A few years back, I wrote a piece about the Syrian Civil War titled "The West v ISIS: Air strikes just means endless war minus victory". That now seems, in hindsight, not only trite but embarrassingly off the mark. Some could say that I failed utterly as an analyst because look what the Russians did in Syria with a few planes and some Spetsnaz forward observers. They literally wiped the rebel forces arrayed against Assad (termed by Western media as ISIS) off the map. And they did it with so few aircraft, many of them aging, some third and fourth generation planes but nothing compared to NATO's overpriced "fifth generation" stealth fleet; all of which makes you wonder if it was NATO's or the Western powers intention to ever defeat ISIS at all?
And here we come to what I'll call "the darkness".
The darkness you will never see on any news channel or media outlet in any country under the umbrella of the post WWII globalist order. And by that I mean every English speaking country's news channels, including mainland Europe's, Israel's, South Korea's and Japan's. Whatever language is spoken, this post WWII order has held on but is now descending into a kind of darkness. This darkness is first and foremost the idea and the fact that the corporate media and the entire political establishment is lying to you.
That's fact one and certainly dark. But the darkness I am positing rocks the foundations of my belief in the post WWII Western order I grew up in which primarily meant that the victors of WWII were the "good guys". Maybe I was that naive. Or more likely a kid. But twenty year old me could be forgiven for that. Because how many twenty year olds know much about anything other than mating rituals and having a laugh?
The question I find myself asking today, twenty years on as I note the state of the darkness, is a question idealistic 12 year old me asks from his dreams...
"Are we in the West the bad guys now?"
"Are we in the West the bad guys now?"
For anyone who reads this blog, this may not be new information. But let's indulge in a game. Let's talk about the Syrian Civil War now. Now that it is almost over, let's uncover from the rubble and the darkness some truth that war makes the first casualty of. The average person in Western OECD countries is busy making a living and feeding their family. It's difficult to be too much concerned with what your tax money is paying for. For instance, a Tomahawk missile costs 1.2 million dollars. And 300 million worth were launched against Syria because of some bullshit gas story pushed by the media in April. Gas is indiscriminate and horrible but it also has some especially evil connotation in the minds of the public who have never been near a war zone.
Gas in war drives foreign civilian populations insane. It's a trigger word. And the media knows this. If your child in a war zone dies by air burst artillery (a common occurrence in Aleppo or Damascus or Gaza) that means such munitions pepper your child with ball bearings travelling at Mach 3. Fucking horrible and unthinkable. You'd think. But let an enemy open a barrel (allegedly) that spreads some weaponized chlorine/sarin for at best a square block and now you've got an international casus belli on your hands. But any soldier will tell you artillery is far worse and more terrifying then some dissipating cloud you have a small but possible fighting chance at running from. What's worse is the media pushing the public into outrage using gaseous fear and demanding intervention in a desert war thousands of miles away from the average taxpayer doing his best to feed his family.
The famous Churchill quote "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at to no result." is probably true. How about gassing people? He would know. How about bombing people and killing them via kinetic blast energy? Is that more evil then gas? In 2001, as we all know, 19 Saudis flew two planes and took down three buildings in New York, wrecked a wing of the Pentagon with another plane and nose dived a fourth into a field because of the heroism of the passengers. Officially. That was quite a feat in a country with a military larger than the next ten country's military's combined. Try anything like that today near Damascus and your plane isn't even going to make it over land from the Mediterranean. We're talking about a city with the 4th most sophisticated anti aircraft defense network on the planet. That's why the Israelis launch their AGMs at Syria from F-16s from their airspace or Jordanian airspace. The Syrians could take a shot at them but they don't exactly need another next door neighbor flinging more shit over the garden fence at them right now.
The point being?
Syrian airspace became impregnable and that was the beginning of the turning of the tide in favor of Assad. Russian intervention we'll talk about in Part II but for now let's stick to how we got to where we are today. How did we get to the Syrian Civil War?
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| The Russians like their naval base at Tartus. And why wouldn't they? Geopolitics is a chessboard, why give up a square? |
How did we get to a place where bombing wins a war.
I mean this figuratively of course, bombing wins wars but only as a component of a combined ground strategy and other factors. The Syrian Civil War is unique in the sense that never have so few aircraft done so much to change a major war. There's a Churchill Battle of Britain quote in there but I'm not using it because it's just too obvious.
To begin talking about Syria, we're going to have to go all the way back to 2010. Remember that thing called the "Arab Spring"? Western media touted it on your TV screen. Maybe you do, maybe you don't but let's do a quick primer.
It's possible it was a genius destabilizing operation run by Western intelligence agencies but there was an organic nature to it too. Since all Western media is a propaganda operation {and not just the news), I mean all of it. From the Kardashians to the Walking Dead and all the commercials in between, it's all a kind of mind control telling you what to aspire to, what to fear, what is good or bad in life and in our case, who the bad guys are. It's all controlled opposition aimed at priming the public. The Arab Spring story went something like this. Some Tunisian bazaar merchant set himself on fire due to some injustice. A local authority figure made him buy a permit to continue selling whatever bullshit a street vendor in Tunisia would sell to tourists. Who knows why? But some local official took away his livelihood and he lost his mind. That I can understand. Any man can. But setting yourself on fire to make a point is a drastic maneuver and does tend toward making the man with the match a martyr for a cause. And that's exactly what happened.
For many reasons, this act of self-immolation led to a wave of popular uprisings that destabilized every country in North Africa but especially Egypt. That was the biggest domino to fall but surely an unintended target. Israel and the US liked Mubarak but not his people, the Egyptians. Sinai is a hard, calcine forbidden desert but it is a point of contention. The Americans were paying Mubarak a billion a year to keep his population under control and not cause trouble for the Israelis. The most important thing for them was his zealous efforts to police the border with Gaza and make sure other Arab nations or shady arms dealers could not funnel weapons into Gaza, especially not shoulder mounted AA weapons that could challenge Israeli air superiority every time they bombed a hospital they claimed had a bottle rocket in the basement.
