Syria Airstrikes: The Oil/Gas Heist & Cameron’s Phantom Army…

Weeks now after the ‘Syria Vote’ in UK parliament and the initiation of British bombing against ISIL targets in Syria, the talk has once again – inevitably and predictably – begun to turn back to the ‘Assad Must Go’ script.

This was in spite of a brief interval following Russian intervention and the Paris attacks in which Western officials appeared willing to consider Assad and the Syrian state as legitimate parties in any resolution to the Syrian conflict.

It was fairly predictable, however, that this wasn’t going to last. The objective has always been the removal of a strong, independent Syrian state and leadership.

David Cameron, one of the chief puppets who went along with the international conspiracy to destroy Libya, is just as committed to seeing the final collapse of the Syrian state as he was to seeing the collapse of Libya. Because it has all been planned, even if some of it hasn’t quite  gone  according to plan.

The failure of those plans to achieve the underhanded objective of overthrowing the Syrian state was so spectacular that it led to mass slaughter not just in Syria but in Iraq too, and has now forced the Russian military into Syria to try to clean up the mess and protect its own interests.

And in spite of all that, the David Camerons, John McCains and the like are still pushing the same propaganda and the same ideas that have already failed so spectacularly. Cameron is certainly little more than a puppet of unseen, unelected forces in any case.

All of this isn’t really about bombing ISIL, but bombing  Syria. Cameron lost his vote on bombing Assad and the Syrian government two years ago, so the premise had to be tweaked and the stakes raised (the ‘immediate’ ‘existential’ threat posed by ISIL to the UK, which sounds a lot like the immediate, existential threat posed by Saddam Hussein‘s WMDs back in 2003); but essentially, in terms of the end game, it’s the same game as two years ago, the same objective that was intended from 2011 – the absolute removal of the Syrian state, the destruction of Syrian sovereignty and infrastructure, and the end of an independent Syria.

Back in 2011, Syria was meant to go the same way as Libya did in the same year; it has simply proven much more difficult to pull off in Syria what was pulled off in the once thriving and independent African/Arab state, partly because Assad has more willing allies than Gaddafi did and partly because Syrians had observed closely what was transpiring in Libya (Gaddafi’s only outlet in his final days had in fact been Syrian state TV and he had remained in contact with Assad right up until his terrible end in October 2011).

But even now, even after all the death and carnage and all the spillover into other nations and all the refugees, even now the same political leaders are still pushing the same game and maneuvering for the same end result: the removal of the Syrian state and the creation of a new Syria – which, if the creation of ‘a new Iraq’ and ‘a new Libya’ were anything to go by, isn’t something most Syrians are likely to be all that enthusiastic about.

Predictably, a new round of anti-regime propaganda has been circulating in mainstream Western and Gulf-State media to accompany the beginning of the new year.

Vanessa Beeley has covered this renewed propaganda campaign at length on  The Wall Will Fall  (see here and here) as has Eva Bartlett on the  In Gaza  blog; I refer people to their sites to examine the nature and details of this concerted resumption of the propaganda war. But getting back to the bombing. The Syrian state almost immediately claimed the UK’s decision to join the US-led coalition bombing the country is a violation of international law. The same would apply to France and the United States.

Should we consider it curious that the first targets to be struck by British jets immediately after the vote were supposedly oil fields ‘under ISIL control’?

Doesn’t that essentially mean  Syrian  oil fields that a criminal militia happens to have hijacked? Given that the ISIL militias have always been backed by foreign governments and are essentially there in Raqqa due to massive international backing, this seems like the jets were bombing Syrian infrastructure on the pretext of bombing ISIL.

There’d be nothing new in that for anyone who knows what the French/British-led NATO bombing in Libya was all about. But if this *is* what’s going on, even I’m surprised at the brazenness of bombing the oil fields on the first day of UK airstrikes. The government would claim this is intended to stop ISIL making their millions of dollars a day from selling oil.

‘There are very large oil fields in Eastern Syria and it is very important’, said the Defense Secretary.

However, according to The Independent, citing  Al-Arabbiya, it would appear the oil fields in question were reportedly already “destroyed” by a US-led air strike two months prior to that; so what’s going on is anyone’s guess.

