Terrorist Road Trip

The Russians with their extensive media coverage of the mostly-Syrian war, have exposed most of the lies peddled by the Western media directly, but have indirectly caused all the major players to expose their hands. Sometimes they are exposed by their own logical fallacies, of which there are many, as the propaganda war might be the only thing larger in scope than the actual war. It’s these cases that are the most fun to watch, at least when you can hear a Whitehouse spokesperson squirming to find a good angle to spin.

Serves them right. For some odd reason, perhaps complacency, perhaps a naive belief in their own supremacy at psychologcal warfare against the world, the Western Main-stream media (MSM) has just realized that the Russians are quite capable of delivering their message too. This is not to say the Russians are doing anything really like the MSM, they aren’t running a propaganda campaign to bamboozle their audience, they have the luxury of telling the truth.

Now we could argue the truth is a slippery fish we all want to catch, but at it’s most basic level, the truth is largely just well described obviousness, and much of what’s going on is entirely obvious. Unless you’ve spent a lifetime believing the propaganda, then it might not seem so obvious.

It’s a funny thing for East-Europeans who grew up during WWII, or anywhere within the Cold War period, to watch the level of bullshit get swallowed by North Americans, and even Westernized populations like British, or Germans. It’s equally laughable to most Arabs in the Middle-East, who seem to implicitly know what’s going on, partly the result of growing up in a largely tribal society, like which group is beholden to whom. Ask your average educated Londoner, who Harakat Al-Nujaba fights for, or who supplies Jaish Al-Fatah, and you probably get blank stares.

So it’s not entirely suprising that after years of MSM rinse-repeat-cycles using the very simplest terms, with overly simplistic explanations, has put an intellectual vice around the average Western citizen’s head. we were all told Al-Qaeda was enemy #1, ever since the day of 9/11, when an Israeli on international TV said we will all be fighting a new war, a war against people in caves, in far away places because of this event. He even warns us that traveling will become difficult, and general freedoms will be taken away. Yay!

No one at the time seemed bothered that Al-Qaeda as we knew them, were the same group of pseudo-terrorists trained and armed by the CIA as the Mujahadeen, the ones we supposedly loved for fighting against the evil Communists in Afghanistan a decade earlier. Just like no one seems bothered today, when Al-Qaeda in Syria was rebranded to Jahbat Al-Nusra, or the English-friendly Nusra Front.

Even when prominent officials like John McCain travelled to meet with the leaders of Al-Nusra and what we call the Islamic State group, calling them moderates he can work with, the response was muted. Seeing a mozquito in a room would have had a greater reaction in the West. What we have in the place of an uproar, was a media blitz about how the democratically elected President of Syria is a brutal dictator. Because as we all know, America is the sole authority on who is elected.

Facts on the Ground

Despite the battle of words in the public sphere, the real treat for observers is the struggle on the ground, between the proxies of the West, and the citizens who want them gone. That is the battle that has the highest stakes, and the most vested interests. The negotiations in Geneva are a sideshow, or at best a way to appear to be doing the next logical thing, while the real activity of repositioning on the battlefield takes place. There are a lot of terrorist groups to coordinate, many of them are now out of reach of supplies, even by air-drop, thanks to the Russian airforce. All in all, it’s a bad time to be a terrorist.

Whatever you hear courtesy of the MSM right now sounds disjointed, contradictory, incoherent, or just outright insane. Which is just as much a reflection on the situation, as it is on the utter strategic confusion of the Coalition. They never expected Russia to step in, but I’m sure they expected some kind of support at least. They never expected the Syrian people to support their President Assad so strongly, but I’m sure they expected the Iranians to help. There’s many instances of being caught off guard, eventualities the strategic planners had not mapped out fully, or had just assumed in error.

So, the West’s precious terrorists, having lost the advantage they had in Lybia, by way of imposing a no-fly zone, virtually guaranteed the Syrian government forces would more effectively fight back. The Syrian Airforce was antiquated though, and the Pentagon knew that. Maybe some analyst weighed this calculation, concluding a no-fly zone wasn’t considered imperative at the time, and while it’s a good thing for the people of Syria, this was a tactical mistake for the Pentagon. It’s failures like these that will have caused a ripple effect within the warmonger circles, questioning their own choices, questioning all their comforting previous assumptions. Total intellectual disarray. Shattered egos.

