patrick.net

how about if we build two maginot lines through syria, about 100 yards apart...long enough and wide enough to support the pipeline from the sauds...

Quigley says

It's about gas and money, just like always.

This thread made me curious (even more so than usual), so I read further. Apparently, it goes back at least as far as the W administration:

"According to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to "attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years", starting with Iraq and moving on to "Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran." In a subsequent interview, Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region's vast oil and gas resources.
***
In 2009 - the same year former French foreign minister Dumas alleges the British began planning operations in Syria - Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter's North field, contiguous with Iran's South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets - albeit crucially bypassing Russia. An Agence France-Presse report claimed Assad's rationale was "to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally, which is Europe's top supplier of natural gas".

Instead, the following year, Assad pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran, across Iraq to Syria, that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe from its South Pars field shared with Qatar. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the project was signed in July 2012 - just as Syria's civil war was spreading to Damascus and Aleppo - and earlier this year Iraq signed a framework agreement for construction of the gas pipelines.
***
It is this - the problem of establishing a pliable opposition which the US and its oil allies feel confident will play ball, pipeline-style, in a post-Assad Syria - that will determine the nature of any prospective intervention: not concern for Syrian life."

Other publications across the spectrum, but outside the mainstream American commercial media, have reported substantially the same narrative. In 2014, the Armed Forces Journal reported:

"Much of the media coverage suggests that the conflict in Syria is a civil war, in which the Alawite (Shia) Bashar al Assad regime is defending itself (and committing atrocities) against Sunni rebel factions (who are also committing atrocities). The real explanation is simpler: it is about money.

In 2009, Qatar proposed to run a natural gas pipeline through Syria and Turkey to Europe. Instead, Assad forged a pact with Iraq and Iran to run a pipeline eastward, allowing those Shia-dominated countries access to the European natural gas market while denying access to Sunni Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The latter states, it appears, are now attempting to remove Assad so they can control Syria and run their own pipeline through Turkey."

I'm sure the Syrians are enjoying their chance to be pawns of the powers.
In the end, it's a game between between America and Russia.

Syriasly ?

If the truth ever appears to be that we aren't clearly the good guys, it's probably best not to think about it. OTherwise, don't be complaining about the price of oil the next time it goes to 140 a barrel.

I think that's pretty much the way the thinking goes. And honestly, when you don't have all the information and all of the strategic considerations, it is probably too easy to armchair quarterback it.

Although,then again, isn't wrong wrong ? https://www.youtube.com/embed/MautscPF5wE

Syria: Libya Part Two.

BTW, Hillary admitted in the hearings yesterday that the goal was to overthrow Qaddafyi, not "Humanitarian", in Libya. Obama and Hillary never mentioned overthrowing Qaddafyi when they were lobbying to bomb Libya, saying they were only trying to fight "Extremists".

My recollection is that we were supporting Nato with its Libya mission, not leading it, much to the disappointment of a lot of right wing hawks in the U.S.

If by "supporting" you mean flying double the number of missions as all the rest of NATO combined.

Or providing the Lion's Share of the Military Forces.

Or running it out of the USS Mount Whitney Command Ship.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/may/22/nato-libya-data-journalism-operations-country

It was only after the Libyan Air Force and Air Defense was a nullity that the US passed command to NATO.

In fact, Libya today is what Syria would look like without Assad. Establish a no-fly zone, which robs government forces of Close Air Support and Recon and greatly swings the battle in favor of Jihadi Insurgents (with a tiny group of ex-Officers ostensibly Democratic to give the Insurgents a veneer of respectability).

In the end, the best is that a small group of Oligarch ex-Generals rule a tiny slice of the country, the rest endemic warfare between Jihadi groups.

Very humanitarian to have your town flip back and forth between various Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS-style groups month after month, with all the rockets, RPGs, etc.

thunderlips11 says

Very humanitarian to have your town flip back and forth between various Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS-style groups month after month, with all the rockets

That's just the price of Freedom (TM)!!!

thunderlips11 says

they were only trying to fight "Extremists".

Dropping a 10 kiloton fuel/air bomb that incinerates your target and their next three hundred and fifty neighbors seems fairly "extreme" to me.

I'm just really tired of the propaganda we call news. Today the news story was that Tony Blair blames the Iraq war for ISIS.
So, in a classic distraction technique, the powers accept a lesser "incidental" blame by the voice of a disempowered former ally to try to reassign culpability for the absolute clusterfuck their DIRECT actions brought about (and are still bringing about.).
Amazing....
Not buying it tho

To make matter worse they are too fucking inept to even succeed.
The hubris in their stupidity is astounding.
At first Obama came in real tight fisted, then for the last two are three years, he fired all of his support people who helped set him up for where he is. Then he just figured the rest would coast right along on easy street. He had an app for it.

Quigley says

I'm just really tired of the propaganda we call news. Today the news story was that Tony Blair blames the Iraq war for ISIS.

So, in a classic distraction technique, the powers accept a lesser "incidental" blame by the voice of a disempowered former ally to try to reassign culpability for the absolute clusterfuck their DIRECT actions brought about (and are still bringing about.).

