Hours after the overnight US-led missile strikes on Syria, WikiLeaks republished a crucially important diplomatic cable through its official media accounts confirming that Saudi Arabia's long term strategy in Syria has been to pursue regime change "by all means available." According to the leaked internal Saudi government document, this is the kingdom's proposed end-goal even should the United States at any point show "lack of desire" due to the threat of Russian response and possibility of a 'great power' confrontation.
With American lawmakers and media pundits already urging President Trump to escalate and sustain attacks against Syria, it must be remembered that close US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia have long coordinated to create the conditions that might tip the US administration toward full military action resulting in regime change in Damascus. And more recently, fresh off his weeks-long tour of the US, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has both slammed previous proposals of US troop withdrawal in Syria and declared eagerness "to work with allies on any military response in Syria if needed."
t is also essential to recall that the al-Qaeda linked group which originated the claims of a government orchestrated chemical attack on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Douma, called Jaish al Islam (JAI), is and has always been state sponsored by the Saudi regime. The Guardian, among others, reported beginning in 2013 that Saudi Arabia founded and trained the group, spending millions.
Zero Hedge
WikiLeaks Secret Cable: "Overthrow The Syrian Regime, But Play Nice With Russia"
Tyler Durden
See also from ZH
Prophetically foreshadowing the current crisis (and apparent action plan), leaked CIA documents from the reign of Bashar al-Assad's father in the 1980s show a Washington Deep State plan coalescing to "bring real muscle to bear against Syria," toppling its leader (in favor of one amenable to US demands) , severing ties with Russia (its primary arms dealer), and paving the way for an oil and gas pipeline of Washington's choosing.
29 comments:
Why the intense desire for regime change in Syria by the US, Tom?
Israel wants to invade Lebanon to steal its land rich with water supplies, but Hezbollah has twice successfully Beaten them back. Both Syria and Iran support Hezbollah and hence why Israel wants those countries defeated. So, Hezbollah is depicted as a terrorist organization and that's why they say Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the ME, but Hezbollah is just defending its country from foreign aggression.
Assad, as a ally with Russia, won't let the Saudis or Qatar put gas pipelines through to Europe through Syria, and so these countries wanted Assad removed. The US wants these pipelines in place do that they can turn the Russian pipelines through the Ukraine off. This would weaken Russia. US companies probably have high stakes in the Qatar and Saudi gas supplies. Also, the US wants to sell its expensive shale gas to Europe.
The US is desperately trying to stop the new Russian Nord Stream 2 pipelines into Europe but Germany and Scandinavia want them. So, a couple of rogue vassal states.
When you see images of Syrian cities badly shelled and full of bullet holes where hundreds of thousands have died, most in agony, nany from starvation and thirst, think how it was all done by the 'Good West' for money. All those people died so the Western and Saudi elite could make a ton of money. Barack Obama started it, the president who came across as intelligent and measured, a nice liberal. This is how ruthless the Empire is. And yet in our TV's at night are the nice broadcasters saying how evil Assad is. Everything in the West is built on a lie.
“The US wants these pipelines in place do that they can turn the Russian pipelines through the Ukraine off”
LOL the Russians already did that .... when gas was over 13!!!!
U.K. commutes sentence of PanAm Lockerbie terrorist as discreet favor to daffy Kadaffi so Kadaffi throws him a parade upon return and rubs U.K. nose in it...
Oil goes to $150 and Venezuela has largest reserve of oil in hemisphere so Chavez expels all the US partners who built and operated the system for them....
US president says he’s going to leave Syria so Syria gets out the poison gas...
Kaivey, see any behavioral pattern developing here???????
I see a pattern. It's just not the one you think.
Why the intense desire for regime change in Syria by the US, Tom?
The brand context is maintenance of US global hegemony and Western (white) dominance globally.
This necessitates regional control, which is why the US has some 800 (known) bases around the world and the world's largest military, ensuing "dominance in all domains."
MENA (Middle East and North Africa), that is, the Islamic countries, are a vital region and Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran. Were not under US control.
