How appropriate that on April Fools’ Day Hillary Clinton’s 83-nation Demintern Popular Front “Friends of Syria” meets in neighboring Turkey to devise a way to ramp up the fighting again in Syria now that the rebels have been routed by the Syrian security forces and rejected by the vast majority of the population. Regime change at the end of a gun has failed in Syria, just as the first attempt to foment another phony “Arab Spring” failed before that. The empire is desperate and when desperate it is even more dangerous.
Who is paying for all these “friends of Syria” to gather in Turkey? Who is picking up the tab? Want to guess?
How many have paused to reflect on the grotesqueness of a “Friends of Syria” group of nations gathering to decide how to carve up a sovereign state because they have decided that the regime there needs to be changed? The United Nations Charter is turned on its head as, flawed as the concept may have been, the UN at the least recognized the inviolability of sovereignty that must lie at the core of an international body dedicated to peace. Rip the rug from that concept and you have what we are now witnessing in places like Libya and now Syria: Various outside interests — corporate, government, NGO, etc. — can plot against any sovereign leader under the cooked up mantle of “protecting human rights,” dismantle the state, and remake it as they wish with their own compliant satraps in charge.
Attention libertarians: This is not anarchy taking hold! Rather, it is the opposite.
Secretary of State Clinton, whose bloodthirstiness makes even the neo-cons cringe, demands that the Syrian government implement the UN-Arab League peace proposal “without delay.” It was suspicious to see the plan that came out of Kofi Annan’s recent visit to Syria embraced by China and Russia as well as the US, and now we can see why: The “friends of Syria” simply did a bait and switch operation, substituting the slightly more nuanced demands of the Annan plan that all sides must disarm with the spirit of the original vetoed US/GCC United Nations Security Council resolution demanding that only one side — the government authority — disarm and the president resign, leaving the country open to a Libya-style takeover by the rebel groups. And we all know how that “humanitarian intervention” went…
Says Clinton: “Our message must be clear to those who give the orders and those who carry them out: Stop killing your fellow citizens or you will face serious consequences.” Clinton insists that the rebels are getting better organized and more efficient. We have seen a good taste of that recently, reading a piece in the German “Spiegel” profiling one of the “freedom fighters” of Syria:
That first execution was a rite of passage for Hussein. He now became a member of the Homs burial brigade. The men, of which there are only a handful, kill in the name of the Syrian revolution. They leave torture to others; that’s what the so-called interrogation brigade is for. “They do the ugly work,” says Hussein, who is currently being treated in a hospital in the Lebanese city of Tripoli. He was injured when a piece of shrapnel became lodged in his back during the army’s ground invasion of Baba Amr in early March.
He is recovering in relatively safe Lebanon until he can return to Syria and “get back to work.” It’s a job he considers relatively clean. “Most men can torture, but they’re not able to kill from close range,” he explains. “I don’t know why, but it doesn’t bother me. That’s why they gave me the job of executioner. It’s something for a madman like me.”
These are the friends of the Friends of Syria.
And all those atrocity stories fed constantly to a Western audience intoxicated with enthusiasm for the global democratic revolution? No doubt the Syrian government — as all governments — has used force and no doubt it has used extreme force against those tho they feel are threatening. Ask any G-8 protester about this phenomenon. But even some of the cheerleaders of the Syrian revolution are starting to notice that the rebels are simply cooking up videos, Hollywood-style, to hand to the “free” press in the West. Here is another fake video that CNN fell for uncritically.
Hillary and the “Friends” are lying about the Annan plan. They demand that the government lay down its arms while all the while massively transferring military equipment to the rebels. Saudi Foreign minister Saud al-Faisal, a representative of one of the most brutal dictatorships on the face of the earth, said, “The arming of the [Syrian] opposition is a duty, I think, because it cannot defend itself except with weapons.” What a humanitarian! After providing covert military support through a morally-disintegrating Turkey, the US plans to overtly provide “communications” equipment to the Syrian rebels — more likely to be targeting devices linked to CIA satellites than Twitter devices, to be sure.
The result of “Friends of Syria II” will no doubt be more bloodshed in Syria, just as we saw the flicker of the promise of a return to normalcy and the promise of reform brought about by the recent (unnoticed by the West) constitutional referendum. But countries like Syria can no longer be allowed to solve their own domestic problems internally, and any solution therein attempted must be undermined by the US/NATO and its allies. Sovereignty must be destroyed in the name of global democratic revolution. With friends like these…
11:33 am on April 1, 2012
