|
by Pepe Escobar
October 14, 2016
from
ZeroHedge Website
Let's cut to the chase...
Hillary Clinton is ready to go
to war against Russia in Syria - with inbuilt, potentially
terrifying, thermonuclear consequences.
Anticipating an outcome of the U.S. presidential election as a remix
of the 1972 Nixon landslide, Hillary has also coined, George "Dubya"
Bush-style, a remixed axis of evil:
Russia, Iran and "the Assad regime".
That's not even counting China, which,
via "aggression" in the South China Sea, will also feature as a
certified foe for the Founding Mother of the pivot to Asia.
And if all that was not worrying enough, Turkey now seems on the
path to join the axis.
President Putin and President Erdogan met in Istanbul.
Moscow positioned itself as ready to develop large-scale
military-technical cooperation with Ankara.
That includes, of course, the $20 billion, Rosatom-built,
four-reactor Akkuyu nuclear power plant.
And the drive to "speed up the work" on
Turkish Stream - which will de facto strengthen even more Russia's
position in the European gas market, bypassing Ukraine for good,
while sealing Ankara's position as a key East-West energy
crossroads.
In addition, both Moscow and Ankara back UN Special Envoy for Syria
Staffan de Mistura's position
that "moderate rebels" (the Beltway's terminology) holding eastern
Aleppo hostage must be eradicated.
The geopolitical game-changer is self-evident.
As much as Erdogan may be a whirling
political dervish, impossible to fathom and trust, while
Putin is a master of the strategic long
game, Moscow's and Ankara's interests tend to converge in the
New Great Game; and that spells out closer integration in the dawn
of the Eurasian Century.
Quite a cup of hemlock for Hillary Clinton, who has already equated
Putin with Hitler...
Regime change
or hot war?
In the appalling spectacle that turned out to be round two of the
interminable
Trump/Clinton cage match, Donald
Trump once again made a rational point - expressing his wish for
a normalized working relationship with Russia.
Yet that is absolute anathema for the
War Party, as in the neocon/neoliberalcon nebulae in the
Beltway-Wall Street axis.
The Clinton (Cash) Machine-controlled Democrats once again condemned
Trump as a tool of Putin while bewildered Republicans
condemned Trump because he goes against,
"mainstream Republican thinking".
Here's what Trump said,
"I don't like Assad at all, but
Assad is killing ISIS. Russia is killing ISIS and Iran is
killing ISIS."
Trump's outlook on Southwest Asia relies
on only one vector; destroy ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.
That's what adviser and former Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) director, retired Lt. Gen. Michael
Flynn, has been infiltrating into Trump's notoriously short
attention span.
Flynn may have admitted on the record that ISIS/ISIL/Daesh's
progress was a "willful" decision taken by the Obama administration.
Yet in his disjointed book Field of
Fight, Flynn insists that,
"the Russians haven't been very
effective at fighting jihadis on their own territory", are "in
cahoots with the Iranians", and "the great bulk of their efforts
are aimed at the opponents of the Assad regime."
This is a neocon mantra; unsurprisingly,
the co-author of Flynn's book is neocon Michael Ledeen.
From dodgy American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
and Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)
armchair "experts" to former counselors at the State Department,
they all subscribe to the laughable view that the remixed axis of
evil - now fully adopted by Hillary - is useless against jihadis;
the good guys doing the difficult work are "the U.S.-led
coalition".
And damn those who dare criticizing the
"relative moderates" backed by
the
CIA.
What Trump said is anathema not only for establishment Republicans
who despise Obama for not fighting against the Hillary-adopted
remixed axis of evil. The real mortal sin is that it "disregards"
core U.S. foreign policy bipartisan assumptions held to be as sacred
as the Bible.
Thus the success of the neocon Ash Carter-led Pentagon in bombing
the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire deal which would imply coordinated
airstrikes against both ISIS/ISIL/Daesh and the Front for the
Conquest of Syria, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al Qaeda in
Syria.
Neocons and mainstream Republicans blame lame duck Team Obama for
the "unholy reliance" on Russia and Iran, while neoliberalcons blame
Russia outright.
And high in the altar of righteousness,
hysteria rules, with the neocon president of the NED
calling for the U.S. government to
"summon the will" to pull a Putin regime change.
Ready to go
nuclear?
Hillary Clinton continues to insist the U.S. is not at war with
Islam.
The U.S. is de facto at war in,
It's not hard to do the math...
In parallel, the deafening talk about Washington now advancing a
Plan C in Syria is nonsense.
There has never been a Plan C; only Plan
A, which was to draw Russia into another Afghanistan. It did not
work with the controlled demolition of
Ukraine. And it will not work
in Syria, as Moscow is willing to supply plenty of air
and missile power but no boots on the ground of any consequence.
That's a matter for the Syrian Arab
Army (SAA), Iran and its Shi'ite militias, and Hezbollah.
Ash Carter has threatened Russia with "consequences". After blowing
up the ceasefire, the Pentagon - supported by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff - now is peddling "potential strikes" on Syria's air force to
"punish the regime" for what the Pentagon actually did; blow up the
ceasefire.
One can't make this stuff up...
Major-General Igor Konashenkov, Russia's Defense Ministry
spokesman, sent a swift message to "our colleagues in Washington";
think twice if you believe you can get away with launching a
"shadow" hot war against Russia.
Russia will target any
stealth/unidentified aircraft attacking Syrian government targets -
and they will be shot down.
The only serious question then is whether an out of control Pentagon
will force the Russian Air Force - false flag and otherwise - to
knock out U.S. Air Force fighter jets, and whether Moscow has the
fire power to take out each and every one of them.
So in this three-month window representing the "death throes"
of the Obama era, before the likely enthronization of the Queen
of War, the question is whether the Pentagon will risk launching
WWIII because "Aleppo is falling".
Afterwards, things are bound to get even more lethal. The U.S.
government is holding open a first-strike nuclear capacity against
Russia.
Hillary firmly supports it, as Trump
made clear he,
"would not do first-strike".
The prospect of having axis of evil
practitioner Hillary Clinton with her fingers on the nuclear
button must be seen as the most life-and-death issue in this whole
circus...
|
