by Thierry Meyssan
19 June 2011
from
VoltaireNet Website
Italian version
The operations conducted against
Libya and Syria involve the same actors and strategies.
However, their respective
outcomes will differ since the situations in these countries
are not comparable.
Thierry Meyssan analyzes the
semi-failure experienced by the colonial and
counter-revolutionary forces, and predicts a 'pendulum
reversal' in the Arab world.
French Foreign Minister Alain
Juppé
and his U.S. counterpart
Hillary Clinton
in Washington on 6 June 2011.
The efforts to overthrow the Syrian government
have a lot in common with what has been undertaken in Libya.
However, the results are substantially different
owing to each country’s social and political background. The project to
break up these two States simultaneously was initially brought up by John
Bolton on 6 May 2002 when he was serving as Undersecretary of State in
the
Bush administration.
It’s implementation by
the Obama administration
nine years down the line - in the context of the Arab Awakening - is not
without problems.
Like in Libya, the original plan intended to bring about a military coup,
but it soon proved impossible owing to the lack of willing Syrian military
officers. According to our sources, an analogous plan had also been
envisaged for Lebanon. In Libya, the plot was leaked and Colonel Gaddafi
proceeded to have Colonel Abdallah Gehani arrested . [1]
In any case, the initial plan had to be revised
in light of the unexpected "Arab Spring" scenario.
Military action
The central idea was to foment unrest in a well circumscribed area and to
proclaim the establishment of an Islamic emirate that would serve as a
platform for the dismemberment of the country.
The choice of the Daraa district can be
explained by its proximity to the Jordanian border and the Israeli occupied
Golan Heights. This layout would make it easy to funnel supplies to the
secessionists.
An incident was contrived involving students who engaged in provocations. It
succeeded beyond all expectations given the brutality and stupidity of the
local governor and police chief. When the demonstrations started, snipers
were positioned on the roofs to shoot at random into the crowd and against
the police forces. A similar script had been used in Benghazi to fuel the
revolt.
Other clashes were planned, invariably in a border area to secure a support
base, first in Northern Lebanon, then on the border with Turkey.
The skirmishes were led by small commandos, mostly made up of some forty
men, combining individuals recruited on the spot with foreign mercenary
overseers belonging to Saudi Prince
Bandar bin Sultan’s network.
Bandar
travelled to Jordan where he supervised the kick off of operations, together
with CIA and Mossad officials.
But Syria is not Libya and the outcome was reversed. Indeed, whereas Libya
is a state that was created by the colonial powers which united
Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan by force, Syria is a historical country
which was reduced to its simplest form by those same powers.
Therefore, while Libya is spontaneously at the
mercy of centrifugal forces, Syria attracts centripetal forces bent on
reconstructing Greater Syria (comprising Jordan, occupied Palestine,
Lebanon, Cyprus and part of Iraq). Syria’s population today cannot but
repudiate any plan to partition the country.
Also, a parallel can be made between Colonel Gaddafi’s authority and that of
Hafez al-Assad (Bashar’s father). They rose to power during the same period
and both made use of their intelligence and brutality to hold sway.
Bashar al-Assad, on the contrary, did not seize
power nor did he expect to inherit it. He accepted to fill the office of
president when his father died because his older brother had perished in an
accident and because only his family heritage could have prevented a power
struggle among his father’s generals.
Although it was the army who went to look for him in London, where he was
quietly practicing his profession as an ophthalmologist, it is his people
who be-knighted him. He is undeniably the most popular political leader in
the Middle East. Up to two months ago, he was also the only one who moved
around without armed guards, and felt comfortable in a crowd.
The military operation to destabilize Syria and the propaganda campaign that
came with it have been orchestrated by a coalition of states under US
coordination, in exactly the same way that NATO coordinates its member and
non-member states to bombard and stigmatize Libya.
As indicated above,
the mercenary forces have
been provided with the compliments of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was
forced to knock on several doors, including in Pakistan and Malaysia,
seeking to boost his personal army deployed in Manama and Tripoli.
As an example, we can cite the installation of
an ad hoc telecommunications center on the premises of the Ministry of
Telecommunications in Lebanon.
Far from arousing the population against the "regime", this blood bath
triggered a national outpouring for President Bashar al-Assad. Aware that
they are being drawn into a civil war by design, the Syrians are standing
shoulder to shoulder. The overall number of anti-government protest rallies
garnered between 150 000 and 200 000 people out of a population of 22
million inhabitants.
By contrast, the pro-government drew crowds the
likes of which the country had never seen before.
The authorities reacted with calm in the face of such events. The President
finally enacted the reforms that had been on his agenda for a long time, but
which the majority of the population had resisted for fear they might
westernize their society. Anxious not to fall into archaism, the Ba’ath
Party has embraced a multiparty system.
The army did not crackdown on the demonstrators
- contrary to what the
Western and Saudi media have reported - but reined in
the armed groups.
Unfortunately, the high-ranking military
officers, most of whom were trained in the USSR, failed to practice any
restraint towards the civilians who were caught in the middle.
