Washington’s Machiavellian Game in Syria
http://journal-neo.org/2016/02/17/washington-s-machiavellian-game-in-syria/
Column:
<http://journal-neo.org/category/columns/politics/>Politics
= Region:
<http://journal-neo.org/category/locations/usa-in-the-world/>USA in the World
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=172020#172020
<http://journal-neo.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/mosul1.jpg>
[]
One of my often-cited sayings is around 2,500
years old. It’s from the respected Chinese
philosopher Sun Tzu in his small masterpiece, The
Art of War. For centuries it’s been one of the
most influential strategy writings not only in
Asia, but also the Western world. It goes as follows:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you
need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If
you know yourself but not the enemy, for every
victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If
you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In geopolitical analysis, when I examine a major
political or economic development, it’s very
important that I first look into myself, to feel
if I’m blurring my analysis because of deep-felt
personal wishes for a peaceful, more harmonious
world, blurring the reality of a given nation or
groups of nations. Similarly, if I take those
malevolent patriarchs who dominate American and
NATO policies today, I must be certain I know,
not merely the surface of what an American
President or Secretary of State might say on a
given day. It can be a lie, a slick maneuver or
it can be even honest. The work of any serious
analyst is to sort out which it is, to go deeper,
to “mine” the lode in order to see the real strategic implications.
Such is the case with finding out what is the
real Washington policythe economic and foreign
policy today. For example, what is the real
meaning and purpose behind the journey of the
92-year-old Henry Kissinger to Moscow to meet
Vladimir Putin and others recently? What’s the
real purpose of John Kerry when he appears to
follow a policy more friendly towards Russia
than, say, his Assistant Secretary Victoria
Nuland or Secretary of Defense Ash Carter? Is it
the voice of a significant faction within the
foreign policy establishment that genuinely seeks
a shift in Washington policy with Moscow from
confrontation and war towards detente, diplomacy
and a policy of peace and economic cooperation?
What’s the real intent of the Roman Pope in
wanting to come together with the Orthodox
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the first such
meeting between those two churches–east and
west–since the Great Schism of 1054? Is that a
positive step towards world peace or is it something ominous?
Washington: confusion or deception?
It’s a widespread notion, fostered by US and
European mainstream and other media, even by
media in Russia and China that Washington is in
confused disarray, a Superpower or hegemon which
has lost its bearings. Media analysts write of a
policy clash or internal factional battle that
renders any US action in destroying DAESH or ISIS
in Syria and Iraq a ludicrous, bumbling joke.
From years of looking at US foreign policy, I’ve
learned to bring a certain respect in to my
assessment. The respect is not at all admiration
but an appreciation that, after all, the world’s
most powerful Superpower did not come to that
position of power without extraordinary skills,
cunning, a remarkable ability to lie
convincingly, to deceive, to very precisely
manipulate the weaknesses of their opponents.
That deception has been the hallmark of American
foreign policy for the entire post-1945 period,
as towards the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev
in 1989, when Gorbachev trusted his American
interlocutors who solemnly promised that the West
would never advance NATO to the East. The
deception is the hallmark of US economic policies
since Bretton Woods in 1944 established the
Dollar as supreme, and which destroyed any
potential challenge to the domination of the US
dollar as reserve currencythe most strategic of
the American pillars of power aside from that of the US military.
Some years ago I was told by a former West Point
officer that the cadets of West Point who go on
to become America’s future colonels, generals and
military strategists, are steeped in Sun Tzu as
well as in Italian Renaissance diplomat Niccolò
Machiavelli’s The Prince, which teaches “the
employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct.”
In international politics, it’s unwise to believe
your enemy is stupid. It can be fatal. Mistakes,
of course, they continuously make, only to
re-program and correct or push on another front
in their obsession with world power and control.
More useful is to assume they have a
well-thought-through strategy behind a veil of
Machiavellian lies and deception, rather than to
assume stupidity as our operating premise. So,
amid a most incredible array of contradictory
indications out of Washington, what’s going on
between the actors in the war against Syria and
the entire Middle East today, in February 2016?
