U.S. Position on Syria Becoming Untenable: How Long Can Obama Keep the Spotlight from Shining on Saudi Arabia?

How do you publish a lengthy feature on the growth of ISIS, as the Gray Lady does today with Ian Fisher's "In Rise of ISIS, No Single Missed Key but Many Strands of Blame," and barely -- maybe once or twice in passing -- mention Saudi Arabia?

It is ludicrous, but it goes directly to the heart of the U.S. position on the war in Syria. Obama is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. On the one side, he has repeatedly dismissed the seriousness of Islamic State, insisting the caliphate is an epiphenomenon of Assad's brutally; that once Assad is ushered off the stage, then the dove of peace will descend and all will set about to the righteous path. On the other side, Obama has warned of toppling the Syrian government militarily, for chaos a la Libya will reign in the absence of Baathist rule.

So what you have is a policy of slow-motion regime change where the U.S. is facilitating as best it can, according to the wishes of its partners in the GCC, a victory of jihadist forces over the Syrian government, while simultaneously hoping that the situation doesn't get too out of control.

But the situation is clearly out of control and it has been for years. It is only when a European capital city comes under assault that most people in the West suddenly appear to have arisen from slumber and started to demand answers. Of course prior to Paris, there was Beirut, Sharm el Sheikh, Ankara, etc., not to mention the huge influx of refugees to Europe from the greater Middle East.

That's why on Monday Obama was riddled with skeptical questions from reporters at the G20 conference in Turkey. In that appearance before the press (Michael Shear and Peter Baker,
"Obama Says Strategy to Fight ISIS Will Succeed") Obama contradicted his CIA chief John Brennan by saying that the Paris terror attack was not all that sophisticated but more a product of ideology, before reasserting the canard that ISIS flourished in the vacuum created by the war in Syria:

At his news conference here, Mr. Obama sounded weary as he repeatedly rejected criticism of his yearlong strategy. Wrapping up 48 hours of diplomacy in this Turkish resort community on the Mediterranean Sea, the president seemed frustrated by second-guessing and twice chided reporters for asking the same question in slightly different ways. 

He denied underestimating the Islamic State, saying that the group’s attacks have not been particularly sophisticated. “If you have a handful of people who don’t mind dying, they can kill a lot of people,” he said. “That’s one of the challenges of terrorism. It’s not their sophistication or the particular weaponry that they possess. But it is the ideology they carry with them and their willingness to die.” [But whose ideology is it? It is Saudi Wahhabism.]

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In the end, he said, the strategy will choke off the Islamic State’s financing, cut off its supply lines and reinforcements and make it harder to hold territory. Along with a diplomatic solution to the Syrian civil war that provided a vacuum for the Islamic State to fill, “that ultimately is going to be what’s going to make a difference,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “and it’s going to take some time.” 

But who created that vacuum of war? The U.S. and its allies did.

If you want a "man on a galloping horse" perspective on the war in Syria, straight with no bullshit, consult Abel Bari Atwan's interview yesterday on Democracy Now!:

You know, Saudi Arabia is the origin of radicalism, Islamic radicalism, in the Middle East and the whole world and the whole Islamic world. Why? Because al-Qaeda ideology—sorry, Islamic State ideology is the same Wahhabi ideology which adopted by the Saudi kingdom. This is—you know, they go back to the time of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in 1704, you know, so they are doing—doing exactly the same. They are doing in Syria and Iraq this brutality, this savagery, the Wahhabism of the Saudi regime in 1705 and ’06, when they actually invaded Karbala and Najaf. They committed the same massacres.

So, Saudi Arabia, actually, now, they are—they are, actually, with Qatar and with Turkey. They have some sort of alliance. And they started the problem in Syria. They poured billions in Syria, hoping to topple the Assad regime for personal revenge, not for political means, not for actually, you know, a strategic move from their side. They just want to take revenge, personal revenge, because Assad insulted them in a way or another, and also because they thought that they can topple him in a few weeks, few months maximum. So they poured billions of weapons. And also, they encouraged a hundred—sorry, tens of thousands of volunteers to go through Turkey to Syria to fight against the Assad regime.

