Reuters: US to Strike Syria Before UN Evidence Collected

Tony Cartalucci
Activist Post

The US has accused the Syrian government of delaying UN inspectors from accessing the site of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Damascus. But now, according to Reuters, the US appears to be preparing to strike Syria militarily before the UN’s now ongoing investigation is concluded and evidence revealed to either support or conflict with the West’s so far baseless allegations.

Reuters’ article, “Syria strike due in days, West tells opposition: sources,” states that:

Western powers told the Syrian opposition to expect a strike against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces within days, according to sources who attended a meeting between envoys and the Syrian National Coalition in Istanbul.

“The opposition was told in clear terms that action to deter further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime could come as early as in the next few days, and that they should still prepare for peace talks at Geneva,” one of the sources who was at the meeting on Monday told Reuters.

Clearly, such a strike would render moot both the UN inspection team’s investigation and any evidence they may find.

While the US has accused the Syrian government of obstructing an investigation that is indeed already being carried out, the impending US attack would indefinitely end the UN’s efforts. If, as the US reasons, obstructing the UN’s investigation implicates guilt, then the US has just made itself the prime suspect of what is increasingly appearing to be a staged provocation to salvage a proxy war the US and its allies have all but lost.

What “Limited Strikes” Really Means

Before the US and its allies mire the world in another unprovoked military adventure at the cost of thousands, perhaps even millions of lives, the wider strategy behind what the US is calling “limited strikes” should be fully understood.

Much of the West’s proxy war against Syria has been drawn from plans laid by the Brookings Institution versus Iran in a 2009 document titled, “Which Path to Persia?” The report stated:

…it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)  -Brookings Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report, pages 84-85.

Clearly those in the West intent on striking Iran (and now Syria) realize both the difficulty of obtaining a plausible justification, and the utter lack of support they have globally to carry out an attack even if they manage to find a suitable pretext. An article recently published in Slate indicates that the approval rating of a proposed assault on Syria is only 9% – making the potential war the most unpopular conflict in American history.

Brookings would continue throughout their 2009 report enumerating methods of provoking Iran, including conspiring to fund opposition groups to overthrow the Iranian government, crippling Iran’s economy, and funding US State Department-listed terrorist organizations to carry deadly attacks within Iran itself.

In Syria, each and every one of these options have also been tried, and have subsequently failed. It was revealed as far back as 2007 that the US was planning on arming and funding terrorists to overthrow the government of Syria, as reported by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker article “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?“

Starting in 2011, it has become increasing clear that the so-called “freedom fighters” in Syria are in fact terrorists drawn directly from the ranks of Al Qaeda, armed, funded, and otherwise supported by NATO just as was described in Hersh’s 2007 report.

Despite these overt acts of war, and even considering an option to unilaterally conduct limited airstrikes against Iranian and now Syrian targets, Brookings indicated there was still the strong possibility Iran (and now Syria) would not allow itself to be sufficiently provoked:

It would not be inevitable that Iran would lash out violently in response to an American air campaign, but no American president should blithely assume that it would not.

The report continues:

However, because many Iranian leaders would likely be looking to emerge from the fighting in as advantageous a strategic position as possible, and because they would likely calculate that playing the victim would be their best route to that goal, they might well refrain from such retaliatory missile attacks. – Brookings Institution’s 2009 “Which Path to Persia?” report, page 95.

Already, both Turkey’s current government and its regional partner Israel have attacked Syria on numerous occasions with Syria each time exhibiting infinite restraint.

It is then revealed that the term “limited strikes” is a euphemism for “attempted provocations” to intentionally initiate a wider conflict. While the Brookings document refers to Iran, it is clear that if the West is to topple the Syrian government now with its proxy forces already spent, it will have to do so itself with a military campaign exceeding the currently planned “limited strikes.” Additionally, realizing there is virtually no support for a war with either Syria or Iran, special interests across the West are attempting to tangle the world in this lethal conflict by disingenuously proposing, at first, something relatively benign they believe they can get away with even without popular support.

Western special interests hope that a Syrian response and the death of American and/or Israeli troops – perhaps the sinking of a US ship or the loss of multiple US aircraft – will turn the 9% approval rating for their premeditated assault on Syria into an overwhelming baying for blood across the West’s populations. Failing to elicit a response from Syria, this may be accomplished with false flag attacks, as was the case in the Gulf of Tonkin incident at the onset of the Vietnam War.

Understanding that the intentional endangerment and death of US troops and their allied counterparts is part of initiating an otherwise impossible wider war, inoculates much of an already war-weary Western population from the “rally around the flag” effect Western special interests are depending on to re-energize their failed Middle East adventure.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at 
Land Destroyer Report, Alternative Thai News Network and LocalOrg. Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.