First thoughts on the Saudi-Iranian conflict: is an attack on Iranian forces in Syria next?

775 ViewsJanuary 04, 2016 5 Comments

First and foremost, a disclaimer: I don’t normally comment on an event right after it has happened, if only because in most cases the key information needed to make an evaluation is missing.  In this case, however, I am confident that three things are already obvious:

First, the murder by the Saudi Wahabis of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and 46 other Shia was a deliberately planned provocation.  The Saudis knew, knew full well, that it would result in an explosion of rage in the Shia world.  Not only that, but the timing was also carefully chosen.

President Rouhani strongly condemns the attacks

Second, and no matter how deliberate the provocation was, the Iranians, sadly, did walk directly into the Saudi trap.  Yes, I know,  crowds are unpredictable, the local cops and riot police probably shared the same outrage, in the past, embassies were also attacked in other countries too (Russia, China), and President Rouhani unambiguously condemned these events and promised that every single rioter would be found and punished, but the fact remains that the Iranians did fall into the Saudi trap by failing to protect the Saudi diplomatic buildings (which was their legal obligation) and thereby gave the Saudis the perfect excuse.

Third, even if Iran did screw up, the Saudi reaction is ridiculously out of proportion and this clearly indicates that this was a carefully staged provocation aimed at creating a new, and extremely dangerous, crisis in the Middle-East.

Now let’s look at the bigger picture:

• Daesh is in trouble in Syria and, possibly, in Iraq
• The Saudis are in trouble in Yemen
• Turkey has committed a huge mistake in shooting down the Russian SU-24
• The Saudis have just created an anti-Shia military force (their so-called “anti-terrorist Islamic force) which includes no less that 34 countries!
• Other Wahabi run states (such as Bahrain, Sudan and the UAE) are now joining the KSA in its anti-Iranian stance

In my opinion there is a good probability that these events are all the staging process of an attack against Iran, but not on Iran’s territory, but in Syria.  I doubt that the Wahabis would dare to attack Iran directly simply because there is no way for them to defeat Iran.  Not only is the Iranian military vastly superior to anything these Wahabi fat cats could deploy, but the geography of Iran makes this country really impossible to defeat.  If the Saudis and their Wahabi allies cannot even defeat the Yemenis, they are light-years away from being able to take on a sophisticated major regional military power like Iran (not to mention that an insurrection of Shia in Bahrain could give Tehran a perfect pretext to intervene). So no, I don’t see the Saudis taking on Iran frontally.

But what they can do is to attempt to attack the (much smaller) Iranian force in Syria.  Under the guise of an anti-terrorist operation the Gulf monarchies could justify sending even more troops and weapons to Daesh and further exploit the numerical advantage Daesh has over the Syrian forces.  Considering what they did to the Russian airliner over the Sinai, I would not even put past these crazies to hope to maybe attack the tiny Russian ground force currently deployed in Syria.  All that’s needed to this hellish combo is to have the Turks declare some “safe zone” and openly bring in their forces into northern Syria.

Okay – maybe I am paranoid (I am!).  But when I see how deliberately the Saudis engineered their provocation and now how smoothly they then ridiculously over-reacted, I get very, very nervous indeed.

I have always said that, besides Israel, the craziest and most dangerous countries in the region are Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. To see two of them so deeply committed to an escalation is, I submit, very worrisome.

And that brings me back to something I wrote in my latest report about the Russian military intervention in Syria: Iran has taken a huge risk in getting militarily involved.  It appears that the Wahabi crazies, whether egged on by Uncle Sam or not (probably yes), have decided to make Iran pay for its role.

Not good.

So for all the conciliatory words of Biden & Co. in Moscow, it appears that the AngloZionists are, yet again, doubling down and going yet on another offensive.

I have an extremely high opinion of the Iranian leadership, which has shown tremendous wisdom and caution in the past, and I trust that they will take the necessary steps to deny the Saudis what they want.  But one thing is for sure: the new year 2016 begins with some very bad developments.

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January 04, 2016

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Poland: Raid on NATO linked Counterintelligence Centre in Warsaw

Is NATO’s European honeymoon on the rocks?

