MIDDLE EAST: Syria: Obama Threatens U.S. Military Intervention/Libya and the End of Western Illusions/Egypt to Withdraw Ambassador to Israel over Ambush

Syria: Obama Threatens U.S. Military Intervention

Posted: 20 Aug 2011 10:08 PM PDT

By Sara Flounders /Global Research.ca

President Barack Obama on Aug. 18 demanded that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down, saying that the Syrian leader’s days are numbered. The governments of Britain, France and Germany joined in this demand. This statement is ablatant imperialist interference in Syria’s internal affairs. More than that, it is an open threat to intervene militarily in another country in that region, just as the U.S. and its European allies have done already in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Somalia, with rockets and bombs. It is a threat against the Syrian people of something like the last five months of slaughter of the Libyan people.

Two weeks earlier, on Aug. 5, Russia’s envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin told the media that NATO is planning a military campaign against Syria to overthrow the Assad regime. In an interview with Russia’s Izvestia daily newspaper, Rogozin said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is also probably establishing a long-reaching goal of preparing an attack on Iran. (Reported in Xinhua, Aug. 5)

When U.S. imperialism engages in an attack on any government or movement, as it is now on Syria, it is cowardly to be neutral. It is rank betrayal to stand on the same side as the imperialist octopus, which seeks to dominate the world. This has been an ABC for workers’ movements through 150 years of class-conscious struggles. It is the very basis of Marxism. Whatever one’s assessment of the government under attack, any attempt at imperialist intervention, whether through sanctions or through armed attack, must be opposed.

Obama’s double standard

The Obama administration has called out only for the governments of Libya and Syria to resign. You would think there are no other governments that are using the force of the state against a portion of the population.

Look across the Atlantic to Washington’s closest ally, in London. That government just sent 16,000 police against the rebellious people of the capital city. They sent people to jail for four years for sending messages with blackberries. These same police killed 333 civilians in England over the last 13 years. And the state power in Spain fired rubber bullets at demonstrators camped out on Plaza Catalunya in Barcelona. In Greece they repress strikers and demonstrators. And Washington cheers on the state power in all three allied capitals for punishing these legitimate rebellions.

Even more blatant is the repression in Bahrain, a country of a half-million people where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed. With dozens of protestors killed and hundreds arrested and tortured, the monarchy there has received no criticism from Washington. And that’s even after Saudi troops invaded the island to help put down the uprising.

Syria’s internal situation may be difficult to understand, but in this unfolding struggle clear statements against U.S. destabilization efforts have come from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Hezbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and several exiled leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian organization that was elected by the people of Gaza. These political leaders have experienced first-hand U.S. destabilization campaigns that used corporate media fabrications, externally financed opposition groups, targeted assassinations, “special operations” sabotage and well-trained Internet operatives.

The threat to Syria is connected to the social explosion shaking the Arab world. U.S. imperialism and all the old regimes tied to it in the region are trying desperately to manage and contain this still unfolding mass upheaval into channels that do not threaten imperialist domination of the region.

The U.S. and its collaborators are also trying to divide and undermine the two main wings of the forces resisting imperialist domination — the Islamic forces and the secular nationalist forces — which together overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia. There is now a concerted U.S. effort to turn these same political forces against two regimes in the region that have opposed U.S. domination in the past — Libya and Syria.

Both Libya and Syria have their own developmental problems, which are exacerbated by the general global capitalist crisis and decades of compromise imposed on them as they tried to survive in a hostile environment of unrelenting attacks —political, sometimes military and including economic sanctions.

The U.S./NATO bombing of Libya has clarified where imperialism stands regarding that country. Syria is also targeted by imperialism — because of its refusal to recognize the Zionist occupation, its assistance to Hezbollah in their struggle to end the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and its strategic alliance with Iran.