Bless you. Also probably an attempt to soften the endlessly delayed report about how the UK got into Iraq that's been held up for years now by accepting some mild culpability.

Here's another snippet of Food for Thought: Hundreds of Thousands of ISIS Fighters. Food. Uniforms. Bullets. RPGs. Gasoline for all their Toyotas. All trucked in over a couple of highways in the middle of a desert, with multiple satellites overhead and constant Drone/Recon Jet patrols as well as Ground Radar.

Where is all this logistical support coming from?

Eastern Syria doesn't come to mind when thinking of Oil. It may have a few wells, but it's nothing like Saudi Arabia or even the North Sea in terms of production. Even so, that means tanker trucks transporting oil over desert highways, that stick out like a Cockroach on a White Carpet. And even so again, that means Oil is being swapped for thousands of tons of equipment, food, refined gas, etc. daily...

In short, there's absolutely no way ISIS is getting supplied without it being very obvious and easy to interdict via air strikes.

thunderlips11 says

If by "supporting" you mean flying double the number of missions as all the rest of NATO combined.

by supporting I mean that it was their plan, their lead. With UN resolutions too, and the UN is dominated by Islamic countries.

marcus says

by supporting I mean that it was their plan, their lead. With UN resolutions too, and the UN is dominated by Islamic countries.

Well duh certain Islamic countries supported this mess, until they didn't. The bloc of Sunni Muslims (SA, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt) supported the regime change operation in all its nefarious glory. But we expect sinister things from
Muslim countries. We don't expect to be in the nation perpetrating the most sinister tactics of all!

Quigley says

Tony Blair blames the Iraq war...

"Blair is right that the people who did the invasion of 2003 do bear a heavy responsibility for what’s happening now, not just in terms of the Islamic State, but in terms of the war that followed in 2003, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the fact that there still isn’t proper electricity supply in Baghdad, the fact that now when you talk to people in the streets of Baghdad they all hate the British and the Americans. Many of them yearn for Saddam. And that’s really shocking, because, I mean, Saddam Hussein was a monster. And there was nothing wrong with getting rid of him, but the way they got rid of him and the way they behaved when they got rid of him led to all of this chaos in Iraq, which has spread to Syria.
***
[E]very Arab state is a dictatorship, and every other Arab State, except Syria, receives American support. So it wasn’t dictatorship that the U.S. was against. It was Syria’s relationship with Iran, Syria’s dependence on Iran for strategic depth, and Syria’s support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hezbollah’s antagonism towards Israel. That’s the real problem for the U.S., which some American officials have admitted, but the media seems to have missed this."
***
Remember that the ideals of the Arab Spring, particularly in Tunisia and in Tahrir Square in Cairo, were secular. [They] were liberal. They wanted freedom of the press. They wanted an independent judiciary. They wanted transparent governance. They wanted to live like normal people and not be afraid of their government. They wanted their dignity. Well, what it has transformed itself into in Syria and Iraq is an institution, the Islamic State, which is opposed to all of those things, even more than the military dictatorships were. So the only opposition now to the regimes in Baghdad and Syria, which are corrupt, is a force that is much more illiberal, much less tolerant than they were. The Syrian state, for all of its flaws, tolerated religious diversity. There was social freedom in Syria. Women did not—were not have to dress—were not forced to dress in a certain way."

marcus says

by supporting I mean that it was their plan, their lead. With UN resolutions too, and the UN is dominated by Islamic countries.

Only the UN Sec Council has the power to declare "just wars". No Muslim country sits on it. Libya happened because Obama promised Medeved he was only going to bomb Fundamentalists, so Russia abstained. China usually abstains on most questions. Then Obama bombed Qaddafyi's forces and Medeved vowed he'd never be lied to by Obama again. It was the Obama Administration, not NATO, that pushed it.

Also, the Sunni Gulf States of Qatar and the UAE also participated, as did other non-NATO countries. It was a US-Sunni Alliance, not the UN and not NATO.

I see B'liar is doing a limited hangout, probably because of the Chilcot report that is in Limbo.

thunderlips11 says

doing a limited hangout, probably because....

That doesn't really follow. Conceding a beachhead does not improve Blair's ability to defend his position.

More from Charles Glass via Democracy Now!, which estimated the war in Syria has killed more than 300,000 since 2011:

