At least eight are dead and 118 wounded after a car bomb rocked the Lebanese capital of Beirut. The attack in the majority Christian neighborhood killed a top-ranking security official.
RT crosses over to Beirut to talk to Ali Rizk – an expert on the Middle East.
RT (Russia Today) is a global news network broadcasting from Moscow and Washington studios. RT is the first news channel to break the 500 million YouTube views benchmark.
Americans have been told that 150 troops have been sent to Jordan to help with refugee problems from Syria.
Britain is doing the same. A hundred and fifty can be “150” or it can be 800, two countries can be a dozen.
Combine this with the Turkish moves, forcing down a Syrian airliner flying out of Russia, handcuffing and abusing passengers, bizarre tales of imaginary electronics, a brazen confrontation, not just with Syria but Russia, a major and quite relentless nuclear power, and the desperation of the failures to crush Syria according to a long-established timetable become clear.
Intelligence agencies analyze patterns, making up a mosaic that reveals intentions. Our mosaic includes recent claims by the US that Iraq is now the home for a massive new Al-Qaeda force, one made up entirely of former Ba’athists that had been in the pay of the US.
Our source on this is the fleet’s then chief political officer and former presidential advisor Gwyneth Todd, who was, last year, subject to a kidnap/assassination attempt by US government personnel.
Ms. Todd is living in Australia, married to a Defense official, the mother of three. Silencing her, for some reason, had become a priority.
Adding to the “witches brew” of plots against Syria is the corridor Israel has established across Jordan and Iraq to supply their new airbase at Mosul in Iraq’s Kurdish region.
Now the Israeli papers report a “massive air defense exercise” involving the United States, with naval forces to be stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Our first serious question is the troops in Jordan. There is no rationale for the US, Britain and other NATO powers to use Special Operations forces to provide “humanitarian services” to refugees. The United Nations does this as do other NGO’s and, of course, the government of Jordan, which has funds available by agreement, from Saudi Arabia.
The troops, minimally, are involved in intelligence gathering, interviewing refugees, but, additionally, are establishing a foothold for a larger potential force in the immediate future.
Similarly, the current and unsubstantiated misrepresentation of sectarian strife in Iraq, is hardly proof of a “massive” Al-Qaeda cell planning attacks on the United States, as expressed by extremist elements in the American press, more honestly, much of the American press.
We have two uses of the term “massive” as though it had some magic meaning, as though it were a justification for military action.
One problem has been the consistency within the Obama administration, in assuring Iran that no attack will be made until every imaginable diplomatic means is exhausted.
However, Syria has no such blanket protection and, moreover, Secretary of State Clinton has been particularly belligerent in her recent pronouncements.
We seem to be seeing a repetition of recent events in Libya. There has been continual discussion of “buffer zones” and “safety corridors” or rumors of deals to split Syria up or force a “regime change” though no legal authority for any involvement in Syria has been established.
The most recent meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran was particularly clear, 120 nations selected Iran as the movement’s president, representing a majority of the member states of the United Nations.
The ability of the five permanent member states, the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China to veto any military action or authorize it, to support any sanction, was clearly recognized as undemocratic and a relic of both the Cold War and 19th Century colonialism, a disease that seems to be re-infecting the world.
The additional issue, of course, is the use of unauthorized and unrestricted unilateral sanctions, actions that clearly qualify as acts of war in accordance with international law, acts that, in a democratic United Nations, should, in fact, bring about a vote of the General Assembly which, by all that is reasonable, require “reverse sanctions” on the aggressor nations.
An examination of the intended impact of sanctions is directly parallel to the blockade of Europe used by the Allied powers against Germany. The intent, normally part of a combined operation of unrestricted bombing of cities, as with Dresden in 1945, represents a strategic program of unlimited warfare against a civilian population, disease and starvation the desired result.
The targets are clear. Syria is to fall, followed by Lebanon, then the renewal of operations in Iraq and a program of selected destabilization of Iran by nations that, frankly, lack both the will and ability to fight a sustained ground war in Iran.
The intent is clear, mischief, intimidation and enslavement in all cases, the model in place currently in Afghanistan, or intended to be in place anyway.
One might ask, why would a nation being so soundly defeated in an adjacent country want to repeat the same disaster multiplied by ten?