Using Russia in Syria
If we look at current US policies in the Middle
East, especially in Syria and in Iraq, and assume
it is a very well-thought-out strategy to reach a
specific, well-defined goal, the situation looks very different.
My current conclusion is that under a smokescreen
of apparent policy confusion and incompetence on
the side of Washington, of the Pentagon, of the
State Department and their backers on Wall
Street, there is a carefully-planned strategy to
ignite a war in the oil-and-gas-rich Middle East
that will dramatically alter the political and
geopolitical oil map of the world. Yes, another
war about oil like so many of the wars of the
last century, a Century of War as one of my books calls it.
The Washington-Wall Street think tanks behind the
coming change are orchestrating the actions of
state actors in the Middle East who, blinded by
their own greed or desire for empire, Ottoman or
Saudi, see not that they are falling into a fatal trap.
They apparently haven’t studied Sun Tzu, much
less, even a thought of such deep themes as
knowing themselves and knowing their enemy. They
are mostly driven by burning hate, as with
Erdogan and his Turkey today–hate for the
Syrians, for the Kurds, for the Europeans, even
for the Saudis with whom Erdogan claims to be
allied. In Erdogan’s Kasbah, everyone has their
daggers ready behind their backs.
Washington sets the trap
What can be the true strategy of Washington and
their patrons in Wall Street in the present
Middle East chaos called the “war to defeat DAESH” or IS?
It’s useful to go back to the end of September,
2015 when Russia surprised not only Washington,
but the entire world, with the swiftness and
effectiveness of its requested military
intervention against DAESH and other terror groups destroying Syria.
It’s clear from the lack of an effective
Washington response, and from subsequent
Washington actions, that their policy strategists
took time to recalculate their original regime
change strategy for Syria. What emerges is the
clear evidence that they decided to actually use
that Russian military intervention to advance
their original strategic plan for the region,
much like classical martial arts teaches–use your
opponent’s force against them. It smacks of
Churchill’s strategy of luring Hitler into a
Polish invasion in 1939 so Britain could declare
war on Germany, but waiting until Germany invaded
the Soviet Union before seriously acting, the period of so-called Phony War.
Washington has orchestrated events, including the
apparent US-Russian accord around the UN Security
Council Resolution 2254 of December 18, 2015 that
led to Geneva III “peace” talks. The Geneva III
talks were sabotaged from the outset by
Washington’s control of the UN “peace” mediators,
including US diplomat, now UN
Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs,
Jeffery D. Feltman, and his subordinate, Staffan
de Mistura, the Machiavellian United Nations
Envoy to Syria and the Arab League. Washington
acceded to Saudi demands that the large Syrian
Kurdish minority, who are in the firing lines of
DAESH in Syria, be excluded, and that Syrian
“opposition” be determined by the oil-hungry Saudis.
Now, following the Munich talks of the
International Syria Support Group (ISSG) on
February 12, co-chaired by Kerry and Lavrov,
Russia and the USA have on paper agreed that,
“cessation of hostilities will commence in one
week, after confirmation by the Syrian government
and opposition, following appropriate
consultations in Syria.” Further, “The members of
the ISSG reaffirmed that it is for the Syrian
people to decide the future of
<http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2016/02/252428.html>Syria.”
Now there are two points that I find flashing
red. The “cessation of hostilities” means that
Russian highly-effective air support to the
Syrian National Army and Hezbollah and other
pro-Assad forces will stop or be significantly
reduced at a critical point. Russian
parliamentarians claim cessation will not apply
to the areas around Aleppo controlled by DAESH or
Al-Nusra Front, but that remains to be
<http://tass.ru/en/politics/856244>seen. In either case it is a trap.
That ceasefire will happen just as Syrian forces,
backed by Russia are on the brink of a major
victory in Aleppo, breaking the DAESH supply
lines to Erdogan’s Turkey, the oatron of DAESH
along with the Saudi monarchy. Second, there is
no demand that DAESH or Al-Nusra cease
“hostilities.” That means Russia has agreed to
stop support of Assad but DAESH is no party to
the deal, leaving it free to rearm with Turkish
and Saudi support. Now the plot thickens and gets very dangerous.
