War, Rinse, Repeat

The war the American people never wanted but our rulers started anyway has been waged for five years now. In 2013, President Obama tried to invade Syria in response to a false flag chemical attack designed to gin up public support and provide cover for invading. But the American people said no, and President Putin of Russia saved the day by orchestrating the removal of weapons of mass destruction from Syria, saving lives, American and Syrian, in the process.

But only temporarily.

After the Russians intervened in the war at the request Syrian President Assad, US rulers invaded anyway to save the terrorists. Since that time, every time the US is tempted to withdraw, another false flag attack is staged by the terrorists or their CIA handlers, and the announced withdraw is reversed.

Here we go again.

Following the instincts that got him elected and make him the least bad president in our lifetimes, President Trump recently ordered 2,000, supposedly all, US troops out of Syria.

We’ve seen this play out before, but this time it’s different. The Wall Street Journal reports, “In an abrupt reversal, the U.S. military is preparing to withdraw its forces from northeastern Syria, people familiar with the matter said Wednesday, a move that throws the American strategy in the Middle East into turmoil. U.S. officials began informing partners in northeastern Syria of their plans to begin immediately pulling American forces out of the region where they have been trying to wrap up the campaign against Islamic State, the people said.”

The key word here is abrupt. Trump blindsided his deep state adversaries with the order. I can’t help but laugh at the claim the US was planning to wrap up the campaign against ISIS as if it took five years. The reality is the Russians, Syrians, and Iranians crushed ISIS. US forces surrounded and protected their last enclave from them. US rulers don’t want them defeated. They want to use them to topple Assad as the first domino on the way to Tehran.

US deep state rulers melted down because Trump surprised them. NPR documents the extent of the meltdown. “Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, has announced his resignation, reportedly in protest of President Trump's decision this week to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria,” it reported.“News of McGurk's resignation came just two days after Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced he too was leaving the Trump administration. Mattis' resignation followed the abrupt announcement by President Trump on Wednesday that he was pulling all 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria.”

These resignations offer hope deep state rulers haven’t had time to set up another false flag yet. There’s no shortage of hubris among deep state rulers, so it’s possible they failed to plan for this order in advance. Speaking of hubris, the Middle East’s Al-Monitor reports, “Some current and former US officials faulted what they saw as overreach by administration Iran hawks, in particular US Syria envoy Jim Jeffrey and his lieutenant, Joel Rayburn, the deputy assistant secretary of state for the Levant, who have argued publicly that US forces would not leave Syria until all Iranian forces had left.”

The hawks including uber-hawk National Security Advisor John Bolton set conditions which could never be met and would keep US troops in Syria forever. That was their plan all along. Fortunately, Trump saw though it and outmaneuvered them.

But there’s still some skepticism. Consortium News suggests several reasons we shouldn’t trust Trump’s announcement, not least of which is this: “...the U.S. is not closing down its military presence in Syria. It is digging in for an indefinite period, making Raqqa the equivalent of the Green Zone in Baghdad. By the official count, there are 503 U.S. troops stationed in the Islamic State’s former capital. Unofficially, according to The Washington Post and other press reports, the figure is closer to 4,000—twice the number that is supposed to represent a ‘full withdrawal’ from Syrian soil.”

Still, the resignations suggest Trump’s surprise order upended those plans. Syrians and Americans should be wary of a new false flag terrorist attack.

Syria isn’t Trump’s only victory against US empire-builders who wish to rule the world. Michael Rozeff notes, “Trump is withdrawing American forces from Syria. He is withdrawing thousands of American forces from Afghanistan too, and he is talking to the Taliban. Trump has stopped refueling Saudi airplanes against Yemen. Trump is negotiating with North Korea.”

Trump also resists starting a war with Russia in Ukraine, and he’s reevaluating the US role in supporting Saudi Arabia’s mass murder in Yemen. If he succeeds in these efforts, the US and the world will become more peaceful and safer.

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Obama Gets His War

Great Pharaoh, who, in his role as god on earth, was going to reverse the centuries-long rise of the oceans, finally got his divine war in Syria. Just last year President Obama announced he was going to bomb Syria back to the stone age to help rebels oust Syrian President Assad. This was in response to a chemical weapons attack attributed to Assad but which turned out to be a false flag attack carried out by the rebels. War-weary Americans overwhelmingly rose up and overruled Obama. Russian President Putin rescued Obama with a plan for Assad to surrender his chemical weapons to be destroyed, which he did.

But our petulant president wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to attack Syria, and he needed to convince the pesky people to support his war. At that time nobody had heard of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). A search of Google News turns up only one mention of ISIS or ISIL (substitute Levant for Syria) in 2013. Now a day doesn’t go by without government’s propagandists crying hysterically that ISIS is the greatest threat the US has ever faced.

That’s not a coincidence. ISIS roared into prominence because the US and its regional allies funded, armed and trained ISIS fighters to be the highly successful terrorists they are today so they could defeat Assad. ISIS isn’t an enemy of the US. It’s a tool of the US. Obama is using ISIS; ISIS is using Obama; and everybody is suffering as a result.

