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Hillary
Clinton and the Syrian Bloodbath
By
Jeffrey Sachs
February
16, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Huffington
Post"
- In the Milwaukee
debate, Hillary Clinton took pride in her role in a recent UN
Security Council resolution on a Syrian ceasefire:
But I would add this. You know, the Security Council finally got around to adopting a resolution. At the core of that resolution is an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva, which set forth a cease-fire and moving toward a political resolution, trying to bring the parties at stake in Syria together.
This
is the kind of compulsive misrepresentation that makes Clinton unfit
to be President. Clinton's role in Syria has been to help instigate
and prolong the Syrian bloodbath, not to bring it to a close.
In
2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire
being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US
intransigence - Clinton's intransigence - that led to the failure of
Annan's peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among
diplomats. Despite Clinton's insinuation in the Milwaukee debate,
there was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage.
Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now
displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000
dead.
As
every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not
mostly about Bashar al-Assad, or even about Syria itself. It is
mostly a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic
and misguided for that reason.
Saudi
Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East, view
Iran, the leading Shia power, as a regional rival for power and
influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable foe that
controls Hezbollah, a Shi'a militant group operating in Lebanon, a
border state of Israel. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have
all clamored to remove Iran's influence in Syria.
This
idea is incredibly naïve. Iran has been around as a regional power
for a long time--in fact, for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is
not going away. There is no way, and no reason, to "defeat"
Iran. The regional powers need to forge a geopolitical equilibrium
that recognizes the mutual and balancing roles of the Gulf Arabs,
Turkey, and Iran. And Israeli right-wingers are naïve, and deeply
ignorant of history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe,
especially when that mistaken view pushes Israel to side with Sunni
jihadists.
Yet
Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia,
Turkey, and right-wing Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran.
In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between Israel and
Syria to
attempt to wrest Syria from Iran's influence. Those talks
failed. Then the CIA and Clinton pressed successfully for Plan B: to
overthrow Assad.
When
the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and
the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an
opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a
geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the
CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change.
In
early 2011, Turkey and Saudi Arabia leveraged local protests against
Assad to try to foment conditions for his ouster. By the spring of
2011, the CIA and the US allies were organizing an armed insurrection
against the regime. On August 18, 2011, the US Government made
public its position: "Assad must go."
Since
then and until the recent
fragile UN Security Council accord, the US has refused to agree
to any ceasefire unless Assad is first deposed. The US policy--under
Clinton and until recently--has been: regime change first, ceasefire
after. After all, it's only Syrians who are dying. Annan's peace
efforts were sunk by the United States' unbending insistence that
U.S.-led regime change must precede or at least accompany a
ceasefire. As the Nation
editors put it in August 2012:
The US demand that Assad be removed and sanctions be imposed before negotiations could seriously begin, along with the refusal to include Iran in the process, doomed [Annan's] mission.
Clinton
has been much more than a bit player in the Syrian crisis. Her
diplomat Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi was killed as he
was running a
CIA operation to ship Libyan heavy weapons to Syria. Clinton
herself took the lead role in organizing
the so-called "Friends of Syria" to back the
CIA-led insurgency.
The
U.S. policy was a massive, horrific failure. Assad did not go, and
was not defeated. Russia came to his support. Iran came to his
support. The mercenaries sent in to overthrow him were themselves
radical jihadists with their own agendas. The chaos opened the way
for the Islamic State, building on disaffected Iraqi Army leaders
(deposed by the US in 2003), on captured U.S. weaponry, and on the
considerable backing by Saudi funds. If the truth were fully known,
the multiple scandals involved would surely rival Watergate in
shaking the foundations of the US establishment.
The
hubris of the United States in this approach seems to know no bounds.
The tactic of CIA-led regime change is so deeply enmeshed as a
"normal" instrument of U.S. foreign policy that it is
hardly noticed by the U.S. public or media. Overthrowing another
government is against the U.N. charter and international law. But
what are such niceties among friends?
This
instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark
violation of international law but has also been a massive and
repeated failure. Rather than a single, quick, and decisive coup
d'état resolving a US foreign policy problem, each CIA-led regime
change has been, almost inevitably, a prelude to a bloodbath. How
could it be otherwise? Other societies don't like their countries to
be manipulated by U.S. covert operations.
Removing
a leader, even if done "successfully," doesn't solve any
underlying geopolitical problems, much less ecological, social, or
economic ones. A coup d'etat invites a civil war, the kind that now
wracks Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It invites a hostile
international response, such as Russia's backing of its Syrian ally
in the face of the CIA-led operations. The record of misery caused by
covert CIA operations literally fills volumes at this point. What
surprise, then, the Clinton acknowledges Henry Kissinger as a mentor
and guide?
And
where is the establishment media in this debacle? The New York Times
finally covered a bit of this story last month in describing
the CIA-Saudi connection, in which Saudi funds are used to pay
for CIA operations in order to make an end-run around Congress and
the American people. The story ran once and was dropped. Yet the
Saudi funding of CIA operations is the same basic tactic used by
Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal of the
1980s (with Iranian arms sales used to fund CIA-led covert operations
in Central America without consent or oversight by the American
people).
Clinton
herself has never shown the least reservation or scruples in
deploying this instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Her record of avid
support for US-led regime change includes (but is not limited to) the
US bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001,
the Iraq War in 2003, the Honduran coup in 2009, the killing of
Libya's Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, and the CIA-coordinated insurrection
against Assad from 2011 until today.
It
takes great presidential leadership to resist CIA misadventures.
Presidents get along by going along with arms contractors, generals,
and CIA operatives. They thereby also protect themselves from
political attack by hardline right-wingers. They succeed by exulting
in U.S. military might, not restraining it. Many historians believe
that JFK was assassinated as a result of his peace overtures to the
Soviet Union, overture he made against the objections of hardline
rightwing opposition in the CIA and other parts of the U.S.
government.
Hillary
Clinton has never shown an iota of bravery, or even of comprehension,
in facing down the CIA. She has been the CIA's relentless supporter,
and has exulted in showing her toughness by supporting every one of
its misguided operations. The failures, of course, are relentlessly
hidden from view. Clinton is a danger to global peace. She has much
to answer for regarding the disaster in Syria.
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Jeffrey Sachs Director, Earth Institute at Columbia University
Zie ook: 'NAVO slachting in Libië: de waarheid over de omverwerping van het bewind van Khadaffi......'
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