Friday, October 21, 2005

The New Told Lie: Syria in the Sights



Friday October 21st 2005

Once again, we must assume the Syrians are dunderheads so murderous and impulsive as to be unable to control themselves, going right ahead and killing Rafiq Hariri, irrespective of the consequences. In fact, if we are to believe the United Nations—a disgusting lickspittle for neocon interests on several different occasions—the pernicious conspiracy to murder Hariri runs right up the Syrian totem pole of power to none other than the family of Bashar Assad, the Syrian president. According to the Independent, the politically motivated UN “report says senior Syrian and Lebanese security officials were directly involved in the killing of Hariri in February and planned it over many weeks. The missing names are of Asef Shawkat, President Bashar Assad’s brother-in-law who is Syria’s intelligence chief, and his brother, Maher Assad.”

Naturally, Bush wants a special UN session so he can rattle the bones of war. It’s of course no secret the neocons want to take out Assad and render Syria into a smaller version of Iraq—a smoldering ruin of misery and chaos—or short of that (the UN gets squeamish about such things and prefers inflicting misery from a distance) impose a medieval siege on the country as the UN and the United States teamed up to do more than a decade ago against the people of Iraq. Imposing sanctions and a “no-fly zone” over Syria will also provide U.S. pilots with the same opportunity they enjoyed in Iraq—to blithely fly around and shoot up Iraqis like fish in a barrel. All told, the Bush-Clinton-Bush sanctions were a smashing success, killing around a million hapless Iraqis. It was worth it, as the Iron Maiden, Madeline Albright, attested.

Few people doubt there is a treacherous dictatorship in Syria and the Assad family is capable of wholesale butchery (consider the elder Assad killing around 40,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982—and the well-documented fact the Brotherhood is a CIA penetrated organization). Even so, it is a stretch to believe the Syrians, especially the Assad family—having clung to power all these past decades—would be stupid enough to kill a high-profile Lebanese politician and expect to get away with it, especially when it should be obvious to a ten year old killing Hariri plays right into the hands of the United States and especially Israel.

It is common knowledge in Bushzarro world on the Potomac that Syria is “low-hanging fruit,” an easy target for neocon bullies determined to reduce Muslim society and culture to smoldering wreckage, a front and center plan for hoodlum Likudites for some time now. As Bill Van Auken writes, Hariri’s assassination is fishy:

The timing of the assassination, barely a week after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced their truce in Egypt, is noteworthy. It is quite possible that any limited concessions the Israeli regime may agree to make as part of the “peace process” with the Palestinians will be repaid by Washington giving the green light for Israeli provocations and military actions against Syria.

Moreover, the assassination and the impending sanctions (or direct military action) are manna from heaven for the likes of neocons such as David Wurmser, Cheney’s adviser on the Middle East. “Wurmser has long called for the United States and Israel to work together to roll back the Ba’ath-led government in Syria,” notes SourceWatch. “For the latter part of the 1990s, he wrote frequently to support a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to undermine then-President Hafez el-Assad in hopes of destroying Ba’athist rule and hastening the creation of a new order in the Levant to be dominated by ‘tribal, familial and clan unions under limited governments,” a long-held Israeli dream. It should also be noted that Wurmser, a rabid Zionist, would do all of us well if he were wasting away in federal prison (making sure not to drop the soap) for his role in passing classified information to Ahmad Chalabi and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—an act of treason once punished by firing squad, now apparently no big shakes, especially for Zionists who more or less are allowed to roam around, organizing “art student” spies and micromanaging nine eleven terrorists.

In fact, Wurmser co-authored (along with the weasel Douglas Feith and the Prince of Darkness Richard Perle) a report drafted for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (the infamous A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm document). “It called for a repudiation of the ‘land for peace’ formula that had served as the basis for Middle East peace negotiations, in favor of a plan to ‘roll back’ regional adversaries. It advocated the overthrow of the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and recommended Israeli strikes against ‘Syrian targets in Lebanon’ and within Syria itself,” explains Van Auken. A couple years later, Wurmser “helped draft a document entitled ‘Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon: the US Role?’ It called for a confrontation with the regime in Damascus, which it accused of developing ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ Among those signing the document were Feith and Perle, as well as Elliott Abrams, Bush’s chief advisor on the Middle East, who was recently appointed deputy national security advisor.”

Considering all of this—well documented and not hidden under a rock—and also Israel’s long and sordid history of using assassination (especially car bombings) as an instrument of state policy, you’d think the United Nations would have arrived at a different conclusion. Instead, we are expected to believe the Assad family is not only stupid but also unable to cover its own tracks and self-destructively begging to be bombed or stand by while their people starve to death under brutal sanctions, a favorite tactic of milquetoast bureaucrats at the United Nations. In fact, according to the Independent, Shawkat and Maher Assad were so stupid they “talked about killing Hariri in talks begun in September last year in Damascus,” conversations apparently so casual the United Nations had no problem tracking down alleged documentation.

Once again, we are expected to believe whatever our rulers tell us—even if it makes absolutely no sense and it is obvious only the neocons and Israelis stand to benefit from such carnage. Syria only stands to lose—and lose big time as the U.S. will eventually use military action against the Syrian people, as they did—predicated on similar lies—against the people of Iraq.

It’s about time more of us wake up and call the Bushites on these transparent crimes. But of course this will not happen because Americans generally do not care what their government does—apparently not even to their own Constitution and Bill of Rights—and most Americans are hard-pressed to even find Syria on a map, let alone understand the magnitude of the neocon war against Islam and the horror that portends: millions of people ultimately slaughtered, entire countries reduced to uninhabitable rubble, and poisonous depleted uranium and who knows what other deadly and noxious chemicals spread over large areas, killing and making people sick for generations to come.

Indeed, we are verging on Nazi-like crimes here. Only the magnitude is missing—but given enough time, the neocons will give Hitler and Stalin and run for the money.

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