In short, the planners of this proxy war are having a crisis, a crisis that needs a salvageable outcome, or heads will roll. Perhaps this is why the disgraced General Petraeus is aiming for a political comeback, and why a traitor like John McCain is so pleased by the idea. What’s being done is just not working, that much is obvious, but the psychos at the Pentagon don’t think rationally like we do. When we see a hypocritical policy of supporting terrorists with the left hand, while fighting to contain them with the right hand, they a policy implementation error, their plans failed because Obama is too soft.

None of this is to say mistakes weren’t made on the other side, the Syrian government made a few big mistakes early on, losing outlying military bases, and underestimating the support the terrorists enjoyed. President Assad and his Generals couldn’t comprehend the scope of weaponry and money being provided to the terrorists invading their countryside. Though in fairness, I’m not sure how any leader could have, unless they explicitly knew Daesh and its various cousins were really just trained mercenaries, trained by CIA, Mossad, MIT and other intelligence agencies in the Coalition countries. The Syrians even admitted that losing the Idlib province was mostly tactical blunders, not a question of military power.

The red line that drew the Russians into the fray, was the Iranian General Soleimani unequivocally stating Latakia province would fall, putting at risk the Russian naval port at Tartus. President Assad and President Putin then made a deal, a deal unlike the typical arrangements made by the Americans or British, a deal that was mutually beneficial. A deal made under international law, to protect Syria from the destabilizing foreign fighters, for the duration of Syria’s choosing. There was no economic takeover, or strong-arming involved. This appalled the corporate-fascists who had been salivating on raping yet another country.

The Russians brought some much needed modern equipment and professionalism to the fight, while the Iranians crack troops would operate mostly as special forces, Russian advisors would bring their own tactical expertise into any joint operations. Perhaps the greatest achievement was the creation of joint intelligence centers in Iraq, Syria and Jordan, where all parties would share information, discuss tactics and decide targets, which would all be verified by drone and satellite surveillance. That’s when things got serious. That’s when the tide turned against the West.

Thus, the Syrian Arab Army, the National Defense Forces, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias from just across the border, including Kat’Eb Hezbollah from Iraq, and of course Russian Defense Forces, are kicking ass. The gains they’ve made are stunning, as are the previously ineffective Iraqi Army gains, which have all but expelled the terrorists from Ramadi, despite the Coalition’s best efforts to stop them. The pro-govt ground troops are making steady gains, while the terrorist groups are falling apart, in part because the foreign puppet-masters aren’t invited to the intelligence sharing party, and therefore can’t see the strategy being employed to find an effective counter-strategy. Targets all over the country are being bombed, and ground offensives are taking place at almost as many, it must be very confusing looking in from the outside.

Even though the Russians have offered to share information formally with the American-led Coalition, they have always refused, they know it would put them into an awkward situation, like when they tell their own pilots (who can see the terrorists) to stand down. We can guess that there’s some unspoken level of irony that’s just too much for the Department of State to handle. The reality is, if the Americans admit they know where all the terrorists are, it
would make them look complicit for not bombing them, which they are. Yet if they pretend to know nothing, then they would look incompetent which might even be worse in the public’s eyes. There’s no upside for them to share anything.

I don’t however believe the Russians expected anything to the contrary, they were just playing the game politely, doing what they would do if everyone was earnest, while having some fun with it. Sometimes I wonder how Lavrov keeps a straight face when dealing with Kerry. I would even say that the entire Russian leadership is well aware of NATO’s duplicity in Ukraine, and just as aware of the Saudi-Qatari-Israeli-Turkish-American terrorist operation to destroy all the independent nations in the region, then use them as a launching point to spread into the former Soviet states, to ultimately threaten Russia. Yet, the Russians say nothing. It is the wise thing to do.

