US
Fireworks: Awaiting Details From Afghanistan, A Look At Syrian Outrage
Saeed Naqvi
President Trump has furnished proof that
the leader of the Free World, which dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima,
remains true to form: it has dropped an even bigger Mother Of All Bombs (non
nuclear, we are being persistently reminded) on Nangahar province in east Afghanistan
on what are being described as IS tunnels. Since details are not known, let us first
sort out the Syrian outrage.
The alleged Sarin gas attack on Khan
Shaykhun, a small town in Idlib province where the Jabhat al Nusra’s militant
offshoots are now fighting with their backs to the wall, invited a massive US
retaliation: 59 cruise missiles were fired on the nearby Shurayat air strip to
teach Bashar al Assad a lesson.
Analysts under pressure to meet
deadlines, hurriedly suggested the strikes made Trump look virile in his
meeting with Xi Jinping in Florida, that Rex Tillerson looked strong in his
meeting with Sergei Lavrov and that the North Koreans will think twice before
their next menacing launch. All of this is fanciful because the big players
know the truth. Yes, the opposition to the Syrian army, mostly al Nusra and IS wearing
other labels, and their regional sponsors, now know that the Trump, brow beaten
at home, can be dragged into the Syrian fight. The civil war can be prolonged.
To make sense of the air strikes, it
would be useful to visit a similar incident in August 2013. Then also a Sarin
gas attack was allegedly mounted on an even bigger scale on Ghouta township, on
the outskirts of Damascus. Two US missiles took off from a US base in Spain – a
retaliation, ofcourse. On this occasion, the Russian anti missile paraphernalia
at their base in Tartus, brought down the missiles in the Mediterranean sea.
Apparently, a sizeable number of missiles fell in the sea this time too. So the
Russian S400 and S300 are indeed operational.
President Obama would have met President
Vladimir Putin at the September, 2013, G20 summit in St. Petersburg from what
the US “Deep State” had designed to be a position of strength once the two
missiles have been launched. Instead his face was in the lower mould during his
bilateral aside with the Russian leader. If the Russian intercepts had caused a
loss of face, subsequent face saving for the Obama administration in 2013 was also
provided by the Russians. They suggested that Syria sign the Chemical Weapons
Convention and surrender its chemical weapons.
On September 11, 2013, Putin wrote in
the New York Times: “No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there
is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian army, but by
opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons,
who would be siding with fundamentalists.”
Putin then points to something even more
sinister. “Reports that militants are preparing another attack, this time
against Israel, cannot be ignored.”
In other words, the opposition were
checked in their tracks by timely Russian intervention. Air attacks in
retaliation for the false flag at Ghouta were prevented. The desperate
opposition was now about to play its trump card: launch a poison gas attack on
Israel.
In his weekly address to the nation,
Obama said:
“Until recently, the Assad regime would
not admit that it possessed chemical weapons. Today Syria has signaled a
willingness to join with 189 other nations, representing 98 percent of
humanity, in abiding by an international agreement that prohibits the use of
chemical weapons.” There was fulsome praise for Russia. “Russia has staked its
own credibility in supporting this outcome”, Obama said.
It was clear even then that this
Washington-Moscow entente over Syria would set the cat among the pigeons in Tel
Aviv and Riyadh. All their huge investments in arms, money, mercenaries and
years of planning was liable to be wasted in Obama’s second term when John
Kerry because his Secretary of State.
On the issue of Russia and Syria, the
Deep State, with the media as amplifier, was not going to give up. No wonder it
pitched its tent behind Hillary Clinton’s platform for the 2016 Presidential
elections. The spider in the Deep State web, weaving the Syrian yarn is one Robert
Stephen Ford, US ambassador to Damascus in 2011 when the “insurgency” was first
initiated.
The most accurate narrative of Ford, in
cahoots with this French counterpart, Eric Chevallier, and how they stoked the
fires in Syria should be available with New Delhi’s ministry of External
affairs. Of the entire diplomatic corps in the Syrian capital that this
reporter met, the sharpest eye was that of Ambassador V.P. Haran.
The grinding of the US, Israeli, Saudi
propaganda machine in Syria never stopped.
Every now and then the White Helmets in
Syria would produce a heart wrenching story of “Assad’s brutality”. The
photograph of a four year old Syrian boy, his face burnt by “Assad’s” attack on
civilians in Aleppo, found its way to the final Trump-Clinton debate in Las
Vegas on October 19, 2016. Clinton simulated a lump in her throat describing
the child with burns as evidence of indiscriminate Russian (not just Syrian)
bombing of civilians.
Exactly on cue, Christiane Amanpour of
the CNN, in her high profile interview with Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei
Lavrov, produced the very same picture for Lavrov to see. “This is a crime
against humanity” Amanpour thundered. Lavrov looked at the photograph. “Very
tragic” he said. He then made a bold assertion: the US was probably supporting
the Jabhat al Nusra.
Meanwhile, NGOs in the field furnished
video recordings of the “burnt boy” being diligently filmed to be presented to
the world media: propaganda of the macabre genre.
If the Pulitzer Prize winning
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is to be believed, the West is itself
implicated in all the Sarin gas scandal. His outstanding piece in the London
Review of Books after Ghouta, quite incontrovertibly establishes that “the
Sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles.” He quotes British
Intelligence for this detail. He adds:
“A secret agreement in 2012 was reached
between the Obama administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and
Qatar, to set up a Sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the US could
invade and overthrow Assad.”
Sarin gas has been in the news earlier when
Bill Clinton’s Defence Secretary William Cohen caused journalists as senior at
Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw to be sacked for having pointed to US stockpiles
or nerve gas which were used on a village in Laos to hunt down US army
defectors. It became notorious as Operation Tailwind. The official version then
was that the gas was not dropped on Americans. That which was dropped, on
whoever, was not Sarin but “but garden variety CS tear gas.” The reporters
stuck to their guns.
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