World opinion is being orchestrated towards a military operation against the Syrian regime, researcher and author F. William Engdahl told RT. Still, any decisive action against Assad will be postponed until after the US presidential election.
The international forces supporting regime change in Syria are continuing to mount pressure on the Assad regime, whipping up the fact that the country possesses chemical weapons. Despite the Syrian government's firm assurance these weapons will never be used in the internal conflict, countries supporting Syrian opposition are openly discussing plans to take Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles under their control.Since control could be established only by physical presence of some sort of military force at the sites where the weapons are kept, foreign intervention into the country would be necessary. Syria's ex-ambassador to Iraq, who defected to the opposition, has claimed the Assad regime may have already used chemical weapons.F. William Engdahl, the author of "Myths, Lies and Oil Wars" says all allegations the chemical weapons in Syria have already been used – or will be in the future – serve the single purpose of paving the way for intervention.Chemical weapons are not precise and could not be used in residential quarters where most of the fighting in Syria is going on. They are “for huge battle field conditions,” insists Engdahl, because “you’ll [poison] your supporters as well as Al-Qaeda mercenaries,” he explains.Actually, the situation with chemical weapons in Syria is a déjà vu of the hysteria over the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a decade ago, believes the researcher.“I smell a re-run of the old Pentagon scenario that Dick Cheney and friends ran to justify the war in Iraq,” Engdahl states. “And now they’re trying to do that with the chemical warfare weapons of mass destruction in Syria, to create a climate that this is the most pressing thing on the face of the Earth. And this is simply not the case.”The historian wonders how many times it will take for people to wise up to the fact that the WMD hysteria was scripted in the RAND Corporation (American think tank) for Pentagon which put it into its “how-to” manuals.“They are just toppling one regime after another to create their ‘grand design’. This is not the way toward democracy. This is a way toward a one superpower tyranny,” slams Engdahl.The efforts to expose the Assad regime as a brutal one are going along the same lines as the media smear campaign against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya a year ago. Just like in Libya, the Syrian regime is now being accused of using fighter jets against rebels, without any evidence whatsoever being produced. In Libya the alleged use of its air force led to a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone over the country and ultimately the direct military interference of Western democracies into the internal conflict of a sovereign state.“We’re just watching the orchestration of images being played on to the world opinion,” acknowledged Engdahl. “This is exactly what happened in Libya –‘we must do something’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ and so forth,” he explained. “Frankly, I don’t think that that is a reality.”Engdahl believes that “establishing a no-fly zone over Syria now is not feasible given the massive and effective aircraft defenses that Syria has.”The Syrian conflict will be kept “on a hot burn” until after the presidential elections in the US, he shared.“Whether Israel, for reasons of its own, in wanting to tip the US elections toward Mitt Romney and away from Obama – whom [Israeli PM Benjamin] Netanyahu despises personally and politically – that I can’t say. I’m not privileged to have inside information on Israeli intent, if they are going to try to hot up this chemical weapons scenario to create the rush toward war,” said Engdahl.“I think we’re going to see a huge escalation of all of this after the November elections and January oath of office of the next US president,” he concluded. “Obama doesn’t want this breaking into an open war before the election. The last thing American voters want to see is another Iraq or Afghanistan on their doorstep.”