The US camouflaged its arming of ISIS by supplying, arming and training supposedly moderate rebels. The problem is there are no moderate rebels. The personnel in the rebel militias are fluid. Moderate groups funnel weapons to fierce militias like ISIS. At the same time, ISIS fighters pretend to be moderates to obtain training and weapons. It’s a charade designed to fool the American people, and all parties understand it.

A month ago Obama himself said there were no real moderate rebels. “With ‘respect to Syria,’ said the president, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has ‘always been a fantasy,’” The New York Times reported. “‘This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.’”

Yet today Obama claims he will defeat both ISIS and Assad by arming those same doctors, farmers and pharmacists to be the boots on the ground supported by US bombs. Pat Buchanan comments, “The strategy that President Obama laid out Wednesday night to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL,’ is incoherent, inconsistent and, ultimately, non-credible.” No kidding. Nobody, not even Arab countries threatened by ISIS, will send their troops to fight. That’s because Obama’s strategy is a sham.

The key to understanding this is understanding Iran is the ultimate target. Obama doesn’t want to destroy ISIS. He wants to help ISIS topple Assad because toppling Assad will further isolate Iran.

Obama admitted he already used ISIS to oust Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, who was tightly aligned with Iran. The Times reported, “The reason, the president added, ‘that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.’” This also explains reports that Iraqi troops were mysteriously ordered to retreat instead of fighting ISIS when ISIS first invaded Iraq.

But the advance of ISIS in Iraq still didn’t convince the American people to support Obama’s newest war. He needed more propaganda, so he sent Secretary of Defense Hagel to fearmonger. Reuters reported, “Asked if the hardline Sunni Muslim organization posed a threat to the United States comparable to that of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hagel said it was ‘as sophisticated and well-funded as any group we have seen.’”

Considering al Qaeda had about 500 fighters in 2001, and ISIS currently has over 20,000, this is a stark admission of the failure of the US policy of perpetual war to make us safer. Clearly, Hagel is saying it has made us less safe. ISIS helped Hagel by shortening its name to Islamic State to make it appear they threatened the US.

But Hagel’s claims still didn’t convince the American people. It took two videos of Americans being beheaded to finally push Americans over the edge and give Obama the support he needed. What went largely unreported was the claim by the family of Steven Sotloff that Obama’s moderate Syrian rebel buddies, who recently signed a non-aggression pact with ISIS, sold him to ISIS and the beheading videos were faked.

Obama’s propaganda campaign worked. It got him his latest war. Joseph Goebbels would be proud.

Schizophrenic Middle East Policy

Iraq as we knew it is gone. In a modern blitzkrieg, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also called ISIL), allied with Sunni militias and carved the Sunni Triangle out of Iraq. Formerly called al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the main enemy US troops fought during the Iraq surge, al Qaeda kicked the organization out of the al Qaeda umbrella for being too vicious. Pictures of ISIS fighters executing Iraqi soldiers, the same Iraqi soldiers Americans paid with blood and treasure to train for eleven years and who, despite greatly outnumbering the rebels, collapsed like a child’s backyard tent in a rainstorm, flood the internet. ISIS is enforcing Sharia law in every town it conquers.

Taking advantage of the situation, the Kurds took Kirkuk, effectively declaring their independence. Iraq is effectively split along tribal lines: Kurds to the north, Sunnis in the west, and Shia to the south.

President Obama and his minions feigned surprise, but they’re lying. This result was predicted during the debate before the US invaded Iraq, and has been repeatedly predicted since. Reminding us that even a broken clock is right twice a day, then-Senator Joe Biden advocated dividing the country along sectarian lines to prevent just this kind of result once the US pulled out. He was roundly ridiculed. Obama even created a secret plan to stop ISIS from taking over Iraq a year ago. It failed.

In 2007, Ilana Mercer wrote, “Once we decamp, some Saddam-like strongman will fill the power vacuum left. The dictator to emerge from the ruins of Iraq will impose Sharia, pray to the hidden Imam, and compel women to walk about in black nose bags. We had it good with Saddam because he was secular, an enemy of fundamentalist Islam. Can we have back what, in our folly, we fouled up? No.” Oh, for the good old days of Saddam.

But this rebellion wasn’t only predictable; the US precipitated it with its policy in Syria. For years the US has been arming the Syrian rebels, and ISIS is the main fighting faction of those rebels. The US claims it doesn’t arm ISIS, but that’s a pretense. It directly arms supposedly moderate rebels knowing full well those rebels funnel the weapons to ISIS fighters because they’re on the forefront of combat. Arming the other factions just enables team Obama to implausibly claim “plausible deniability.” And not only is the US arming ISIS through its rebel allies, US proxies Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming ISIS directly. Even Washington Post propagandists were forced to admit the civil wars in Iraq and Syria are really one war, and the US is on both sides.