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist based in Moscow, Russia. His articles have been featured in many publications, including Russia in Global Affairs, The Moscow Times, Russia Insider and Infowars.com. Bridge is the author of the book on corporate power, “Midnight in the American Empire”, which was released in 2013.

Get short URL Published time: 1 Jan, 2016 16:38
Edited time: 1 Jan, 2016 17:39

Amid NATO’s non-stop campaign of overseas military misadventures, which are displacing millions of people and forcing them to EU shores, Europeans may be finally losing their patience with the military organization’s reckless ways.

The year 2015 came to a screeching, white-knuckle end for the 28-member states that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

As Europe struggles to accommodate a tidal wave of refugees escaping the blood and violence of its former colonial lands, right-wing parties are winning over the hearts and minds of Europeans who are increasingly wary of multiculturalism, neo-liberal reforms, austerity measures - and now, it seems, even NATO itself.

Just this month, Polish military police, accompanied by Antoni Macierewicz, the new defense minister of the newly elected Law and Justice Party, conducted a dramatic midnight raid on a NATO-linked counterintelligence center in Warsaw. Yes, you read that right: Polish authorities conducted a raid on a NATO-linked facility on their own territory.

According to the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, authorities entered the complex using a duplicate key and then unceremoniously dismissed the director in absentia, Col Krzysztof Dusza and replaced him with Col. Robert Bala. Dozens of other bureaucrats and assorted paper-shufflers were also relieved of their shadowy duties on the spot.

The former Polish defense minister Tomasz Siemoniak told reporters: “Nothing like this has happened in the history of NATO, where a member state attacks a NATO facility.”

One NATO official attempted to downplay the unprecedented event, calling the night raid “an issue for the Polish authorities.”

But clearly there is much more to the story than what the public is being told.

After all, what would cause a traditionally pro-Western country like Poland to ignore constitutional due process and risk relations with Brussels, NATO - not to mention the group’s top dog, Washington - by conducting a crack of dawn, neo-Nazi-style raid? For those who were surprised by Warsaw’s tough tactics fail to see which way the political winds are blowing not just in Poland, but across the EU.

Much of the winds of change howling through the streets of Europe can be connected to the failure of US foreign policy, and the repercussions that has had on the European status quo.

For much of Europe: No hope, no change

First, the promise of ‘hope and change’ that failed to materialize under US President Barack Obama has been a major letdown not just for millions of Americans, but for countless Europeans as well. On April 5, 2009, 20,000 people jammed in front of the Prague Castle to listen to America’s first black president seduce his audience with tele-prompted tales of peace, prosperity, non-proliferation and promises, promises and more promises.

In fact, Europe was so giddy about the arrival of Barack Obama that the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize just nine months into his first term as president. Today, the reality of the farce is painfully conspicuous: Guantanamo Bay detention facility is still open for business, Libya is in dire straits, while the US military is operating in Syria, albeit it with little or no effect on Islamic State, its proclaimed target.

Clearly, what Obama has delivered over the course of his two terms in office has been strikingly different from the advertisement. Instead of being relieved from the warmongering insanity of the Bush era, the world is still embroiled knee-deep in crisis – and in new places (Libya, Syria and Pakistan) that exploded on Obama’s watch, as well as in Russia, where the Kremlin wised up fast to the fairy tale known as ‘reset’ (The one bright spot in US foreign policy has been the Obama administration’s conclusion of a controversial nuclear deal with Iran, yet judging by recent events – which included the US Navy accusing Iran of firing missiles in proximity of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman in the Persian Gulf – charges Tehran has slammed as “psychological warfare”).

But the crisis now enveloping the world is not limited to those of a military nature: Ever since the 2008 Financial Crisis, the worst economic setback since the Great Depression, Europe has been mired in dismal economic growth and high unemployment, compounded by an insane influx of millions of refugees that are only serving to erode Europe’s financial prospects, to say nothing about demographics.

And in order to ‘cure’ the disease of insolvency, many once-proud, self-sufficient European countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, to name a few) are forced to rely on impossible-to-return loans from the very same global bankers that wrecked these national economies in the first place (the fact that only isolated Iceland was politically independent enough to punish its bankers and restructure its economy without suicidal austerity measures proves that Europe is under the influence of powers far beyond the control of democratic procedure).

