Rumble in the Desert – Events Leading up to Arab Spring
As stated before in Part I of this two-part series, the redrawing of the Middle East has been in the U.S. radar for a long time. Quoting Wesley Clark again, he was told – in 1991 – by the prominent Neocon and then #3 official in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz: “One thing we did learn from the Persian Gulf War is that we can use our military in the Middle East and the Russians won’t stop us. And we’ve got about five or ten years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”
Syrian President Assad knew he was on the crosshair of the US military, so he actually tried to court the US and the European governments. After 9/11, he cooperated extensively with the FBI and the CIA, giving them valuable information on Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda who were covertly operating in the Syrian/Iraqi borders.
But all his efforts were like a rabbit trying to make friends with a hungry lion. Before the dust settled on the “shock and awe” campaign against Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration had labeled Syria a “rogue nation” and threatened it with sanctions, which came into force the next year. By 2005, the Bush administration had withdrawn the U.S. ambassador from Syria. That’s when the “regime change” apparatus and programs were switched on.
After decades of regime changes around the world, the program has been fine-tuned into an algorithm. Enticing top political and military leaders to defect, funding “grassroots” opposition movements on the ground, arming militants, waging propaganda war, stirring up religious and social tensions are all standard protocols in a regime change operation.
By 2006, a former Vice President of Syria with close ties to Muslim Brotherhood had defected and gone to live in France; Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Sunni opposition groups within Syria; Kurdish groups within Syria were being lured to join the fight; and Sunni extremist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood were infiltrating Syrian borders. A WikiLeaks cable shows the depth of detailed analysis and planning in 2006 to bring Assad down.
Later in 2009, a U.S.-funded satellite TV station started beaming anti-government propaganda all over Syria (as revealed in another WikiLeaks memo, many years later).
The next year or so was rather uneventful, perhaps because the U.S. government was trying to recover from the great financial disaster of 2008.
Libya as the Template
However, with the spark of Arab Spring in 2011, the globalists were back on the saddle. What started in Tunisia was quickly leveraged by Washington to quickly chart out regime changes in Libya, Egypt and Syria.
Gaddafi (also spelled Qaddafi) of Libya had been an ally of the West for a long time and he was also quite popular in his country. Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa, and Gaddafi spent a lot of the oil money on his people, providing them with free education, free healthcare and numerous other benefits. Under Gaddafi, Libya had the highest Human Development Index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all of Africa.
But he had one fatal quality: the desire to not be a puppet of the France-U.S. coalition. He talked about bringing in Chinese and Russian oil companies into Libya; he dreamed of a gold-based currency – “gold dinar” – that would move Libya’s bank reserves away from the Petro-dollar.
Thus, in 2011, the U.S. started arming and funding all kinds of militant mercenary groups from around the world to pour into Libya. Many of them were linked to Al-Qaeda and other known terrorist groups. But it didn’t matter. Here is an example: In 2004, the CIA Director warned about a terrorist group called Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in a congressional testimony. The leader of that group got arrested soon after and spent 7 years in a CIA prison. But in 2011, ABC News had a glowing article about the founder and leader of that same group. Why? Well, he made a deal with the CIA, got released from the prison, and now was fighting against Gaddafi for us!
There were also situations of arming known terrorist groups in Libya by accident. “Oops, we wanted to give the weapons to the moderate rebels, but it fell into the hands of the terrorists.” Few years later, we would see similar stories about ISIS getting hold of U.S. weapons under similar pretense.
Before we move on to Syria, it is worth noting that Libya is now in ruins, taken over by Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Yes, ISIS is in Libya now, trying to take over their oil. And guess what the proposed solution is? Bomb Libya, again! Endless wars equal endless profit.
Back in 2011, Washington elites were congratulating themselves. Hillary Clinton laughed at Gaddafi’s death and said, “We came, we saw and he died.” Clinton and others were also sure that the stunning victory in Libya could be replicated in Syria.
Demolition Derby: Syria
So, the rebels from Libya – Al Qaeda and other violent Islamists from Libya, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria etc. – were given money, arms and one-way tickets to Syria. On to the next project, the glorious warriors went. Even mainstream media like CNN reported on this with a positive spin. The infamous Benghazi compound was in fact a CIA operation, and it helped transfer all kinds of weapons to Syria, including mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and the controversial anti-aircraft heat-seeking SA-7 missiles.
The next planned action was that NATO planes would declare a no-fly zone in Syria so that the global jihadists can keep attacking, but the Syrian government wouldn’t be able to retaliate with air strikes. This strategy had worked like a charm in Libya. But in Syria, there was an unexpected hurdle: Russia and China drew the line on the sand.
