[D66] US prepares military onslaught against Syria
Nord
protocosmos66 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 28 10:10:55 CEST 2013
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/28/syri-a28.html
US prepares military onslaught against Syria
By Thomas Gaist
28 August 2013
The Obama administration is in the final stages of its longstanding
preparations for a massive military onslaught against Syria. President
Obama is signing off on one of the various scenarios that have been
developed over the past two years by the Pentagon. In all likelihood,
the initial stages of the attack will involve the use of cruise missiles
fired from US navy vessels and “standoff” attacks launched by US war
planes from beyond Syria’s borders.
According to an NBC News report Tuesday evening, the US could hit Syria
with an initial three days of missile strikes, beginning as early as
Thursday. Subsequent waves of strikes could then be launched, unnamed
senior officials told NBC, “to target what was missed in further rounds.”
“We are ready to go,” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told the BBC on
Tuesday.
“This is as much a warning to Iran, as I see it, as it is action against
Syria,” Representative Peter King of New York told CNN.
In order to provide political camouflage for the military operations and
deceive the public, the administration and the media are claiming that
the attack will be of a limited nature. This is a lie. Aside from the
fact that the use of bombs and missiles against a heavily populated
capital must lead to massive casualties, the political and military aims
of the undeclared war are far-reaching.
The US and its imperialist co-conspirators in Britain, France and
Germany intend to destroy the Assad regime’s military capabilities,
eliminate its ability to resist the proxy “rebel” forces that are
serving US interests, and bring about regime-change. This outcome will
set the stage for a war against Iran within the next year or two, if not
earlier.
The four US destroyers stationed off the coast of Syria are capable of
delivering 160 cruise missiles to targets inside the country. Once the
assault begins, the US onslaught will likely continue until Syria’s
defenses have been decimated and the situation on the ground has shifted
in favor of the US-backed militias, consisting for the most part of
right-wing Islamists with connections to Al Qaeda forces. As in Iraq and
Libya, the infrastructure of Syria will be devastated and countless
thousands of Syrians will lose their lives.
Proposals for military intervention laid out by the top US military
officer further expose the claims that a US assault will be limited in
nature. In a letter written to Congress in June, Gen. Martin Dempsey,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed a scenario involving
“stand-off strikes” which would target “high-value air defense, air,
ground, missile and naval forces, as well as the supporting military
facilities and command nodes… Stand-off air and missile systems could be
used to strike hundreds of targets at a tempo of our choosing.”
A primary objective of the US intervention will be to kill Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad, in a grisly repetition of what was done to
Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In a bloodthirsty and fascistic column
published Tuesday, entitled “Target Assad,” Bret Stephens of the Wall
Street Journal declared:
“Should President Obama decide to order a military strike against Syria,
his main order of business must be to kill Bashar Assad. Also, Bashar’s
brother and principal henchman, Maher. Also, everyone else in the Assad
family with a claim on political power. Also, all of the political
symbols of the Assad family’s power, including all of their official or
unofficial residences.”
The US-NATO war on Libya was a dress rehearsal for the coming war
against Syria, which in turn is merely the prologue to future
confrontations with not only Iran, but also Russia and China.
It is hardly a coincidence that top Israeli defense and intelligence
personnel are in Washington DC to discuss “Iran’s nuclear program” and
“Hezbollah and Iran’s role in the Syria crisis,” according to Haaretz .
The public is being subjected to an unrelenting propaganda campaign
designed to chloroform opposition to war by a media that ignores the
howling contradictions and obvious lies in the Obama administration’s
account of events. In a Tuesday editorial, the New York Times
characterized Secretary of State John Kerry’s hypocrisy-drenched and
fact-free moralistic condemnations of Assad as “forcefully making the
case for action.”
Far from demanding that the administration back up its claims with
scientifically verified evidence, the media is utterly indifferent to
the factual foundations of the government’s allegations. Without
evincing the slightest concern, PBS News reported Tuesday night that the
Obama administration will not wait until the United Nations
investigators complete their report on the alleged chemical attack
before ordering military action. What better proof could there be that
the allegations against the Assad regime have been manufactured only to
serve as a pretext for war?
If a chemical attack took place, there are good reasons to believe that
it was carried out by Syrian “rebels” with the assistance of the United
States. Evidence of US-directed rebel operations in the areas where the
chemical weapons were allegedly used continues to emerge.
Over the past two weeks, US Special Forces have reportedly been leading
teams of opposition fighters in operations against regime targets near
Damascus, in the very same area where the government claims the chemical
attack took place. (See: “US prepares military assault on Syria”.) Le
Figaro reported last week that guerrillas who were being trained in
Jordan border by CIA agents began massing near the Syrian capital
beginning in mid-August. Hundreds of freshly trained fighters reportedly
began crossing the border into Deraa on August 17.
The Jerusalem Post reported, “The rebels were trained for several months
in a training camp on the Jordanian-Syrian border by CIA operatives, as
well as Jordanian and Israeli commandos.”
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem corroborated these claims in a
statement Tuesday, saying “rebel” fighters trained outside Syria were
flooding into the Damascus suburbs and preparing an assault on “four
different fronts.”
America’s regional allies and the European imperialist powers are lining
up in support of the assault on Syria. Meeting in Cairo, the Arab League
condemned the alleged chemical weapons attack and signaled support for a
US-NATO assault by declaring that Assad was responsible. Arab League
governments such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have been crucial
backers of the anti-Assad forces fighting in Syria.
Turkey, which has also played a central role in stoking up a sectarian
civil war in order to topple Assad, declared its full support for a
US-NATO intervention.
Germany, Britain and France have joined in calls for action against
Syria. Conversations between Obama and British Prime Minister David
Cameron over the weekend yielded agreement on the need for “a serious
response.” Additional Syria-related discussions between the US, British
and French governments are set for this week. British Prime Minister
David Cameron announced Tuesday that Parliament will cut short its
summer holiday and reconvene on Thursday to authorize military action
against Syria.
Top military officials gathered on Monday in Amman Jordan, including
General Martin Dempsey and military chiefs from Britain, Italy, Germany,
France, Canada, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan, and an emergency
meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels is scheduled for Wednesday.
The US Congress is not planning to hold public hearings that might delay
the outbreak of war, or submit the Obama administration’s claims to any
critical examination. There are virtually no demands from Congress for
even the legal fig leaf of congressional authorization for the war.
While, according to a recent poll, only 9 percent of the public support
a war against Syria, the pro-war mood in the Congress is overwhelming.
Obama, who won election in 2008 on a wave of anger against the Bush
administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now, just five years
later, about to drag the country into a war against Syria, once again on
the basis of lies about weapons of mass destruction.
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