Imperialist Adventurism: Payback for America’s Unholy Military Alliance
The Western-instigated and Turk, Saudi, Israeli-backed terrorist monster running amok in the Middle East could turn out to be the mother of all chickens that comes home to roost for these powers.
When the late African-American civil rights leader Malcolm X was asked in 1963 about the assassination of President John F Kennedy, he said it was akin to “chickens coming home to roost”.
The statement provoked widespread condemnation among the US mainstream media and political establishment for its apparent callousness. However, Malcolm X was vilified then for simply bearing an unpalatable, but nevertheless truthful message. The fact was that Kennedy, like all US leaders before and after, was engaged in sanctioning violence, covert wars and assassination of foreign political figures. Malcolm X was merely telling it like it is: if you play with fire, then eventually you get burned.
The same axiomatic truth applies to the unholy alliance of powers that are waging a covert criminal war against Syria – a covert war that is becoming increasingly overt by the day. For months, these powers – the US, Britain, France, Turkey, Israel and the Persian Gulf Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have been maintaining the deception that they are not involved in Syria’s conflict.
Then these powers shifted – when the evidence to the contrary was becoming overwhelming – to concede that they were “only supplying non-lethal aid”.
On 16 May 2012, the Washington Post reported that the Obama administration categorically denied supplying weapons to Syria. The paper quoted a US State Department spokesman as saying: “We are increasing our non-lethal assistance to the Syrian opposition, and we continue to coordinate our efforts with friends and allies in the region.”
Now – unable to conceal the truth any longer – it is being widely reported that the US-led unholy alliance is supplying anti-aircraft missiles, mortars, explosives and machine-guns, as well as telecommunications and other non-lethal means to increase the lethality of the mercenaries running amok in Syria.
In other words, the US-led anti-Syrian axis is up to its neck in waging war on Syria. The shock troops on the ground serving the unholy alliance are constituted from a global terrorist army whose members have gravitated from such disparate places as Britain, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Chechnya.
Every fundamentalist have-a-go soldier from every corner of the world, it seems, has received marching orders to wage war on the state of Syria to fulfil some warped objective supposedly in the name of Islam. It is the most noxious amalgam imaginable: reactionary, ruthless, depraved, loaded on spurious theology and bloodlust. And this global terrorist army has the full backing of Washington and London.
Recent graphic video footage shows these foot-soldiers carving off the head of a young Syrian man who refused to join their ranks. Other footage shows the bodies of a dozen men lying on a roadside outside Damascus, their hands tied behind their backs and bullet wounds to the head.
Elsewhere, naked men in Syria’s northern city of Aleppo are lined up against a war before being sprayed with machine-guns. These terrorists – bankrolled, armed and directed by the US-led unholy alliance – have engaged in the most wanton acts of murder: no-warning car bombs, massacring women and children in villages, summary execution of kidnapped pilgrims.
No crime is off-limits.
But what the conflict in Syria is doing, inadvertently, is crystallizing the truth of what these powers and their proxies have been engaged in over many years in many countries. Separated by distance and time, these powers were in the past afforded a deceptive get-out clause of disconnect in the public mind or plausible deniability. Yet today, in Syria, what we are seeing is the coming together of all these past sinister threads into one tapestry of criminal collusion.
The US, Britain and France are long practitioners of assassination, mass murder, sabotage and subversion.
Some notorious examples include: the US-British coup in Iran in 1953; the Anglo-French attack on Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis; the plot to assassinate Syrian political and army leaders in 1957, sanctioned by US president Dwight Eisenhower and British prime minister Harold Macmillan; and the suspected CIA involvement in the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and of US puppet dictators Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in 1961 and South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 – the same month that JFK was shot dead in Texas. Today, this mongrel breed for covert murder and coups is at once on display doing its tricks in Syria.
And the tale gets a modern twist.
Washington and London were the architects of the terrorist army that was first recruited in Afghanistan in the early 1980s to wage guerrilla war on the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. Over the decades, this informal army has grown with Saudi oil money and Western intelligence to encompass a global deployment from the Balkans to Libya to Syria. What is happening currently in Syria appears to be the full spawning of this Western terrorist proxy army, with rank and file coming together from every erstwhile field of operation into one, single battlefield.
Like the fabled Frankenstein monster, the creators are at risk of losing control of their beast. The CIA-MI6 terrorists in Afghanistan that defeated the Soviet army have since turned their American and British-supplied weapons to good effect against NATO troops. The same terrorists inflicted thousands of fatalities among American-led troops in Iraq.
For now though there seems to be a rapprochement between the Western and Saudi-backed Islamic fundamentalists for the immediate purpose of destroying Syria to bring about regime change. How any replacement regime in Damascus would behave towards its Western sponsors is moot, but the evidence of Libya suggests an uncertain, precarious future of lawlessness and sectarian killings.
The Western-instigated and Turk, Saudi, Israeli-backed terrorist monster running amok in the Middle East could turn out to be the mother of all chickens that comes home to roost for these powers.
The chickens can come home to roost in other ways too. While the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Turkey play with the fire of sectarian politics in Syria, their own houses are increasingly exposed to internal flames.
Saudi state forces are struggling to contain daily street protests against the House of Saud that are spreading from the mainly Shia Eastern Province to the capital Riyadh and Mecca in the Western Province. The more King Abdullah makes ostentatious calls for democratic reforms in Syria, the more it emboldens his own downtrodden, oppressed Shia people to demand the same.
As for Turkey, its treacherous back-stabbing of its not-so-long-ago Syrian “brother” is serving to isolate Ankara in the eyes of its own people and the masses across the region. Ankara’s neo-imperialist meddling is resurrecting memories of past Ottoman barbarities, such as the Armenian Genocide, and, more recently, of Turkey’s pernicious involvement in NATO’s clandestine campaign of terrorism across Europe under the Cold War cloak of Operation Gladio.
Ankara’s long sought-after membership of the European Union looks like being torpedoed as its reputation sinks into a quagmire of duplicity. Turkey’s other more recent genocide against its Kurdish people also looks like fanning into renewed struggle as Syrian and Iraqi Kurds join forces with that ethnic population in Southeast Turkey to take advantage of the turmoil that Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan is fuelling across his country’s borders.
The governments of the US, Britain, France and Israel are increasingly being seen by their own people as engaging in a foreign war that the domestic populations can ill afford and do not want. Previous imperialist adventurism occurred at times of relative prosperity at home and therefore went largely unnoticed. Now this same reckless adventurism coincides with the worst economic slump since the Great Depression.
The announcement last week by double-dip recession Britain that it was sending USD 8 million in extra aid to terrorist death squads in Syria is a mortal self-inflicted blow to the legitimacy of British rulers. The same goes for austerity-dominated France and the US – where, in the latter, two million unemployed workers are due to have their social welfare payments cut off.
Recent anti-war demonstrations in Tel Aviv on the back of protests against economic hardship that have led to the self-immolation of four Israeli citizens in recent months is surely another chicken coming home to roost.
America’s unholy alliance assailing the people of Syria right now may think that it has the upper-hand in their machinations for regime change and regional hegemony. But while these powers and proxies are busy trying to execute a coup in Syria, back home the chicken coup is bustling with deep, deep trouble.
Finian Cunningham , Global Research