Israel bombs Syria; U.S. signals approval

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No serious observer of Middle East­ ern politics believes that the Zionist, co­ lonial, settler, and racist state of Israel makes a single move before consulting with its U.S. benefactors. Indeed, the Israeli army and state depend on the billions annually allocated by U.S. im­ perialism to maintain Israel as its chief imperial representative in the region. Israel is by far the largest recipient of U.S. military aid.

The May 2-3 and May 4-5 nighttime bombings of Syria’s International Air­ port and military installations report­ edly killed hundreds. Israeli officials declared that the strikes were aimed at preventing Syrian aid to the Lebanese Hezbollah forces, which defeated the Israeli intervention in Lebanon several years ago.

Following the first attack, President Obama readily sided with Israel, affirm­ ing in a press interview that he fully supported Israel’s right to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah. But major media, includ­ ing The New York Times (May 4), raised questions as to whether the objectives of the attack were to intervene into the conflict in Syria itself.

Indirect support to the Syrian bomb­ ing was signaled days earlier by state­ ments from President Obama and U.S. Secretary of “Defense” Chuck Hagel, who threatened overt war against Syria if the U.S. could verify the Israeli charge that Syria had used deadly sarin gas against the rebel opposition. Obama sanctioned direct and lethal military aid when he stated last week that the use of poison gas by the Syrian government would be crossing the “red line” that provided sufficient justification for an overt U.S. intervention.

To date there has been no verification of the use of sarin gas. Traces of chlo­ rine have been found in soil samples near a Syrian chlorine plant bombed by the rebel forces. But despite repeated accusations and innuendos, neither U.S. nor international agencies have been able to point to concrete evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Syria.

Even a May 5 Reuters report from Geneva implying that rebel forces have used sarin was not without qualifica­ tion. The report stated: “UN human rights investigators have gathered tes­ timony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

“The United Nations independent com­ mission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte. ‘Our investigators have been in neigh­ boring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, accord­ ing to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,’ Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

“‘This was use on the part of the op­ position, the rebels, not by the govern­ ment authorities,’ she added, speaking in Italian.”

What is incontrovertible is that U.S. allies in the region—Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—have supplied hundreds of millions of dollars worth of lethal military aid to destabilize the Syrian re­ gime. The U.S. also claims to have sup­ plied some $400 million in “non-lethal aid.” The United States, which funds Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile program, missiles used in the early May bomb­ ings, is the chief military force in the region.

In the case of Qatar, a nation without an army, the U.S.-established and priva­ tized Blackwater military installation is used daily as an operational base for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. It was cen­ tral to the imperial conquest of Libya, with Blackwater-trained troops playing a key role in the “liberation” of Tripoli.

While there is little doubt that the U.S. seeks the removal of the Assad regime, there appear to be divisions among the U.S. ruling elite as to how this should be accomplished. The central issue in dispute is the nature of the government to be established, presumably after the Syrian regime is either compelled to ne­ gotiate a “settlement” that establishes a new government with Assad or after Assad’s complete defeat.

This internal dispute among top U.S. decision makers is fueled by the fact that none of the rebel forces are seen as reliable U.S. allies, and almost all of them oppose the establishment of an­ other colonial regime beholden to the U.S. or any other colonial power.

U.S. envoys to the region, from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the present Secretary, John Kerry, have met repeatedly with the Syrian Na­ tional Council in efforts to forge unity between these disparate, warring, and mainly expatriate Syrian bourgeois ele­ ments, all with virtually no influence on the ground.

The inability of the United States to establish a credible government and (Above) Obama with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

therefore achieve “regime change” with yet another puppet government has led it to funnel aid to the rebels from all quarters, including from Islamic fun­ damentalists that the U.S. publicly op­ poses. Meanwhile, Washington stands silent as this component of the Syrian opposition receives lethal aid from Qa­ tar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

The U.S. Machiavellian strategy is first and foremost to weaken the Assad re­ gime to maximize its opportunity to establish a new government amenable to U.S. economic, military, and regional “interests,” the latter including deepen­ ing the isolation of Iran.

At the same time, as in the U.S. war against Libya, the U.S. seeks to isolate and weaken, if not destroy, the oppo­ sitional forces that began the two-year war with peaceful protests against the Assad dictatorship. Those forces were brutally repressed by the regime, thus fueling a broad and popular mass move­ ment, organized by independent Local Coordinating Committees and rank-and-file Syrian soldiers who refused or­ ders to attack civilian protesters.

Today, while it is far from clear what the relationship of forces is among the rebel opponents, who include Islamic (continued on page 5)

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