The new schedule is clear, based on the “informed” belief that the American election will be rigged for Romney and his friends in organized crime to win and immediately authorize military action which will, very possibly, end in a world war.
Wilder and more conspiratorial “polls” come out every day; the control of the press is so obvious as to be laughable.
The Libyan attack, one clearly orchestrated from Tel Aviv, one intended to be used by the Romney camp to attack the Obama presidency is, as planned, the primary foreign policy issue.
No American president could live a day telling the truth, “Israel did it.”
Intelligence agencies have been backdating phony reports to invent imaginary Al-Qaeda cells operating for years in Libya, a nation that was the bulwark of the Bush-Blair rendition program.
The new wars will be chasing imaginary Al-Qaeda from Syria to Iraq to Iran and from Yemen to Somalia to Mali and Niger to Nigeria and Cameroon and then to Uganda and Kenya.
The plans are on the drawing board though nobody has told Al-Qaeda yet.
Kimberly Rivera, an American soldier who moved to Canada to avoid the Iraq war, has been deported to the U.S.
The mother of four presented herself at the Canada-U.S. border in Gananoque, Ont. on Thursday, where she was arrested and transferred to U.S. military custody.
“Kimberly now awaits punishment for refusing to return to Iraq, a conflict which Kimberly and Canada determined was wrong,” the group War Resisters Support Campaign said in a statement.
Rivera’s husband and children, two of whom were born in Canada, crossed the border separately on Thursday, according to the group’s spokesperson.
“She didn’t want her children to see her arrested by the military,” said Ken Marciniec.
The parliamentary secretary to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney confirmed the deportation in the House of Commons, drawing a huge cheer from the Conservative benches.
“Our government does not believe that the administration of the president or the president himself in any way, shape, or form, is going to persecute Ms. Rivera,” said Rick Dykstra, Conservative MP for St. Catharines, Ont.
While Rivera’s supporters were hoping for a last-minute intervention by the government, news of the 30-year-old’s deportation sparked a series of protests across the country.
The largest one was in Toronto, where Rivera has been living with her family since she moved to Canada in 2007.
Some 20,000 people also signed an online petition protesting the deportation order.
Meanwhile, US-backed terror rips across Iraq, as Saudi-Qatari coddled Iraqi vice president is sentenced to death. by Tony Cartalucci
September 10, 2012 – The French government has ignored the will of voters who ousted warmonger Nicolas Sarkozy in recent elections, and is continuing its unpopular military adventurism abroad as well as its support for militant terrorism across the Arab World.
France has announced that it will be funding and arming terrorists operating along Syria’s boarders, offering them heavy weapons, just as they did in Libya last year. In fact, the US-British and UN-listed terrorists assisted into power in Libya, are now leading death squads currently ravaging Syria – disingenuously portrayed as “indigenous” “freedom fighters” by the Western press.
Image: Hollande (right) after paying lip service to French voters, set out almost immediately betraying campaign promises to end foreign military adventurism and is in fact picking up right where ousted Nicholas Sarkozy left off, leading the West’s destabilization and destruction of Syria through funding the very Libyan terrorists his predecessor assisted into power in Tripoli.
“Reuters quoted a “diplomatic source” as saying France had started supporting parts of Syria that are apparently being controlled by the armed opposition. More alarmingly, the report pointed out that Paris was considering supplying heavy artillery to anti-government fighters — a move that would harden the possibility of a full-blown civil war in the country.”
International condemnation led by Russia, China, and Iran have pointed out that the so-called “armed opposition” constitutes sectarian extremists, many of which have direct ties to Al Qaeda, many of which are also not even Syrian, betraying the West’s unraveling narrative. France’s recent announcement is particularly unconscionable, considering that Syria’s so-called “opposition” has recently announced their intentions to begin targeting civilian infrastructure, a blatant war crime.
Evidence stretching back as far as 2007 has exposed a Western conspiracy, years in the making, intent on using sectarian extremists under the guise of “pro-democracy” “regime change’ to violently overthrow the government of Syria and undermine Iran’s influence throughout the Middle East.