The lesson that Europeans learned was an old one: ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ Ever since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Washington (and by extension, NATO) has only delivered Europe a series of global military debacles that the Old World – already suffering under the brutal dictate of IMF debt and World Bank measures – can now ill afford. Now toss a few million desperate refugees into the mix and you have awakened the raw spirit of right-wing political parties – from Le Pen’s Front National in France to Golden Dawn in Greece.

The Financial Times, sympathizing with the neo-liberal globalists, summed up the scenario that is playing itself out in national elections across the EU: “All over the world, globalisation is under challenge from resurgent nationalist forces. One of the great political challenges of the coming year will be to defend the benefits of globalisation — while fending off the arguments of nationalists such as Mrs Le Pen, Donald Trump in the US and his new admirer, President Vladimir Putin of Russia.”

FT failed to mention, of course, that globalization thus far has been a boon for the transnational corporations and a total bust for the denizens of the global village.

Personally, I can’t imagine that, in a situation where nearly every US foreign policy initiative over the last 15 years has resulted in utter chaos and catastrophe, the European people (still highly educated despite biting austerity) will fail to correctly add two-plus-two and conclude that NATO as an institution designed to defend their interests is also failing them in dramatic fashion.

The Western military bloc continues to agitate Russia, pushing smack against the very border of NATO’s Cold War nemesis, while recklessly hampering one of Europe's most reliable trading partners.

The Cold War, according to reliable history books, has been over for about a quarter-of-a-century, yet the Western military bloc continues to incite Russia with clearly threatening moves, most notably the US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, which Russia has warned will upset the strategic balance and invoke a new arms race.

But judging by the frustration and even anger of many European people, which is manifesting itself in the rise of far-right movements that are serving up the heady cocktail of national patriotism and economic protectionism, NATO’s European honeymoon really may be hitting the rocks.

In addition to the Polish midnight raid on the NATO-linked center comes this news: German politicians slammed the Merkel government as well as NATO command after it emerged that German troops will be sent to help NATO-member Turkey defend its border - without notifying parliamentarians in the Bundestag.

"The government must immediately inform parliament of the details of this deployment, in particular what missions will be assigned to these planes and the destination of any data they collect," Tobias Lindner, the Green party's head of defense issues, stated in the German daily Bild.

Yet Berlin - sounding every bit as arrogant and self-important as Washington these days - declared it has no intention of consulting the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament for approval.

The unilateral, undemocratic transfer of German troops (units of the AWACS data-collecting aircraft) on the part of NATO and the Merkel government comes amid smoldering tensions ever since Ankara shot down a Russian fighter jet that Turkey claims entered its airspace for a whole 17 seconds.

Although these two events in two major European countries may be nothing more than mere blips on the radar screen concerning NATO's relationship with Europe, they could also be warning signals of an approaching earthquake in which the steady encroachment of nationalistic political demands begin to seriously clash with NATO's global objectives, which, at this stage, don't seem remotely concerned with the true well-being and security of the European people.

@Robert_Bridge
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/327660-natos-european-honeymoon-hitting/

