be gone. It should be kept in mind that the Islamic world has nuclear weapons too.

There is no possible way to avoid the conclusion that the coming war will be a lose-lose scenario for all concerned. What then is driving events to the brink?

In Israel, the messianic elements have been emboldened by 65 years of easy victories over weak enemies. In America, the toxic combination of the military-industrial-financial war profiteers coupled with the Israel lobby have long held a strangle-hold on foreign policy.

Two out of the last three interventions that the US has undertaken have ended in disaster for America. The third has been a disaster only for the Libyan people, the imagined beneficiaries of America's benevolent intervention. Irregardless, those disasters allowed a clique of insiders in war profiteer circles to profit mightily. Since they cannot conceive of a downside and have never experienced one, they assume the possibility does not exist.

The PR lever that John Kerry has been flogging has utterly no basis in reality. Even if we assume for a brief moment, absent any evidence, that Assad bears responsibility for the gas attack of two weeks ago, by what logic would that entitle the bully on the world stage to "intervene?"

Regime change in Syria has been on the wish list of the usual suspects for at least ten years, and this phony gas attack issue is simply a tool for manipulating public opinion; Saddam's WMDs all over again.

The latest polls show that it's not working this time around. That's not enough. Concerned citizens in the US and especially in Israel have to make it clear to their leaders that under no circumstances will an attack on Syria be countenanced.

Questions of war and peace are too important to be left in the hands of politicians and war profiteers.

Nations of Virtue bay for blood after alleged Syrian gas attack

The "red-liners" are making a concerted effort to use this chemical weapon issue as the lever that will directly engage the US and some of the me-too nations in the euphemistically tagged "Syrian Crisis."

News sites across the western world are at this very moment unanimous in blaming Assad for the attack.

The source of this info seems to be William Hague, who apparently gets the straight skinny directly from George Sabra of the UK-US sponsored Syrian National Coalition.

Therefore this is an obviously impartial verdict coming down the chain of a whole lot of folks with no irons in the fire.

Bullshit!

It's almost impossible to imagine that Assad's military brain trust would choose to deploy chemical weapons on the very day that UN chemical weapons inspectors arrive in the country.

The entire "red line" issue is a bit of a red herring to begin with. Why has it been decided, and by whom, that spending a half hour bleeding to death while trying to push your intestines back where they belong after being collateral damage in a Hellfire missile strike is a perfectly acceptable death, but dying in your sleep in a gas attack is a red line, the crossing of which marks a war crime?

But politics being what it is, it looks more and more as though the red-liners will have their way.

The blow-back will come soon enough, and once again the pundits will scratch their collective heads and wonder aloud why "they" hate us.

UK's Guardian Newspaper reporting Russian troops in Syria

This story has been on the Guardian's website all day. It's entirely consistent with a story floating around yesterday about Russian troops having secured Syrian chemical assets. The advanced anti-aircraft missile batteries that the Guardian claims are being run by Russian "advisers" would presumably be stationed in the same vicinity as the air bases that hold the chemical stockpiles.

There was a flurry of stories back in March of this year claiming that Russian troops were on the ground in Syria, stories that faded away. That of course has nothing much to do with whether the stories are true or not.

One can safely assume that Russia's intervention was on the agenda when Putin and Netanyahu had a face-to-face meeting in June. No one has a keener interest in where Assad's chemical weapons end up than Israel does. At the same time, it would be seen as an intolerable escalation if the Israelis were to act on the matter unilaterally.

Perhaps what we're seeing is a one-hand-washes-the-other symbiosis between Putin and the IDF that seeks to neutralize US influence in the Syrian conflict. If that is the case it would imply that senior elements within the Israeli security establishment have at least for the time being prevailed upon their political masters to put the Iran attack on the back burner.

Syrians take to streets in show of support for al Qaeda

The mis-handling of the Syrian "spring" has to be one of the greatest US foreign policy debacles of our times. Or is it?

It's been clear that American policy has been to lead from behind the scenes as proxies Qatar, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia took the lead in importing and arming the anti-Assad forces. And it's been clear to most of the world for well over a year that the "foreign fighters" who have been converging on Syria have what might delicately be termed "al Qaeda affiliations."

Recently there have been indications that Washington too is aware of this. First the charade of re-jigging the "Syrian National Council" into the "Syrian National Coalition" to make it more "representative". When the Syrians duly jumped through Hillary's hoops on that count, the US suddenly realized that the single most effective fighting force in Syria was in fact the Jabhat al-Nusra, aka al Qaeda, and promptly added them to their official list of terror groups.

This is all in the context of explaining why the US cannot directly arm the  "rebels", and the people of Syria took to the streets to make known their displeasure.

In terms of a Syrian spring, a Syrian liberalization, a democratic Syria, etc, none of this makes any sense.

Can American foreign policy really be that inept and self-defeating?

But what if this entire Syria exercise is just preparing the ground for an invasion of Iran? Suddenly a Syria in ruins is not such a bad thing. Plenty of good excuses to drop tens of thousands of American and/or NATO troops in to restore order/ deliver humanitarian aid / secure the weapons of mass destruction / etc etc.

And those tens of thousands of Sunni fundamentalist fighters on the ground in Syria? I'm guessing that America will permit herself just enough of an accommodation with "al Qaeda" to hand those lads maps to Tehran.

Suddenly it all makes sense!

Jabhat al-Nusra declared terror group by US

This in the lead-up to the "Friends of Syria" conflab in Morocco tomorrow,  at which those friends will decide next steps for the "uprising".

al-Nusra are by some accounts the most effective fighting group on the ground in Syria. How do the Western managers of this "revolution" proceed while sidelining them? Can they be sidelined?

And by declaring that a major insurgent group are terrorists, are the "Friends of Syria" not confirming what Assad has been saying all along, that his regime is fighting terrorists?

This story from Aleppo provides some insight into the evolving quagmire on the ground. In the rebel held areas of the city, the most popular rebels are those of al-Nusra, not the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.

Not only has the West succeeded in destabilizing Syria by flooding the country with fighters and arms, it has now set the stage for prolonged internecine fighting among the rebels themselves.

CNN unleashes Syria-hysteria propaganda attack

Yup, must be true; saw it right there on Anderson Cooper just a minute ago.

We are in the midst of the latest attempt to play that WMD card we were talking about earlier

At this very moment Syrian troops are busy mixing sarin gas. And we all know what the evil blood-thirsty monster Assad is going to do with that, don't we?

That's right. Kill the rest of his own people.

American boots might be on the ground well before spring if this PR onslaught keeps up.