On the side of the supposedly “democratic opposition” are such reactionaries as Sen. Joseph Lieberman, chair of the powerful Senate Homeland Security Committee, who called on the U.S. to bomb Syria next, after Libya. Outspoken supporters of the opposition in Syria include James Woolsey, former CIA director and adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Wikileaks exposes U.S. role

An article entitled “U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups” in the April 18 Washington Post described the Wikileaks report on U.S. diplomatic cables. The article summarizes what these State Department cables reveal about the secret funding of Syrian political opposition groups, including the beaming of anti-government programming into the country via satellite television.

The article describes the U.S.-funded efforts as part of a “long-standing campaign to overthrow the country’s autocratic leader, Bashar al-Assad,” which began under President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama. Now Obama’s open declaration against Assad makes it no longer necessary to see secret cables to know where U.S. imperialism stands.

The Syrian government has charged that snipers fired into demonstrations, shooting army and police in an effort to have police open fire on demonstrators. Weapons have been smuggled in from Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq. Rumors, anonymous Internet postings and satellite television reports aimed at heightening sectarian differences are part of the destabilization campaign.

Dual character of Syria

It is not difficult to see why U.S. imperialism and its pawns in the region, including Israel and the corrupt dependent monarchies of Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, would want to see “regime change’ in Syria.

Syria is one of the few Arab states that have no relations with Israel. Several Palestinian resistance organizations have offices-in-exile in Syria, including Hamas. Syria is allied closely with Iran and with the Hezbollah organization in Lebanon.

Syria today is not socialist nor a revolutionary country. Capitalism with its resulting inequality has not been overturned. There is a capitalist class in Syria. Many within it have benefited from “reforms” that sold formerly state-owned industries to private capital. Thus, the Syrian state represents contradictory forces.

Years of U.S. sanctions and past destabilization efforts have also had a cumulative effect. The state apparatus, ever fearful of continuing outside intervention, has become fearful of change.

Impact of Iraq war

To escape the last eight years of U.S. occupation, more than 1.5 million Iraqis have flooded into Syria, whose population in 2006 was 18 million. According to a 2007 report by the office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Refugees, this influx impacted all facets of life in Syria, particularly the services offered by the state to all citizens and refugees.

The unexpected arrival of these Iraqi refugees has strained Syria’s infrastructure, including guaranteed free elementary and high schools, free health care, housing availability and other areas of the economy and has increased costs across the board. The prices of foodstuffs and basic goods have gone up by 30 percent, property prices by 40 percent and housing rentals by 150 percent.

Iraqi refugees also benefited from Syrian state subsidies in gasoline, food, water and other essential goods provided to everyone. Such a large mass of unemployed people led to the lowering of wages and increased competition for jobs. The impact of the global economic downturn during this difficult period added to the problems. (Middle East Institute, Dec. 10, 2010, report on Refugee Cooperation)

The diverse nationalities, religions and cultural groupings in Syria, the unemployed youth and impoverished sectors of the population, have every right to be part of this process. But what they need most is an end to constant, unrelenting U.S.and other imperialist intervention. U.S. and Europe: Hands offSyria!

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Sara Flounders is co-director of the International Action Center

For previous article see: http://www.iacenter.org/nafricamideast/syria050611//

Source of Article: Global Research.CA

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Libya and the End of Western Illusions

Posted: 20 Aug 2011 09:45 AM PDT

Five months into the bombing campaign, it is no longer possible to believe the initial official version of the events and the massacres attributed to the “Gaddafi regime”. Moreover, it is now essential to take into account Libya’s legal and diplomatic rebuttal, highlighting the crimes against peace committed by television propaganda, the war crimes perpetrated by NATO military forces, and the crimes against humanity sponsored by political leaders of the Atlantic Alliance.

by Thierry Meyssan / Voltairenet.org

Just under half of Europeans still support the war against Libya. Their position is based on erroneous information. They still believe, in fact, that in February the “Gaddafi regime” crushed the protests in Benghazi with brutal force and bombed civilian districts in Tripoli, while the Colonel himself was warning of “rivers of blood” if his compatriots continued to challenge his authority.