Negotiating to Pieces

Watching the situation maps from various sources is both interesting and misleading though. Some will show vast swathes of land controlled by Islamic State, Ahrar Al-Sham, or other groups, when most of that area is flat desert or farmland, and there’s nothing really to capture. Some will show narrower strips of controlled areas, and who controls them, which are far more representative of the situation, since you can’t very well have guns pointing
at everything all the time. At their height, the terrorist groups represented around 90,000 people, most of who were not Syrian, and it would be a large stretch of imagination to believe they could hold the territory of Texas, even with the millions of dollars, smuggled arms, stolen aid supplies, and freshly trained reinforcements from Turkey.

Even if we were to imagine that the Americans or Saudis were actually fighting the terrorists they support, they would still be at a major disadvantage, without having troops on the ground to hold a position they liberate with bombing campaigns, and a further disadvantage of selecting targets, without troops on the ground to gather intelligence or visually verify what they see from above. It’s important to remember that “air power” is a force multiplier for a ground force, it’s impossible to win a “war” from the air alone, short of nuking the target.

We can ask ourselves what it would take to win the war, but the better question to ask is, what will the losers do? Because we know that many of the oil companies have been profiting from the looted Syrian and Iraqi oil, we know the Western political leaders will be under intense pressure not to let the taps get turned off, it’s very hard to find production that’s still profitable at current crude prices. Likewise, because billions of dollars has been spent funnelling small-arms, missile systems, and trucks into the fight, a lot of corrupt politicians risk being exposed as contravening weapons bans, or violating international laws against supporting terrorism. The victor usually writes the history afterall.

With so many conflicting agendas in play, most of them entirely dishonest, it’s really not surprising that everyone is unhappy, except Putin, he’s loving it. There has to be some logarithmic irony scale applied here, because Putin, and the entire Russian alliance with their Middle-Eastern partners, has managed to rout the other coalition in the public space, just by telling the truth. Every day there are meetings held in London and Washington, trying to figure out why their media empires are losing viewers, and losing the propaganda war against Russia, never once stopping to think that people are sick of their faux news. To them it’s just another battle/war to fight, against the Reds. Against Russia Today and Sputnik News. It’s a collective delusion at it’s finest.

So what really can the negotiations in Geneva achieve? Certainly Geneva can’t be mistaken for Damascus, and it’s hard to see how groups that exist solely to topple the Syrian government will agree to anything that doesn’t er… topple the government. We can also be pretty sure that the legally elected President of Syria, a patriot, doesn’t have any intention of handing over the country to a cabal of capitalists, and to be financially imprisoned by a Rothschilds central bank. With the balance of power swinging firmly back to the regime’s hands, they are also under no real pressure to compromise, Syria has survived without Coca-Cola and Goldman Sachs just fine this long, they can survive a few millennia longer without. What are the negotiations but a really bad opera then?

The Other Syrian Army

The Free Syrian Army (FSA) meme has all but vanished from public discourse around Syria these days, and rightfully so, after the Russians have repeatedly proven that the groups supposedly under the FSA banner were the same motley crew of extremists, jihadis, and mercenaries as the worst. It has even been documented that various FSA groups have fluidly changed allegiances between their own leadership, operating in absentia in Turkey, and Islamic State, while being allied with Jahbat Al-Nusra, with whom they’ve done joint offensive against government and civilian positions.

Since shelling a city full of unaligned citizens isn’t going to win you any PR, the fraudulent human rights groups like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR or SHRO) are used to falsely blame the government forces, without ever explaining why they would do that. Ever since October, the American officials have planted spurious stories in MSM about Russians attacking the wrong targets, with the MSM gleefully pushing it, and often citing SHRO reports of imaginary casualties.

One particularly troubling report indicated up to six hospitals were attacked by Russian jets within a week, which investigations later showed was false, only one of the cited locations even had a hospital. Again the irony meter must have been pegged when the Coalition jets bombed a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Afghanistan, on purpose, for half an hour.

Are we then to believe anything the MSM or its “unnamed sources” say? Are the intelligence psy-ops more believable than what they decry as Russian propaganda bullhorns? I don’t think so. More importantly, a growing number of people around the world don’t think so.

