Most of what Donald Trump says and tweets can be ignored. His advisers and cabinet will make all final decisions regardless of what the stable genius says he will do—for instance, leaving Syria.
The US military isn’t going anywhere despite Trump declaring he will bring the troops home. The troops aren’t going anywhere so long as Bashar al-Assad remains in power.
Tump now says he wants to steal Syria’s minuscule reservoir of oil and give it to the Kurds, possibly as a consolation prize for abandoning them to Erdogan and Turkey.
Others can 'patrol the border of #Syria,' US is 'keeping the oil' – #Trump pic.twitter.com/QNnxaip1rR
— Ruptly (@Ruptly) November 2, 2019
Once again, the Oval Office Ignoramus shows off his colossal stupidity.
Trump says they have been fighting over there for a thousand years, a patently false statement. Under the Ottoman Empire, the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East lived in relative peace, were allowed to manage their own affairs, and worship as Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
It wasn’t until the British and the French went in there after the First World War that the fighting began in earnest. It picked up considerably after the state of Israel was established and the Zionists began ethnic cleansing Palestinians while provoking their Arab neighbors.
Instead of reducing the number of troops as promised, Trump approved an expanded “military mission,” supposedly to “secure” Syrian oil.
Trump Expands Military Mission in Syria Aiming to Control Oil Fields https://t.co/LcPtAiBmmc
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) November 8, 2019
The Donald is completely irrelevant.
“At a US government-funded think tank at the forefront of shaping Washington’s interventionist designs, an American official succinctly laid out the continued-regime change strategy,” writes Ben Norton for The Grayzone.
The “think tank”—the neocon infested Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is funded by clueless American taxpayers.
Both of the congressionally appointed co-chairs [of CSIS] also happen to work at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank that grew out of the AIPAC lobbying juggernaut. Their Syria Study Group was a collection of hardline interventionists from pro-Israel and Gulf monarchy-funded DC think tanks…
In other words, the CSIS is working closely with Israel to formulate US foreign policy in the Middle East. Israel has worked to undermine Syria for over sixty years and the US, a relative newcomer in the gambit to undermine Syria, has pursued the goal of undermining the nation for over 25 years.
Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have a document revealing how the US worked with Israel over the decades to destabilize Syria. The CIA, through the American legation in Syria, engineered a Syrian coup in 1947. It’s said the CIA’s Damascus station chief, Miles Copeland, was also behind the coup. Copeland wrote about his role in his 1969 book, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics.
It was about oil, notes James A. Paul in his book, Human Rights in Syria.
In the late 1940’s, U.S. policymakers grew alarmed when the Syrian government, bowing to public pressure, refused to let a U.S. oil company build a pipeline through its territory. Washington also found the strong anti-Western sentiment and the large Communist party in the country ominous. Concerned that Syria was ‘drifting leftward’, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) laid plans to overthrow its three-year old civilian government.
In 1957, the CIA and MI6 planned to assassinate top Syrian military leaders and use the Iraq Army to intervene in the country. The CIA organized Operation Straggle and Operation Wappen to overthrow the Syrian government, the latter organized by Kermit Roosevelt. He previously engineered a successful coup in Iran. The papers of British Defense Minister Duncan Sandys corroborate the coup plan and the involvement of the two intelligence agencies. The assassination plot was approved by then British PM Harold Macmillan.
“In the document drawn up by a top secret and high-level working group that met in Washington in September 1957, Mr Macmillan and President Eisenhower were left in no doubt about the need to assassinate the top men in Damascus,” The Guardian reported in 2003.
The men targeted were Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, head of Syrian military intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, chief of the Syrian general staff; and Khalid Bakdash, leader of the Syrian Communist party.
The disastrous “civil war” in Syria that began with the “Arab Spring” multi-nation targeted color revolution in 2011 was engineered by the US and the Gulf emirates. WikiLeaks made this known when it released a document revealing how the US-funded and trained the Syrian “rebels,” more accurately described as murderous Wahhabi jihadist terrorists. (See Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2013: U.S. has secretly provided arms training to Syria rebels since 2012.)
The corporate media in the US and Europe worked tirelessly to put a “humanitarian” spin on this declaration of war against a nation that did not and does not pose a threat to America, although it does stand in the way of corporate and Israeli designs for the region.
Trump’s campaign promise to put an end to “nation-building” and foreign interventions was undercut when he declared “to the victor belongs the spoils. You take the oil—you don’t just leave it.” He later said the US would not be stealing oil—in this instance, from Iraq—but would be “reimbursing” itself for the cost of the invasion and destruction of the country.
After declaring he would take Syria’s oil, the president was once again “corrected” by the Pentagon. It said the US wouldn’t keep and profit from stolen Syrian oil. It would instead hand it over to the Kurds.
US gives Syrian oil revenue to #SDF: #Pentagon https://t.co/La8HdMoO5D #Syria
— Al-Masdar News (@TheArabSource) November 8, 2019
As should be expected, the corporate media is not underscoring the fact taking oil from Syria and Iraq is pillage under international law. From the International Committee of the Red Cross:
The prohibition of pillage is a long-standing rule of customary international law already recognized in the Lieber Code, the Brussels Declaration and the Oxford Manual. Pillage is prohibited under all circumstances under the Hague Regulations. Pillage is identified as a war crime in the Report of the Commission on Responsibility set up after the First World War, as well as by the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg) established following the Second World War. The Fourth Geneva Convention also prohibits pillage. Under the Statute of the International Criminal Court, “pillaging a town or place, even when taken by assault,” constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts.
I bet Trump is not even vaguely aware of these long-standing prohibitions. His predecessors in the Obama and Bush administrations selectively ignored international law. Bush-era neocons—demonstrated most recently by Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton—have taken an extreme position on the prosecution of war criminals in the international court.
The Trump-Bolton administration continues its flight from any international court or treaty that could hold the US government to the rule of law. #lawless https://t.co/uCWTvEu2x1
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) October 5, 2018
It is quite natural for the US government to steal foreign assets. It did this with Iran after the Islamic Revolution. Corporate media spun the story to make it appear Obama gave Iran billions of dollars, no strings attached. This is one example of the recent use of the Big Lie. Others are numerous.
The elite and its political class in both the US and the EU believe they are not beholden to treaties and laws. The United States is the exceptional nation. It decides what laws and protocols will be honored and which will be violated.
Although this has been the case for some time, the arrival of the neocons during the Reagan, Bush, and Bush II years pushed this rejection of responsibility for mass murder and looting to new extremes.
Dick Cheney and the neocons are adamant. The engineered murder of a million and a half humans and the destruction of Iraq is a positive achievement.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise Donald Trump would make such a brazen mafioso-like threat to the national sovereignty of the Syrian people. The Bush neocons set the pattern for making publicly displayed belligerence a cornerstone of US diplomacy. It is on full display in pathological fashion during this administration.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Al-Masdar News
