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And next, Syria?

Post it.

Meanwhile...

A December 13, 2006 cable, "Influencing the SARG [Syrian government] in the End of 2006,"1 indicates that, as far back as 2006 - five years before "Arab Spring" protests in Syria - destabilizing the Syrian government was a central motivation of US policy. The author of the cable was William Roebuck, at the time chargé d'affaires at the US embassy in Damascus. The cable outlines strategies for destabilizing the Syrian government. In his summary of the cable, Roebuck wrote:

We believe Bashar's weaknesses are in how he chooses to react to looming issues, both perceived and real, such as the conflict between economic reform steps (however limited) and entrenched, corrupt forces, the Kurdish question, and the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists. This cable summarizes our assessment of these vulnerabilities and suggests that there may be actions, statements, and signals that the USG can send that will improve the likelihood of such opportunities arising.

This cable suggests that the US goal in December 2006 was to undermine the Syrian government by any available means, and that what mattered was whether US action would help destabilize the government, not what other impacts the action might have. In public the US was in favor of economic reform, but in private the US saw conflict between economic reform and "entrenched, corrupt forces" as an "opportunity." In public, the US was opposed to "Islamist extremists" everywhere; but in private it saw the "potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists" as an "opportunity" that the US should take action to try to increase.

Roebuck lists Syria's relationship with Iran as a "vulnerability" that the US should try to "exploit." His suggested means of doing so are instructive:

Possible action:


PLAY ON SUNNI FEARS OF IRANIAN INFLUENCE: There are fears in Syria that the Iranians are active in both Shia proselytizing and conversion of, mostly poor, Sunnis. Though often exaggerated, such fears reflect an element of the Sunni community in Syria that is increasingly upset by and focused on the spread of Iranian influence in their country through activities ranging from mosque construction to business.


Both the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here (as well as prominent Syrian Sunni religious leaders) are giving increasing attention to the matter and we should coordinate more closely with their governments on ways to better publicize and focus regional attention on the issue. [Emphasis added.]

Roebuck thus argued that the US should try to destabilize the Syrian government by coordinating more closely with Egypt and Saudi Arabia to fan sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia, including by the promotion of "exaggerated" fears of Shia proselytizing of Sunnis, and of concern about "the spread of Iranian influence" in Syria in the form of mosque construction and business activity.
Click to expand...

WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath
 
mikey mikey said:
Neo-conservatism really is not a boogie monster or a conspiracy theory. Many of the people involved in the PNAC statement are involved at the highest level of politics. Not so recently the Labour Party "moderates" started claiming the term Blairite something similar- a phantom of the Left. This is while they openly expressed a desire for Tony Blair to come back into front-line Parliamentary politics.
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Who has said that there are no neoconservatives exactly?
 
Did I say you said that? I was just reaffirming their existnce. Are you going to start filling in for Pickman and Butcher now J Ed? Start working on that quibbling-squabble ad naseum tangent angle?;)
 
mikey mikey said:
The thread was taken off topic deliberately, as was the Russian ambassador assasination thread, by several individuals who wish to shout down anything not toeing the neo-con pro "moedrate rebels" (i.e. Isis amd AQ) line.

I remember something similar when there was the Iraq invasion and the Republicans were screaming "You hate America!". Except then hey didn't call themselves progressives; they called themselves conservatives. Now a Democrat or a New Labour "moderate" is doing for Syria what Dubya's fans on the internet were doing for Mission Accomplished.
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You are properly full of ill-informed shit.
 
mikey mikey said:
Neo-conservatism really is not a boogie monster or a conspiracy theory. Many of the people involved in the PNAC statement are involved at the highest level of politics. Not so recently the Labour Party "moderates" started claiming the term Blairite something similar- a phantom of the Left. This is while they openly expressed a desire for Tony Blair to come back into front-line Parliamentary politics.