It’s easy to think of any government as a monolithic entity, but like every other organization, the reality is it’s made up of individuals, each with their own goals. The US government is arming both sides, either as a matter of policy or it’s being done by different factions in the government. Iran is enemy number one in the Middle East, followed by Syria, and the Iraqi government is an ally of both, so it’s likely the US is secretly backing ISIS to weaken the Shiite-controlled government of Iraq. Maybe that’s why Iraqi soldiers claim they were ordered to abandon Mosul to the rebels.

The New York Times reports, “‘What we see in Iraq today is in many ways a culmination of what the I.S.I. has been trying to accomplish since its founding in 2006,’ said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation, referring to the Islamic State in Iraq, the predecessor of ISIS.” With the NSA collecting every electronic communication in Iraq, it’s not credible that US agents were unaware ISIS always intended to attack Iraq. They gleefully destroyed old WWI treaty barriers between Iraq and Syria and triumphantly tweeted about erasing the Sykes-Picot Agreement that created that boundary.

Now Obama is sending 575 non-combat troops equipped for combat, whatever that means, back into Iraq. He calls 300 advisors, as if Iraqi troops need advice. He’s flying surveillance missions with fighter planes. He plans to oust Prime Minister Maliki and replace him with someone less friendly to Iran. He’s marching the US back into war one step at a time even though 74 percent of Americans are against going back. The Sunnis don’t want Americans there. The Shiites Americans would supposedly be protecting don’t want Americans there. The military doesn’t want to go back. The only people who have something to gain are the warmongers and war profiteers who instigated this disaster in the first place. They claim everything was great while the US was in Iraq while shamelessly proclaiming their support for the troops they killed before and the ones they plan to kill in the future.

Justin Raimondo summarizes, “If ever there was a crisis entirely created in Washington, what is happening in Iraq today is a textbook case.” The last thing we need is to get more Americans killed and create more terrorists by returning to Iraq.

Warmongers Haven’t Given Up on Syria

False flags are flying in Syria. A false flag is a deception carried out by one party so as to make it look as if another party is responsible. In March of 2013, media first reported the use of chemical weapons in Syria, after President Obama declared their use a “red line”, meaning the US would attack in response to their use.

Warmongers beat the war drums, but saner heads resisted. Pat Buchanan wrote, “It does not require Inspector Clouseau to surmise this may be a fabrication to stampede the ever-gullible Americans into plunging into Syria to win the war for the al-Qaida-saturated Syrian rebels.” That May, The Chicago Tribune reported the statement of one of the UN investigators of the attack, “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.”

That temporarily stalled the rush to war, but the warmongers weren’t finished, so the rebels staged another false flag chemical attack in August. The Israeli government, which also provided supposed intelligence supporting the first false flag, claimed to have intercepted a phone call of a general officer ordering the attack.

The Russians disputed the charge against the Syrian government, claiming, “[T]he shell used in the incident ‘does not belong to the standard ammunition of the Syrian army and was crudely according to type and parameters of the rocket-propelled unguided missiles manufactured in the north of Syria by the so-called Bashair al-Nasr brigade’” The Russians ought to know since they supplied Syria with its chemical weapons.

But this time casualties numbered in the hundreds, and it looked like the warmongers were going to get their war until the American people forced Obama to back down and accept a deal brokered by Russian President Putin to remove Syria’s chemical weapons.

Famed journalist Seymour Hersh recently verified this attack was also a false flag. From London Review of Books, “[Turkish] Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’” Hersh continues, “The [Defense Intelligence Agency] paper drew on classified intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical facilitators,’ it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale production effort in Syria.’”

The US was aware these were false flags all along. Turkey is in NATO, so it can drag the US into war in Syria.

Hersh also verified the four Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, were killed over weapons trafficking, “A highly classified annex to the [Senate report on the Benghazi attack], not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping.”

In March, Turkey shot down a Syrian plane which officials claimed entered Turkish airspace. Also in March, Turkish officials were recorded discussing staging another false flag attack in Syria. One official said, “I’ll send 4 men from Syria, if that’s what it takes. I’ll make up a cause of war by ordering a missile attack on Turkey; we can also prepare an attack on [Turkish monument] Suleiman Shah Tomb if necessary.” Erdoğan responded by blocking Twitter and YouTube so Turks couldn’t listen to the recording.

Now it’s happened again. On April 12 The Washington Post reported, “Syrian government media and rebel forces said Saturday that poison gas had been used in a central village, blaming each other for an attack that reportedly injured scores of people.”

The US, Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and al Qaeda affiliates may seem like unlikely allies. The common factors behind this alliance and between Syria and Ukraine are Russian influence, oil and dollars. Russia has a naval base in Syria and one in Crimea which it recently annexed. Strategic oil pipelines also run through both countries. The US wants control of those pipelines because it fears Russia may sell oil denominated in currency other than the dollar, severing the petrodollar link and ending the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This would trigger hyper-inflation in the US. The US already toppled Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi because they rejected the petrodollar. Iran may be next for the same reason. These civil wars are proxy wars to delay the collapse of the dollar.