The clever bombing of infrastructure targets has probably been going on already in Syria; older reports have suggested US airstrikes sold as anti-ISIL operations were in fact targeting Syrian infrastructure already some time ago. Aside from that, the commitment to airstrikes appears to be strategically questionable anyway, given that ISIL is said to have actually expanded its territory since US-led airstrikes in Iraq began a year and a half ago.

It has also emerged that ‘Genie Energy’, an American-based oil and gas company with investors and advisors including major war profiteers Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch and Jacob Rothschild, has plans to begin tapping into Syria’s substantial oil and gas reserves. The president of the company’s Israeli arm, Efraim Eitam, is an Israeli military commander who has called for expelling the “cancer” of Arabs from Israel.

For more on Genie Energy, see here, here and here.

But the main give-away sign that may have exposed the false narrative of Cameron’s desire to bomb is his ludicrous insistence that there are ‘70,000’ so-called ‘moderate rebels’ ready and waiting to do the bidding of Western governments in the fight against ISIL.

These moderate rebels seem to exist primarily in David Cameron’s mind. He is simply continuing the fallacy propagated by the US State Department, of course; but he is in fact exaggerating that fallacy much further, because even the comedy act of the State Department doesn’t pretend there’s anything like that number of usable rebel fighters anymore.

What ‘moderate’ rebels is Cameron talking about?

Most of the ‘moderates’ who were initially involved in the uprising desisted the campaign once they realised the extent to which the rebellion was a foreign-backed operation, while others were absorbed eventually into the less-moderate groups, and anyone else is probably dead by now.

And yet even after the spectacular failures, the US State Department continues to talk about the enlistment of these fictional ‘moderates’, as if this phantom army should be considered the viable alternative to Assad and the Syrian state. When are they going to just give it up and admit they’ve totally arsed this one up? The State Department’s position has been more and more absurd as the months have gone on, to the extent that a few months ago their strategy consisted of arming and supporting a new group of ‘moderate rebels’ that would fight against both the Syrian government AND the ISIL terrorists – the same ISIL terrorists whose existence is *owed* to the United States and its allies arming so-called ‘moderate rebels’ in the first place!

How is any of this still being taken seriously? Who are Cameron’s 70,000 moderate fighters?

In an older post from last year, I was scratching my head at the newly re-packaged US strategy to create a ‘New Syrian Force’ to fight both ISIL *and* the Syrian regime and was incredulous at the report that this ‘force’ consisted of only 60 fighters. What I hadn’t realised then was that it’s actually even more ludicrous than that, as anyone who saw the recent Senate Armed Services Committee comedy show will have discovered. When asked about the success of the $500m US effort to train ‘moderate’ Syrian forces to fight against ISIL fighters, the answer given as to how many of these ‘moderate’ rebels there are will make you fall off your chair.

“We’re talking four or five,” General Lloyd Austin, commander of US Central Command, answered.

‘Four or five’?

The Senate Armed Services Committee is saying ‘four or five’, and David Cameron is saying 70,000? One of them is spectacularly wrong.

But of course it’s more ridiculous even than that; because most of the fighters the United States was supporting originally, including all of the Saudi and Qatari funded jihadists, were either extremist or Al-Qaeda in the first place or subsequently joined the ‘Islamic State’ group anyway. Those earlier fighters were all sold to us as ‘moderates’ too, but in actual fact some of the most brutal crimes carried out by rebels in the early months of the war (including attacks on Christian towns and locations) were carried about by members of the so-called Free Syrian Army – the so-called ‘moderates’.

The insane, drug-addled Abu Sakkar who, in 2013, was filmed ripping out the internal organs of a Syrian soldier and eating them, was not a member of ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Al-Nusra: he was a member of the Free Syrian Army! The  moderates,  in other words.

Yet the British people are now being told that two years later, there are 70,000 moderate fighters still left in Syria who’d be more interested in helping fight ISIL than in continuing to try to overthrow the state?

And these fictional moderates are, moreover, supposed to be the future of Syria after the Assad government is made to step aside?

And as Patrick Cockburn notes, ‘James Harkin, the author of  Hunting Season  about the kidnapping of foreigners in Syria and a frequent visitor to opposition-held areas, says that it is important to grasp that “none of these people [the armed opposition inside Syria] like us”. They see the US, Britain and France as enemies. This includes the non-jihadists, whom the West hopes to enlist, who suspect they will be used as cannon fodder and then discarded.’

