You have to hand it to Russia. In recent weeks, one move after another by Moscow over the Syrian crisis could be accompanied by the audible word “check”, leaving Washington and its minions grappling with disorientation about how to respond to the Russian moves.
According to Stone, the U.S. government’s destabilizing role actually goes back much further than ISIS. His new series pinpoints moments of American intrusion in the region as far back as the 1930s and follows it all the way to the CIA-backed Iranian coup in 1953, support for Afghanistan-based, anti-Soviet Union militants in the 1980s, George H.W. Bush’s Iraq invasion of 1990, and present-day efforts in Iran, Syria, and other countries.
The ongoing atrocities by Saudi Arabia and its “coalition partners” in Yemen reflect powerfully – and horribly – on both the U.S. and UK. That’s true not only because those two countries in general are among the closest allies of the Saudi regime, but also because they are specifically lavishing Saudi despots with the very arms and intelligence being used to kill large numbers of Yemeni civilians.
Since 2011, the member states of the CSTO have observed the NATO operation known as the « Arab Spring », which was designed to overthrow enemy régimes and also friendly régimes in the Middle East for the benefit of the Muslim Brotherhood (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria), and since 2014, they have watched the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideal with the proclamation of a caliphate which challenges both international law and human rights.
On 23 September, Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations, insisted that the Russian veto power in the Security Council was endangering its legitimacy. Russia had vetoed four Security Council resolutions on Syria. Understandably, the US rabid dogs of war are straining at the chain to which international law constrains them. How dare Russia oppose US plans for regime change in Syria and impede a further blood bath to achieve it?
“Migratory flows are caused by capitalism, by wars, by military intervention and the fact that wealth is concentrated in the hands of too few people.
“We need to democratise resources.”
So now we have a military “pivot to Russia” to complement the by now notorious “pivot to Asia” — which Beijing has interpreted for what it is: a strategic containment policy — running from military encirclement (South China Sea, Indian Ocean, Western Pacific) to trade exclusion (the Trans-Pacific Partnership, TPP), plus the usual threat of sanctions.
Islamist groups are being activated and supplied by the Western-backed Saudi coalition to help prosecute the counterinsurgency war against the rebels. The rebel Popular Committees are calling for a pluralist democratic government in Yemen, which would mark a dramatic change from decades of Western and Saudi-backed dictatorships in the country.
Britain is complicit with Obama’s war – selling Saudi Arabia deadly weapons like Washington. Days earlier, Oxfam CEO Mark Goldring said Yemen “descended into a humanitarian disaster putting its people at risk of famine, and the UK is materially involved through its export of arms and military support to the bombing campaign.”
All one needs to know about the intellectual caliber of the Obama administration is that it is still pondering whether to persist in “ignoring” Russian President Vladimir Putin, or invest in a real partnership to solve the Syrian geopolitical/humanitarian drama. After all, when in doubt between diplomacy or chaos, the Beltway weapon of choice still veers towards the simplistic group think uniting neocons and neoliberalcons: regime change.
While the Guardian and Observer market themselves as caring about justice and equality, but do nothing to bring them about apart from promoting tinkering with the present, hugely unjust, global neoliberal order, Corbyn’s rhetoric suggests that the apple cart needs upending.
The official Western narrative, pushed by the Anglo-American and EU mainstream media since 2011, has almost invariably claimed Russian intransigence on the issue of Assad. That narrative is now in tatters.