MENA is a vital region for several factors, such geographical significance, natural resources (energy resources, especially petroleum and natural gas), and alliances (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Gulf States).
The Middle East is also the gateway to Central Asia from the south, and Central Asia is Russia's underbelly and a passage to attack China from the south while being able to deny China access to energy.
As I have said, it's impossible to understand the dynamic of the grand chessboard on which the game of global dominance is played without understanding the geography.
Syria may seem to be insignificant, but it a pawn that must be removed from the board to advance.
"brand context" should be "broad context"
Syria failed in their GWOT assignment to get rid of Hezzbollah which was the former approach of the Bush2/Obama admins... ie get Assad to do it... he didnt do it so they created an insurgency (Special Operations 101) to take over the country which also hasnt worked...
Trump does not look like he is continuing this policy... but remember he has always said "we invaded the wrong country..."
You guys are all biased anti-war and are somehow grasping onto OLD OUTDATED Cold War stuff... Cold War is OVER we are in GWOT now... Hezzbolah and Iran are still on "the list"...
Putin is old Soviet idiot and an asshole if he tries to put Russia in between the US and its enemies in the GWOT... he'll end up harming Russia...
Dave, are you overlooking the fact that Russia's enemies in the GWOT are Anglo-American proxies created and supported by the US and UK, chiefly CIA and MI6?
Or that the CIA fomented the Chechnya terror groups as it did the Jihadis in Afghanistan under Carter/Bzezenski to attack Russia?
Russia views this as at attack on Russia from the southern underbelly. This perceived as an existential threat.
The US military knows this, of course, and realizes that if this escalates it could go all the way.
The priority is first regime change in Russia, if the fails, economic warfare aimed at economic collapse and only if that fails, wars, which would quite possibly be the last one on Planet Earth for a long time to come.
Matt, but why is there a GWOT? Was it a sensible, defensive response for 9/11? Or was it just an excuse to intensify the (criminal, insane) policies that led to 9/11? You blow up somebody else's towers and he might blow up yours. Why not just declare a Good Neighbor policy for the whole world, let other people run their own countries and stop sowing chaos everywhere? If somebody commits terrorist acts, why not just use legal systems?
Cold War stuff Tom... ie OVER...
Haven't you noticed that it's on again?
I posted a link yesterday to the US Sec Gen making it official.
why is there a GWOT?
Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?
9/11 was the excuse to put the plan into operation after the authors of the memos came to power.
Gen. Wesley Clark on an insider source: "I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense's office. It says we're going to attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years - we're going to start with Iraq, and then we're going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran."
See Glenn Greenwald, Wes Clark and the neocon dream
This is an element in the 9/11 conspiracy theory that is factual. It's the reason a lot people suspect that not only was the intel fixed but also a false flag operation of some sort was also conducted.
Regardless of whether a false flag was involved, these people lied the US and UK into war.
John Bolton was a prominent player and now he is the WH as a key adviser. The game is still on.
Matt defends the elite saying there has always been wars. He talks of the Warrior class with deep respect, and says how they are groomed to be leaders having superior training and so they have the right to rule. He says that building up to WW3 and selling lots of weapons is just guys making lots of money, as if it's a bit of fun.
The establishment are criminals who run protection rackets inventing enemies to scare the public into paying more of their taxes over to the elites armaments industry.
The elite set up false flags to get their wars going and murder innocent people. They got away with it in the past because there was no internet but now millions of people are beginning to cotton on.
To watch Theresa May and Boris Johnson play acting pretending to be so very angry making it all was a Laurel and Hardy act.
Then the US sent it's Armada of warships over to Syria in a massive display of fakery. The right and the true left knew it was a pretense. Trump and his team, and Theresa May and Boris Johnson, looked like a bunch of clowns, hardly inteligent, or sophisticated. Buffoons!
The mainstream Western public has no interest in serous politics and so the elite get away with it - for now. But everyone else knew it was a charade, and it's catching on.