Cameron, like those in Washington, is simply pushing the same idea all over again, despite the fact that his idea has already failed spectacularly. Arming and supporting these fictional ‘moderate rebels’ didn’t work the first two times, yet it’s somehow supposed to be viable now?

The only reasonably ‘moderate’ force fighting ISIL appears to be the Kurdish YPG, who’ve also been the most effective anti-ISIL force on the ground – and they are targeted by NATO member Turkey and will certainly not be allowed by the Turkish state to gain any reward or progress for their efforts.

With Turkey having been openly bombing Kurdish anti-ISIL fighters (under the pretext of supposedly bombing ISIL targets), the entire Western narrative and operation in Syria and Iraq has long since descended into a pantomime.

In addition to that, the other enormous lie is trying to sell these so-called ‘moderate fighters’ to us as strictly Syrians. The fighters involved in the Syrian uprising traditionally haven’t all been Syrians; large numbers of them have been foreign jihadists, recruits from all over the world (many of them trained and vetted by the CIA and Qatari Intelligence), mercenaries, condemned criminals released from Saudi and Qatari jails, etc.

You’ll never hear Cameron or Obama or the others mention that, even though it has been a demonstrable fact. It was the same of course in Libya, where the so-called ‘Libyan rebels’ included large numbers of mercenaries and foreign jihadists, Qatari agents, British, French, American and NATO special forces, etc. Those Libyan ‘rebels’ too were sold to us as ‘moderate’ and as ‘pro-democracy’ forces, but were nothing of the sort (see more here).

And again, if you want to see what Syria will be like when we’re done with it, have a look at the horror story that is post-Gaddafi Libya.

But the reason Cameron continues even now to insist upon the significance of his fictional ‘70,000’ moderate fighters is simply that the pre-existing plan to invade and carve-up Syria is still in operation. However, whether Putin, Russia and Iran will allow the Western powers to carry out that plan anymore is now another problem; and is another reason why this bombing in Syria is very dangerous.

The detailed plans for an imminent final invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Syria have been around for a while, drawn up by American policy-makers.

A policy paper put together by the rather infamous US foreign-policy think-tank, the Brookings Institution (which was crucially involved in drawing up the Neo-Con plans for the Iraq invasion) may be the blueprint. The paper is titled ‘Deconstructing Syria: Towards a regionalized strategy for a confederal country’. As Tony Cartalucci notes, summarising the Brookings Institution document, ‘the United States now plans to use the resulting chaos to justify what it has sought since the beginning of the conflict when it became clear the Syrian government was not to capitulate or collapse – the establishment of buffer zones now called “safe zones” by Brookings. These zones once created, will include US armed forces on the ground, literally occupying seized Syrian territory cleared by proxies including Kurdish groups and bands of Al Qaeda fighters in the north, and foreign terrorist militias operating along the Jordanian-Syrian border in the south.’

The Brookings Institution originally also previously described a scenario where Turkey, in coordination with Israel, could help overthrow Assad by establishing a “multi-front war” on Syria’s borders.

There is nothing ‘incovenient’ or ‘accidental’ about the formation of the so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’.

In fact, leaked documents exist to prove that the Western powers, the Gulf States and Turkey were *trying* to create an extremist (Salafist) ‘Islamic State’ in the region all along – for the very purposes of toppling the Syrian government. It’s highly likely that Libya turning into a dysfunctional wasteland overrun by Islamist extremists was also an intended outcome rather than an unforeseen by-product, particularly as Gaddafi had given multiple warnings that this was what would happen.

This may or may not have also been in concert with the alleged Zionist Plan for the Middle East, also known as the ‘Yinon Plan’, being the vast strategy composed to ensure Zionist regional superiority via the radical reconfiguration of Israel’s geo-political surroundings: through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab nations into smaller and weaker states. Those plans are still in operation, still due to be implemented. After this much time, effort, resource and embarassment, the implementers of those plans are not going to back off and accept defeat; even if it means continuously making absurd statements, telling obvious lies and looking increasingly foolish all the while.

Those absurdities are the tell-tale signs of political frontmen doing the bidding of hidden, unelected masters; and having to commit wholesale to false narratives on account of their being answerable to unseen puppet masters.

The Syrian crisis is most likely entering its end-game now.

The question is what will be left when it is concluded; who will own Syria and who will administer it? And in who’s name and for who’s benefit?