Janus-faced Washington
Washington policy–the policy of the USA
military-industrial complex and their Wall Street
bankers– has in no way changed. That’s clear. I
find no convincing evidence to the contrary. They
plan to destroy Syria as a functioning nation, to
finish the destruction of Iraq begun in 1991, and
to spread that destruction now to the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, to Turkey, and across the entire
oil and gas-rich Middle East. They are simply
using other means to that end given the
“game-changing” presence of Russia since September 30.
While State Secretary John Kerry was working the
“soft cop” routine with Russia’s Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov in the run-up to the February 12
Munich talks, on February 10 a Pentagon spokesman
falsely accused the Russian military of hitting
two hospitals in Aleppo, even though, by prior
agreement, it was US aircraft that operated over
the city on that day. The US Pentagon spokesman,
Colonel Steve Warren, charged that Russian
aircraft in Syria were using “dumb” bombs,
“indiscriminately scattering those bombs across
populated areas regardless of whether those
populated areas have women and children,
civilians or hospitals,” charges denied by
<http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-russia-disagree-airstirke-syria-school-aleppo-ceasefire-when/>Moscow.
Two days later in Munich, Lavrov, on behalf of
Moscow, apparently compromised on its offer to
impose a ceasefire in three weeks and instead
accepted one week, a potentially devastating
setback for the near-victory of the Syrian
National Army forces to retake Aleppo and seal
the Turkey DAESH supply route. It’s interesting
that that decision came only nine days after
Henry Kissinger met with Putin in Moscow. We may
never know if there was a connection. Then on
February 12, Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy
chairman of the committee for international
affairs at the Federation Council, told TASS that
the areas still occupied by terrorists such as
DAESH and Al-Nusra were not covered by the Munich ceasefire.
The Pentagon is also quietly putting “boots on
the ground” in Iraq. War jargon in Washington has
become so dehumanized in the era of drone warfare
that we no longer speak of the soldiers, merely
their “boots.” They are preparing a major
military move in Syria whether through Turkish
and Saudi proxies or direct, or both, despite the
nice sounding words about humanitarian aid and UN
supervised Syrian elections in 18 months. At the
same time, US military veterans are preparing the
propaganda in the US for a ten-year siege before
the US could drive the last DAESH terrorist out
of the oil-rich Mosul, the heart of north Iraqi oil production.
On January 22 in an interview with CNBC Defense
Secretary Ash Carter stated that the US intends
to defeat Islamic State’s greatest strongholds:
the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and the IS “capital” Raqqa, in Syria.
“We’re looking for opportunities to do more and
there will be boots on the ground, and I want to
be clear about that. But it’s a strategic
question whether you are enabling local forces to
take and hold rather than trying to substitute
for them,” Carter said. “We’re prepared to do a
great deal because we have the finest fighting
force the world has ever seen. We can do a lot
ourselves,” Carter
<https://www.rt.com/news/330019-us-troops-syria-pushkov/>said.
The US says it has already sent 50 special
operations forces to northern Syria to gather
intelligence and maintain contacts with local
forces. “It is a keyhole through which one gets a
lot of insight, and thereby allows us more
effectively to bring the huge weight of coalition
military power to bear on the battlefield in an
effective way,” he stated. A leading Russian Duma
parliamentarian, Vladimir Soloyvov, head of the
Russian parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee,
dismisses Carter’s statements as a Washington
publicity move to “steal thunder in fighting
terrorism in the Middle East,” a sign that some
at least in the Russian policy establishment do
not really know their
<https://www.rt.com/news/330019-us-troops-syria-pushkov/>enemy.
A spreading world war
I’m going to make a prediction which you can
verify as accurate or, hopefully, not. In about
two months I estimate, around late March or April
it will be clear. The US Machiavellians have
lured not only Turkey’s Erdogan and Saudi
Arabia’s Prince Salman, but now Moscow into their
trap in the Middle East. The initial losers in
this unfolding deadly game will be Saudi, Turkey,
Syria, Iraq and likely Russia. The ultimate
losers, eventually, will also be the American
Patriarchs or oligarchs behind these incessant
wars of destruction, but not immediately, short of a miracle.