" You blow up somebody else's towers and he might blow up yours. "
What tower did we blow up before 9/11? African embassies were OUR embassies.. they tried once in the first tower attack in '93 to bring it down then... USS Cole when we went in to buy fuel... '83 Beirut Marine barracks under UN action to Lebanese civil war... Khobar Towers were ours...
You guys are just heavy biased anti-war and are unable to understand US strategy in the GWOT.... probably the strategic goals are in the classified documents in Congress that Tom has recently referenced but (if you are not biased anti-war) you can pretty much figure out what must be in there from the context of what we are doing...
I'd say it is now Syria/Hezbollah followed by Iran...
this is like the MMT people being heavy biased as anti-bank... so they cant understand the banking system well enough and go all conspiracy theory instead of trying to figure out what the system is doing...
You guys are all biased anti-war so not much of any of this is going to make a lot of sense to you guys...
You guys are all biased anti-war so not much of any of this is going to make a lot of sense to you guys..
Right. You sound like one of the crazies to me. :o
“You sound like one of the crazies to me. :o”
Well I seem to be able to take it or leave it... probably rather leave it but that doesn’t look like a reasonable expectation based on mankind’s history to me...
Warriors are going to be warring....
Tom I get what your saying, but I am not sure the game players are as ideologically committed to this as you think. Also, we are assuming that everyone is committed to win at all costs. I look at these things differently, and I believe you cannot fool your evolution. In the end, humans will react according to their unconscious drives. All of these players have things that they could lose if it all goes to hell. This will cause them to pause. So I think Matt is onto something, in this one instance only. Mostly I think Matt likes to provoke everyone.
History is dialectal rather than linear.
We just saw this in the recent attack on Syria.
Bolton was for a major and prolonged "shock and awe" approach to take out the Assad regime and Syria along with it.
Mattis prevailed.
However, it is reported that Trump sides with Bolton more than Mattis.
However, Bolton paints a rosy picture, ignoring costs and dangers. Mattis likely set forth the contingencies to Trump and successfully made the case that the risk/reward ratio recommended against a major assault.
So this is likely not over yet. There are 4000 US troops conduct a "training exercise" in Jordan at the Syrian border, read sending a message.
This puts the ball in Putin's court requiring him to decide whether he is willing to take on the US (hence NATO) military on the ground in Syria. Russia is not in a position to do that without serious escalating and probably being forced to use tactical nukes, which will result in MAD.
These people really are crazy with their game theory. They should've learned their lesson from Vietnam and McNamara.
And you can fool your evolution. It's what leads to collapse of civilizations and fall empires at the grand scale, as history testifies. No one at the top is under any illusion here, either. A mistake can result in the unleashing of nuclear winter.
Being hyper-rational in relying on game theory is not rational. Humans are not entirely rational as cognitive science has now established, but which the ancients realized. Feeling and reason cannot be disconnected entirely. Moreover, even the most rational people make poor decisions based on the best information available owing to cognitive-affective biases and uncertainty.
The internal logic of the dialectic based on opposition is pretty straightforward if one understands it.
Relatively few people get it at the global level.
But the players follow the logic nevertheless.
I think I ought to get out of politics and become a Buddhist monk in a monastery and be blissfully unaware. I'll probably make it to the end.
Nice response. Agree the ancients definitely got that. Question: is the building of civilization evolutionary? Leaving out Atlantean conspiracies and so forth, evolutionary science claims Homo sapiens sapiens have only been building civilizations for 10 thousand years. Most of our evolution was spent in small communities, living pretty much like all other animals on the planet.
Seems to me civilization may collapse because it is unnatural, and opposes millions of years of species evolution. The contradictions just catch up with us all, and we revert to the original design.
Animal side always “Trumps” reason.
This is not a question that evolutionary theory has answered as far as I know. How would one test that hypothesis?
In addition, collective evolution based on group selection is controversial, although I tend to be persuaded in favor of it.
Rather whether civilization is the result of voluntary traits seems to be a philosophical question related to assumption about naturalism as the basis of scientific inquiry in contrast to philosophy, which doesn't make that distinction as a fundamental assumption, although some philosophers assume naturalism.
