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Thursday, January 17, 2013

MEDITERRANEAN A GEOPOLITICALLY IMPORTANT SEA


NATO funding, arming, while simultaneously fighting Al Qaeda from Mali to Syria


A deluge of articles have been quickly put into circulation defending France’s military intervention in the African nation of Mali. TIME’s article, “The Crisis in Mali: Will French Intervention Stop the Islamist Advance?” decides that old tricks are the best tricks, and elects the tiresome “War on Terror” narrative.TIME claims the intervention seeks to stop “Islamist” terrorists from overrunning both Africa and all of Europe. Specifically, the article states:
“…there is a (probably well-founded) fear in France that a radical Islamist Mali threatens France most of all, since most of the Islamists are French speakers and many have relatives in France. (Intelligence sources in Paris have told TIME that they’ve identified aspiring jihadis leaving France for northern Mali to train and fight.) Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), one of the three groups that make up the Malian Islamist alliance and which provides much of the leadership, has also designated France — the representative of Western power in the region — as a prime target for attack.”
What TIME elects not to tell readers is that Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is closely allied to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG whom France intervened on behalf of during NATO’s 2011 proxy-invasion of Libya – providing weapons, training, special forces and even aircraft to support them in the overthrow of Libya’s government.
As far back as August of 2011, Bruce Riedel out of the corporate-financier funded think-tank, the Brookings Institution, wrote “Algeria will be next to fall,” where he gleefully predicted success in Libya would embolden radical elements in Algeria, in particular AQIM. Between extremist violence and the prospect of French airstrikes, Riedel hoped to see the fall of the Algerian government. Ironically Riedel noted:
Algeria has expressed particular concern that the unrest in Libya could lead to the development of a major safe haven and sanctuary for al-Qaeda and other extremist jihadis.
And thanks to NATO, that is exactly what Libya has become – a Western sponsored sanctuary for Al-Qaeda. AQIM’s headway in northern Mali and now French involvement will see the conflict inevitably spill over into Algeria. It should be noted that Riedel is a co-author of “Which Path to Persia?” which openly conspires to arm yet another US State Department-listed terrorist organization (list as #28), the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) to wreak havoc across Iran and help collapse the government there – illustrating a pattern of using clearly terroristic organizations, even those listed as so by the US State Department, to carry out US foreign policy.Geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar noted a more direct connection between LIFG and AQIM in an Asia Times piece titled, “How al-Qaeda got to rule in Tripoli:”
“Crucially, still in 2007, then al-Qaeda’s number two, Zawahiri, officially announced the merger between the LIFG and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM). So, for all practical purposes, since then, LIFG/AQIM have been one and the same – and Belhaj was/is its emir. “
“Belhaj,” referring to Hakim Abdul Belhaj, leader of LIFG in Libya, led with NATO support, arms, funding, and diplomatic recognition, the overthrowing of Muammar Qaddafi and has now plunged the nation into unending racist and tribal, genocidal infighting. This intervention has also seen the rebellion’s epicenter of Benghazi peeling off from Tripoli as a semi-autonomous “Terror-Emirate.” Belhaj’s latest campaign has shifted to Syria where he was admittedly on the Turkish-Syrian border  pledging weapons, money, and fighters to the so-called “Free Syrian Army,” again, under the auspices of NATO support.
Image: NATO’s intervention in Libya has resurrected listed-terrorist organization and Al Qaeda affiliate, LIFG. It had previously fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now has fighters, cash and weapons, all courtesy of NATO, spreading as far west as Mali, and as far east as Syria. The feared “global Caliphate” Neo-Cons have been scaring Western children with for a decade is now taking shape via US-Saudi, Israeli, and Qatari machinations, not “Islam.” In fact, real Muslims have paid the highest price in fighting this real “war against Western-funded terrorism.”
….
LIFG, which with French arms, cash, and diplomatic support, is now invading northern Syria on behalf of NATO’s attempted regime change there, officially merged with Al Qaeda in 2007 according to the US Army’s West Point Combating Terrorism Center (CTC). According to the CTC, AQIM and LIFG share not only ideological goals, but strategic and even tactical objectives. The weapons LIFG received most certainly made their way into the hands of AQIM on their way through the porous borders of the Sahara Desert and into northern Mali.
In fact, ABC News reported in their article, “Al Qaeda Terror Group: We ‘Benefit From’ Libyan Weapons,” that:
A leading member of an al Qaeda-affiliated terror group indicated the organization may have acquired some of the thousands of powerful weapons that went missing in the chaos of the Libyan uprising, stoking long-held fears of Western officials.”We have been one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions in the Arab world,” Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a leader of the north Africa-based al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [AQIM], told the Mauritanian news agency ANI Wednesday. “As for our benefiting from the [Libyan] weapons, this is a natural thing in these kinds of circumstances.”
It is no coincidence that as the Libyan conflict was drawing to a conclusion, conflict erupted in northern Mali. It is part of a premeditated geopolitical reordering that began with toppling Libya, and since then, using it as a springboard for invading other targeted nations, including Mali, Algeria, and Syria with heavily armed, NATO-funded and aided terrorists.
French involvement may drive AQIM and its affiliates out of northern Mali, but they are almost sure to end up in Algeria, most likely by design.
Algeria was able to balk subversion during the early phases of the US-engineered “Arab Spring” in 2011, but it surely has not escaped the attention of the West who is in the midst of transforming a region stretching from Africa to Beijing and Moscow’s doorsteps – and in a fit of geopolitical schizophrenia – using terrorists both as a casus belli to invade and as an inexhaustible mercenary force to do it.
By Tony Cartalucci

Politics and Religion in Iraq and Syria: What is the Ba’ath Party?


