U.S. tries to drive wedge between Putin and Assad by Wayne Madsen

U.S. tries to drive wedge between Putin and Assad by Wayne Madsen
President Obama's policy of initiating "constructive engagement" with Russian President Vladimir Putin was prompted by advice given to the American president by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan. Obama has relied on the two for most of his guidance on Middle Eastern affairs. However, both Erdogan and Brennan are fierce critics of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Assad's government is highly skeptical of the actual reasons behind the Obama-Putin rapprochement, fearing that it is a ploy to convince Moscow to abandon its long time ally in Damascus.

Last November, Putin was virtually isolated at the G20 Summit in Brisbane and attendees lined up, one after another, to lambaste Putin over the retro-cession of Crimea back to Russia from Ukraine and Putin's support for eastern Ukrainian Russian-speaking rebels. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott even threatened to "shirt front" Putin, which is an Australian football term meaning chest bump, at the summit. One iconic photo from the summit showed Putin eating lunch alone at a table. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he told Putin, "l'll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: Get out of Ukraine!" Putin, disgusted with the childish behavior from the G20 leaders, including Obama, left Australia early to return home to Moscow.

However, at this year's G20 summit in Antalya, in Islamic State-friendly Turkey and not far from Syria, G20 leaders could not wait to sidle up to Putin. Gone were Abbott, who was ousted in an political party back benchers' coup by Malcolm Turnbull, and Harper, who was roundly defeated by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. Turnbull and Trudeau are friendlier to Russia than their predecessors.


Putin dining alone at the G20 Summit in Brisbane in November 2014.

Putin in negotiations with Obama at G20 in Antalya, Turkey. Obama national security adviser Susan Rice [back turned toward camera] and interpreter join discussion. Assad fears that Obama is trying to convince Putin to abandon Assad in favor of Turkish- and Saudi-controlled opposition forces.
There is solid evidence that there is a propaganda campaign designed to split Moscow from Damascus. Although it has been proven by Syrian Catholic Mother Superior Agnes Mariam and others that the CIA- and Saudi-backed Free Syrian Army launched the sarin gas attack against civilians in Ghouta in a "false flag" operation designed to pin blame on Assad, the same neoconservative and Israel Lobby meme of Assad "gassing his own people" is making its rounds again on the Zionist-controlled MSNBC and The Daily Beast. In addition, the neocons, upset with the G20's decision to work with Putin and Assad, has put forward a conspiracy theory making its rounds in the Zionist-owned media that Putin and Assad jointly created the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Consequently, as a result of the negotiations between Putin and Obama, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's recent Oval Office talks in Washington with Obama, Syria's government is concerned that there is a plan afoot by Washington, Moscow, and Jerusalem to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence, with Moscow being guaranteed port and pipeline access in Syria, Iraq, and a planned independent Kurdistan comprising Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria. Syria has activated its public relations resources in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, to advance the story that Putin has opted to work with Obama, Erdogan, and Netanyahu to redraw the borders of the Middle East, with Assad being the chief casualty.

Damascus is playing a trick of its own in putting forth the Russ-American secret "new Middle East" plan. Syria's interpretation of the plans for the redrawing of the Middle East map includes having Saudi Arabia split into three different nations: a Shi'a-dominated oil-rich Nejd in the east, an insulated Saudi rump state around Riyadh, and a Turkish-influenced Hejaz in the west, which would include the two Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The Syrian interpretation has resulted in the Saudis becoming alarmed at being shut out entirely from the Syrian and Kurdish negotiations and the specter of thousands of jihadis it has supported in Syria and Iraq heading to Saudi Arabia looking for revenge after their defeat on the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.

Assad and his government, however, should rest a bit easier, according to WMR's sources in Europe. Putin has no plans to abandon Assad, even though Moscow supports the plan for United Nations-brokered peace talks between Assad and the Syrian rebels, not including the Islamic State and its allies.

Russia remains suspicious of Obama's and CIA director Brennan's lack of enthusiasm for combating ISIL. The day before the Friday 13th ISIL attacks in Paris, Obama said that he favored merely "containing" ISIL in Syria and Iraq, not wiping it out. It is known that ISIL has received recruiting, financial, military, and intelligence support from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. In addition, the CIA, Mossad, the Israel Defense Force, and Turkish MIT intelligence has provided ISIL and its allies with weapons, ammunition, and logistics support in Syria and Iraq. Only after the Paris terrorist attacks did the U.S., belatedly, order its A10 attack planes to strike a convoy of 116 ISIL oil tanker trucks smuggling oil out of Syria. The U.S. had previously chose not to attack ISIL oil trucks. ISIL received much of its financial support from the sale of smuggled oil on the world's petroleum spot market.