There is also the issue of conflating naturalism as a methodological assumption with materialism, which is an ontological assumption.
Aristotle, the father of biology, defined human beings as rational animals and social animals. These definitions have guided Western thought. However, the ancient concept of the distinction among body (soma), mind (psyche) and soul (pneuma) is considered not naturalistic and science has abandoned it.
But that is a methodological decision. If it is interpreted ontologically, then it becomes a philosophical issue.
BTW, this also affects key assumptions in economics and limits the scope. Some regard that limitation as destructive, arguing that homo economicus is a simplified construct that is inadequate for dealing with the real world populated by homo socialis, as shown by the poor result of economics other than in special cases, whereas scientific theory aims at providing general explanation that is testable through observation.
“BTW, this also affects key assumptions in economics and limits the scope. Some regard that limitation as destructive, arguing that homo economicus is a simplified construct that is inadequate for dealing with the real world populated by homo socialis, as shown by the poor result of economics other than in special cases, whereas scientific theory aims at providing general explanation that is testable through observation.”
I have come across some interesting theories regarding hominid evolution, Beginning with Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, but through other evolutionary anthropologists and biologists, which attempt to explain human behavior, and human activity, through the lens of evolutionary biology. I am not an economist, but it seems to me that modern economies tend to see human beings as rational agents, which we are, as far as it goes, but it fails to take into account the unconscious desires and drives of human beings, which I think are much more likely to give you useful information. Same thing with international politics. In the end, humans have wired evolutionary needs, like food, shelter, social life, novelty, etc. In as much as a man made system meets those needs, then it will be successful. When it does not, it begins to break down.
One could argue then that sociopathy is evolutionary, in the absence of a strong community, like the individualism of western societies, in the sense that environmental stress creates an unconscious drive to fight a perceived threat to the individuals survival. This may be why sociopaths are so charismatic-they appear to us to have the answers to our collective unconscious fears and anxiety.
The wild card in all this is the sheer freakin amount of humans on this planet. There is no way you can predict how these folks will react to different events and stresses. Unconscious evolutionary forces in those numbers are impossible to predict, and that’s what I mean when I say the game theorists are setting themselves up for something they have no theory for, both in themselves and others.
Right. Game theory is based on the 18th century view of rationality that Antonio Damasio trashes in "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994).
In this erroneous view, there is a homogenous human reason that is a fundamental characteristic of human beings. This leads game theorists to generalize their own conception of rationality, which is deeply affected by their own cognitive-affective biases. It also fails to take bad data and uncertainty sufficiently into account.
It's a recipe for disaster when used strategically and tactically, as the Vietnam experience should have proved conclusively if they were paying attention. That they are not indicates strong cognitive-affective bias coupled with inadequate information.
Matt Franko: "You blow up somebody else's towers and he might blow up yours."
Bin-Laden was radicalized by the destruction of towers, high-rises in Beirut in the 1982 Lebanon war. He explicitly made the comparison.
'83 Beirut Marine barracks under UN action to Lebanese civil war.
The marines were in Beirut because Reagan basically supported the 1982 invasion from Israel, which created Hezbollah. Rambo Reagan then just pulled out. It is interesting to compare with 1978, when Israel also invaded Lebanon under much greater provocation (Coastal Road Massacre) than 1982, which was clearly unprovoked aggression in response to the PLO's peace initiatives. 1978 is forgotten because wimp Carter simply ordered Israel out of Lebanon. And Israel obeyed.
You guys are just heavy biased anti-war and are unable to understand US strategy in the GWOT.
Because there isn't any real strategy for any real purpose. The strategy is to create chaos worldwide for no purpose except to justify the military-industrial machine of the US that is creating the chaos. It's a self-licking ice cream cone.
Tending to the vegetables in the gardens in the mornings. Chanting prayer in the afternoons for two hours bringing deep peace and tranquillity. Do some water colour painting or go for cycle ride later on in the day. Drink some of beer in the evening the monks brewed. Bliss!
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