A report published in 2007 by the New Yorker titled “The Redirection” (full article here), cited US, Saudi, and Lebanese officials who admitted that military and financial aid was already flowing to militant groups affiliated with both Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood with the aim of destabilizing Syria and Iran. Former intelligence agents were also cited, warning that the plan, then being implemented under the Bush administration, would lead to a catastrophic sectarian bloodbath – the very sectarian bloodbath now unfolding in Syria today.
France, along with the UK, US, the autocratic Saudi and Qatari regimes, as well as NATO (specifically Turkey) have meticulously planned and created the very violence they now seek to use as justification for further military intervention. In reality, they are employing the very terrorist forces against Syria they have used as an impetus to send their own soldiers to their needless deaths in both Iraq and Afghanistan for over a decade as part of the “War on Terror.”
Meanwhile, in Iraq, violence tore across the nation as former-vice president Tariq al-Hashemi was sentenced to death for his role in using death squads against his political rivals. While the Western press attempts to frame the power struggle within Iraq as one of an isolated sectarian nature, in reality, al-Hashemi, who is being coddled by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, represents extremist elements backed by Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel, while Iraq’s current government is attempting to cultivate closer ties with Iran.
Image: Vice president of Iraq, or viceroy of US-Saudi-Israeli interests? With ex-Vice President Hashemi now hiding abroad and being handed down a death sentence, Iraq has seemingly taken a decisive stance against Hashemi and his foreign backers. The West is now using the threat of igniting sectarian violence once again across Iraq as leverage against the current Iraqi government.
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The terror wave crossing Iraq is being carried out by fighters who are currently operating on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border, indicating that Iraq, as well as Syria and Iran are being targeted by US-Saudi-Israeli backed militants. The violence is connected, and part of a greater strategy to reorder the Middle East against Iran, and ultimately against Russia, China, and all other potential threats to Wall Street and London’s global hegemony.
Britain has already given £5 million in aid to opposition groups in Syria, and its special envoy to the Syrian opposition, John Wilks, has remained in contact with FSA members in Istanbul. Western powers continue to change the regimes of countries which cannot defend themselves and they do it too often and too brazenly.
It is strange for the Arab League, which also contains repressive monarchies and dynastic emirates, to declare one of its member-states tyrannical.
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Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are engaged in a proxy war at the behest of the United States to destabilise Syria and change the regime in Damascus. Saudi Arabia bankrolls the insurgency, Qatar plays a role similar to the one it played in the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and Turkey provides bases to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighting President Bashar al-Assad. It is incredible how the FSA irregulars inflict heavy casualties on the battle-hardened Syrian army and knock out its tanks and helicopter-gunships.
The United States, Britain and France have thrown their might behind the Syrian rebels by providing them intelligence support and sophisticated weapons. The clandestine operation going on for the last 17 months against Syria is meant to weaken the influence of Iran in the region.
The Iranian leadership refuses to acquiesce to imperial designs in the Middle East, unlike the oil-rich sheikdoms. The pattern of Western intervention in Syria is all too familiar. It is the same old pretext of weapons of mass destruction as it was in Iraq, and the same powers – mainly the US, the UK and France.
The Iraq invasion in March 2003 was fresh in people’s minds when Libya was attacked by Western forces and its leader Muammar Qaddafi lynched. The new candidate for regime change is Syria and its leader Bashar al-Assad. In Libya the opposition was the Transitional National Council (TNC), and in Syria it is the Syrian National Council (SNC). Tony Blair played out the US agenda in Iraq, and David Cameron is faithfully doing the same in Syria.
Britain has already given £5 million in aid to opposition groups in Syria, and its special envoy to the Syrian opposition, John Wilks, has remained in contact with FSA members in Istanbul. Western powers continue to change the regimes of countries which cannot defend themselves and they do it too often and too brazenly.
The recently held summit of the OIC in Mecca has suspended Syria’s membership and backed calls for arming Syrian rebels to launch offensives against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has accused Assad of acts of repression against his own people. It is strange for the Arab League, which also contains repressive monarchies and dynastic emirates, to declare one of its member-states tyrannical. Who knows the scenario could change for the worse for Muslim countries which are now instigating rebellion in Syria.
