Today’s story about President Obama’s statement about overthrowing Assad is really interesting and thought-provoking. Reuters quoted Mr. Obama as: “If Assad’s troops fired at American planes entering Syrian airspace, he would order American forces to wipe out Syria’s air defense system.” Alarming!
What it brings to mind is an entire new context to the ISIS threat that has been spotlighted in media across the world over the past month or so. Common knowledge says US and its NATO allies are in bed with fundamentalist Sunni Islamist side, led (economically) by Saudi Arabia and its Middle Eastern allies. Last year when President Obama declared his plans to attack Syria, Saudi Arabia had signed a huge defense deal with US – and one with France. In other words, the Sunni fundamentalist state was paying the west to overthrow Assad’s government – a Shia state backed by Saudi Arabia’s archenemy Iran.
Obama’s declaration of attacking the Syrian state and supporting the Al-Qaeda-based rebels received staunch criticism both in and outside US. His statement that he didn’t need Congressional approval to carry out his attack plan also made him lose much of support within the US government. More conclusively, Russia’s President Putin actively stepped forward in support of Assad’s state to the point of announcing military aid for Syria if US attacked the state. Obama backed out, and to save his face, the drama of international overseeing of Syria’s chemical weapons was created, even declaring a Nobel Peace Prize for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
But now, the plan to topple Assad seems to have been resumed, albeit in disguise. To win national and international support, the US and its allies raised a slogan of war on ISIS after the videos of beheading of two Americans and a British citizen that were taken prisoners by ISIS. Certainly no one wants terrorists to thrive and so far there has been good support from US and foreign groups for the US government’s plans to attack ISIS. However, President Obama’s intentions to topple Assad peek out through his recent statement: overthrowing Syrian state if they fired at US planes.
The question one can ask is why not team up with Assad and wipe out the ISIS as well as fundamentalist rebels – at least that is what UK offered to do in Iraq, to arm and strengthen the Iraqi state against terrorists. Then why not in Syria? And it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out why – because the real target is Assad not the ISIS. So much for the Saudi-West alliance!
Writing this blog, I also came across this article on Counterpunch by Mike Whitney. Feels like our minds are somehow connected as it says exactly what I am sharing here. So please check it out as well.
