Spain Busts Up Al Qaeda Network, Highlighting Western Schizophrenia

The BBC is reporting this morning that Spain has raided an Al Qaeda recruiting network responsible for sending fighters to Syria. The network is based in the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta and the Moroccan city of Fnideq.

This highlights the schizophrenia of the West regarding Syria. On the one hand there is an extensive anti-terrorism infrastructure built up over the last decade-plus to combat Al Qaeda and its affiliates, while on the other we are actively working to enhance terrorist networks in a catastrophic quest to collapse the sovereign nation of Syria. In fact, Secretary of State John Kerry is in Qatar today to huddle with the Gulf Arab monarchies at the forefront of the effort to export jihad to Syria. (An interesting story on the Syrian Arab News Agency from yesterday alleges, based on documentary evidence, that Saudi Arabia is offering a general amnesty for criminals to fight in Syria.)

Last weekend on the Counterpunch web site, Franklin Lamb published a story taking the temperature on Capitol Hill. He interviewed his Congressional-staffer contacts and the opinion was that a no-fly zone was an inevitability, and with a no-fly zone comes all-out war. So the prevailing wisdom was that shortly, possibly a matter of months, the United States would be in a full-scale military conflict with Syria.

Fox is reporting this morning that a bipartisan group of senators led by Kentucky's Rand Paul is trying to block Obama from sending military aid to the rebels.

Rick Gladstone has a story in the New York Times this morning about the Philippines threatening to withdraw its peacekeepers from the Golan Heights unless they are supplied with heavy weapons, antitank and antiaircraft guns, by the United Nations. The Times over the last several days has reduced its coverage of the Syrian civil war.

Patrick Cockburn has a story in The Independent from a couple days back that is worth checking out. He says that Damascus is more peaceful today than it was six months ago. "Assad's forces have a tight grip on 13 out of 14 provincial capitals and increasingly hold the main roads between them." The population is tired of war and have no sympathy for the rebels who shoot children and eat the hearts of fallen soldiers. Cockburn says the government's strategy seems to be a slow encirclement of the rebels. It seems to be working.

I think it's already obvious to anyone paying attention that the West is engaging in an obscenity by supporting the fatwas of Wahhabi clerics. Soon, when the only rebel military strategy left will be suicide attacks, this obscenity will be even more glaring.