For instance, what would happen if the Western media suddenly began to advocate the arrival of democracy in, say, Saudi Arabia, asking it to hold elections? And CNN and The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, known for influencing US foreign policy, could take up the sensitive issue of emancipation of women in the ultra-conservative Saudi society and insist that Saudi Arabia granted them the right to vote. Ridding Afghan women of their blue cloak was part of the lofty agenda of the US invasion in Afghanistan, although the cloak stays when the invaders pack up to leave.
It is sad that the Muslim countries allow themselves to be part of campaigns against other Muslim countries because of sectarian prejudices. Iran has always assured Saudi Arabia and the emirates that it has no ill will towards them. Without outside support Qatar can hardly face Iran. In fact, Qatar is so vulnerable on its own that if threatened by Iran it would have to back off…
The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore.
Saudi Arabia has gone on the offensive against Iran to protect its interests. Their involvement in Syria is the first battle in what is going to be a long bloody conflict that will know no frontiers or limits.
Ongoing Disorders in the island kingdom of Bahrain since February of 2011 have set off alarm bells in Riyadh. The Saudis are convinced that Iran is directing the protests and fear that the problems will spill over the twenty-five kilometer long COSWAY into oil rich Al-Qatif, where The bulk of the two million Shia in the kingdom are concentrated. So far, the Saudis have not had to deal with demonstrations a serious as those in Bahrain, but success in the island kingdom could encourage the protestors to become more violent.
Protecting the oil is the first concern of the government. Oil is the sole source of the national wealth and it is managed by the state owned Saudi Aramco Corporation. The monopoly of political power by the members of the Saud family means that all of the wealth of the kingdom is their personal property. Saudi Arabia is a company country with the twenty-eight million citizens the responsibility of the Saud Family rulers.
The customary manner of dealing with a problem by the patriarchal regime is to bury it in money. King Abdullah announced at the height of the Arab Spring that he was increasing the national budget by 130 billion dollars to be spent over the coming five years. Government salaries and the minimum wage were raised. New housing and other benefits are to be provided. At the same time, he plans to expand the security forces by sixty thousand men.
While the Saudi king seeks to sooth the unrest among the general population by adding more government benefits, he will not grant any concessions to the eight percent of the population that is Shia. He takes seriously the warning by King Abdullah of Jordan back in 2004 of the danger of a Shia Crescent that would extend from the coast of Lebanon to Afghanistan. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria, and the Shia controlled government of Iraq form the links in the chain.
When the Arab Spring reached Syria, the leaders in Riyadh were given the weapon to break the chain. Appeals from tribal leaders under attack in Syria to kinsmen in the Gulf States for assistance could not be ignored. The various blinks between the Gulf States in several Syrian tribes means that Saudi Arabia and its close ally Qatar have connections that include at least three million people out of the Syrian populations of twenty-three million. To show how deep the bonds go, the leader of the Nijris Tribe in Syria is married to a woman from the Saud Family.
It is no wonder that Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said in February that arming the Syrian rebels was an “excellent idea.” He was supported by Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani who said, “We should do whatever necessary to help [the Syrian opposition], including giving them weapons to defend themselves.” The intervention has the nature of a family and tribal issue that the prominent Saudi cleric Aidh al-Qarni has turned into a Sunni-Shia War by promoting Assad’s death.
The Saudis and their Qatar and United Arab Emirate allies have pledged one hundred million dollars to pay wages to the fighters. Many of the officers of the Free Syrian Army are from tribes connected to the Gulf. In effect, the payment of wages is paying members of associated tribes.
Here, the United States is not a welcomed partner, except as a supplier of arms. Saudi Arabia sees the role of the United States limited to being a wall of steel to protect the oil wealth of the Kingdom and the Gulf States from Iranian aggression. In February of 1945, President Roosevelt at a meeting in Egypt with Abdel Aziz bin Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, pledged to defend the kingdom in exchange for a steady flow of oil.
Since those long ago days when the U.S. was establishing Pax Americana, the Saudis have lost their trust in the wisdom or the reliability of American policy makers. The Saudis urged the U.S. not to invade Iraq in 2003 only to have them ignore Saudi interests in maintaining an Iraqi buffer zone against Iran. The Saudis had asked the U.S. not to leave a Shia dominated government in Baghdad that would threaten the Northern frontier of the Kingdom, only to have the last American soldiers depart in December 2011. With revolution sweeping across the Middle East, Washington abandoned President Mubarak of Egypt, Saudi Arabia’s favorite non royal leader in the region.
