tagged w/ Bush's war plan for 4 years
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The strike that shattered US-Syria ties
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Strained relations between Washington and Damascus shifted from bad to worse on Sunday when a United States commando raid on a Syrian border compound near the Iraq border reportedly left eight civilians dead - including one woman. Syrian television has called the attack an "American massacre", but details continue to emerge.
The US broke its silence on the incident on Tuesday, claiming that top al-Qaeda operative Abu Ghadiyah was targeted and killed during what is being described in Western media as a pre-emptive strike. The Associated Press, quoting an unnamed US military official, reported that Ghadiyah was about to carry out an attack in Iraq. Ghadiyah, whose real name is Badran Turki Hishan Al
Mazidih, is the leader a prolific network that moves foreign al-Qaeda fighters into underground resistance factions in war-torn Iraq.
The attack came days after a top US commander in Iraq told reporters that US troops bolstering their presence on the Syrian border, which he called an "uncontrolled" gateway for fighters entering Iraq.
The unconfirmed details and unquestionable tragedy of the raid have left once-promising US-Syria ties in tatters. Top officials in Damascus have blasted the "cowboy" tactics of US forces, and Syrian public opinion has become vociferously anti-American.
The so-called "massacre" won't lead to war between the US and Syria, but it marks an important turning point in a turbulent and unpredictable relationship that stretches back some 60 years.
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Shortly after 4 pm on October 26, four US helicopters violated Syrian airspace en route from Iraq. Two of the choppers landed in the village of Sukariyya in the township of Abu Kamal near the border with Iraq. US soldiers disembarked and opened fire on civilians - killing eight (including one woman), in a battle that lasted for 40-minutes. A short time later, a Syrian TV crew first broke the news of the attack, calling it an "American massacre in Syria".
The Foreign Ministry quickly summoned the US and Iraqi attaches in Syria to condemn the attack. Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem spoke from London, criticizing the American "cowboy" behavior and lashing out heavily on Arab states that remained silent - likely in strong reference to Saudi Arabia - waiting to see how Washington would respond.
One theory says that the entire ordeal was part of the internal US politics in the final lap of the presidential campaign, aimed at boosting the chances of Republican Senator John McCain by giving him more reason to pursue Bush's "war on terror" - this time with Syria.
Twenty-four hours after the attack, an American "source" confirmed the attack, claiming that the US Army was tracking jihadi elements that had crossed the border into Syria. Yet the State Department, Pentagon and White House remained silent suggesting that something was very amiss in Washington.
Had the Americans struck at a terrorist stronghold, the Bush team would have been the first to brag about it on all available media. The fact that the traditional US chorus remained silent seems proof that the Americans were not too proud of what they did, and that perhaps human error had come into play.
....cont....The strike that shattered US-Syria ties
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Strained... more
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SPEAKING FREELY
The oil factor in Bush's 'war on tyranny'
By F William Engdahl
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.
In recent public speeches, President George W Bush and others in the US administration, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have begun to make a significant shift in the rhetoric of war. A new "war on tyranny" is being groomed to replace the outmoded "war on terror". Far from being a semantic nuance, the shift is highly revealing of the next phase of Washington's global agenda.
In his January 20 inaugural speech, Bush declared, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world" (author's emphasis). Bush repeated the last formulation, "ending tyranny in our world", in the State of the Union address. In 1917 it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy", and in 1941 it was a "war to end all wars".
The use of tyranny as justification for US military intervention marks a dramatic new step in Washington's quest for global domination. "Washington", of course, today is shorthand for the policy domination by a private group of military and energy conglomerates, from Halliburton to McDonnell Douglas, from Bechtel to ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, not unlike that foreseen in president Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 speech warning of excessive control of government by a military-industrial complex.
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Historically Washington has had no problem befriending some of the world's all-time tyrants, as long as they were "pro-Washington" tyrants, such as the military dictatorship of President General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, a paragon of oppression. We might name other befriended tyrants - Ilham Aliyev's Azerbaijan, or Islam Karimov's Uzbekistan, or the al-Sabahs' Kuwait, or Oman. Maybe Morocco, or Alvaro Uribe's Colombia. There is a long list of pro-Washington tyrants.
For obvious reasons, Washington is unlikely to turn against its "friends". The new anti-tyranny crusade would seem, then, to be directed against "anti-American" tyrants. The question is, which tyrants are on the radar screen for the Pentagon's awesome arsenal of smart bombs and covert-operations commandos? Rice dropped a hint in her Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony two days prior to the Bush inauguration. The White House, of course, cleared her speech first.
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Target some tyrannies, nurture others
Rice hinted at Washington's target list of tyrants amid an otherwise bland statement in her Senate testimony. She declared, "in our world there remain outposts of tyranny ... in Cuba, and Burma and North Korea, and Iran and Belarus, and Zimbabwe". Aside from the fact that the designated secretary of state did not bother to refer to "Burma" under its present name, Myanmar, the list is an indication of the next phase in Washington's strategy of preemptive wars for its global domination strategy.
As reckless as this seems given the Iraq quagmire, the fact that little open debate on such a broadened war has yet taken place indicates how extensive the consensus is within the Washington establishment for the war policy. According to the January 24 New Yorker report from Seymour Hersh, Washington already approved a war plan for the coming four years of Bush II, which targets 10 countries from the Middle East to East Asia. The Rice statement gives a clue to six of the 10. She also suggested Venezuela is high on the non-public target list.
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cont
SPEAKING FREELY
The oil factor in Bush's 'war on tyranny'
By F... more
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