As revealed in 2015, Putin tried to compromise and agreed to work on a transition plan for Assad back in 2012, but the West was quite miffed and turned his offer down. Syria had to be destroyed and chopped into pieces according to the original plan. Defeat was not an option.
In 2012, Syria was run over by all kinds of rebels – Free Syrian Army (FSA), Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda (called Al Nusra in Syria) and dozens of other jihadist groups from all over the world.
It was like Silicon Valley for Jihadist Startups, funded by Saudi VCs and armed by American technology.
Some moral and honest analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of Pentagon warned that this situation will eventually lead to extremist and fundamentalist Sunni groups such as ISIS – the general term being Salafists – taking over Iraq and Syria. This was revealed in a document later obtained by Judicial Watch. This document uncannily predicted everything that would later on unfold.
But the elites of the American Deep State didn’t care. The repeated mantra was “Assad must go” and whatever it took to get there was fine. The former chief of the DIA would, later on, admit that the powers in Washington “made a willful decision” to allow a group such as ISIS to become powerful.
In 2012, the CIA was Skyping with the rebels on a daily basis; the CIA was also sending tons of lethal weapons to the rebels through Turkey; rebels in Jordan and Turkey were trained by French officers; France was also funding the rebels generously, handing out cash; even Germany had troops in the Turkey-Syria border; not to be outdone, the British were sending plane loads of weapons into Syria, in spite of an arms embargo.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar were mostly playing the financier roles, paying for a lot of these weapons, although they were sending some of their own jihadists and weapons (that they bought from the U.S. or Europe) as well. Interestingly enough, the God-fearing Saudis have also been shipping tons of highly potent amphetamines – Captagon, the Meth of the Middle East – to the rebels. These probably help the militants do the most heinous crimes.
Usually Israel is a mortal enemy of jihadis, but when it came to Syria, even they bonded. Israel was sending weapons and even treating thousands of wounded rebels in Israeli hospitals. Recently the Israeli defense minister said that ISIS was better than having Iranian influence in Syria.
In 2013, Syria was burning. And the Coalition of Regime Change – the U.S. and the seven dwarfs – were pouring oil onto the fire. By July 2013, there were more than 1.6 million Syrians refugees; more than 100,000 Syrian civilians had died, and there was no end in sight. By 2015, 300,000 civilians had died and 8 million – a third of the population – were forced to flee their homes. By the way, a large portion the refugees going to Europe are not even from Syria or other war-torn countries. Most of the displaced Syrians are stuck in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
When Assad’s government still wouldn’t tumble, suddenly there was a claim that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons. This was supposedly the “red line” that Obama had drawn that would bring the U.S. into an open war with Syria. Famous journalist Seymour Hersh describes the shenanigans in his article called “The Red Line and the Rat Line.” Basically, Al-Qaeda (called Al Nusra in Syria) had access to chemical weapons for a long time, thanks to Turkey. They had staged a false flag attack and blamed it on the Syrian government in order to bring the U.S. into the war. The BBC also got caught with its pants down when it reported on a chemical attack using bad actors and a “doctor” who turned out to be the daughter of an Al-Qaeda leader.
The farce of chemical weapons was so blatant that, in 2013, the UK parliament refused to authorize a war. Soon after, the U.S. Congress also declined. At the same time, in Sep 2013, Putin came up with a face-saving deal for all the parties involved: Syria would give up all of its chemical weapons immediately.
ISIS and Beyond
This might be the critical turning point in time when the Coalition of Regime Change decided to go all in with supporting the extremists. Cash and weapons started pouring in indiscriminately. This is when ISIS started to gain funding, weapons and power.
Within a few months, by Jan 2014, ISIS had its first major victory – capturing the city of Fallujah in Iraq. At that time, ISIS was still small, with about 7000 ragtag soldiers. But from then on, they seemed to exponentially grow in power. The official story in corporate media is like a Hollywood movie, with a lot of plausible stories about the growth and success of ISIS.
However, as the saying goes, truth is the first casualty of war, and anyone who carefully analyzes the story of ISIS will see a lot of red flags. Here are some quick examples:
- ISIS has a 24-hr. TV station, a radio station, and even a satellite TV station. Obama has dropped 20,000 bombs on Iraq and Syria in 2015, but none of them hit the radio or the TV stations. As for the satellite TV station, what kind of a satellite company would authorize that? Is the almighty USA unable to stop a satellite company from broadcasting terrorist videos of the most-hated group in the world? The satellites themselves are probably American or British.