Worried by the possibility of Iranian sponsored insurrections among Shia in the Gulf States, the Saudis are asserting their power in the region while they have the advantage. For thirty years, they have been engaged in a proxy war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Syria is to be the next battlefield, but here, there is a critical difference from what were minor skirmishes in Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere. The Saudis with the aid of Qatar, and the UAE is striking at the core interests of Tehran; and they have through their tribal networks the advantage over an isolated Islamic Republic.
Tribal and kinship relations are being augmented by the infusion of the Salafi vision of Islam that is growing in the Gulf States. Money from the Gulf States has gone into the development of religious centers to spread the fundamentalist belief. A critical part of the ideology is to be anti-Shia.
Salafism in Saudi Arabia is promulgated by the Wahhabi School of Islam. The Wahhabi movement began in the eighteenth century and promoted a return to the fundamentalism of the early followers of the Faith.
The Sauds incorporated the religious movement into their leadership of the tribes. When the modern state of Saudi Arabia was formed, they were granted control of the educational system and much else in the society in exchange for the endorsement of the authoritarian rule.
When the Kingdom used its growing wealth in the 1970s to extend its interests far from the traditional territory in the battle against the atheistic Soviet Union, the Wahhabi clergy became missionaries in advancing their ideology through religious institutions to oppose the Soviets. More than two hundred thousand jihadists were sent into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet forces and succeeded in driving them out.
There is no longer a Soviet Union to confront. Today, the enemy is the Islamic Republic of Iran with what is described by the Wahhabis as a heretical form of Islam and its involvement in the Shia communities across the region. For thirteen centuries, the Shia have been kept under control. With the hand of Iran in the form of the Qud Force reaching into restless communities that number as many as one hundred and six million people in what is the heart of the Middle East, the Saudis see a desperate need to crush the foe before it has the means to pull down the privileged position of the Saud Family and the families of the other Gulf State rulers.
The war begins in Syria where we can expect that a successor government to Assad will be declared soon in the Saudi controlled tribal areas even before Assad is defeated. The territory is likely to adopt the more fundamentalist principals of the Salafists as it serves as a stepping stone to Iran Itself. It promises to be a bloody protracted war that will recognize no frontier and will know no limits by all of the participants.
With zero mandate, SAS allegedly “hunts for WMDs” as West attempts incremental intervention at any cost.
by Tony Cartalucci
August 26, 2012 – The British Daily Star has reported in their article, “SAS HUNT BIO ARMS,” that, “nearly 200 elite SAS and SBS troops are in or around Syria hunting for Assad’s weapons of mass destruction.” The Star also claims that the SAS are accompanied by British MI6, US CIA, and both French and American soldiers. This after US’ Barack Obama made comments claiming the US would military intervene if Syria so much as “moves them [unconfirmed WMDs] in a threatening fashion.”Like Iraq, the West has provided no evidence that such weapons even exist, let alone prove that the weapons have or even would be used against terrorists operating across Syria. And like in Iraq, another false pretext is being developed through leaks, and limited hangouts in an attempt to prime the public for a desperate intervention designed to bolster the West’s collapsing terrorist front.
The West also categorically lacks any semblance of an international mandate to act militarily within Syria – meaning that if SAS soldiers are in Syria, they are in egregious violation of international law.
Image: The symbols for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. The West is the undisputed champion of deploying each of these weapons of mass destruction against their enemies – from nuclear bombs upon Japan, to depleted uranium and white phosphorus upon Iraq, to Agent Orange all across Vietnam – it stands to reason that these weapons would eventually end up in the hands of the their proxies as well.
US, British, French, and Gulf State-backed Al Qaeda militants have been attempting to infiltrate and violently overthrow the government of Syria, as well as terrorize the population into submission in a brutal, year and half long terror campaign. In July and August, NATO-backed terrorists attempted to seize Syria’s two largest cities, Aleppo and Damascus only to be dealt severe losses and a rebound of Syrian forces enjoying increasing public support for ending the violence.
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