The Ba’ath Party was made famous in the West by the late Iraqi dictator and one-time ally of the United States Saddam Hussein[1]. It is largely regarded in the West as something to be associated with the most “evil of evils” since the 1991 Gulf War.
As NATO/GCC backed mercenaries and ultra-conservative Islamic militias battle the Government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Ba’ath Party is once more a phrase that is popping up in the Western mainstream media, mentioned in the kind of tones one would associate with when referring to Nazi Germany. But what exactly is the Ba’ath Party? How did it start? What does it actually stand for? And why are Western media consumers nagged into blind opposition against it by their leaders and the mainstream media?
The Ba’ath Party began in Syria in April 1947, formed by the merging of Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar’s Arab Ba’ath Movement and Zaki al-Arsuzi’s Arab Ba’ath. The newly formed Party’s objectives were secularism, socialism, and pan-Arab unification, as well as freedom from Western influence.[2] To that end, the Party was influential in securing independence for Syria from France, and took control of the country in 1963, holding it ever since. However, all was not plain sailing for the Party in the early days, with bitter in-fighting between progressive elements and those of a more nationalist flavour. Eventually, the nationalists won control, bringing the al-Assads to power.
In July 1968, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, predecessor to Saddam Hussein, led the Ba’ath Party to victory in a bloodless coup in Iraq. The Party ruled Iraq until Hussein’s overthrow by the United States and its Coalition of the Willing in 2003 under the pretext that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 2001 attacks on the US, that he had weapons of mass destruction, that he was ready to use them and could do so in forty five minutes, and various other excuses that, at best, have turned out to be outright lies.
After Hussein’s regime was toppled by the Coalition, the Ba’ath Party was outlawed in Iraq, an act which some suggest helped fuel Sunni elements of the insurgency that followed.
And now, it seems, decision-makers in the West have decided that it is the turn of Syria’s Ba’athists to fall. While many could look at Iraq and say with great confidence that Iraq was a resource grab targeting Iraq’s oil, as well as a money making exercise for mercenary companies, arms manufacturers, mega-corporations like Halliburton and its subsidiaries, and the banking cartels, Syria is different. Syria produces oil, yes, but nowhere near the scale that Iraq does.
Syria’s closeness with Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah will obviously stand out as a reason why the US, Israel, the EU, and the GCC want Assad’s government gone. But factoring in the Ba’ath Party’s three objectives of secularism, socialism, and pan-Arab unification, we see more ideological reasons, as well as the motivation for the militias operating under the Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood umbrellas.
Starting with pan-Arab unification, one is reminded of the line “united we stand, divided we fall”. A united Arab people is an idea that is utterly intolerable to the colonialists of the West, who rely on division and playing indigenous peoples off against each other to get their way in the region, allowing the blood to flow while they go about their business.
A fine example of this can be found in the incident in 2005, when heavily armed British SAS soldiers were captured in Basra, Iraq, after shooting at police officers while dressed as locals.[3] It appears that the British were hoping to provoke a response from locals who would blame their particular demographic’s main ‘rival’ demographic and seek revenge. And with the West’s propensity for false flag attacks, one may well ask just how many of the countless bombings, shootings, and similar atrocities that the Iraqi populace suffered – and are still suffering today – were in fact the responsibility of covert Western agents playing the divide and conquer game.
Socialism is obviously not something the West’s capitalist masters will tolerate. Great effort has been made to nullify the threat that ‘socialism’ poses to the current paradigm in the West, as we can see with centre-left mainstream parties in Britain, France and so on becoming centre-left in name only, their policies and actions undermining their marketing. Grass roots left-wing political organisations are largely marginalised in the national political discourses of the major powers of NATO. Western media outlets tailored to consumers of a conservative bent spend a lot of time and effort scaremongering over socialism.
Leftist, socialist, communist, Maoist, Marxist, Leninist, and so on are phrases that are used to induce negative responses and as shortcuts to winning public debates by conservatives, regardless of the differences in actual meaning between the terms. Many conservatives in the West, particularly in the United States, equate the word socialism with the spectre of the Soviet Union, its mere utterance enough to cause many over a certain age flashbacks of the Cold War.
And then there is secularism, an idea abhorrent to Saudi Arabia and the US client-emirates, as well as the ultra-conservative Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, who dominate the rebel movement in Syria.[4] Saudi Arabia is one of the foremost exporters of radical Islamic ideology in the world, and has a human rights record that makes medieval Europe look positively progressive in nature.
Meanwhile, Western leaders are happy for ignorance to flourish at home, and with many media consumers in the NATO bloc mistakenly assuming that all Arabs are Muslim, it may come as a surprise to many that among the founders of the Ba’ath party, Michel Aflaq was actually Greek Orthodox Christian, while al-Bitar was Sunni Muslim, and al-Arsuzi was an Alawite. This same ignorance is what allows Israel to portray its systematic violence against the Palestinians as defending Judaism against Islam to Western audiences. You will rarely hear about secular and Christian Palestinians, and even less the Druze, from the mainstream media.
As it has often been said, it does not serve the governments of the West to have an informed public who may actually question the official narrative that they are fed by the vast propaganda/infotainment machine of the US and Europe if they knew a little more about the history and the motivations behind world events.
And while the primary motivation behind the attempt to topple the Ba’ath Party in Syria may be for the strategic benefit of the Israelis and the US in their quest against Iran, there are other motivating factors that should not be ignored, for they help us to see a more complete picture.
Notes
1. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/18/1029114048796.html
2. http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/history/baath-party.html
3. http://www.globalresearch.ca/british-uncover-operation-in-basra-agents-provocateurs/990
4. http://www.globalresearch.ca/unmasking-the-muslim-brotherhood-syria-egypt-and-beyond/5315406
By Jason Langley

source globalresearch canada


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