WHY ISN’T THE ‘WEST’ HELPING ASSAD?

The right and the most obvious thing to do is that all the warring parties other than Islamic State join together to defeat the Islamic State and then call for a free and fair election in Syria under the UN auspices. I doubt if President Bashar Al-Assad could reject that offer and yet claim that he is the rightful President. In fact, Assad had himself suggested such an election and offered to run for the President again “if people are not against it”.

However, that wouldn’t happen because even if  Obama proposes it  – if he tries that, not just the Republicans, but even many Democrats will probably join together  to impeach him. A war in one or more corners of the world is essential for the American weapon industry – the one that creates the most jobs – keep going and growing.  Like it or not, much of American affluence since the Second World War has been dependent on wars overseas.

Take a look at what has been happening in the war against Islamic State till now is

• United States supplies arms to all belligerents of both sides  through direct and clandestine channels
• United States also bombs Islamic State that rose from the ashes of Iraq war (most of its senior officers being from Saddam’s Army), but is too cowardly to ‘put boots on the ground’. This policy makes sure that you can never win and thereby put an end to the war.
• Al Assad fights the Syrian rebels as well as Al Qaeda factions on the ground while also fighting Islamic State.
• Saudi Arabia, and  its allies (Islamic Coalition) , supposed to be fighting Islamic State alongside the US,  bombs Assad’s fighters, Shia Houthis and civilians – in essence, all those who are opposed to  Islamic State.
• . Saudi Arabia and its allies also bomb Yemen to oust Houthis who are Shias, armed by Iran. However, Human Rights Watch investigated several coalition airstrikes in which there was no evident military target in the vicinity, such as strikes on the markets at Muthalith Ahim and Amran.
• Iranian volunteers, Assad’s army, Kurds and Shia Militia fight Islamic State on the ground.
• ·Turkey bombs Kurds who fight Islamic State.
• Russia gives military assistance to Assad and makes bombing sorties (probably suspended for now).
• Turkey also helps Islamic State to augment its human guided missiles (suicide bombers) by welcoming them at its airports and allowing them free passage through its border to Syria
• Both American and Russian bombers cause havoc with civilian lives in hospitals and schools, but deny reports.
• Islamic State destroys historical monuments, beheads journalists, members of  international aid agencies, hostages,  own fighter-volunteers who try to go home in disgust and kill over 1700 civilians including women and children. Yazidi men and married women are killed; younger women are enslaved and used as sex objects; some are supposed to be married off to willing soldiers.

Get the picture? It is pretty mixed up, like a Picasso painting. United States no longer risks the life of its soldiers – not that they were ever considered un-expendable.

How did this senseless war begin? An unlawful  attack, prohibited by a UN resolution, on a sovereign Nation by the United States under President George W Bush and United Kingdom under Tony Blair on blatantly false ground which, if Nuremberg example sand jurisprudence were to be followed, both of them would be strung up by ropes..

Bush explained the reason for the senseless and vicious attack to a Palestinian delegation:

“God told me: George, go attack Iraq and end the tyranny”:

Disgusted at his successor’s ineffectiveness to enter a full-scale war, he alsosaid

“In order to be an effective president … when you say something, you have to mean it,” said George Bush. “You gotta kill ’em.”

You gotta kill ’em is a favourite  American expression – spoken and practiced,

George W. Bush said this in a private conversation that was heard all over the world. By that reckoning, Bush was an effective President. So was his father, HW Bush who started the first Iraq War in 1990 and meddled with so many other nations waging their own wars. Another effective President was Ronald Reagan of Iran-Contra fame. In some measure, all Presidents starting with General Eisenhower till G W Bush have been effective in keeping America’s weapons industry bustling at the cost of millions of expendable lives and untold suffering at distant overseas places.

Bush also predicted (probably God told him that too): “You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren…That’s how Americans should view the deal.”

Moral? Make plenty of wars so our grandchildren can flourish. By the time Obama clued in on to these maxims, it is unfortunately time for him to leave the oval office that decides the fate of human race but for a couple of trouble makers such as Russia and China.

By West, what you mean is the United States. The rest of those from Europe are its tail-board passengers.  Britain has been a major  partner in the war crimes of invading  distant countries (at least 35 of them – see the list quoted below), conspiring to destabilize duly constituted governments (many of them democratically elected or supported by the populace, and in any case of no direct consequence to the invaders). Among the achievements of the ‘West’ are carnage in North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq  to name only those nations where United States involved itself in full scale war.  This, apart from supplying conventional, chemical and biological weapons to Saddam’s Iraq, Shah’s Iran and Everyone’s  Israel . The US is still supplying to, among others, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Pakistan – some of the most dangerous  nations in the world that train and fund terrorism of one type or another. It is well known that  many of those weapons (other than aircraft – so far) are transferred  to terrorists under the care of these nations. The sole aim, evidently, is perpetuating wars in some part of the world or another with a view to keep its colossal weapon industry and the ancillary businesses ticking. There is no business like weapon business.

