 | | War on Syria: Echoes of Iraq-WMD Fraud in Syria
Tuesday, September 12 @ 08:22:04 UTC | 
Just as the West ignored signs in 2002-03 that anti-government Iraqis were fabricating WMD claims, evidence is being brushed aside that Syrian jihadists have ginned up chemical attacks.
By Robert Parry
September 11, 2017 - consortiumnews.com
The New York Times and other Western media have learned few lessons from the Iraq War, including how the combination of a demonized foreign leader and well-funded “activists” committed to flooding the process with fake data can lead to dangerously false conclusions that perpetuate war.
What we have seen in Syria over the past six years parallels what occurred in Iraq in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion in 2002-03. In both cases, there was evidence that the “system” was being gamed — by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in pushing for the Iraq War and by pro-rebel “activists” promoting “regime change” in Syria — but those warnings were ignored. Instead, the flood of propagandistic claims overwhelmed what little skepticism there was in the West.
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War on Syria: Trump Competes With Clinton in U.S. War of Lies and Terror Against Syria
Saturday, July 01 @ 01:58:03 UTC |  By Glen Ford
June 30, 2017 - blackagendareport.com
Donald Trump is the very embodiment of why the undeserving rich must no longer be allowed to reproduce themselves, as a class. They are the fuse that, if not removed, will ignite a fiery doom for the species. Decisively kettled in the White House by a bipartisan War Party that feared he might weaken the momentum of the Obama-Clinton military offensive in Syria, Trump appears to have opted to outdo his tormentors in mad brinksmanship.
On Monday, seemingly out of the blue, the White House announced that the U.S. had “identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children.” Press secretary Sean Spicer provided no substantive details, only a warning that if “Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price."
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War on Syria: Russia-Baiting Pushed Trump to Attack Syria
Monday, April 10 @ 10:14:57 UTC | ...and Increases the Risks of Nuclear Annihilation
By Norman Solomon
April 10, 2017 - Common Dreams
Vast efforts to portray Donald Trump as Vladimir Putin’s flunky have given Trump huge incentives to prove otherwise. Last Thursday, he began the process in a big way by ordering a missile attack on Russia’s close ally Syria. In the aftermath of the attack, the cheerleading from U.S. mass media was close to unanimous, and the assault won lots of praise on Capitol Hill. Finally, the protracted and fervent depictions of Trump as a Kremlin tool were getting some tangible results.
At this point, the anti-Russia bandwagon has gained so much momentum that a national frenzy is boosting the odds of unfathomable catastrophe. The world’s two nuclear superpowers are in confrontation mode.
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War on Syria: He Who Hesitates Is Lost And Russia Hesitated
Tuesday, September 27 @ 03:16:03 UTC |
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 27, 2016 - paulcraigroberts.org
The Russian government deceived itself with its fantasy belief that Russia and Washington had a common cause in fighting ISIS. The Russian government even went along with the pretense that the various ISIS groups operating under various pen names were “moderate rebels” who could be separated from the extremists, all the while agreeing to cease fighting on successive verges of victory so that Washington could resupply ISIS and prepare to introduce US and NATO forces into the conflict. The Russian government apparently also thought that as a result of the coup against Erdogan, which was said to implicate Washington, Turkey was going to cease supporting ISIS and cooperate with Russia.
Alas, the Russians so fervently, or perhaps I should say feverishly, desired an agreement with Washington that they deceived themselves. If Finian Cunningham’s report is correct, Washington has taken advantage of Russia’s urging that Washington and Turkey join in the attack on ISIS by invading northern Syria under the guise of “fighting ISIS.”
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War on Syria: Turkey Provokes Russia with Shoot-down
Friday, November 27 @ 01:43:16 UTC |  By Robert Parry
November 24, 2015 - consortiumnews.com
President Barack Obama – always sensitive to neocon criticism that he’s “weak” – continues to edge the world closer to a nuclear confrontation with Russia as he talks tough and tolerates more provocations against Moscow, now including Turkey’s intentional shoot-down of a Russian warplane along the Turkish-Syrian border.
Rather than rebuke Turkey, a NATO member, for its reckless behavior – or express sympathy to the Russians – Obama instead asserted that “Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its airspace.”
It was another one of Obama’s breathtaking moments of hypocrisy, since he has repeatedly violated the territorial integrity of various countries, including in Syria where he has authorized bombing without the government’s permission and has armed rebels fighting to overthrow Syria’s secular regime.
