Stephen Lendman

Washington planned war on Syria years ago. Last year it was Libya. Earlier it was Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since conflict erupted last year, Washington, other NATO states, and regional allies recruited, armed, funded, trained and directed Syrian insurgents. Public admissions emerge slowly. Language conceals what's been ongoing all the time.

On November 29, CNN said Washington is "weighing whether or not to provide arms to the Syrian opposition." US Syrian ambassador, Robert Ford, said Obama "never (took) the provision of arms off the table." They've been supplied regularly under it covertly.

On December 9, Los Angeles Times columnist Doyle McManus headlined "A call to arms for Syria's rebels."

Yesterday (December 11) Washington recognized the illegitimate opposition coalition as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Syrian people." In November, Britain and France announced support. The EU moved closer to official recognition. Member state foreign ministers extended their endorsement.

At the same time, Germany expelled four Syrian embassy staff members. Assad's ambassador was forced out in May. Britain, France, Italy and Spain took similar actions. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said:

"Shortly ahead of" the December 12 Friends of Syria meeting in Morocco, "the EU has given another clear signal of the upgrade and support of the coalition." [He added that doing so] "promote(s) the erosion of the Assad regime."

EU members previously accepted Syrian National Council (SNC) 2.0 members (National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces) as representatives of Syrian "aspirations."

They did so despite strong internal Assad support. Majority "aspirations" don't matter. Washington diktats overrule them. That's how imperialism works.

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William Blum

The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

From the Congress of Vienna of 1815 to the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the "Allies" invasion of Russia in 1918 to the formation of what became the European Union in the 1950s, the great powers of Europe and the world have gotten together in grand meeting halls and on the field of battle to set the ground rules for imperialist exploitation of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, to Christianize and 'civilize', to remake the maps, and to suppress revolutions and other threats to great-power hegemony. They have been deadly serious. In 1918, for example, some 13 nations, including France, Great Britain, Rumania, Italy, Serbia, Greece, Japan, and the United States, combined in a military invasion of Russia to "strangle at its birth" the nascent Bolshevik state, as Winston Churchill so charmingly put it.

And following World War 2, without any concern about who had fought and died to win that war, the Western powers, sans the Soviet Union, moved to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO, along with the European Union, then joined the United States in carrying out the Cold War and preventing the Communists and their allies from coming to power legally through elections in France and Italy. That partnership continued after the formal end of the Cold War. The United States, the European Union, and NATO are each superpowers, with extensive military, as well as foreign policy integration — almost all EU members are also members of NATO; almost all NATO members in Europe are in the EU; almost all NATO members have had a military contingent serving under NATO and/or the US in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere.

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Paul Craig Roberts

With its power declining, Washington was not able any longer to keep Russia out of the World Trade Organization. Congress showed its spite over its impotence by hooking the normalizing of trade with Russia to what is called the “Magnitsky rule.”

Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian attorney who represented a British investment firm accused of tax evasion and fraud in Russia. Apparently, the UK firm supplied information to media alleging government misconduct and participation in corruption inside state-owned Russian companies.

Magnitsky represented the accused UK firm. He claimed that the firm had not committed fraud but had been a victim of fraud. In turn, Magnitsky was arrested. He developed serious illnesses in prison for which he apparently received inadequate medical care.

Whether he died of untreated illnesses, we cannot know. But the US Congress, acting on the unsubstantiated allegation that Magnitsky was tortured and murdered, attached to the trade normalization bill a provision that requires the US government to release a list of Russian government officials believed or imagined to have been involved with the violation of Magnitsky’s human rights and to freeze the assets of these members of the Russian government and to deny them visas to travel to the US. Considering Washington’s belief that its law is the universal law of humankind, Washington probably intends for every country to enforce its edict or to be sanctioned in turn.

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