Neocons and Blairites would like the population to forget that they were the ones who spread lies about WMD in Iraq and set up Gitmo, brought back the use of torture and detention without trial. They would like you forgetthat the press became complicit in their crimes because the general public trusted the likes of the BBC and CNN to tell them the news and not government war propaganda.

Now these same people and this same press are asking us to back the very terrorists we were originally at war with and they are distorting facts and creating fake news just like before.

And no, I won't "piss off".
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If you'd any decency at all in you, young man, you'd be down your local organising a meat raffle for the white helmets .
 
J Ed said:
Why say that neoconservativism is not a conspiracy theory if no one has said it?
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Why did you put"neo-con agenda" in speechmarks? That site is indeed known widely as a platform for neoconservatives. There is no so-called about it.

I asked you:

mikey mikey said:
Are you going to start filling in for Pickman and Butcher now J Ed? Start working on that quibbling-squabble ad naseum tangent angle?;)
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I will take your last answer as a yes
 
mikey mikey said:
Post it.

Meanwhile...



WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath
Click to expand...

Well posted. It's sickening how this is totally ignored by the prevailing narrative. I've no doubt that there were tensions in Syria before the war between various sections in society and the government (where is there not especially in the MENA) and serious tensions at that, but the role played by the United States, Britain and France in what's going on has been crucial to how this became an actual war. And this is a war, with all that goes with war including devastating attacks on entrenched forces in cities, their beseigement, the use of air-power and artillery, dead children and older civilians all over the place (in government held and non government held territory).

So on the one hand the transformation of the kind of issues faced in a multi-faith/multi-ethnic authoritarian-legacy corruption-afflicted Global South nation in the face of the economic tensions and upheavals that have left even Western Europe in a dangerous state of flux- on the other hand a focused and deliberate effort to exacerbate all this to breaking point by the Western powers toward some sort of project of creative-destruction-

Nah nah nah, ignore all that conspiraloon "West is a big meany" bollocks ignorant know-nothing, Assad Must Go/Alahu Akbar/Syrian Left.
 
camouflage said:
Well posted. It's sickening how this is totally ignored by the prevailing narrative. I've no doubt that there were tensions in Syria before the war between various sections in society and the government (where is there not especially in the MENA) and serious tensions at that, but the role played by the United States, Britain and France in what's going on has been crucial to how this became an actual war. And this is a war, with all that goes with war including devastating attacks on entrenched forces in cities, their beseigement, the use of air-power and artillery, dead children and older civilians all over the place (in government held and non government held territory).

So on the one hand the transformation of the kind of issues faced in a multi-faith/multi-ethnic authoritarian-legacy corruption-afflicted Global South nation in the face of the economic tensions and upheavals that have left even Western Europe in a dangerous state of flux- on the other hand a focused and deliberate effort to exacerbate all this to breaking point by the Western powers toward some sort of project of creative-destruction-

Nah nah nah, ignore all that conspiraloon "West is a big meany" bollocks ignorant know-nothing, Assad Must Go/Alahu Akbar/Syrian Left.
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Barrel bombs !!!
 
teqniq said:
Lol no chance. :D Try actually reading the thread first.
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So you can't even correct six simple lines of text. Riiiiigghhht!

Talking of destabilising countries...

US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government

US secretly created 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest and undermine government

In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government.
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McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the US government.


McSpedon didn't work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the US Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid.


According to documents obtained by the Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones "Cuban Twitter," using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba's strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet.
Click to expand...


Oh dear. How short our memories have become.
 
Last edited:
No, I wasn't colouring in, either.

I was posting a Guardian article that was relvant to the notion that Syria was destabilised by US and UK forces.
 

That's roughly half a terrorist/Russian airstrike compared with an average of three for ours. There is either something wrong with their airstrikes or with their definition of who is a dead terrorist.

In our case a dead terrorist is any military aged male in proximity to a strike. We got that from the Israelis. Of course CENTCOM might be over counting its bodycount metrics to cheer up the PowerPoint; averaging three Beards/strike seems rather high to me.
 
yeh but after all the us ones there weren't so many terrorists left for the russians
CrabbedOne said:

That's roughly half a terrorist/Russian airstrike compared with an average of three for ours. There is either something wrong with their airstrikes or with their definition of who is a dead terrorist.