When the Whitehouse PR guy comes to his podium and suggests the beleaguered “moderate opposition” need more weapons and vehicles to fight the evil terrorists, does it seem like they have the worst job in the world? During the Bush Jr. Presidency, they were going through professional liars once every 2-3 months, these days under Obama, they graduated to rotating several, maybe they realized the impossible position they are put in is bad for their health?

In any case, the Free Syrian Army has all but dissolved, with whatever loose associations it had, and it’s clear the Whitehouse has stopped pretending they mattered. They either came to the conclusion that the groups no longer have cohesive leadership, or the Coalition stopped supporting them for being ineffective, or because many of the genuine moderates are now helping the Russians by ratting out their extremist buddies for airstrikes. The actual reason is not terribly relevant, but the whole episode is just one of many that got brushed under the rug.

The Americans did try again to raise a mythical anti-terrorist opposition beast, this time they called it the Syrian Arab Coalition (SAC), consisting of some Kurdish groups, and some supposed moderate group funded by the Pentagon. This charade didn’t last long, and the discourse reverted to talking about the Coalition, not the Syrian version specifically. This one might have been a tougher sell to the public though. Since Syrian Kurds are being attacked by Turkey constantly, while the Pentagon works with many of the same Kurdish groups against Islamic State, and trying to explain how that’s acceptable could be challenging. Not more challenging than explaining how really Turkey isn’t supporting the terrorists, despite buying their oil, buying their stolen antiquities, sending them aid, selling them weapons, and throwing a tantrum whenever Russian or Syrian airstrikes kill them, but challenging.

Post-war settlement

Turkey is playing a dirty game of refugee blackmail with Europe, double-crossing the Kurds, helping the terrorists in Syria, and trying to incite the Russians into an aggressive confrontation, and doing it with tacit support from Washington. The Turkish President Erdogan clearly has brass balls, but the same can’t be said about the Saudi Prince in charge of the disastrous war in Yemen, nor about President Obama. As the Coalition is losing the proxy war in Syria, Erdogan is really the primary aggressor still invested in all-out war.

For Turkey, Syria has some prime real estate to nab, and Erdogan is paranoid about the Kurdish solidarity movement taking hold. The Kurds could potentially unify a giant belt of territory, stretching from Turkey to Afghanistan, into an unrecognized defacto Kurdish nation. Any Kurdish government would then have a stranglehold on trade in the region, would by default require concessions on any oil pipelines built, could tax or embargo any shipments between Turkey and most of the Middle-East, and just be a general pain to deal with.

It’s for this reason that America lightly supports the Kurds, it’s a very effective bargaining position against all the sovereign states in the region. This is a rouse however, they are just gaslighting the Kurdish people, alternately pushing for Kurdish autonomy, and then allowing their allies to attack them. The Kurds aren’t a serious ally, they don’t have a vote on the Security Council, they are just leverage. Divide and conquer, even among allies. The psychopathy of the Pentagon and CIA has no bounds.

Turkey aside, most of the terrorist supporters seem to be quietly acknowledging the facts on the ground, and the fact is they aren’t going to win in Syria, which then begs the question, what do they do with all these trained and semi-loyal dependent militants? The answer is to move them somewhere they can be useful, before they all get killed, or desert.

To this end, the Saudis have been transporting thousands of militants from Syria into Yemen to help destabilize the country, which has remained remarkably resilient with the Houthis and Yemeni Army standing their ground. The Saudi-led group of aggressor nations is making little to no military progress, and spends most of its time bombing civilians, though most of the alliance does little more than guard Saudi installations, as none of them are keen to see people killed.

Of the terrorists fighting in Syria, they are slowly being suffocated as they are encircled, or their supply lines to Turkey get severed, and largely out of reach. So just where is this sudden surge in Islamic State in Lybia coming from? Simple, it’s the thousands of militants, mercenaries really, that have abandoned ship, departing for the extremist haven of Turkey. These newly unemployed faux-jihadis are being recruited and shipped over to Lybia, at least the ones that didn’t find their way to Europe with fake passports, but they were probably too moderate anyway right?

And thus the merry-go-round of destabilization continues, with a change of clothes, a change of venue, and another excuse for the American Empire to get involved, curtailing the French interests in the region as a side effect. Divide and conquer.