The economic war
At that point, the Western-Saudi strategy needed to be revised.
Realizing that military action would fall short
of plunging the country into chaos in the near term, Washington decided to
undermine Syrian society in the middle term. The rationale is that the
policies of the Al-Assad government have been forging a middle class (the
true mainstay of a democracy) and that it would be feasible to turn this
class against him. In that case, an economic collapse of the country would
have to be engineered.
Now, Syria’s main resource is oil, even if its production cannot compare in
volume with that of its rich neighbors.
To market the oil, Syria must have
assets deposited in Western banks to serve as guarantee during the
transactions. It would be enough to freeze them in order to pull the country
down. Hence, the expediency of tarnishing its image to mold western public
opinion into accepting the "sanctions against the regime."
In principle, an asset freeze requires a resolution by the UN Security
Council, which appears problematic. China, for one, may not be in a position
to oppose it since it has already been blackmailed to renounce its veto
power in the Libyan context under threat of losing access to Saudi oil.
But Russia could do it, without which it would
lose its naval base in the Mediterranean would have to keep its Black Sea
cooped up behind the Dardanelles.
The Pentagon has already attempted to
intimidate Russia by deploying its guided-missile cruiser, the USS
Monterrey, in the Black Sea to underscore the futility of Russia’s naval
ambitions.
Be that as it may, the Obama administration may decide to revive the
2003
Syrian Accountability Act allowing it to freeze Syrian assets independently
of a UN resolution or Congress approval. Recent history has shown,
especially as regards Cuba and Iran, that Washington can easily convince its
European partners to endorse sanctions that it applies unilaterally.
Thus, the stakes have currently shifted from the battle field towards the
media.
Public opinion will allow the wool to be pulled
over its eyes all the more given its ignorance of Syria and its blind faith
in the new technologies.
The media war
At first, the propaganda campaign focused the public’s attention on the
crimes allegedly committed by the "regime" so as to avert any questions
regarding the nature of the new opposition.
In fact, these armed groups have little in
common with the intellectual dissidents that drafted the Damascus
Declaration. They emerge from Sunni religious extremist circles. These
fanatics repudiate the religious pluralism of the Levant and long for a
state to their image and likeness. They don’t challenge President Bashar
Al-Assad because they deem he is too authoritarian, but because he is an
Alawi, that is a heretic in their eyes.
Ever since, the anti-Bashar propaganda has been based on a reality reversal.
An amusing example is the case of the blog "Gay Girl in Damascus", created
on 21 February 2011. Edited in English by 25 year-old Amina, the website
became a source of reference for Western media. Therein the author described
the plight of a young lesbian under Bashar’s dictatorship and the day-to-day
unfolding of the terrible repression unleashed against the revolution.
As a gay woman, she garnered the protective
empathy of Western web surfers who mobilized as soon as her arrest by the
secret services of the "regime" was announced.
However, as it happened,
Amina was a fiction. Betrayed by his IP address, a
US 40 year-old "student" was discovered to be the real author of this
masquerade. This propagandist, who was allegedly preparing a PhD in
Scotland, recently participated in a pro-Western opposition conference held
in Turkey, urging for a NATO intervention.
He quite obviously did not attend in his
capacity as a student .[2]
What is particularly surprising is not so much the gullibility of the
internet surfers who swallowed the lies about the fake Amina, but the
outpouring of the defenders of freedom in support of those who trample those
same freedoms. In secular Syria, private life is sacrosanct and
homosexuality, though prohibited by the texts, is not curbed. It may cause
malaise within the family, but not in society.
On the other hand, those who are upheld by the
media as revolutionaries, and that we consider instead to be
counter-revolutionaries, are vehemently homophobic. They are even
contemplating the introduction of corporal punishment or, in some cases, the
death penalty to punish that "vice."
Reality reversal is a principle being applied on a large scale.
We may recall
the United Nations reports on the
humanitarian crisis in Libya alleging that tens of thousands of immigrant
workers were fleeing the country to escape from violence. The conclusion
drawn and spewed by the Western media was that the Gaddafi "regime" had to
be toppled in favor of the Benghazi rebels.
And yet, it was not the government of Tripoli
who was responsible for this tragedy, but the so-called revolutionaries in
Cyrenaica who were hunting down black Africans. Stirred by a racist
ideology, they accused them of being at the service of Colonel Gaddafi and
lynched whoever they could get their hands on.
In Syria, the images of armed groups perched on the rooftops and firing at
random into the crowd or on police forces were broadcast on national
television networks. Yet, these same images were relayed and used by
Western
and Saudi television channels to attribute these crimes to the government of
Damascus.
At the end of the day, the plan to destabilize Syria is not working all that
well...
It succeeded in persuading public opinion that
the country is in the grips of a brutal dictatorship, but it also welded the
vast majority of the Syrian population firmly behind its government.
Ultimately, the plan could backfire on those who masterminded it,
notably
Tel Aviv.
In January-February 2011 we witnessed a revolutionary wave in the
Arab world, followed in April-May by a counter-revolutionary wave.
The swing of the pendulum is still in motion.
Notes