‘Expect everything’: A new pretext to justify bombing Syria?

While the Obama administration pays lip service to the Russian solution, there is no reason to believe that Washington will take its finger off the trigger.

In a recent interview with CBS, Syrian President Bashar Assad warned that the United States should “expect everything” if it launches a military strike against Damascus, insinuating that the already highly combustible situation could genuinely spiral out of control if Washington escalated this war. The pictures coming out of Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 speak for themselves. A year after the killing of US Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was one of the principle coordinators of arms to the Libyan rebels (many of whom are now fighting in Syria on the side of the US), instability ensues in a chaotic post-regime change Libya. In the words of Hilary Clinton reflecting on last year’s attack, “How could this happen, how could this happen in a country we helped liberate?” It’s an easy question to answer – it happened as a result of unthinkably destructive and illegal US foreign policy that materially enabled terrorist groups to overthrow a government that Washington didn’t like.

The Obama administration clearly hasn’t learned its lesson, but as bombs rip through the Libyan city of Benghazi two years in a row, it's going to be even harder for Obama to sell this war not only to the public, but to his own government. Round two of Benghazi blowback raises numerous questions – we’re supposed to believe Washington’s intelligence that it knew Assad planned to use chemical weapons 3 days in advance and that its totally secret evidence, which it won’t reveal to anybody, is solid. It seems that US intelligence agencies are only adept at finding “evidence” that is amenable to their strategic foreign policy objectives, meanwhile they are totally incompetent when it comes to preventing terrorist attacks, from Benghazi to Boston. The Russian solution has succeed in getting warmonger Obama to backpedal on his bombs-for-peace proposal for the time being, even so, one should also “expect everything” from the rabid Washington regime that has poured enormous financial and diplomatic resources into bombing Syria and toppling Assad. In other words, expect a new pretext.

Washington clings to Moscow’s diplomatic life raft

Sergey Lavrov has made a bumbling fool of John Kerry, whose off-the-cuff “rhetorical statement,” that he arrogantly assumed would never be possible, was swiftly brought to fruition by the Russian Foreign Ministry. Just like that – Damascus pledged to hand over its chemical weapons to international supervisors and sign the Chemical Weapons Convention. One could make a score of analogies here, but put simply, this is a shining moment for Russian diplomacy, which has demonstrated that it is overpoweringly more competent than that foul “diplomacy” emanating from the US State Department – not to mention more compatible with the real international community (not the “international community” of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a few European finger puppets). Nobody can keep track of the Obama administration’s ‘forward pedaling-back pedaling’ position on Syria, and whatever credibility he had leftover from his multi-million dollar rock star hope & change campaign has been flushed. Even those lobotomized ‘Obama-zombies’ who voted for him in 2008 and 2012 now see the ugly neo-con behind the mask.

One can always trust “socialist” Papa Hollande and his barking poodle Laurent Fabius to toe Washington’s line at the United Nations, and the recently rejected Syria disarmament resolution is no different. In an unprecedented move, the resolution threatened Syria with military intervention under Chapter VII of the UN Charter if it did not comply. Russia immediately opposed the caveat to threaten Syria with military force that the frogs slipped into their resolution as President Putin reiterated that the disarmament would only work if the United States and others “tell us they’re giving up their plan to use force against Syria.” In Obama’s latest address to the nation, he reluctantly endorsed Russia’s disarmament proposal, but reiterated that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond with limited military action. It is not conceivable that the US would back down from its hostile stance; therefore there is every reason to believe that Washington will engineer a new atrocity to blame on Assad’s government to justify bombing Syria.

The only way to sell the war: Defending Israel

Sources recently told RT that the Syrian rebels, who vocally oppose the Russian solution and call on Obama to give them air-support, may launch a chemical attack on Israel from government-controlled territories as a “major provocation” to rubber stamp US intervention. Coming to the aid of this illegal apartheid fingernail of a state is the last resort of Assad’s opponents who are foaming at the mouth to bomb Syria, and they are crazy enough to do it. The regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv are cynical enough to invoke humanitarianism to intervene in Syria when they ignore the plight of neighboring Palestine, and they are pathological enough to use depleted uranium in Iraq and white phosphorus in Gaza while justifying a war based on phony evidence that Assad used chemical weapons. These are regimes that have demonstrated their own depravity and their ominous lack of empathy over the mass suffering and deaths of others, and everybody knows it.

It would be pretty difficult to stage a false flag chemical attack on Israel if Damascus starts getting rid of its chemical stockpiles, but one could imagine the unbridled hysteria of the Western and Israeli media, who will conjure up the horrors of Hitler’s gas chambers to destroy Assad, the du jour villain of the ‘free world’ – because the Obama administration said so. Be it with chemical or conventional weapons, the only pretext left in Obama’s arsenal is to come to the aid of Tel Aviv – and it will rope both Assad and Hezbollah into the equation if necessary. Recent history tells us those countries who are “rouge states” in the eyes of Washington usually get bitten when they disarm. One would imagine that the Russian solution only got off the ground because there is genuine trust between Damascus and Moscow – in other words, a defense pact of sorts must exist, and should if it doesn’t already. What happens when Washington and Tel Aviv overtly enter the war and topple Damascus? Ambassador Chris Stevens would probably say, “Expect everything.”

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.