{"id":18044,"date":"2013-05-29T22:31:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-30T02:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=18044"},"modified":"2013-05-29T22:31:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-30T02:31:00","slug":"syria-endgame-approaching-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2013\/05\/syria-endgame-approaching-fast\/","title":{"rendered":"El desenlace de Siria se acerca r\u00e1pidamente."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"_56690395_moxkunln\"<\/a>by SHAMUS COOKE<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The Fate of the Middle East in the Balance<\/span><\/address>\n
\u00a0<\/address>\n

The tempo of events in Syria has accelerated in recent weeks.\u00a0The government forces have scored<\/span>\u00a0significant battlefield victories\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/span>over the rebels, and this has provoked a mixture of war provocations and peace offers from the U.S. and its anti-Assad allies.<\/span><\/p>\n

With Obama\u2019s blessing Israel fighter jets recently attacked Syria on three occasions; in one massive air strike on a military installation in Damascus 42 Syrian soldiers were killed. Shortly thereafter Obama finally agreed to a peace conference with Russia, which had been asking for such talks for months.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama is entering these talks from a weakened position; the Syrian government is winning the war against the U.S.-backed rebels, and success on the ground is the trump card of any peace talks.\u00a0Obama and the rebels are in no position to be demanding anything in Syria at the moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that Obama wants to avoid further humiliation in his Syria meddling by a last minute face-saving \u201cpeace\u201d deal.\u00a0It\u2019s equally likely, however, that these peace talks are a\u00a0clever diplomatic ruse, with war being the real intention.\u00a0It\u2019s not uncommon for peace talks to break down and be used as a justification for an intensification of war, since \u201cpeace was attempted but failed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And Obama has plenty of reasons to pursue more war:\u00a0 he would look incredibly weak and foolish if Syria\u2019s president were to stay in power after Obama\u2019s administration had already announced that Assad\u2019s regime was over and hand picked an alternative government of Syrian exiles that the U.S. \u2014 and other U.S. allies \u2014 were treating as the \u201clegitimate government of Syria.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how the<\/span>\u00a0BBC referred<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to Obama\u2019s Syrian puppet government:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 the Syrian opposition\u2019s political leadership \u2013 which wanders around international capitals attending conferences and making grand speeches \u2013 is not leading anyone. It barely has control of the delegates in the room with it, let alone the fighters in the field.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

If an unlikely peace deal is reached, these Syrian exiles \u2014 who only a tiny minority of the rebel fighters actually listen to \u2014 will be the ones to sign off on the deal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many politicians in the U.S. are still clamoring for war in Syria, based on the unproven accusation that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against the rebels. In actuality, however, the<\/span>\u00a0UN so far has only indicated that the exact opposite is true<\/span><\/a><\/span>: there is significant evidence the U.S.-backed rebels used chemical weapons against the Syrian government:<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course this fact only made the back pages of the U.S.media, if it appeared at all.\u00a0Similarly bad news about the U.S.-backed rebels committing large scale<\/span>\u00a0ethnic\/religious cleansing<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0and numerous<\/span>\u00a0human rights violations<\/span>\u00a0<\/a>didn\u2019t manage to make it on to the front pages either.\u00a0And the numerous<\/span>\u00a0terrorist bombings<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0by the U.S.-backed rebels that have indiscriminately killed\u00a0civilians have likewise been largely ignored by U.S. politicians and the media.<\/span><\/p>\n

The U.S. position is weakened further by the fact that the majority of the rebel fighters are Islamic extremists, who are fighting for jihad and sharia law, not democracy.\u00a0The Guardian\u00a0<\/span>reported recently<\/span><\/a><\/span>:<\/p>\n

\u201cSyria\u2019s main armed opposition group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), is losing fighters and capabilities to Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist organization with links to al-Qaida that is emerging as the best-equipped, financed and motivated force fighting Bashar al-Assad\u2019s [Syrian] regime.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The<\/span>\u00a0New York Times<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0adds:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But even with all these barriers to the U.S. dictating its terms to the Syrian government, Obama has trump cards of his own: the U.S. and the Israeli military.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that the Israeli airstrikes on Syria were used as a bargaining chip with the proposed peace conference in Russia. If Obama threatened to bomb Syria into the Stone Age there is plenty of evidence \u2014Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya \u2014 to back up this threat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Following through with this kind of threat is actually considered intelligent foreign policy to many politicians in the U.S., since a country not aligned with the U.S. will have been weakened and fragmented as an opposing force, lowering the final barrier to war with Iran.<\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. foreign policy is now completely dependent on using the threat of annihilation. As U.S. economic power has declined in relation to China and other countries, the economic carrot has been tossed aside in favor of the military stick.\u00a0Plenty of U.S. foreign policy \u201cexperts\u201d are demanding that Obama unsheathe the stick again, lest this foundation of U.S. foreign policy be proven to be just talk and no action.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the essence of U.S. involvement in Syria, which is risking\u00a0regional war that could include Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Iran,\u00a0Jordan, and Saudi Arabia with the potential to drag in the bigger powers connected to these nations, the U.S. and Europe on one hand and Russia and China on the other.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fate of the already-suffering Middle East is hanging in the balance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by SHAMUS COOKE The Fate of the Middle East in the Balance \u00a0 The tempo of events in Syria has accelerated in recent weeks.\u00a0The government..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,21,84,189,97,119],"tags":[295,192,228,197,226,199,230,200,234,201,242,345,207,269,277,284],"class_list":["post-18044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","category-international","category-statements","category-us-military","category-us-news","category-war","tag-afghanistan","tag-china","tag-colonialism","tag-imperialism","tag-imperialist-war","tag-iran","tag-iraq","tag-israel","tag-jordan","tag-lebanon","tag-libya","tag-reactionary-watch","tag-russia","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-syria","tag-turkey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/56690395_moxkunln.jpg?fit=640%2C360&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}