Why was the United States under  Barack Obama – a winner of Nobel Prize For Peace –  so excited about the so-called Arab Spring when it bloomed in 2010? Wouldn’t the CIA, the intelligence agency reputed for its cutting-edge surveillance and espionage technology have known that replacing a few benevolent despots like Muammar Gaddafi (who ran a welfare state of zero poverty), Hosni Mubarak  (at least less despotic than, say, King Abdullah) would only lead to murderous sectoral wars in every Arabian nation. Isn’t it strange that there was no Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia,  the most despotic countries of all, with its terrible human rights records? To offset the fallout,  the king duly ordered a  a couple of notional reforms.

Islamic State shows off its methods of execution, particularly beheading of innocent victims on the social media for gaining wide publicity. Are they the most vicious? Saudi Arabia carries out on the average one beheading or stoning (including, or especially, women and foreigners) every second day. Click here to watch the video if you’re above 18 and have the stomach. (You may have to agree to bear with the ghastly show).

Its record for 2015 was 157 which is less than the number of civilians (other than Yazidis) known to have been beheaded by Islamic State. Rapes, murders and amputation of servants and employees by private Saudi employers are not uncommon. The government-appointed moral police roam the streets to look for, arrest and punish (jail, amputate, execute) defaulters by Sharia Law

Compared to the United States record, all these might seem trivial.  25 to 30 men and women and children are shot by private guns every day; quite a few – about one or two a month –  black citizens are shot by white cops with impunity.  The country has the largest prison population in the world at over 1.57 million prison inmates and at least some 2.4 million under some form of incarceration. The methods of judicial execution may range from electrocution, lethal injection (giving scope for doctors to experiment and innovate for maximum suffering), gas chamber, firing squad and hanging according to the whims of individual states. The image here shows the botched lethal injection that caused terrible suffering for hours to Romell Broom, who, happily, had to be retuned to the death row – at least until someone could find a vein.

Which of these hitech executions is more humane than beheading can only be judged by one who had undergone them all – which leads us to what is scientifically known as the Uncertainty Principle. In February 2016, Brandon Jones. another black man suffered for more than 45 minutes and had to be injected several times before he succumbed. If you have the stomach, read the gory details of botched up judicial murders here.

Torture and newly invented methods of torture were written into law and signed by the US President (George Bush, who else?) in 2002 and was practiced with further  innovations and vigour on suspected prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in the island of Cuba, Abu Gharaib in Iraq  as well in as in several secret prisons across the world.

Many years after their capture and regular torture, most of the victims were let off  without even being charged. The ghastly experience they recount make terrible coffee-table reading, but no one dares ask the perpetrators – the United States – for an explanation. Justice system, based on Jury decision, discriminates against Blacks, Hispanics and Asians. President Obama who lost the audacity of hope in his first term has even failed to close down Guantanamo Bay where such Christian treatment is meted out to humans (mostly Muslims). If you think them all to be obnoxious violations of human rights and decency, United States has a new Presidential hopeful – Mr. Donald Trump – who promises to introduce techniques  more vicious than the dreaded waterboarding as soon as he takes office.

SYRIA AND THE ARAB SPRING

It is conceivable that Saudi Arabia, along with the CIA moles who are everywhere, engineered the so-called Arab springs of 2010  that turned out to be a long and bloody winter for the citizens. Syria was a special target because its President was from the  Alawi  sect of Shia denomination – an anathema to the Saudis who are out to propagate by force  their kind of intolerant Sunni- Wahabi Islam all over the world. The concept of a Wahabi Caliphate that rules the world as per stringent Sharia Laws  is  the  driving force behind the new menace known as Islamic State. The only Saudi objection to this concept is presumably that the self-styled Caliph.  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is an usurper and claims to be a descendant of the Prophet whereby he alone has the right to be a Caliph, which dislodges any future claim of the King of Saudi Arabia or of Jordan or the President/Prime Minister of Turkey to ascend the throne that would rule the world. Even if Islamic State is finally defeated and sent into oblivion, the hope and armed designs for establishing a world-dominating Caliphate is unlikely to die with it. Thereby rests the future growth of  the weapon makers in the US and some of its fellow-passengers like UK, France etc.

THE WAR RECORD OF THE UNITED STATES

After the end of WWII, the United States invaded, without provocation, several countries and instigated, armed and installed several dictatorships.  Read a list of those wars by William Blum, an American author, here.

1. KOREA

At the end of Korean War, General Curtis Lemay , later a vice presidential hopeful, boasted that inside of three years, the US destroyed 20% of the Korean population. Typical of American attitude towards human life, Lemay also said : “If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting....But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.