I would add that the Saudis and Turks have strategic objectives. They want to make sure after the deal with the West on its nuclear program that the Iranians do not have stable allies in Iraq and Syria. 

The Metrojet Airbus and the New Cold War

What we get when we read the news is not what is really going on. We get a general picture, almost like clip art, and then a large, elaborate, well-constructed frame to adorn the picture and shape how we perceive it.

If you read the news every day, attempt to follow the presentation of the clip art, you develop a kind of sixth sense when something is awry. And something is definitely awry when it comes to the story of the Russian charter jet that blew apart the weekend before last over the Sinai, killing all 224 on board.

At first, all officials -- from Russia, Egypt, the United States, Britain -- denied that the Airbus A321-200 could have been downed by a terrorist attack. Why? Because Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, Islamic State's affiliate in the Sinai, allegedly doesn't possess surface-to air missiles capable of reaching the altitude of an Airbus jetliner.

But the weakness of that argument is the assumption that the only way a terrorist can strike is with a missile.

Then there were several-days worth of stories chock full of MacGuffins about the structural integrity of the Metrojet Airbus, its previously repaired tail section, the shoddy nature of Russian commercial aviation, etc.

During this time you had the Pentagon interjecting anonymously -- why? -- that it had satellite imagery showing a flash emanating from the plane which pointed to an explosion; meanwhile Russian and Egyptian officials maintained their ludicrous denials of foul play.

Finally the dam broke when the U.K. suspended flights to the Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh after concluding a bomb blew apart the Russian charter jet. The Brits started shuttling their nationals out of the Sinai peninsula with the plane cargo holds empty. What does that tell you?

Obama performed an about-face and said terrorism could very well have brought down the Metrojet. Over the weekend the storyline shifted to a "those wacky Egyptians and their lax security" theme. Now it is broadly acknowledged that a bomb smuggled aboard the Airbus, as Michael Schmidt reports in "Consensus Grows for Bomb as Cause of Russian Jet Crash, Officials Say," was the cause of the crash.

Where most regular news consumers immediately assumed foul play, the mainstream media at the behest of their official minders in government took their readers, listeners and viewers on a week-long wild goose chase. Why?

Because something is happening here. Tectonic plates are shifting and realigning. I am of the opinion that Western-style democracy in the industrial core is getting harder for the power brokers to manage (look at the U.S. presidential campaign). Watching the NFL games yesterday, I have never seen such a mixing of the military with popular sports. Coaches and players wore camouflage gear on the sidelines. It is an homage to Veterans Day, but it runs far deeper than that, as the report, "Tackling Paid Patriotism," of Arizona senators John McCain and Jeff Flake makes clear. The Pentagon pays millions to have sports teams honor the military. This is fascism of course.

But the Pentagon needs to spend that money in order to maintain support for all its foreign interventions, such as bolstering its troop presence in Europe.

Russia is making its own play, and not just with its forceful intervention in Syria. Pepe Escobar makes the case in "What’s the Big Deal Between Russia and the Saudis?" that Russia is negotiating with its enemies al-Saud and Turkey on oil and pipelines. While Mike Whitney argues in "Turkey Goes to War" that a post-landslide-election Erdogan is still aiming to establish a buffer zone in northern Syria with Turkish troops.

When everything appears to be in flux -- the G20 meeting in Turkey this weekend should be interesting -- stick with the obvious. The Russian charter jet was obviously brought down by a terrorist attack. The jihadis have not been successful  in bringing down commercial jets with on-board bombs, as Michael Schmidt points out:

If the Islamic State was behind the crash, it was able to mount the kind of attack that Al Qaeda has found difficult to carry out in recent years. At least three times since 2009, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has come close but failed to bring down an airliner using bombs that were designed to be undetectable. 