Putin is acutely aware that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his government is quietly assuring, through Ukrainian nationalist leaders like Dmitry Korchinsky, that top ISIL commanders will be given asylum in Ukraine as long as they carry their war on against Russia in the Donbas region and Chechnya. Korchinsky, the leader of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian "Brotherhood," actively participated in the Maidan Square uprising against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych Korchinsky and his nationalist activists received support from the George Soros network, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt (both of whom are Jewish), the CIA, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Obama and the other members of the "Quint," Britain, the U.S., France, Germany, and Italy, said they had no plans to relax Western sanctions imposed against Russia over Ukraine. As long as Ukraine is prepared to welcome ISIL guerrillas to its soil to fight against Russia, Assad can rest easy that Putin will never sacrifice him in favor of the duplicitous interests of the United States and European Union.

Seymour Hersh Unearths More Lies on Syria By Jonathan Cook

Seymour Hersh Unearths More Lies on Syria By Jonathan Cook April 07, 2014 "ICH" - Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has a second fascinating essay that rewrites the official record of the sarin gas attack on Ghouta, near Damascus, in August last year. As usual, Hersh uses his sources in the US security establishment to throw light on what really took place. The bottom line: Turkey was almost certainly the party responsible for the attack, hoping it would force Obama to honour his threatened “red line” if Assad used chemical weapons. Was the Assad regime to be brought down by a US military campaign, Turkey assumed it would be able to turn Syria into a client state. Like the earlier article, this one will probably gain very little attention. It is published in the obscure UK literary publication the London Review of Books. Presumably like last time, Hersh could not find a mainstream publication willing to take it – and I’m guessing that, like last time, these stunningly important revelations will be shunned by the liberal media. Instead, it will be consigned to the memory hole, along with so much other evidence of western crimes against humanity. Pundits and analysts will continue to tell us confidently that Assad carried out the Ghouta attack, oblivious to Hersh’s findings. The reason the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian have been studiously ignoring Hersh’s investigations on this, it seems to me, is that they show the Obama administration’s foreign policy is just as criminal as the previous Bush White House’s. Here is a summary of Hersh’s main findings: * Obama’s sudden climbdown on his threatened military strike against Assad was in part forced on him by a chemical analysis of samples of the sarin used in Ghouta, which showed that its signature did not match that of the stockpiles held by the Assad regime. * Despite US claims, the White House knew that the Syrian rebels had developed chemical weapons production facilities. UN investigators thought the Syrian opposition were the most likely culprits behind earlier chemical weapons attacks, in April and May 2013. The American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra maintained a sarin production cell. * The military strike being prepared by the White House after the Ghouta attack was, far from small-scale, as secretary of state John Kerry intimated, modelled on the shock and awe campaign against Saddam Hussein. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. … The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings. * The US developed a back channel of weapons-smuggling to the Syrian rebels, known as the rat line, in cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, using the “liberated” arsenals from Libya following the west’s ousting of Gaddafi. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. … 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. … The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his biographer. * The job of the US consulate in Libya – the one where ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed – was to provide logistical assistance with the rat line. That was the reason the consulate was attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’ … Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going. ‘The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were relaying to the jihadists,’ the former intelligence official said. Within weeks, as many as forty portable surface-to-air missile launchers, commonly known as manpads, were in the hands of Syrian rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter. ‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles, warning that the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to shoot down commercial aircraft.’ * By late 2012 the US had assessed that the rebels were losing the civil war, and started to downgrade their involvement in the rat line. That left Turkey’s Recep Erdogan the main loser. The American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into Syria left Erdoğan exposed politically and militarily. ‘One of the issues at that May summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue to supply the rebels in Syria,’ the former intelligence official said. … Without US military support for the rebels, the former intelligence official said, ‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state in Syria is evaporating and he thinks we’re the reason why. When Syria wins the war, he knows the rebels are just as likely to turn on him – where else can they go? So now he will have thousands of radicals in his backyard.’ * Erdogan therefore became focused on exploiting the “red line” Obama had set on Assad’s use of chemical weapons to force the US to attack Syria. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war because of logistics – the distances involved and the difficulty of moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t respond [to the previous chemical weapons attacks] in March and April.’ … We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s people to push Obama over the red line,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas attack in or near Damascus when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus on 18 August to investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were there. The deal was to do something spectacular. … Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.http://www.jonathan-cook.net