That very well spells out the policy of the US administration through its history – starting with the killing of American natives till there was none left to fight.

It is estimated that the Korean war killed about 3 million in all.

Brian Wilson, Vietnam war veteran and author, “Korea, Global Research” of Canada (October 2006), wrote : 

“North Korea is portrayed in the international media as a threat toglobal security, but there is absolutely no evidence to that effect. On theother hand, North Korea is the only country in the world that has lost up to aquarter of its population in recent history [during the Korean War, when theNorth Korean population was wiped out by US bombings],”

Even US actions find  their reactions, however late they come, and however suicidal it could be.  North Korea is still practicing its own brand of  ‘Dictatorship of Proletariat’. If its brand of Communism  was a threat to South Korea at the start of the war in the fifties, it is now poised at striking  the United States with nuclear weapons risking its own annihilation. If that happens, 9/11 would be remembered by the surviving humanity  as  children’s pranks with toy guns.

Michel Chossudovsky, the head of the Center for Research on Globalization, an independent Canadian think tank,  states about the Korean War:

The US has on countless occasions violated the Armistice Agreement. It has remained on a war footing. Casually ignored by the Western media and the international community, the US has actively deployed nuclear weapons targeted at North Korea for more than half a century in violation of article 13b) of the Armistice agreement…The armistice remains in force.The US is still at war with Korea. It is not a peace treaty, a peace agreement was never signed.

Chossudovsky’s intention was to persuade the government to enter into a peace treaty with Korea after more than 60 years after signing the armistice, but that advice has obviously fallen into deaf ears. (Chossudovsky is a Canadian, not a Russian).

2. VIETNAM.

Human casualties, nearly 3 million again. (Not counting US  veterans who went back neurological disorders, murder syndromes, and those who committed suicide or turned criminals). The shameful history of atrocities like that involved the psychopath officers and men  such as Lieutenant Calley who shot nearly 400 women and children in cold blood . (A grateful US government commuted his sentence to house arrest).

Result? Defeat and shame-faced withdrawal. Not to forget the use of billions worth weapons – albeit at the expense of the taxpayer.

3. AFGHANISTAN

By 1986, the Soviet Union had withdrawn, and Dr. Mohammad Najibullah had become the President.  His fault, if any,  was that he had once worked as an intelligence chief when the country was under Russian occupation. In any case, Communist Soviet Union was crumbling under its own  weight and Gorbachev was hastening the process. A man of peace, a pediatrician wary of Islamic extremism,Najibullah had  actually written to President HW Bush of the impending doom.

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he told Alan Brody of the UNICEF who was then visiting Najibullah while the latter was hiding in a UN building,, “I wrote to Bush. I explained all of this, I told him that the Reds are finished, and the enemy of the United States is no longer the Reds, it is the Greens. I offered to work together with him.”

By the‘Greens’, Najibullah meant Taliban, the Pakistan-trained extremist Muslims who had been equipped with stinger missiles, recoil-less rifles and other high-tech weapons by the United States.  He also foretold the catastrophe that was to befall the United State ten years later:

““Dear Alan,” Najibulla told Alan Brody of the UNICEF. “Do not be naïve about what you are facing. They will bring a destruction you cannot imagine.”  He said that a decade before 9/11, soon after which he was dragged out of the UN building, castrated and dragged along the streets tied to a truck and finally hanged in a public place. Those who should have listened to him did not feel sorry, for they had branded him a communist puppet.

Alan Brody concluded:

““It was an anomaly, throughout the 1980s, that the West was empowering Mujahidin groups who were burning down schools, banning girls frombeing  educated, trying to cut women off from basic opportunities or even healthcare, and preaching ideologies of xenophobic hatred. The CIA and others did all of this in the interest of bringing down a government that, in the areas of social development at least, stood for secular and progressive Western values. “

What was the consequence of this first Afghan War by the US? The Taliban and other rebels got a huge stockpile of arms and ammunition to fight the United States in 2001 and thereafter.

4.  IRAQ WAR BY H W BUSH (GULF WAR OR OPERATION DESERT SHIELD)

The US supplied weapons, napalm, anthrax and nuclear know-how to Saddam Hussein and encouraged him to go to war with Iran, which only boomeranged in more ways than one. Why did H W Bush turn against Saddam? Was it because he attacked Kuwait, claiming it to be a district of Iraq (which it once was) ? Hardly. The attack was at the instance of Saudi Arabia, the worst autocratic and theocratically extremist monarchy in the world. Saddam had always thought that the Americans won’t turn against him (because he knew too much), but HW Bush was the man who was three shades worse than Reagan who once said that the rebels of Nicaragua who overturned a democratic government with arms supplied by him was like America’s pioneers. Reagan was not wrong, of course, considering what the ‘pioneers’ had done to the native owners of the land.

