John Chuckman

COMMENT ON EVENTS IN SYRIA INCLUDING THE KILLING OF ISIS LEADER ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI AND THE SENDING OF AMERICAN TROOPS BACK INTO PART OF NORTHEASTERN SYRIA, THIS TIME WITH HEAVY ARMOR

 

Well, the United States is claiming that it has killed the fabled leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in northern Syria.

The United States has made such claims in the past, and they’ve always proved false, so much so that many have speculated that al-Baghdadi was always a Western agent. More than one source has speculated that al-Baghdadi was an American agent or asset, possibly even an Israeli one, and there are some grounds supporting such suggestions.

There are old photographs of the late John McCain with al-Baghdadi and some others. McCain was, after all, America’s tireless peripatetic advocate for bombing runs everywhere.

The ISIS operations in Iraq and in Syria generally served American objectives, giving it a reason for illegally keeping well-armed troops there and building bases in someone else’s country with no permission. There is absolutely no record of ISIS ever attacking even the most minor Israeli or Saudi interests, the very groups, along with any Americans who happened to be around, who would be the prime targets for the kind of Jihadi group ISIS is supposed to be.

Now and then, the United States may have targeted elements of ISIS, but, after all, when you are dealing with kind of rag-tag mercenary killers and adventurers attracted by such outfits, you do get some folks who don’t follow directions well or who get ideas of their own, or who, much like Trump himself at a G-7 meeting, sit with scowling looks on their faces and their arms tightly folded over their chests, refusing even to respond to others in the room.

If so, they are easily enough brought back into line by bombs, and they have no one in the West sympathetic with them. While their past theatrical shows of brutality were deliberate efforts to terrorize the very people the United States wanted terrorized, they served also to advertise to the West what an ugly bunch it was that America “was bravely fighting.”

The Syrian Army, supported by Russia and Iran as legal allies, has done all the heavy-lifting against ISIS, treating it always as the terrorist organization that it is, one consistently working to hurt Syria. The whole past record of what ISIS attacked and who it hurt is very much in agreement with the idea of its serving American and Israeli aims.

Much of America’s past bombing – as also that of its allies, Britain and France – really has been more of a covert operation against Syrian infrastructure, to hurt Syria’s national government while pretending to attack ISIS. America has been sarcastically described in the past as providing an air force for ISIS. And American and Israeli helicopters in the past have been observed moving around ISIS groups. The same for other terror groups, as al-Nusra, doing pretty much the same work.

The Russian military, fairly recently, said that if there was one place al-Baghdadi was not to be found, it was in northern Syria where Trump is claiming to have killed him, and no one has any better intelligence on the region than the Russians who have been so active in the air and on the ground.

The United States just loves blubbering about killing “masterminds,” just as it did for Osama bin Laden, but such talk is often pure comic-book stuff. The notion appeals to the black-and-white thinking Washington loves to foster while it pursues its many shadowy projects. Black-and-white thinking is the thinking useful to propaganda because it is easily absorbed by large numbers of people who appreciate having an “explanation” for what is mysteriously going on.

In a sense, it is almost irrelevant whether the new claim is accurate or not. Al-Baghdadi ‘s “death” now serves a useful purpose. It helps justify America’s turnaround in evacuating all its troops from Syria, sending some back in from the places in Iraq they also illegally occupy, accompanied by heavy armor. “See, we told you, ISIS is still a threat in the region.”

The place where al-Baghdadi is said to have been killed was quickly destroyed by American air strikes. How very convenient.

Just as when Osama bin-Laden’s body was buried unobserved at sea. I don’t think there was any suspicion of Osama’s having worked for American interests, but many believe he actually died long before his “killing” in Pakistan by American special forces. I don’t know or make any claim that way, but such is the stuff that swirls around all of America’s secretive, murderous work in the Middle East.

I should qualify the first part of that last sentence. Osama did effectively work for American interests in the 1980s, when he helped fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He was with the mujahideen groups who were covertly subsidized and supplied with weapons by the CIA. By all accounts, he was a brave and able fighter, and the Taliban faction, who came later to rule Afghanistan after a post-Soviet period of chaos, gladly gave Osama, a Saudi, refuge in recognition of that fact.

And “we need to protect Syria’s crude oil fields from falling into the hands of ISIS, who would use them to finance their evil operations.” ISIS is an outfit that has served a lot of useful American purposes in the region. Of course, what the United States is doing is undoing much of what Trump has bragged about doing in recent days.

It sure helps to have a big diversion on hand when you reverse yourself as extremely as Trump has, a diversion identifying you with something good in the comic-book world, like killing an evil “mastermind.”

If Trump isn’t going to have quite the withdrawal of troops that he thought he’d have as a key bragging point for his re-election (vis-à-vis any of the war-supporting Democrats who are likely opponents), at least he has this to demonstrate why he needed so quickly to alter his plans.

The real reason is that Israel and its supporters have been extremely unhappy at the idea of the United States returning northeastern Syria back to Syria’s national government. This grabbing with armored columns of an important national resource has no other reason but to weaken Syria and make a little profit while doing so.

Russia spy-satellite photos have shown that the United States has been stealing oil in the region already. Russian officials are calling America’s behavior, “banditry,” and it is hard to see how any informed person can argue with that.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Trump defends decision to pull U.S. troops back from Syrian-Turkish border

“Democratic and Republican lawmakers condemn decision, fear a Turkish offensive”

 

The only people who ever seriously fought the Jihadists in Syria are the Syrian Army, their Iranian allies, and their Russian allies.