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War on Syria: More Paris Puzzles
Thursday, November 19 @ 03:48:08 UTC |  By Paul Craig Roberts
November 19, 2015 - paulcraigroberts.org
Some people who are not inclined to believe the official story of the Paris attack are troubled by the question why Muslim suicide bombers would blow themselves up for a false flag attack. The answer to this question is very simple. But first we should dispose of the question whether suicide bombers did blow themselves up. Is this something that we know, or is it part of the story that we are told? For example, we were told that during 9/11 passengers in hijacked airliners used their cell phones to call relatives, but experts have testified that the technology of the time did not permit cell phone calls from airliners at those altitudes.
To dispose of the question whether we have or do not have any real evidence that suicide bombers blew themselves up, I will assume that they did.
So we have suicide bombers blowing themselves up.
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War on Syria: Military Intervention Is the Problem, Not the Solution
Thursday, November 19 @ 03:08:19 UTC | The Islamic State's latest atrocities are a calculated effort to bring the war in Syria home to the countries participating in it.
By Peter Certo
November 19, 2015 - OtherWords
A café. A stadium. A concert hall. One of the most horrifying things about the murderous attacks in Paris was the terrorists’ choice of targets.
They chose gathering places where people’s minds wander furthest from unhappy thoughts like war. And they struck on a Friday night, when many westerners take psychic refuge from the troubles of the working week.
The message was simple: Wherever you are, this war will find you.
The same could be said for the 43 Lebanese civilians murdered only the day before, when a bomb exploded in a crowded marketplace in Beirut. Or for the 224 vacationers who died when their Russian airliner blew up over Egypt a few weeks earlier.
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War on Syria: US, Russia & Syria: The Problem With Faking It
Thursday, October 15 @ 03:15:04 UTC |  By Thomas S. Harrington
October 15, 2015 - commondreams.org
The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up.
This is what has just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of Russia into the fight against ISIL.
And as is generally the case with posers caught with their pants down, the US policy elites are not happy about it.
You see, the US strategic goal in Syria is not as your faithful mainstream media servants (led by that redoubtable channeler of Neo-Con smokescreens at the NYT Michael Gordon) might have you believe to save the Syrian people from the ravages of the long-standing Assad dictatorship, but rather to heighten the level of internecine conflict in that country to the point where it will not be able to serve as a regional bulwark against Israeli regional hegemony for at least another generation.
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War on Syria: Should US Ally with Al Qaeda in Syria?
Friday, October 02 @ 08:50:25 UTC | By Robert Parry
October 02, 2015 - consortiumnews.com
The key sentence in The New York Times’ lead article about Russian airstrikes against Syrian rebel targets fell to the bottom of the story, five paragraphs from the end, where the Times noted in passing that the area north of Homs where the attacks occurred had been the site of an offensive by a coalition “including Nusra Front.”
What the Times didn’t say in that context was that Nusra Front is Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, an omission perhaps explained because this additional information would disrupt the righteous tone of the article, accusing Russia of bad faith in attacking rebel groups other than the Islamic State.
But the Russians had made clear their intent was to engage in airstrikes against the mélange of rebel groups in which Al Qaeda as well as the Islamic State played prominent roles. The Times and the rest of the mainstream U.S. media are just playing games when they pretend otherwise.
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War on Syria: Why Assad Refuses to Step Down
Tuesday, December 09 @ 12:01:50 UTC | Paris Match: Many people say the solution lies in your departure. Do you believe that your departure is the solution?
Syrian president Assad: What was the result (of French policy when they attacked Gaddafi)? Chaos ensued after Gaddafi’s departure. So, was the departure the solution? Have things improved, and has Libya become a democracy?
By Stephen Gowans
December 09, 2014 - gowans.wordpress.com
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has told an interviewer from the French magazine Paris Match that he won’t step down. And not because he wants to remain president, but because he “will never accept that Syria become a western puppet state.”
The view that Syria is under attack because it isn’t a western puppet state, and that Washington wants Assad to step down to make it one, cannot be so easily dismissed. There’s plenty of evidence that states that seek to remain independent of US prescriptions on how they ought to organize their economies and foreign policies are uniquely targeted for sub-critical warfare (sanctions, sabotage, demonization, diplomatic isolation), or—where a military victory can be secured with impunity for the aggressor—by outright military intervention.
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War on Syria:
Monday, October 06 @ 10:51:42 UTC |  By Ramzy Baroud
October 05, 2014
What if the so-called Islamic State (IS) didn’t exist?
In order to answer this question, one has to liberate the argument from its geopolitical and ideological confines.
Many in the media (Western, Arab, etc) use the reference “Islamist” to brand any movement at all, whether it is political, militant or even charity-focused. If it is dominated by men with beards or women with headscarves that make references to the Holy Quran and Islam as the motivator behind their ideas, violent tactics, or even good deeds, then the word “Islamist” is the language of choice.
According to this overbearing logic, a Malaysia-based charity can be as “Islamist” as the militant group Boko Haram in Nigeria. When the term “Islamist” was first introduced to the debate on Islam and politics, it carried mostly intellectual connotations. Even some “Islamists” used it in reference to their political thought. Now, it can be moulded to mean many things.
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War on Syria: 'US seeks to use IS to weaken each state in the region'
Thursday, September 18 @ 11:12:24 UTC | The US is attempting to use ISIS to destroy each government in the region including Syria and Iraq, and is trying to drag Iran into this, Soraya Sepaphour-Ulrich, a researcher and expert on Iran, told RT.
September 17, 2014
http://rt.com
RT: Why do you think Iran doesn't want to cooperate with the US on fighting the Islamic State?
Soraya Sepaphour: I think Iran is well aware of what the United States’ end game is. They have been observing America repeating the same pattern. And they are well aware that this is not really a fight against a group of terrorists - of the making of Americans themselves and their allies - but it is really to reoccupy the Persian Gulf region. Its angle is to remove Assad from power and to reoccupy Iraq and then perhaps even to take the offensive to Tehran. So Tehran appreciates the threat from these terrorist groups which they call ISIL or IS right now. They also understand that without the Americans, without the Saudi money, and American training it wouldn’t exist here in the first place.
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War on Syria: Western Leaders Fear-Monger to Mobilize Support for Air-Strikes on Syria
Saturday, August 30 @ 11:59:52 UTC |
By Stephen Gowans
August 30, 2014 - gowans.wordpress.com
One of the roles of leading politicians and top officials of the state is to enlist public support for policies which serve the goals of the upper stratum of the population from whose ranks they sometimes come and whose interests they almost invariably promote. When these policies are at odds with the interests of the majority, as they often are, the mobilization of public consent is possible only through deception. The deception is carried out through prevarication, equivocation, and fear-mongering, crystallized into misleading narratives which the mass media can be reliably counted on to amplify. So it is that Western officials have ramped up a campaign of deception to provide a pretext for military intervention in Syria to combat ISIS but which may very well serve as a Trojan horse to escalate the war on the Syrian government.
The foundations of the campaign were laid in March, when US officials began warning that Islamists bent on launching strikes against Europe and the United States were massing in Syria. [1] The campaign kicked into high gear with ISIS’s territorial gains in Iraq and the organization’s beheading of US journalist James Foley. Now US officials say they are contemplating air strikes against ISIS targets in Syria.
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War on Syria: Syria's New Game: The Russian Factor
Thursday, September 19 @ 05:33:13 UTC | By Ramzy Baroud
September 19, 2013
Many US media commentators were fairly accurate in labeling some of the language used by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a New York Times article as "hypocritical". But mainstream US media should be the last to point out anyone's hypocrisy as it has brazenly endorsed every military intervention unleashed by their country since World War II.
Putin's statement "we must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement," merits serious scrutiny. Considering that violence has been a readily available option in Russia's own wars from Afghanistan, to Chechnya and Georgia, the language of dialogue and civilized political settlements have been rarely exercised.
However, independent from that context, Putin was surely correct in his assessment of US behavior. It was indeed difficult to point out any palpable inaccuracy in Putin's NYT's article published on the 12th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
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War on Syria: The Imperialists and the Jihadis: The Evil Alliance Against Syria
Wednesday, May 30 @ 16:02:57 UTC | A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
May 30, 2012 - blackagendareport.com
“In Syria, as in Libya, the United States has allied itself with al Qaida and forces that are politically very much like al Qaida.”
The afternoon airhead on CNN snarled her revulsion at the very idea that a commentary on Russia’s Pravda newspaper would conclude that Syrian rebels, or even American or British special forces, might be behind the killing of over 100 Syrian civilians, about half of them children, in the town of Houla. Her country and its Free Syrian Army allies would never do such a thing! But, of course, it goes without saying – and without the necessity of any proof whatsoever – that the Syrian government slits babies’ throats for breakfast. For CNN, the inherent goodness of the U.S. and whoever its allies of the moment might be, is a matter of faith.
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