Look carefully at the little-reported statements
in recent days of two key Washington war
actors–Joe Biden and John Kerry. On January 24,
Vice President Joe Biden, the one who
orchestrated the US coup d’ etat in Kiev in
February 2014, met with Turkish President and
would-be Sultan of a neo-Ottoman imperium, Recep
Erdogan. Biden told Erdogan and Prime Minister
Davotoglu that Washington wanted Turkey and Iraq
to “coordinate” on an emerging US military plan
to take back the Iraqi city of Mosul from DAESH
or the so-called Islamic State. An Obama
Administration official described the Mosul
attack as in “hard-core planning” stages, though not imminent.
The unnamed US “senior” official, most likely
Biden, stated that the US is also selecting
several hundred Sunni Arabs in Syria, as well as
some Turks, who Turkey says its government has
identified as “potential fighters,” to help the
US close the roughly 60 miles of border with
Syria that remains under Islamic State control.
The source added that Washington is hoping to
finalize a package in coming weeks of new
technological assistance for Turkey to aid in securing that stretch of border.
Biden also strongly backed Turkey’s fight against
the Turkish Kurdish PKK and said that the US
would strengthen its military campaign against
ISIS if there is no agreement on a political
solution in Syria. Joe Biden well knows that
Erdogan and Turkish MIT intelligence head, Hakan
Fidan fully back DAESH and fully are out to
create ethnic cleansing against the Kurds in
Turkey, and in Syria. He knows because the CIA
worked with Fidan, a US educated Turkish military
veteran, at secret Turkish bases over the past
two years to train DAESH terrorists in the Washington war against Assad.
If you are beginning to smell a big skunk here,
you have a healthy sense of smell.
So now we have Washington and Erdogan bringing
undesired US and Turkish troops into Iraq’s Mosul
region to prepare a major military operation,
with or without the agreement of Iraq’s Prime
Minister, Haider al-Abadi, who has repeatedly and
impotently demanded the Turkish army leave Mosul.
Why Mosul?
You may fairly ask, why Mosul? To paraphrase Bill
Clinton in his 1992 famous retort to George H.W.
Bush, “It’s the oil, stupid.” The US failed
operation dubbed Arab Spring, the failed CIA and
Obama Administration backing of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt and across Middle East oil
states, and now their operations with Turkey in
Mosul and Syria are all about the oil.
This time, however it isn’t about taking over the
rich oilfields of Iraq and Syria. It’s about
destroying them. The US-engineered,
French-executed destruction of Qaddafi’s Libya is
the model. Iraq, as Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy
Policy Task Force discovered, holds the world’s
third largest proven conventional oil reserves,
on a par with Iran, with Saudi reserves the
largest. The area around Mosul and the
Kurd-controlled Kirkuk fields nearby are the
current focus of the US military strategy. In
Syria, DAESH terrorists control most all Syrian
oilfields, where they illegally export with aid
of Erdogan’s family to world markets to finance
their terror campaign against Assad’s regime.
An ominous wire report sent a shiver down my
spine when I read it. On January 28, US Army
Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, head of the
US-led coalition against Daesh (ISIL) in Iraq and
Syria, said that the US military was on site at
the Mosul Dam to assess “the potential” for the
collapse. Were it to be blown up, it would send a
flood of water down the heavily populated Tigris
river valley. “The likelihood of the dam
collapsing is something we are trying to
determine right now… all we know is when it goes,
it’s going to go fast and that’s bad,” MacFarland
told reporters in Baghdad. The US State
Department estimates up to 500,000 people could
be killed and over one million rendered homeless
should Iraq’s biggest dam
<http://presstv.ir/Detail/2016/01/28/447727/Mosul-Dam-Iraq-US-McFarland-Warren-ISIL/>collapse.
It would likely flood the large oilfields of
Kirkuk on its path, rendering them inoperable.