During my two months’ investigation on the ground, I was able to verify that these accusations were pure propaganda intoxication, designed by the NATO powers to create the conditions for war, and relayed around the world by their television media, in particular Al-Jazeera, CNN, BBC and France24.

However, the reader who doesn’t know where he stands on this issue and who – despite the brainwashing of September 11 and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction – is reluctant to accept that the United States, France, the UK and Qatar were actually capable of fabricating such lies, will be able to forge an opinion over time. NATO, the largest military coalition in history, has failed after five months of bombardments to overthrow the one it designated as a “tyrant.” Every Friday, a large demonstration in support of the regime is organized in a different city and all experts are unanimous in considering that Colonel Gaddafi enjoys at least 90% of popular support in Tripolitania and 70% across the entire country, including the “rebel” areas. These are people who every single day put up with the blockade, aerial bombardments and ground fighting. Never would they be defending with their flesh and blood someone who committed against them the crimes of which he has been accused by the “international community.” The difference between those in the West who believe that Gaddafi is a tyrant who fired on his own people, and those in Libya who believe that he is a hero of the anti-imperialist struggle, is that the former live in an illusion created by TV propaganda, whereas the others are exposed to the concrete reality on the ground.

That said, there is a second illusion to which the West has succumbed – and in the “Western” camp I now include not only Israel, where it has always claimed to belong, but also the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council and Turkey which, though of Eastern culture, have chosen to embrace it -, the illusion to think that it is still possible to devastate a country and kill its people without legal consequences. It is true that, until now, international justice has been the justice of the victors or the powerful. One may recall the Nazi official who heckled the judges at Nuremberg telling them that if the Reich had won the war, the judges would have been the Nazis while those held accountable for the war crimes would have been the Allies.

More recently, we saw how NATO used the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to try to justify post facto that the war in Kosovo was “the first humanitarian war in History,” according to the expression employed by Tony Blair. Or again, how the Special Tribunal for Lebanon was used in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government, then to decapitate the Lebanese Hezbollah, and probably soon to accuse the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Not to mention, the International Criminal Court, the secular arm of the European colonial powers in Africa.

However, the development of instruments and organs of international justice throughout the twentieth century has gradually established an international order with which the superpowers themselves will have to comply or which they will have to sabotage in order to escape their responsibilities. In the case of Libya, the violations of international law are countless. The main ones, presented below, were established by the Provisional Technical Committee, a Libyan ministerial coordination organ, and expounded at various press conferences by the legal adviser to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, French attorney Marcel Ceccaldi [1].

TV channels which, under the leadership of their respective Governments, have manufactured false information to lead to war, are guilty of “crimes against peace“, as defined by the relevant UN General Assembly resolutions in the aftermath of World War II [2]. The journalist-propagandists should be considered even more culpable than the military who perpetrated war crimes or crimes against humanity, to the extent that none of these crimes would have been possible without the one that preceded them: the “crime against peace.”

The political leaders of the Atlantic Alliance, who diverted the object and purpose of Resolution 1973 to engage in a war of aggression against a sovereign state, are personally responsible before international justice. Indeed, according to the jurisprudence established by the Tokyo Court following the Second World War, crimes cannot be ascribed to either States or organizations, but to individuals. Plundering the assets of a state, establishing a naval blockade and bombing infrastructure to cause people to suffer, attacking an army inside its barracks and ordering the assassination of enemy leaders or, failing this, terrorizing them by murdering their families, all amount to war crimes. Their systematic perpetration, as is the case today, constitutes a crime against humanity. This crime is imprescriptible, which means that Messrs. Obama, Sarkozy, Cameron and Al-Thani will be pursued by the law for the rest of their lives.