Western intelligence officials have feared that the Islamic State has larger ambitions for attacks outside Syria and Iraq — where it seized large stretches of land in 2014 — especially after the United States and Russia began separate military operations against the group.

Why now? And why didn't the jihadis go after the United States? The U.S. has purportedly been bombing ISIS longer than Russia.

Bombs in cargo holds reek of spy craft, double agents and intelligence agencies. If the British were able to make a determination of terrorism because they intercepted chatter about the Metrojet explosion, they either knew that it was going to happen or knew that an ally agency was running the operation. This was definitely a tit-for-tat attack in the New Cold War.

Anti-War Sentiment Remains Strong

As time moves on and we get closer to a vote in Congress on an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) Obama and his war cabinet are running up against two major impediments to an attack on Syria. First, public opinion is dead set against the folly of another military campaign. Charles Blow, a staunch Obama liberal, in an opinion piece this morning, "The Era of Disbelief," traces the post-9/11 history that has delivered the electorate's current anti-war "hive mind." It is backed up by a Jeremy Peters story, "Obama Faces Barrier in His Own Party on Syria," that captures the absence of any solid bloc of support in the Democratic caucus for Obama's warmongering. Elijah Cummings, former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and current member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says Obama's got more work to do in convincing the public.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, who represents a district that includes parts of Baltimore and has not decided how he stands on attacking Syria, said the pressure from his constituents to oppose the president’s plan is unmistakable. When he visited a grocery store on Wednesday, he said, almost a dozen people told him they thought intervening in Syria was a bad idea. None of them expressed support. 

“If you’ve got 95 percent of them saying one thing, it becomes far more difficult to go against them,” he said, adding that the president needed to make a more forceful and convincing case to the public if he wanted Congressional consent for an attack. “As a good friend of his and someone who supports him, I think he’s got to help the Congress help him.”

Which brings us to the second major impediment to a rush to war: the press is starting to do its job. If the administration's bum rush, which began this past Sunday with Secretary of State John Kerry's appearance on cable news and has been going non-stop backed by a steady stream of support from allied intelligence services, has yet to make a dent in anti-war sentiment then it is unlikely, given a growing skepticism in certain segments of the fourth estate for some of Kerry's pronouncements, that any new revelations of Syrian regime barbarity will make a difference. As an example of the press beginning to examine some of the incongruities of Obama administration's case against the Assad government, see Colum Lynch's "U.S. dismisses U.N. inspections in Syria of alleged chemical weapons sites":

Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. inspector who headed the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, said he finds it “ironic” that the Obama administration finds itself on similar ground as the Bush administration, which also decided to bypass the work of U.N. inspectors in Iraq. 

“It’s odd that they are dismissing the United Nations,” he said. 

“By going through the U.N., you subject yourself to the vagaries of that schedule,” Duelfer said. “Certainly it will take time for inspectors to develop results of the analysis of these samples. But the utility of that is it is seen as credible in the international community.” 

Duelfer acknowledged that it’s possible that U.N. inspections could provide a muddy picture of what happened in Syria. Some of the evidence, according to diplomatic officials, may point to exposure of Syrian security forces — Russia and Syria could claim that it proves rebel forces used chemical weapons, but British, French and American officials could contend that it was the result of misfired rockets hitting the government’s own troops. 

Still, Duelfer disputed the U.S. contention that it is too late to collect credible evidence. The science of inspections, he said, has advanced so that traces of chemical weapons agents can be obtained years after an attack.

Then there is today's story by C.J. Chivers, "Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West," which directly addresses the lie told by Kerry in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing the other day that the moderate elements of the opposition are on the rise. Hopefully Chivers' piece will get some play on the big search engine news pages.

The warhawks backed by their cheerleaders in the media waxed mightily the last three-four days. Things started to shift yesterday thanks to stubborn anti-war sentiment in the United States. With Obama likely to take a drubbing at the G20 meeting in St. Petersburg, support for the administration's warmongering will continue to wane. Keep a skeptical watch out for breaking news of incendiary claims as the warhawks realize that they don't have the votes in the House for the AUMF.