Whoever controls the Mosul Dam, the largest in
Iraq, controls most of the country’s water and
power resource. The dam holds back over 12
billion cubic meters of water that is crucial for
irrigation in the farming areas of Iraq’s western
Nineveh province. In a 2007 letter, US General
David Petraeus, a key figure in the destruction
of Iraq and in the creation of what became DAESH,
warned Iraq’s government that “A catastrophic
failure of Mosul Dam would result in flooding
along the Tigris River all the way to
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28772478>Baghdad.”
Washington Proxy War Builds
Combine this statement by General MacFarland,
head of the US-led coalition against Daesh (ISIL)
in Iraq and Syria on that Mosul Dam, the Biden
talks to get Turkey’s military invasion accepted
by Iraq “in the war against DAESH” and the
encouragement by State Secretary John Kerry of
Prince Salman’s Saudi war against
<http://sputniknews.com/us/20160125/1033695021/kerry-support-saudi-yemen-campaign.html#ixzz3z1gsJG42>Yemen,
as well as the recent Davos statements by Ash
Carter. Add to that the fact that the Saudi and
Turkish militaries just announced plans undertake
joint military actions to “cooperate against common threats.”
On February 13, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut
Cavusoglu confirmed a joint Turkish-Saudi joint
attack plan for invading Syria, telling press,
“If we have such a strategy, then Turkey and
Saudi Arabia may launch a ground
<http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/saudi-jets-deploy-turkey-joint-turkish-saudi-assault-syria-now-imminent/ri12828>operation.”
xvi
Now add to that the fact that Turkish military
began shelling a Syrian airbase and village
recently retaken by Syrian Kurds, with the
argument that the Kurds of Syria were
“terrorists” like the Turkish PKK Kurds. Turkish
Prime Minister Davutoglu confirmed the
cross-border mortar shelling into Syria territory
on February 13: “We will retaliate against every
step (by the YPG),” he told state broadcaster TRT
Haber. “The YPG will immediately withdraw from
Azaz and the surrounding area and will not go
close to it
<http://journal-neo.org/www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/turkey-shells-kurdish-held-airbase-syria-aleppo-160213160929706.htm>again.”
Now add the fact that this week Washington
repeated that it does not regard the Syrian Kurds
as terrorists and that the Syrian Kurdish
Democratic Union Party (PYD) have just opened its
first foreign representative office in Moscow and
we begin to see the outlines of Washington’s
strategy of steering heated-up and hated-up
Turkey and Saudi Arabia to trigger Washington’s
surrogate war, a war where Turkey, a NATO member,
Saudi and the Gulf Arab oil states, find
themselves in a direct military confrontation
with Russia in Aleppo province of Syria. The
Turkish shelling at present is clearly a testing
of the waters of a war with Russia to see how, in
the wake of their ceasefire agreement, they will
react. Will Russia retaliate by hitting Turkish
military targets, in a NATO country?
Combine all that with the quiet but strategic
Pentagon deployments inside Syria and Iraq with
“boots on the ground,” and we have the
combination for an explosion across the oilfields
of the entire Middle East that would rock the
world. Truly, as the old Greek saying goes, whom
the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
I can imagine a disgusted world turning on those
American Patriarchs and their proxy partners in
war, telling them, to use the words of the great
Freddy Mercury song, the one about rocking certain people.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant
and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from
Princeton University and is a best-selling author
on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the
online magazine <http://journal-neo.org/>“New Eastern Outlook”.
<http://journal-neo.org/2016/02/17/washington-s-machiavellian-game-in-syria/>http://journal-neo.org/2016/02/17/washington-s-machiavellian-game-in-syria/
--
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"PEPIS" group. Please feel free to forward it to anyone who might be interested
particularly your political representatives, journalists and spiritual leaders/dudes.
To post to this group, send email to pepis@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to pepis-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pepis?hl=en
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PEPIS" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to pepis+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"PEPIS" group. Please feel free to forward it to anyone who might be interested
particularly your political representatives, journalists and spiritual leaders/dudes.
To post to this group, send email to pepis@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to pepis-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pepis?hl=en
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PEPIS" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to pepis+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.