The US End Game in Syria

US End Game in Syria is Just the Beginning for Wider Regional War

By Tony Cartalucci

Information Clearing House,

17 October, 2015

The Syrian conflict is profoundly misrepresented across the entirety of the Western press.

To call it a civil war is a gross mischaracterization. The entire conflict was engineered and fueled from beyond Syria’s borders. And while there are a significant number of Syrians collaborating with this criminal conspiracy, the principle agents driving the conflict are foreigners. They include special interests in the United States, across the Atlantic in Europe, and regional players including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel.Syria is far from an isolated conflict. 

America’s interest in dividing and destroying Syria is part of a much larger agenda serving its aspirations both in the region and globally. The division and destruction of Syria as a functioning, sovereign nation-state is admittedly meant to set the stage for the conquest of Iran next.

Reuters recently published an op-ed titled, “Syria’s one hope may be as dim as Bosnia’s once was,” which argues that the only way the US can cooperate with Russia regarding Syria is if all players agree to a weakened, fragmented Syria.

If this scheme sounds familiar, that is because this op-ed was authored by Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution – a corporate-financier funded think-tank that has in part helped engineer the chaos now consuming the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). O’Hanlon previously published a paper titled, “Deconstructing Syria: A new strategy for America’s most hopeless war,” in which he also calls for the division and destruction of Syria.

In it, O’Hanlon calls for the establishment of “safe zones,” the invasion and occupation of Syrian territory by US, European, and Persian Gulf special forces, the relaxing of criteria used to openly fund what would essentially be terrorists operating in Syria, and openly making the ousting of the Syrian government a priority on par with the alleged US fight against the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS/ISIL).

“Relaxing” criteria regarding who the US can openly fund and provide direct military support for, is nothing less than tacit support for terrorism and terrorists themselves.

But none of these treacherous methods should be shocking. That is because O’Hanlon is also a co-author of the 2009 Brookings Institution report titled, “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran”. In this signed and dated criminal conspiracy, methods for covertly overthrowing the Iranian government with US-backed mobs augmented with armed militants, the use of US listed foreign terrorist organizations to wage a proxy war against Iran, the provocation of open war with Iran, and the use of Israel to unilaterally attack Iran first, before bringing America inevitably into the war shortly after are all described in great detail throughout the 156 page report.

While some have tried to dismiss this report as a mere theoretical exercise, suggestions like having terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) removed from the US State Department’s foreign terrorist organization list so that the US could openly arm and fund it in a proxy war against Iran, has since come to pass. The report was written in 2009, MEK was de-listed in 2012.

Additionally, the report also suggests luring Iran to the negotiating table where the United States would place before it a deal so irresistible that when Iran either rejected it or accepted it and then appeared to violate it, subsequent US military intervention would be seen by the world as a reluctant option of last resort that Iran brought upon itself. This has since manifested itself as the much lauded “nuclear deal.”

And almost to the letter, every criminal conspiracy laid out in this report meant for Tehran, has been each in turn used against Syria. The report noted that Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah would be significant obstacles to dividing and destroying Iran and that each must be dealt with first. The report was written in 2009, the war in Syria began in earnest in 2011.

Understanding that Syria is not an isolated crisis, but is tied to US designs aimed at Iran and beyond, illustrates why O’Hanlon and other Western policymakers’ proposals for a “political transition” or the partitioning of Syria are unacceptable. It will not be the end of regional conflict, but rather the end of just the beginning.  The successful destruction of Syria will portend war with Iran and beyond.

Solving Syria at the Source 

Regarding what the West claims is Russia’s true motivation for intervening in Syria,  O’Hanlon’s op-ed in Reuters claimed:

Putin’s real goal in Syria is almost surely not to fight ISIL. His more plausible aim, as reflected in his military’s initial bombing targets, is to bolster President Bashar al-Assad’s shaky regime by attacking insurgent groups close to ISIL strongholds — even if they are relatively moderate and unaffiliated with ISIL or al-Nusra, an al Qaeda offshoot. Putin wants to protect his own proxies, retain Russian access to the naval facility along the Mediterranean coast at Tartus and embarrass the United States while demonstrating Russia’s global reach.

Surely that is what O’Hanlon expects most Reuters readers to believe, but he unlikely believes it himself. Russia’s involvement in Syria is tied to self-preservation. Moscow likely understands that a “settlement” in Syria is a misnomer, and that the collapse of Syria as a functioning nation-state will be only one of several events in a chain reaction that will effect first those along Russia’s borders, then everything within its borders.

O’Hanlon’s op-ed is chilling. In it he claims:

Assad is responsible for killing most of the 250,000 Syrians who have died in the civil war to date — and caused most of the massive displacement and refugee flows as well.