Nobody expected the Arab Spring to get out of the control. Sure the CIA, Mossad, MI5 and whatever the French call their intelligence agencies took advantage. Maybe they poured fuel on the fire. The point being, the Arab Spring spiraled out of control. It wasn't exactly engineered but it wasn't organic either. Egypt got destabilized simply by the fact that every house in North Africa and the Middle East by 2010 had a satellite dish on their roof. And the population were not swallowing the local line of bullshit their media propaganda were pumping out. They could see the world outside and realize they were getting fucked over big time. So there were riots. Tanks on the streets did nothing, not even bullets could quell the uprising in Cairo.
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| The Arab Spring. |
Mubarak, the man on the Western payroll had nowhere to run and had to stand trial. Suddenly he got sick. Seriously, this shit reads like a bad novel. The revolutionaries put him on trial and first fined him 33 million dollars and locked him up in a jail cell where he suddenly had a heart attack (who wouldn't)? It's possible that a bunch a hard hitting Bedouin motherfuckers went medieval on his ass, but either way, Egyptian prison didn't agree with him.
Interestingly, the Israeli's offered him asylum (he was, after all, on their payroll via the US anyway) but the Egyptian courts put him on trial again anyway and grabbed another 22 million from his bank accounts before things started going to absolute shit on the streets of Cairo again. This was almost certainly funded by foreign money (the usual suspects), but even so, it turned out that just because the Muslim Brotherhood might be good at praising Allah and fooling some of the people all of the time didn't mean they were any good at running a bus line to the Pyramids never mind running a whole fucking country. Egypt went to shit and Mubarak got free, ran for the hills and is still alive somewhere living far better than you or me.
But lets slow this story down a bit.
The Arab Spring was getting out of hand. With Mubarak gone and the Muslim Brotherhood taking control of Egypt that made Israel's strategic position precarious. Every AIPAC activist was funneling millions to every US Congressman and Senator's re election campaign. Something had to be done to stop this threat to Israel's southern border and the Gazan/Egyptian tunnel network infiltration points
And so Western nations arrived at the usual answer when tact is difficult and bombs are cheap.
"They started blowing the shit out of everything in North Africa."
But especially Libya because they were the target in the cross hairs of Western avarice.
The second richest country in Africa, run by a dictator and strongman, Gaddafi. (go ahead and tell me a Middle East country that isn't run by a strongman) and for that matter, go ahead and tell me any country not run by a person with a motivation that Nietzsche called the "will-to-power.". Democracy these days is just something to make you feel good; like you have some say in the ways of the world as you deposit your voting slip. Meanwhile, we're all run by strongmen or these days, strong women. Who cares who fronts the organization, man or woman, what matters is the power behind the person in the suit they push in front of the TV cameras.
But I've digressed.
Libya.
Here's who attacked. For no reason other than to destroy an oil rich success story on the Mediterranean. This is your tax money at work.
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| These are the nations with blood on their hands. |
What did Libya do to deserve this international coalition of death via air power?
Now we must enter more darkness and things they'll never tell you on TV.
Libya, committed the crime of going against the international system. They hoarded gold and exported oil. Sure, Gaddafi got rich and let's face the man was no saint. But every Libyan newlywed got a house. Gaddafi used Libya's oil wealth to pipe aquifers and turn the desert into farmland. Libya had the highest literacy rate in Africa and free education; free education to the point that any gifted Libyan could get their university fees paid even in foreign universities like Oxford or Harvard. Think about that while you're paying off your student loan for the next 20 years.
Gaddafi was even floating the idea of an African investment bank, and a gold backed currency, that meant oil sales for gold instead of paper and that's the kind of talk that gets you killed real quick.
What is Libya today?
A nightmarescape worse then South Chicago with open air slave markets and rival rebel factions roaming the streets in pick-up trucks brandishing heavy machine guns and battling rival gangs for local control from Tripoli to Benghazi. Meanwhile the population hide in their houses. Thanks Obama. Thanks Hillary Clinton. Thanks Sarkozy. International criminality hide behind these leaders they fund, dress in suits and have their bought and paid for media industrial complex friends paint these leaders as "nice people" projected into the public consciousness via TV camera reading bullshit off a teleprompter.
That's the absolute state of modern "democracy".
Far, far from the ideals of the ancient Athenians.
That's the absolute state of modern "democracy".
Far, far from the ideals of the ancient Athenians.
The Syrian Civil War started out as an opportunistic attempt by Western powers to get rid of Assad. Since Libya went down so easily, foreign think-tanks and NGOs got high on the idea that if you pump enough bullshit into a satellite dish and funnel enough arms to a hired local militia, (ISIS, AL Nusra, Al-Qaida) whatever; and then feed your home population a series of gruesome beheading vids just to make sure they know who the bad guys are; you can take over a whole country for less cash than the daily profits of Google or Apple.
With total media control, you've got an enemy your domestic population hates while at the same time a private army you can use to run roughshod all over the Middle East. Also, you've got a bunch of crazies who'll eviscerate and mow down hundreds in Paris, stab their way across London, mow down hundreds with trucks in France and Germany and generally keep the public focused on who the bad guys are before they wheel out the piano guy who sings "Imagine" at the candlelit vigil while the citizenry holds flowers and gets misty eyed while doing absolutely fucking nothing about their own government causing all this mayhem in the first place.
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| If only human nature could be this simple... then perhaps John and Yoko would be right. If you want it. |
That's what chaos is.
No authority.
And chaos was coming to Syria...
