American Agenda for Mideast

-DR. ABDUL RUFF COLACHAL

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When egoistic super power status of USA was being crushed by Russian smartness in Ukraine, Israel came to its rescue, attacking the besieged Palestinians in Gaza strip, thereby diverting the terrible scenario in Ukraine, also shaking the foundations of US imperialism.

However, Israel overdid the terror operations in Gaza killing even little children, generating global outcry. So, the USA has restarted the its Mideast war by feeding the ISIS with terror goods one the one hand and  also attacking it, on the other, thereby confusing the general masse of the world which takes media reports from the western terrocracies as god’s final words.

USA has decided to prolong its Mideast war to gain complete control of Arab resources which might take years.  ISIS is the key tool the Pentagon-CIA twins use for destabilizing both Syria and Ira by bringing ISIS to the doors of Iran.  Saudi Arabia is fully satisfied with US efforts to disturb both Syria and Iran and the techniques adopted and implemented to remove Syrian regime of Assad.

Instead of the usual NATO, President Barack Obama has touted as an international coalition to battle the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in a new US war in the Middle East, launched without the approval of either the United Nations or the US Congress. US warplanes have stepped up their bombing of ISIS positions around the beleaguered city , and the airstrikes seem to have at least temporarily slowed the advance of ISIS forces, which control about one-third of the enclave.

Revealed are the contradictory and conflicting interests of the various elements making up Obama’s supposed coalition, including Turkey, the monarchical Sunni Arab despots of the Gulf States, France, Germany, a few lesser European powers and Washington’s closest allies, Canada and Australia. Both Canada and Australia are making strenuous efforts to be seen as  important terrocracies on earth, almost at part with USA.

White House, controlled by a black President pursuing whitish polices of Neocons, is under increasing pressure, from the military-intelligence apparatus, from its Kurdish allies in northern Iraq, and from warmongering critics in both the Republican and Democratic parties, to intervene more aggressively in Syria.

Both Washington and Turkey backed the war for regime change in Syria, in which ISIS emerged as the strongest armed anti-government group among a collection of largely Sunni Islamist militias. While the Obama regime is now using the campaign against ISIS as a means of reasserting US hegemony over the region, including through regime change in Damascus, it is at odds with Turkey over the tactics and timing of this campaign.

Washington and Ankara agree on the ultimate goal of overthrowing Assad, but they have sharp differences over the means to accomplish this as both have got their own individual agenda for Mideast. The Obama administration is pressing the Turkish government either to send ground troops across the border to break the siege of Kobani, or to allow armed Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi Kurds to come to the defense of the town. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has so far refused, demanding a public US commitment to the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria and a US-protected buffer zone along the Syria-Turkish border.

Turkish policy has been to promote ISIS as part of the anti-Assad campaign in Syria. Obviously on concurrence with Washington, Turkey has allowed thousands of ISIS recruits to pass through its territory to Syria to join the Islamist group. This triggered a political upheaval in the Kurdish-populated region in Turkey, with anti-government rioting in which at least 22 people were killed. Turkish government had decreed a state of emergency in six provinces in southeastern Turkey.

Turkey has an army of nearly 700,000, the sixth largest in the world and by far the largest in the Middle East, heavily equipped with US and European-made weaponry, including a large air force. Nonetheless, NATO secretary-general Stoltenberg was at pains to suggest that a few thousand ISIS fighters on the Turkish border constituted a threat that could justify military intervention under Article Five of the NATO charter.

While Washington and NATO have been prodding Turkey to intervene, the government of Iran condemned the Turkish parliament’s action last week, giving Erdogan authority to send Turkish troops across the border. Iran warned of “irreparable consequences” if Turkey violated the sovereignty of Syria, which is Iran’s sole ally among the Arab states of the Middle East.

The Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has demanded that Washington agree to establish a no-fly zone over Syria and a buffer zone inside Syrian territory as conditions for its participation in the US-led war. These proposals are aimed, in the first instance, at crushing the autonomous region carved out along the border by Syrian Kurds, who are allied with Turkey’s Kurdish nationalist movement, the PKK, and at quickly turning the US war into a direct drive to overthrow the Assad government.

Washington has insisted that it is pursuing an “Iraq first” strategy, centering its intervention on “degrading” and “destroying” the ISIS forces inside Iraq, and has carried out its limited operations in Syria with the approval of the Assad regime, even as it insists that the government in Damascus is not “legitimate.”

Erdogan drove home the depth of the disagreements, ordering Turkish warplanes to carry out air strikes, not against ISIS in Syria, but against the PKK, whose fighters, alongside Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish militias, have been the sole ground forces to effectively challenge the advance of ISIS in either country. In Iraq, they have operated in tacit coordination with US military “advisers,” despite being on a State Department list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Turkey claimed that the air strikes in southeastern Turkey were in retaliation for PKK attacks on Turkish military bases, which was denied by the PKK itself. The attacks, the first in nearly two years of peace negotiations between the government and the PKK, follow a week of violent clashes across Turkey that left at least 35 people dead, as Turkish Kurds, who make up close to 20 percent of the population, took to the street to protest Ankara’s blockade of the besieged city of Kobani.

The Turkish press reported this week that Turkish forces have not only blocked Kurdish fighters, arms and ammunition from reaching Kobani, but have even refused entry to wounded Kurdish fighters from the city, leaving them to bleed to death on the border. The latest air strikes threaten to upend the peace talks between Ankara and the PKK, reigniting a civil war that claimed some 40,000 lives over the course of three decades.

The carve-up that Erdogan fears most is the emergence of an independent Kurdistan, which is why his regime has sought to seal off Kobani and allow ISIS to pummel its Kurdish defenders. His answer appears to be the revival of Turkish hegemony over the region, beginning with the installation of a Sunni Islamist regime in Damascus. Erdogan also used a speech at Marmara University in Istanbul Monday to declare that the greatest threat facing Turkey was that “new Lawrence of Arabias” is destabilizing the region.

The conflicting reports are not merely mixed messaging, but reflect the actual incoherence of both US and Turkish policy on the Syrian crisis. Both Washington and Ankara seek the removal of Assad, but the Turkish government regards the Kurdish separatists as a more immediate target, while the Obama administration seeks to use ISIS as its pretext for escalating military operations in the region.

While the American media has give nonstop saturation coverage to atrocities like the ISIS beheading of captured journalists and aid workers, the portrayal of the group as a major threat to the population of the NATO countries is ludicrous.

However, Iran has warned about the irreparable consequences of US move to contain Iran by extending the ISIS war to Iranian borders. Iran has already suggested it would send troops across the border into Iraq to fight ISIS if the Sunni Islamist group approached too closely to Iranian territory.  

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian charged that the Erdogan government was pursuing a policy of “neo-Ottomanism” in the Middle East and vowed that Tehran would not allow the Syrian government, its sole Arab ally, to be overthrown by outside powers.

While the US-led war has registered no discernible advances against ISIS in either Iraq or Syria, it is already creating sharp tensions that can erupt into a conflict that could engulf the entire region and beyond.

Eventually, all this would lead to a possible direct war between Sunni and Shi’a nations that the sworn enemies of Islam in the West and East look forward at the earliest.