The first Iraq  war was seen across the world like a fireworks display by CNN on its newly introduced TV technology. As per a study by Beth Daponte, then a US government Census Bureau demographer, it caused the death of at least 200,000 humans, most of them civilians. Another 1.7 Million , many of them children, perished in hunger and deprivation due to the ‘sanctions’ enforced by the US, bullying the rest of the world to join in the sanctions –  in defiance of the United nations.

5. ATTACK ON AFGHANISTAN AFTER 9/11

Nobody really knows whether Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi Arab himself, and funded by Saudis really had anything to do with 9/11 although, while the going was good and Muslims were hailing it as a victory for Islam, he obliquely stated (in a video that wassuspect) it was indeed planned by him. On the other hand, what is well known is that:

• 15 of the 19 hijackers of airliners  on 9/11 were Saudi Arabas.
• There was no proof of any of the hijackers having met Osama Bin Laden. I 2006, Al Jazeera showed a video where Osama Bin Laden was supposed to be meeting ‘some of the hijackers’. The faces of the hijackers were not visible; apart from Al Jazeera’s words, there was no proof that they were really the hijackers.
• On the other hand, Mullah Omar, then the rulerof Afghanistan and Taliban supremo had offered to hand over Osama to the US ifthey could show him any proof that the latter was involved. A month later, whenBush started bombing Afghanistan indiscriminately, there still was no proof.
• It is incredible that Musharraf did not know,and through him Bush did not know that Osama was under the safe keep of Pakistan army. Exposing Osama would have blown the lid off the claim that the war was waged to capture Osama Bin Laden and that he masterminded the attack on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.  Bush needed an alibi to go to war – and here was the murder of over 3000 Americans  by Saudis, but by some sleight of words could be attributed to Afghans.
• If Osama was the kingpin, why are the Americans detaining  Khalid Shaikh Mohammad – the plotter of 1995 failed attempt at a similar hijack -still in the Guantanamo Bay?

What was the result of the 13-year long war? 2232 US soldiers died; at least 4000 civilians were bombed and shot to death which Bush dismissed as “collateral damage”. Afghanistan is still smouldering.

6. IRAQ WAR BY GW BUSH

The Second Iraq war claimed  601,027 deaths, 2.5% of the population

What was the excuse for going to war with a country that was rendered hungry and defenceless through murderous sanctions and repeated warnings? Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein was holding weapons of mass destruction.

Physicians for SocialResponsibility (PRS) of Washington DC , in a study released in 2011 stated:  “the death toll from 10 years of the “War on Terror” since the 9/11 attacks is atleast 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.

Those killed. Or maimed for life included children in schools, pregnant women, and patients in hospitals – the violent death of all of whom was summarily disposed of by Bush as “Collateral damage”.

It was well known that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Saddam was made to destroy practically all heavy weapons in his armoury under threat of attack and further sanctions. A UN inspection team certified that there were no  WMD in Iraq. Children of Iraq were dying under a farcical and dysfunctional oil-for-food program.

The Nobel-Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility reported that of the 1.74million Iraqi civilians who died due to the cruel sanctions (a euphemism forblockade of goods and services), more than half were children.

What was the outcome of this senseless pogrom? Birth of Islamic State and eternal strife with no end in sight.

7.  SYRIA

Obama, probably for fear of too much unpopularity among the weapon makers who decide Republican voting, helped the Wahabi opponents to al-Assad’s regime  by supplying them weapons and equipment most of which went to the hands of Al Qaeda who were also fighting against Assad. Presumably some of those weapons land up in the hands of Islamic State that the ‘Free World” is supposed to be fighting.

Almost immediately after receiving a warning from Barack Obama that use of chemical weapons by Assad, the US will treat it as ‘crossing the red line’ (meaning it will result in a direct attack by the US), chemical weapons were used in Syria. Who had the motivation? Not Assad, who had to fear the promised attack by the most powerful nation on earth. On the other hand, the rebels had all the motivation in the world – use of chemicals would help end the Assad regime. Many of the rebels were Sunni deserters from Assad’s own army who knew  how and where the weapons were stored, and how to use them. The motives clearly lay with them – Assad would be blamed and defeated by the Americans,

Assad denied using those weapons, but it was decided that accepting his plea was not convenient, but Obama did not want to join the fray if he could help it. Russia’s Putin came to Obama’s rescue – he proposed a formula that all remaining chemical weapons be removed from Syria. Nobody was as happy as Assad was at that suggestion.

Yet this man whose audacity and hope lies in ruins on account of a belligerent Senate funded by weapons trade,  has his back against the wall and fights on. It suits the weapon makers and agents and traders of the ‘West’..

So now you know why Obama can’t help Syria defeat Islamic State and then call for election. World Peace is bad for business.