In our case a dead terrorist is any military aged male in proximity to a strike. We got that from the Israelis. Of course CENTCOM might be over counting its bodycount metrics to cheer up the PowerPoint; averaging three Beards/strike seems rather high to me.
Click to expand...
 

...
39. The Board stated that it had received reports that information existed to the effect that the SAAF was highly likely to have perpetrated the attack, and even that the attack was carried out by three Syrian Mi-17 model helicopters, followed by three unnamed fixed-wing aircraft, with a single Russian aircraft also suspected of being involved. However, the Board did not have access to raw data to support these assertions and, in their absence, it was unable to draw a definitive conclusion. Moreover, the Governments of both the Russian Federation and Syrian Arab Republic denied all allegations of their involvement in the incident.

40. The Board noted in this connection that there were technical issues pertaining to a hypothesis of the incident being a result of a joint Syrian Arab Air Force/Russian Federation strike. The Board had been informed that that the Russian Federation did not conduct joint strikes. A high degree of interoperability and co-ordination would also be required for two air forces to operate in the same airspace, targeting the same location.
...
Click to expand...
UN straining not to reach a conclusion while pointing the finger.

That last point does seem to make a joint strike unlikely and is credible. Reading all this I'd suspect it wasn't the Russians even if they had an airframe in position. All the motivations were with the Syrian regime and it's an incident very much in the Assad clan style of doing business. It was a rather effective fuck you to the Russia-US led Geneva process after a little Coalition oopsie in Deir trashed a regime position.

Blaming the Russians for everything that happens in Syria is a US negotiating posture with a hint of hopeful delusion that Moscow actually had/has control over Damascus. That conceit has been rather central to the fairly daft Lavrov-Kerry process.
 

That second paper is really interesting. Syrian economy completely fucked by profiteering military/paramilitary spivs. It's basically a lively Hobbesian economy of armed actors on both sides energetically screwing the population. Lots of incentives for perpetuating low level conflict. Conventional developmental assistance may not work until this societal breakdown is somewhat repaired and a more centralised state restored.
Screen Shot 2016-12-22 at 16.30.41.png
Screen Shot 2016-12-22 at 16.35.28.png
 

...
The profiles of these individuals follow a pattern: they are well-established Al Qaeda operatives, close associates to the senior members of Al Qaeda released in September, and some of them are close associate of the Jordanian ideologue Al Maqdisi. The relationship between those individuals and the core Al Qaeda leaders, who moved to Syria after their release, is too close and strong for Al Qaeda to agree to a split against their wish. It is simply a risky move for Al Qaeda in terms of loyalty.

Three possible explanations for the defections can be pointed out. Members could be truly disgruntled at the Syrianisation of an Al Qaeda affiliate and wanted out. Another possibility is that they were fearful of the new direction and wanted to establish a front group similar to Black September, to absorb defections and to attract jihadists with groups such as Jund Al Aqsa while Jabhat Fateh Al Sham attracts Syrians with a national agenda. A third possibility is that the members intend to establish a group, also similar to Black September, to revive the so-called Khorassan group.

Regardless of which scenario will play out, one thing is clear: a new organisation is in the making in Syria, and it will be more hardline than the original one.
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The Khorassan group was meant to be internal to Syrian AQ, internationally focused and a US target. To me that just looks like the last option: another operational arm with a similar focus and added deniability. It would naturally follow from the rebranding exercise.

It's a common thing in terrorism to spin off the really nasty business. Usually use the same funding/training/supply infrastructure and responds to the same chain of command but are fire walled off which provides some deniability and has security advantages. HA had a devastating terrorist A-Team, the Islamic Jihad Organisation under Imad Mughniyah. The PKK has long used TAK for mass casualty suicide ops that don't really go with the Girl Scout PR.
 
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