It is chilling because readers must remember that O’Hanlon himself signed and dated the Brookings paper “Which Path to Persia?” where he and his colleagues at Brookings deliberately engineered the very chaos that has consumed Syria and cost so many people their lives. Syrian President Bashar Al Assad is only guilty of holding power when those who underwrote Brookings’ criminal designs had them aimed at the nation of Syria and executed.

President Assad did what all responsible leaders have done when faced with a foreign threat endangering the survival of their nation – stood and fought back. That O’Hanlon has since repeatedly called for the division and literal “deconstruction” of Syria but still blames President Assad for the chaos that entails, only further illustrates the depravity from which Western foreign policy flows and the dishonesty they present the results of their criminal conspiring to the public with.

However, O’Hanlon, and even Brookings itself are not solely responsible for the death and destruction Syria now suffers, or Libya, Iraq, and others have suffered before it, or even those the US plans to target next will suffer. They are but individual cogs in a much larger machine. To understand the scope of that machine, one must look at who underwrites and ultimately directs the work Brookings does. By doing so, we can understand the very source of what drives the chaos in Syria, and then go about stopping it.

The Source 

Brookings’ 2014 annual report (.pdf) reveals among others, the following sponsors from big-finance; JP Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, State Farm, MetLife, and GEICO. From big-defense there’s; General Electric, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Big-telecom is represented by; Comcast, Google, Facebook, AT&T, and Verizon.  Big-oil; Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, British Petroleum, and Shell. And even consumer corporations like Pepsi and Coca Cola help underwrite what are essentially policy papers conspiring to commit crimes against humanity that have since been systematically carried out at the cost of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.

It is the Fortune 500, centered on Wall Street and London, driving the conflict in Syria and the larger arc of chaos consuming the MENA region and beyond.

Russian and Syrian efforts aimed at stemming the flow of weapons and cash over Syrian borders alone is not going to “solve Syria.” Clearly the problem is larger than Syria, and even larger than the geopolitical chaos the US has created arcing over the MENA region. It is the unwarranted wealth, power, and influence that drives that chaos that constitutes the ultimate source of the problem. Disrupting or displacing that power will be difficult, and the failure thus far to significantly disrupt or displace it is precisely why this chaos continues.

Multipolarism and Localism

For Moscow’s part, particularly in the wake of Western sanctions targeting Russia, the search inward to become more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign imports, foreign financial institutions and systems, and other features of Wall Street and Washington’s “international order,” has set an example for other nations to follow in undermining and ultimately uprooting this global threat at its very source.

Understanding the premeditated nature of the West’s war on Syria and the fact that this current conflict serves only as a stepping stone toward a well-defined strategy to next destroy Iran explains why “partnering” with the US in any kind of solution regarding Syria is an impossibility. A “political settlement” that results in the division of Syria or the removal of the current government is also entirely unacceptable for this same reason.

Russia’s decision to defend the sovereign government of Syria and assist in the elimination of Syria’s enemies within its borders, as well as the warding off of its enemies beyond them is the most immediate course of action to “solve Syria.” Inviting Iran and even China to take take part in a larger campaign to secure Syria’s borders and assisting in the restoration of order within the country is a concrete next step. Expanding this coalition to cover Iraq next will create a geopolitical “no-meddling-zone” the West will find itself outside of.

However, ultimately, it is Russia’s concept of a multipolar world displacing the unipolar international order established by the West – an order that breeds servile dependency among all drawn into it and which seeks to destroy all who try to avoid it – that stands the best chance of not only “solving Syria,” but preventing other nations from suffering its fate. Multipolarism aims straight at the source of Western global hegemony – at the corporate-financier, political, and institutional monopolies which prop it up. Multipolarism emphasizes national sovereignty and a decentralized global balance of power.

And while Russian, Syrian, Hezbollah, Iranian, and Iraqi forces stand on the front line of the true free world, for the rest of us, we need to understand that full-spectrum domination pursued by the West requires full-spectrum resistance from the rest of humanity. The corporations underwriting Brookings’ abhorrent work enjoy impunity, immense wealth, and nearly unlimited influence and power solely because each and every person on Earth takes their paycheck every month, and renders it to them, at the shopping mall, at the new car lot, in Starbucks, at McDonald’s, or at the pump.

A multipolar world not only means a distribution of global power, but also a distribution of global responsibility and wealth. And this extends not only to nations, but also states and provinces, as well as communities and even individuals. However insignificant individual efforts may seem to decentralize power and wealth away from existing monopolies, they are no less insignificant than the efforts of individual soldiers fighting and winning in Syria. Indeed their individual contributions alone are meaningless – but collectively they lead to victory.

Solving Syria truly, means solving the problem presented to us by the prevailing unipolar order itself. It is not a battle simply for Syria and its allies to fight within the borders of Syria, but a battle for all who oppose unipolar global hegemony to fight. Maybe not with bullets, bombs, and missiles, but a fight nonetheless.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.