America has many times used the excuse of Jihadists to stay somewhere in Syria where it doesn’t belong. It is not an ally of Syria and has never been given permission even to be there, let alone create military bases, train rebellious people, distribute weapons and supplies to them, and generally to encourage mayhem.

What it has really been doing in the Northeast is to assist the Syrian Kurds in opposing Syria’s government and encouraging the notion of a Syrian Kurd rump state. Anything to weaken Syria.

The amount of misinformation on the topic of Syria and its nasty war, a war deliberately created by outside interventions, is monumental, and with good reason since those responsible don’t want the world really to understand what has been going on. That is the way hybrid and proxy wars work.

The Syrian War was always about toppling a legitimate government by using proxy fighters. The proxies get plenty of publicity as “Jihadists” but they really are for the most part plain old recruited mercenaries playing theater parts. And of course, as with any army, the ordinary soldiers receive very little information about what it is all about. All of their pay and supplies has come from the informal coalition of Saudi Arabia and America and Israel and Britain and France and a Gulf State or two.

Every time an arms cache has been discovered by advancing Syrian forces, it contains weapons made in America or Israel or Bulgaria, a country from which the CIA often buys volume-discount weapons to send to interventions and coups.

The people in Washington who are upset by Trump’s move are using terms like “betrayal of allies.”

It’s ridiculous language if you know any history of the region, but most of the people using the words are themselves being dishonest, not telling people why they really want to assist the Kurds.

First, the Kurds are not allies. They do not even represent an organized state, although they always dream of creating one. They are scattered as a minority in many places of the region, almost like a large population of gypsies. Their fierce hope for a state makes it easy for someone like the United States to exploit them for undeclared purposes, as it has been doing now and has done previously.

Some people tried warning the Syrian Kurds about depending on the United States for help, but they wouldn’t listen. The region borders on Turkey, which has its own substantial and rebellious Kurdish population, and is simply never going to tolerate a Kurdish-run rump state on its border. It regards the idea as a serious security threat, given the aspirations of its own Kurds. So American notions have been at direct odds with Turkey’s interests from the start.

The United States has toyed with this notion about the Kurds in northeastern Syria as a kind of consolation prize for having lost the main war in Syria, the war using proxy forces to destroy the Syrian government. Hiving off an important segment of Syria, a place with crude oil reserves, would clearly hurt the country. Trying to reclaim it, even if eventually successful, would keep poor Syria in turmoil for years to come. Israel, unhappy about the main proxy war having been lost, was keen on the concept.

You do have to put the Syrian War into its proper context. It is part of the long series of Neocon Wars in the Middle East designed, more or less, to pave over everything anywhere near Israel. That’s what the meaningless term, “War on Terror,” going back to George Bush really was about. You cannot have a war on a method, clearly, but the term just managed to jumble things up enough for the public and to feature that witch-like incantation term, “terror,” so that America’s government would never have to account for what it was actually doing.

America had done a full-fledged traditional invasion of Iraq, complete with one pathetic ally to share the shame. It was a terribly bloody and destructive enterprise, and so for the other names on its list of countries in the Middle East to be paved over, it settled for proxy and hybrid efforts.

The invasion of Iraq was not only extremely costly, it produced waves of bad publicity and condemnation, something to be avoided when your public relations efforts focus on words like “democracy” and “freedom.” Proxy and hybrid hostilities allow you to put up smokescreens so that no one quite knows what you are doing. You can even blame other people.

Out of the immense destruction American bombing in half a dozen lands caused in a “War on Terror,” we did see, here and there, some few people seek reprisal and revenge against the very powerful who were abusing their power. Those few instances of “International Terror” served, almost like public relations stunts, to reinforce the government’s explanation of what all the killing was about.

The United States has betrayed the region’s Kurds before, going back to the days of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. American plotting got Iraq’s Kurds to rebel against Saddam, and they ended in a mass slaughter. Suggestions of American support vaporized.

Well, here we go again. Unless new steps are taken to avert it, Turkey is going to do the Syrian Kurds serious damage. This United States move serves also as an important gesture to Turkey about America respecting its interests. After all, America and Turkey have had a number of noisy, public disagreements recently.

No matter how difficult the United States sometimes finds accommodating Turkey’s Erdogan, in the end, it very much wants Turkey to remain in NATO. Its geographical location makes it almost a kind of capstone in NATO’s edifice.

It’s not clear how this will all turn out, but Israel, so immensely influential in Washington, is not happy with anything that could end in any degree of Syrian reunification.

The apocalyptic tone about Trump’s move used by Senator Lindsey Graham – one of the most tireless defenders in Washington of Israel’s narrow interests, so much so he frequently makes himself ridiculous – tells us all we need to know about Israel’s view. Israel does like, whenever possible, not to be heard commenting directly on American military decisions, so it uses proxies like Sen. Graham.

The Kurds, armed by America to fight against Syria, may be able to approach the Syrian government and invite them to take back the region, protecting them against the Turks. It is notable that Russian engineers just completed in record time a new military-style bridge crossing the Euphrates into NE Syria, one capable of supporting armored vehicles.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SOUTHFRONT

 

“IRAQI INTELLIGENCE OFFICIAL: ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI [LEADER OF ISIS] IS HIDING NEAR PALMYRA, PLANNING TO ENTER IRAQ”   

 

I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Mossad or the CIA.

That’s why he’s had so many miracle escapes.

That’s why they never catch him and often don’t even know where he is.

And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince targets.

Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years.

ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud.