By Thomas S. Harrington CommonDreams.org The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that ...
By Thomas S. Harrington
CommonDreams.org
CommonDreams.org
The great danger
of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone
with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and
show you up.This is what has
just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of Russia into the fight
against ISIL.
And as is
generally the case with posers caught with their pants down, the US policy
elites are not happy about it.
You see, the US
strategic goal in Syria is not as your faithful mainstream media servants (led
by that redoubtable channeler of Neo-Con smokescreens at the NYT Michael
Gordon) might have you believe to save the Syrian people from the ravages of
the long-standing Assad dictatorship, but rather to heighten the level of
internecine conflict in that country to the point where it will not be able to
serve as a regional bulwark against Israeli regional hegemony for at least
another generation.
How do we know?
Because important protagonists in the Israelo-American policy planning elite
have advertised the fact with a surprising degree of clarity in documents and
public statements issued over the last several decades.
The key here is
learning to listen to what our cultural training has not prepared us to hear.
In 1982, as the
Likud Party (which is to say, the institutional incarnation of the Revisionist
Zionist belief, first articulated by Jabotinsky in the "Iron Wall"
that the only way to deal with "the Arabs" in and around Israel was
through unrelenting force and the inducement of cultural fragmentation) was
consolidating its hold on the foreign policy establishment of Israel, a
journalist named Oded Yinon, who had formerly worked at the Israeli Foreign
Ministry, published an article in which he outlined the strategic approach his
country needed to take in the coming years.
What follows are
some excerpts from Israel Shahak’s English translation of that text:
"Lebanon’s
total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab
world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already
following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into
ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary
target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the
military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria
will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into
several states such as in present day Lebanon…."
"Iraq, rich
in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a
candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us
than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger thanSyria. In the short run it is Iraqi
power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war
will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to
organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab
confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the
more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in
Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in
Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist
around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in
the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."
"If Egypt
falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan or even the more distant states will
not continue to exist in their present form and will join the downfall and
dissolution of Egypt.
"There is
no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a
long time, and Israel’s policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed
at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power
to the Palestinian majority."
Yinon’s vision
reappeared in the now infamous "Clean Break" document from 1996,
authored by a consortium of US and Israeli "strategic thinkers" that
included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David and Meyrav Wurmser, which was
meant to serve as a foreign policy guide for the first administration of
Benjamin Netanyahu.
The text is
nothing if not obsessive regarding the need to seriously debilitate Syria’s
ability to act in any way is a pole of regional influence in the in the area .
"Israel can
shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by
weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on
removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic
objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional
ambitions."
"Most
important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting
diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions
against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross
into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite."
And as Dan
Sanchez has recently shown, David Wurmser went into even greater detail about
the need to balkanize Israel’s northeastern neighbor in articles published in
approximately the same time period, talking quite openly in one essay about
"expediting the chaotic collapse" of Baathist Syria.
Then there is
Wesley Clark's famous speech, given in 2007, in which he revealed the true
strategic aims of those running US foreign policy in the wake of the September
11th attacks. In it, he tells of a conversation he had at that time with a
Pentagon official who admitted that the real plan was "to attack and
destroy the governments in seven countries in five years".
Those countries,
according to Clark, were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq.
In the same speech, he explicitly ties the hatching of the plan to Richard
Perle, head of the cadre of people who wrote in the "Clean Break"
document of the paramount importance of putting Israel in position to
"shape its strategic environment".
On September
5th, 2013, Alon Pinkas, the former Israeli Consul General in New York and
well-connected member of Tel Aviv’s conservative policy elite described the
Syrian conflict in the following terms in the New York Times:
"This is a
playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don’t
want one to win — we’ll settle for a tie,....Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to
death: that’s the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there’s no
real threat from Syria."
I don’t think it
can get much clearer than that. The US-Israeli plan in Syria never been about
helping anyone in that country, but rather insuring its effective dismemberment
so as to further the perceived "strategic interests" of the Jewish
state.
As Tomás
Alcoverro, the longtime Mideast correspondent of Barcelona’s La Vanguardia
newspaper wrote 9 October 2015, in reference to the combined Russian and Syrian
government attacks carried out during the previous week: "If this joint
offensive is successful, the US plan for continuing the war of attrition until
both sides are exhausted, will lie in ruins".
Yes, the US and
Israelis, have been "faking it" in Syria for a good long time now.
And Putin has come along and called their bluff.
And they are not
happy about it. Which is why the ongoing campaign of demonization against the
Russian leader is being ratcheted up—if that’s possible—to still higher levels
of intelligence-insulting hyperbole.
About The Author:
Thomas S. Harrington is a professor of Iberian Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and the author of the recently published book, Livin' la Vida Barroca: American Culture in a Time of Imperial Orthodoxies.
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