Syria, since late 2011, has been on fire. And we see the evidence of this in the fact that more than half of the population is now homeless—7 million people internally displaced, and 5 million people have fled the country altogether. And it’s because this country is being rapidly destroyed in a conflict that probably should never have happened.
***
It happened for a number of reasons. One, in 2011, there was a great wave of protest sweeping the Arab world—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and then Syria. The Syrians were part of that wave. But there, in Syria, because the opposition took up arms, which never happened in Egypt or Tunisia—they seem to have gone more for the Libyan model, where they did take up arms—it led to chaos, because the opposition itself was very fractured. You have to remember that in Syria political opposition was always suppressed, particularly democratic opposition, and they were not unified. And so, within the first 18 months, according to IHS Jane’s, there were already more than a thousand armed groups in Syria, sometimes fighting one another, which was very good for the regime, sometimes fighting the regime. But the anarchy was destroying the country. Now there are fewer groups, because they’ve coalesced into various Islamic fronts.
***
Bashar al-Assad hangs onto power, first of all, because he inherited a very effective security state from his father. Remember, between 1949, when the CIA overthrew Syria’s elected government in order to put an oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia through Syria without Syrian preconditions—from 1949 until 1970, when his father, when Hafez al-Assad, took power, there had been a coup d’état in Syria almost every year, and the instability was crippling the country. His father, who was a great conspirator, had been minister of defense and was from the Alawite sect, which is a subbranch of Shia Islam, which is very secretive, because they don’t really want the Sunnis to know all of their beliefs. They were very conspiratorial anyway. So they were the most conspiratorial people in the regime, and they were able to take over the regime and solidify the regime. And there hasn’t been a military coup since... And then they had a Muslim Brotherhood uprising between 1979 and 1982, which they suppressed. So they were, effectively, very strong, in addition to which they had enriched a lot of the Sunni Muslim Arab middle class in the big cities, Aleppo and Damascus, so they had support."

Regarding Syria, Amy Goodman has narrated for years who, what, when, and how; this thread opened my eyes to why.

curious2 says

That doesn't really follow. Conceding a beachhead does not improve Blair's ability to defend his position.

It does, he hopes that admitting some flaws and appearing "reasonable" with Iraq will shore up his legacy by deflecting Criticism. And distract from the big issue, which is the level of intelligence doctoring and backroom deals he did to get Britain into a war that the majority was opposed to before he went in.

Most of the editorials and commentaries view his CNN interview as a spin operation ahead of the publication of the Chilcot report, which is expected, wrote the Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor, to be “damning.”

The Daily Mail accused the former prime minister of weasel words in “an apology of sorts.” The Daily Mirror thought he had delivered a “half-hearted apology” that “will bring no comfort to families whose loved ones never came home.”

The Daily Telegraph, rejecting any sense that it amounted to an apology, said Blair was “making sure the political ground has been prepared for the fight to defend his reputation.”
Who backs whom in the Syrian conflict
Read more

As for the Times, its opinionated news page headline reflected its scepticism, “Blair gets his Iraq defence out early.”

The Independent argued that Blair’s “admission... represents progress in coming to some sort of understanding about that ill-starred adventure and its longer-term consequences.”

And the Morning Star saw Blair’s argument that “‘the intelligence we received was wrong’... is not an apology — it is blaming British and other intelligence agencies for making mistakes.”

It is scarcely surprising that Tony Blair gave a half-hearted apology for the way he dragged Britain into a disastrous invasion of Iraq. What is more surprising is that he had not done it much sooner – and that he did it to an American broadcaster.

Blair knows full well that he will be heavily criticised by the Chilcot inquiry for the way he joined George Bush’s invasion without properly informing his cabinet, let alone parliament and the public, and for rejecting advice from his government’s law officers.

Akin to what Churchill did to get England into WW2

US was trying to overthrow Assad since 2006, declassified report reveals. Even though they knew it could lead to an Islamic State and required the US to back Al Qaeda, just like it did using "No Fly Zones" in Libya, to shelter AQ/MB insurgents from the Libyan Air Force.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/secret-pentagon-report-reveals-west-saw-isis-as-strategic-asset-b99ad7a29092#.q65job9h5

The revelations contradict the official line of Western governments on their policies in Syria, and raise disturbing questions about secret Western support for violent extremists abroad, while using the burgeoning threat of terror to justify excessive mass surveillance and crackdowns on civil liberties at home.

Among the batch of documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a federal lawsuit, released earlier this week, is a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document then classified as “secret,” dated 12th August 2012.

The DIA provides military intelligence in support of planners, policymakers and operations for the US Department of Defense and intelligence community.

So far, media reporting has focused on the evidence that the Obama administration knew of arms supplies from a Libyan terrorist stronghold to rebels in Syria.

Some outlets have reported the US intelligence community’s internal prediction of the rise of ISIS. Yet none have accurately acknowledged the disturbing details exposing how the West knowingly fostered a sectarian, al-Qaeda-driven rebellion in Syria.

Charles Shoebridge, a former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism intelligence officer, said:

“Given the political leanings of the organisation that obtained these documents, it’s unsurprising that the main emphasis given to them thus far has been an attempt to embarrass Hilary Clinton regarding what was known about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012. However, the documents also contain far less publicized revelations that raise vitally important questions of the West’s governments and media in their support of Syria’s rebellion.”

The West’s Islamists

The newly declassified DIA document from 2012 confirms that the main component of the anti-Assad rebel forces by this time comprised Islamist insurgents affiliated to groups that would lead to the emergence of ISIS. Despite this, these groups were to continue receiving support from Western militaries and their regional allies.

Noting that “the Salafist [sic], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” the document states that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition,” while Russia, China and Iran “support the [Assad] regime.”

The 7-page DIA document states that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the precursor to the ‘Islamic State in Iraq,’ (ISI) which became the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,’ “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media.”