NATO, as an organization, is legally responsible for the material and human damage of this war. The law leaves no room for doubt that the organization must pay, even though it will surely try to invoke a privilege of jurisdiction to dodge its responsibilities. It will be up to the Alliance to decide how the bill for the conflict should be split among Member States, even though some of them may be on the verge of bankruptcy. This will be followed by disastrous economic consequences for their peoples, guilty of having endorsed such crimes. In a democracy, no one can claim to be innocent of the crimes committed in its name.

International justice will have to address more specifically the case of the Sarkozy “administration” – I use this Anglicism here to underscore the fact that the French president has been piloting his Government’s policy directly, without going through his prime minister. Indeed, France has played a central role in preparing for this war since October 2010 by organizing a failed military coup and then, as early as November 2010, by planning with the United Kingdom the bombing of Libya and the landing of ground troops on its soil, which was then believed to be feasible, and finally by actively conspiring in the lethal unrest in Benghazi which led to the war.

In addition, France, more than any other power, has deployed Special Forces on the ground – without uniforms, no doubt – and violated the arms embargo by supplying the insurgents, either directly or through Qatari airplanes. Not to mention that France has violated the UN freeze of Libyan assets, funnelling part of the fabulous cash from the Libyan Sovereign Fund to the CNT puppets, to the detriment of the Libyan people who wanted to guarantee the well-being of their children in the face of oil depletion.

These gentlemen from NATO, who hoped to escape international justice by crushing their victim, Libya, in a few short days so that it would not survive to pursue them, will be disenchanted. Libya is still there. She is filing complaints with the International Criminal Court, the Belgian courts (whose jurisdiction NATO falls under), the European Court of Justice, and the national courts of aggressor states. She is undertaking steps before the Council of Human Rights in Geneva, the Security Council and General Assembly of the United Nations. It will be not be possible for the big powers to extinguish these fires all at once. Worse, the arguments they will use to evade a court will ricochet against them in another court. In a few weeks or months, if they have not succeeded in destroying Tripoli, they will have no other way out to avoid humiliating convictions than to negotiate the withdrawal of the complaints at a very high price.

Thierry Meyssan

[1] Putting an end to the confusion that prevailed at the beginning of the war when various departments hired lawyers for different disorderly proceedings, Libya has appointed Marcel Ceccaldi in July to oversee all proceedings.

[2] “Journalists who engage in war propaganda must be held accountable”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 16 August 2011.

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Thierry Meyssan, French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English :9/11 the Big LiePentagate

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Egyptian army and policemen block the gate of a building where the Israeli embassy

Egypt to Withdraw Ambassador to Israel over Ambush

Posted: 20 Aug 2011 09:27 AM PDT

Egyptian army and policemen block the gate of a building where the Israeli embassy

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt recalled its ambassador from Israel Saturday to protest the deaths of at least three Egyptian troops killed in a shootout between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants who had launched a deadly attack on Israel from Egyptian soil.

The decision sharply escalated tensions between the neighboring countries, whose 1979 peace treaty is being tested by the fall of Egypt’s longtime autocratic leader, Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt’s interim government accused Israel of violating that treaty and said the envoy would be withdrawn until Israel concludes its investigation into the Egyptian security forces’ deaths. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said the Israeli government was holding consultations on the Egyptian move. He had no further comment.

The Cabinet, which was appointed by the ruling military council that took over power after Mubarak’s ouster, revised an earlier statement saying the envoy, Yasser Reda, would be summoned for consultation — something that would have signaled a lower-level spat. Israel was likely to see that as a worrisome sign that Egypt’s new leaders would be more responsive to public opinion about the Jewish state, which remains overwhelmingly unpopular because of its conflict with the Palestinians.

The cross-border attack has also reinforced Israeli fears that the leaders of post-Mubarak Egypt would not assert control over the increasingly lawless Sinai Peninsula, whose porous borders with both Israel and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip make it an attractive staging ground for Palestinian militant attacks on Israel. Israel says Gaza militants armed with guns, explosives, mortars and an anti-tank missile, killed eight Israelis in a roadside ambush on Thursday after infiltrating Israel through Sinai.