Syria Shatters Pentagon Dream

Pepe ESCOBAR | 16.12.2015 | 00:00

No wonder Full Spectrum Dominance practitioners in the Beltway and beyond are consumed by deep denial. They look at the Syrian chessboard and as power projection goes, they see Russia comfortably settling down, with a serious land and air base, to conduct all sorts of operations across MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) in the near future. The Pentagon obviously never saw it coming.  And that’s just the beginning. Further on down the road there’s bound to be increased military interaction between Russia, China and Iran across Southwest Asia. The Pentagon qualifies Russia, China and Iran – the key nodes of Eurasia integration – as threats.  Russia getting deeper into Syria – and in the long run MENA – progresses just as Moscow insists on dealing with assorted NATO members as «partners» in the war against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Some stab Moscow in the back, like Turkey. Some may share sensitive military intel, like France. Some may profess the desire to collaborate, like Britain. And some are a geyser of ambiguity, like the US. Amidst all the ambiguities, «partners» could not be a more delightfully diplomatic way to mask what is a stunning fact in the skies: with its current mix of sophisticated surface-to-air, sea-to-air and air-to-air defenses, from cruise missiles launched out of submarines to the S-400s, the de facto no-fly zone over Syria is now decided by Moscow – not Washington and much less Ankara.  Pick your coalition Those S-400s, by the way, will soon move up north around the vastly complex Aleppo theatre, as the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) progressively gains ground. In the first half of 2016 we should be contemplating a situation where the S-400s will be targeting and covering the whole Turkish-Syrian border. This will be the moment when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will completely lose his marbles. Russia’s air cover for the SAA advances – and soon Syrian Kurd YPG advances – is methodically preparing the terrain for the end of all Ankara’s elaborate plans for a no-fly zone disguised as a «safe zone», fully paid by the 3 billion euros disbursed by the EU to Turkey to settle Syrian refugees. So the logic in the battlefield from now on is clear; the Turkmen – Ankara’s fifth column, heavily infiltrated by Turkish Islamo-fascists – are being pushed back to Turkish territory, all across the spectrum. And the YPG will soon have a chance to unite all three Syrian Kurdish cantons across the border. When that happens, call it, in a nutshell, the victory of one coalition – the «4+1» (Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq plus Hezbollah) – against another (the pared-down NATO-GCC combo) in this surrealist war of two different coalitions against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.  And every Full Spectrum Dominance practitioner not blinded by ideology will clearly see why the «4+1» is winning; it’s a graphic case of a small but highly motivated and perfectly streamlined air force positioned in the right place with the right weapons and counting on good ground intel. The US-led coalition, which I chose to call Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO) have none of the above.  Team Mediocrity in action Washington is in a quagmire of its own making. And virtually everything has to do with the astonishing mediocrity of the Obama administration’s so-called «senior» foreign policy team.  Team Obama always neglected Erdogan’s love affair with Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria, as Ankara allowed their Jihad Express through the Turkish-Syrian border. And Team Obama always neglected ISIS/ISIL/Daesh’s Stolen Syrian Oil Express flowing via a huge, easily satellite-detectable fleet of truck tankers.  Team Obama was incapable of decoding NATO ally Turkey’s sleazy, slippery agenda; and in that they were hostages of Full Spectrum Dominance, as for the Pentagon Ankara is the proverbial «anchor of stability» and the key Full Spectrum Dominance pawn in the region. Thus Team Obama’s inability/incompetence in smashing those oil tanker convoys; Ankara’s feathers could not be possibly ruffled. Team Obama always neglected how Riyadh and Doha, directly, and then via «private donors» – coordinated by the notorious Bandar Bush in person – financed both al-Nusra and Daesh.  Instead, Team Obama rode the merry weaponizing of al-Nusra and Ahrar ash-Sham, via the CIA’s supplies to the Free Syrian Army (FSA); all those weapons were captured by al-Nusra and Ahrar ash-Sham. Team Obama, never surrendering to their own myopia, duly branded al-Nusra & co. «moderate rebels».  Team Obama always derided Iran as a «hostile» nation, a «threat» to the GCC vassals and Israel. So everyone allied or supported by Tehran was also «hostile» or a «threat»: the government in Damascus, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shi’ite militias trained by Iran, even the Houthis in Yemen.  And to top it off, there’s «Russian aggression», manifested in Ukraine, and then with Moscow «interfering» in Syria, via what was interpreted by Team Obama as a crude power play in the Eastern Mediterranean. Amidst all the current shadow play, the true test of the Obama administration’s intentions is whether the US coalition will really fight Daesh, al-Nusra and Ahrar ash-Sham (which harbors a lot of jihadists from Chechnya, Dagestan and Uzbekistan), with no reservations. This would imply Team Obama telling both Ankara and Riyadh, in no uncertain terms, to back off. No more Jihad Express. And no more weaponizing. Without these red lines, the Syrian «peace process» juggling between Vienna and New York does not even qualify as a joke. No one should be holding their breath. As no one should be reasonably expecting that an astonishing mediocre, lame duck Team Obama would have the balls to confront Wahhabism as the true ideological matrix of all strands of Salafi jihadism, «moderate rebels» included.   Which brings us back to all that angst simmering across the Beltway. With or without Team Obama, the fact remains: no conquered – or at least balkanized – Syria, no Full Spectrum Dominance.

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/16/syria-shatters-pentagon-dream.html

Tags: Pentagon Middle East Syria US