- ISIS also has a huge presence in the social media. Consider that German citizens who criticize the government’s immigration policy get their Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts suspended, pronto. Somehow, ISIS has great success recruiting people and spreading evil message on U.S.-based, NSA-monitored social media.
- ISIS soldiers drive around in long lines of spanking new Toyota trucks that should be an easy target for any drone or a fighter jet, but yet they roam around happily. Also, when people raised questions about where ISIS got these trucks from, nobody has an answer.
- As discussed in Part I of this series, ISIS does a huge business of selling oil to Turkey, a NATO member and an American ally. Until Russian jets destroyed about a thousand oil trucks, this business was flourishing and constituted the prime source of revenue. What the U.S. did however was to drop flyers on these trucks before the Russian jets attacked them. Really (see picture below). The reason given by American officials was that the drivers may be ordinary citizens who are not associated with ISIS. Wish the elites showed this much compassion when they bombed a hospital in Afghanistan for more than an hour and killed many patients as well as doctors and nurses from Doctors Without Borders, a few months ago. Also, when asked why the U.S. didn’t attack the oil refineries of ISIS all this time, a commander answered that it was because of “environmental concern.” These people must have memorized George Orwell’s 1984.
- The official line of “we are supporting moderate rebels” make no sense when a) these rebels belong to Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, b) these groups repeatedly sell their arms to ISIS or simply join ISIS, and c) the weapons seem to get accidentally dropped into the hands of ISIS all the time.
- Some of the top ISIS commanders were CIA-trained terrorists from Georgia, Chechnya, Libya and other areas (Example 1, Example 2). Of course, they were not considered “terrorists” when they were fighting in the “right” region.
- Funding of ISIS by Saudi Arabia and Qatar also get conveniently ignored. Once in a while, a loose cannon like Joe Biden may slip up and admit to it, but otherwise it’s an embarrassing truth not to be discussed in polite company. As noted in Part 1 of this series, Hillary Clinton also speaks the truth about Saudi Arabia’s funding of terrorism all over the world in confidential memos, but just not in public.
One could go on and on. But hopefully this two-part series has provided sufficient history and analysis of the geopolitical agendas, Machiavellian tactics and Orwellian tools so that the reader can question and challenge the official narrative/propaganda.
So where do we go from here?
Well, the bigger picture here is that ISIS serves a purpose – a huge, profitable purpose that is beyond just Syria. ISIS is the next bogeyman that provides the rationale for wars and expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Communism was extremely rewarding for the war industry for about 50 years. Then we had Bin Laden who provided a great opportunity for $6 trillion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also gave us the Patriot Act, the birth of unwarranted surveillance of all Americans, and the death of several constitutional rights.
But Americans get bored easily. They need a new enemy – more frightening, more novel, and one that is not defeated easily. Hence ISIS – a rebranded terrorist group, v2.0, with an amazing PR machine, generous financial supporters with deep pockets, and an endless supply of weapons.
ISIS won’t be defeated easily. It is not meant to be defeated.
Consider this: there were no Al-Qaeda, ISIS or any other deranged extremists in Iraq, Syria or Libya before. Now all three countries are in utter disarray, ravaged by terrorism. What a blessing for the military-industrial complex.
Russia’s Putin is making real progress in Syria, and the Coalition of Regime Change is attempting to negotiate a settlement (the party that is losing the war is the one that always wants to “negotiate”). Even if the war in “Syr-aq” ends, ISIS and Al-Qaeda and other groups will simply move on to other projects. They are already back in Libya. There are plenty of volatile regions around the world – Central Asia, Western China, Southern Russia, Indonesia etc.
The only way to defeat terrorism and ISIS is through a change in the elite circles of banking and the military industrial complex. The financing and religious indoctrination arising from Saudi Arabia must stop. The weapons from the U.S., U.K., France and others must stop.
Many people don’t realize that the Muslim countries were far more liberal fifty years ago than today. Look at the pictures below – from Afghanistan and Iran in the 1960s and 70s.
The West has to take a leading role in liberalizing the Muslim world again … without being an occupier or a puppet master.
Finally, what we need is a Higher World Order where building nations is more profitable than destroying them; conducting fair trade with other nations is more mutually beneficial than occupying them and stealing their resources; and living in a multi-polar world is more peaceful and profitable than one nation hopelessly clinging on to a dangerous fantasy of a unipolar world.
COMMENTS