The ambush also has threatened to stoke the Mideast conflict as retaliatory violence between Israel and Gaza militants spiked. Israeli airstrikes killed at least 12 Palestinians, most of them militants, Friday in Gaza, and nine Israelis were wounded by Palestinian rockets fired into southern Israel.

On Saturday, one of those rockets struck three Palestinians who were  residing in Israel, injuring two of them seriously, police said.

The Egyptian troops were killed as Israeli soldiers went after suspected Palestinian militants involved in Thursday’s deadly attack.

Israel has offered conflicting accounts about how the Egyptians were killed and the Israeli military has promised an investigation. But the Egyptian Cabinet, in a strongly worded statement, held Israel “politically and legally responsible for this incident,” saying lax security on its side allowed the ambush to take place.

“The Egyptian ambassador to Israel will be withdrawn until we are notified about the results of an investigation by the Israeli authorities,” the Cabinet statement said, demanding an immediate probe.

It said Egypt would take all measures and send reinforcements to protect its borders and “to respond to any Israeli military activity at the Egyptian borders.”

It was the first time in nearly 11 years that Egypt decided to withdraw its ambassador from Israel. The last time was in November 2000 when the Egyptians protested what they called excessive use of violence during the second Palestinian uprising.

The decision to withdraw Reda was announced as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, demanding the expulsion of the Israeli envoy. A Palestinian flag was unfurled at the site, and some of the demonstrators threw firecrackers at the building.

Mohammed Adel, a leader of the protests that toppled Mubarak, welcomed the Cabinet decision, saying, “It proves to all that the Egyptian revolution is capable of imposing its rules on the Israeli enemy.”

The clamor against Israel also spilled into the political arena.

“Israel and any other (country) must understand that the day our sons get killed without a strong and an appropriate response, is gone and will not come back,” declared Amr Moussa, a former Arab League chief and now an Egyptian presidential hopeful. He tweeted his statement along with, “the blood of our martyrs which was spilled while carrying out their duties, will not be shed in vain.”

An Israeli military officer, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with military regulations, initially said a suicide bomber, not Israeli soldiers, killed the Egyptian security forces. He said the attacker had fled back across the border into Egypt and detonated his explosives among the Egyptian troops.

Israeli media also reported that some of the sniper fire directed at the Israeli motorists Thursday came from near Egyptian army posts and speculated that the Egyptian troops were killed in the cross fire.

It was not possible to reconcile the different versions.

Although Egypt’s new leaders have asserted their commitment to the landmark peace treaty with the Jewish state, Israel has worried that a regime more hostile to it would emerge in post-Mubarak Egypt.

While relations between the two countries have been chilly since Egypt became the first Arab nation to make peace with Israel in 1979, Israel valued Mubarak as a source of stability with shared interests in containing Iran and its radical Islamic proxies in the region — including the Hamas militant group that rules Gaza.

Israel fears that Egypt’s political upheaval and the resulting power vacuum in Sinai will open dangerous new opportunities for Gaza militants to open a new front against it along the Sinai frontier. While keeping up sporadic rocket attacks against Israel, Gaza militants have refrained from large-scale attacks since Israel conducted a punishing three-week war against them 2 1/2 years ago.

Hamas praised the attacks Thursday but denied any involvement. Israel accused a Hamas-allied group, the Popular Resistance Committees, of carrying out the ambush, but holds Hamas responsible for all violence coming from the Palestinian territory.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited some of the wounded in the hospital Friday. “We killed the head of the group that sent the terrorists, but this is just an initial response,” he said. “We have a policy to extract a very heavy price from those that attack us and that policy is being implemented in the field.”

The attack was the deadliest for Israel since a Palestinian gunman killed eight people in a Jerusalem religious seminary in 2008.