No ‘Done Deal’ in Syria, as Thermonuclear War Looms

The irony that the British and the Obama Administration are in an open alliance with al Qaeda in their effort to impose "regime change" (i.e, colonialization) on Syria is lost to none but the blind. Even US intelligence studies show the dominance of Saudi and Qatar funded terrorist networks, mostly non-Syrian, in the Syrian rebellion. But the target is not Syria, but the destruction of sovereignty, and especially that of Russia and China, as Ramtanu Maitra demonstrates in the following article from the current EIR. Mike Billington

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No ‘Done Deal’ in Syria, as Thermonuclear War Looms
by Ramtanu Maitra

July 31—As thousands of Sunni terrorists from Britain,
the Arab world, the Maghreb, and South Asia converged
on the outskirts of Syria’s most populous city,
Aleppo, planning a violent confrontation, the Syrian
military was poised to counter the terrorist offensive.
According to some analysts, the battle for Aleppo is a
decisive one for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. U.S.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is visiting the
region and is known for mouthing what the White
House wants him to say, told reporters aboard a military
plane en route to Tunisia, that “if they [the Syrian military]
continue this kind of tragic attack on their own
people in Aleppo, I think ultimately it will be a nail in
Assad’s coffin.”
Major players in this conflict are already planning a
post-Assad Syria. Reuters reported on July 31, citing a
statement from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan’s office in Ankara, that a 36-minute phone call
took place between Erdogan and U.S. President Barack
Obama on July 30. The two heads of states discussed
“how they could work together to speed up political
transition in Syria,” the statement said. “In the talks,
they took up the co-ordination of efforts to accelerate
the process of political transition in Syria, including
Bashar al-Assad leaving the administration and the
meeting of the Syrian people’s legitimate demands.”
However, unlike what Erdogan or Obama would
like to consider a done deal, the Syrian conflict is heading

towards chaos, which could lead to full-fledged war
in the region, posing even a threat of thermonuclear
war. The reasons are the following:
First and foremost, the strategic goal of the Anglo-
American puppet-masters who are stoking the war has
nothing to do with Syria per se, but with destroying national
sovereignty as the fundamental principle of world
relations. This is the stated goal of the British monarchy
and its hangers-on internationally. The target is not so
much the small nation of Syria, with its 22 million
people and few resources, but superpowers Russia and
China.

Out of Control
It is widely accepted around the world that most of
the “Syrian rebels” are not Syrians at all. They are a
contingent of Sunni terrorists, some of whom belong to
the Muslim Brotherhood, while others come from a
mish-mash of terrorist groups, spawned and nurtured
since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
These terrorists, who have been bunched loosely
under the banner of al-Qaeda, are funded by Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar, and a few other nations, and
are being used by Britain and the United States. The
groups’ primary objective is to establish a Wahhabi extremist
variety of Sunni Islamic rule, even an Islamic
Caliphate, throughout the Islamic world, from northern
Africa to Russia’s northern Caucasus.

Those, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar,
who are funding these terrorists, are doing so primarily
for two reasons. The first is the elimination of Shi’ite
power, led by Iran’s political influence, on the Arabian
peninsula. The second objective is to protect their fragile
monarchies, which are coming increasingly under
attack from their own citizens. By sidling up to the old
colonials, such as Britain and France, and the most
powerful protector of the colonial powers, the United
States, these fragile regimes are clinging to the hope of
maintaining their decrepit monarchies. In order to meet
these colonials’ needs, as a quid pro quo, the Saudis,
Qataris, and Kuwaitis are infusing their oil-generated
surplus cash into the bankrupt colonial powers of
Europe.
his policy has sharpened the Shi’a-Sunni conflict,
a conflict that remained dormant within Islam for centuries,
and has been exploited ruthlessly during the last
century by Britain, in particular, to expand its Empire,
which needed cash and control of waterways vital for
its global maritime trade and troop movements.
As a result, Iran has been isolated, and the Arab
world, with the exception of Syria and Iraq (particularly
when Saddam Hussein was in power) has abandoned
what was previously the burning issue: the occupation
of Palestine by Israel. In essence, the Saudis, Qataris,
and Kuwaitis have become the local supporters of Israel’s
occupation of Palestine. Iran, the world’s leading
Shi’a nation, along with Syria and Iraq, became the primary

backer of the Palestinians, invoking the
fury of the colonial nations and the United
States.
This means that Iran and the Shi’as in the
region consider the Syrian conflict an existential
threat posed to them by the West and its
bag-carriers in the Arab world. Some analysts
openly say that the road to Tehran goes
through Damascus: that the forces that are
adopting terrorist means to destroy Syria will
pounce upon Iran once their present objective
is attained.

Why Russia Will Resist
Two other global powers besides the
United States—Russia and China, Russia in
particular—may oppose such a takeover, by
meeting the challenge using full force, including
their nuclear arsenals. There are reasons
why Russia will be left with no choice
but to use force.
To begin with, Syria had long been a Russian ally,
defying the colonial powers’ designs.
In 2007, Moscow announced that its Navy would
be revived and that it would build up a constant naval
presence throughout the world’s oceans. This was reaffirmed
by then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Feb.
20, 2012, when he vowed to restore Russia’s “bluewater
Navy.” Once one of the world’s most powerful
forces, the Russian Navy now has few ships regularly
deployed on the open seas. In this context, the Russian
interest in Syria is vital.
Under a 1971 agreement during the Soviet era,
Russia maintains Syria’s Mediterranean port of Tartus.
The port, which has been in serious disrepair since
1992, is Russia’s only access to the Mediterranean.
Moscow has plans to modernize Tartus to accommodate
heavy warships after 2012. In February 2010, Russian
Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky told RIA Novosti news
daily that “Tartus will be developed as a naval base. The
first stage of development and modernization will be
completed in 2012,” adding that it could then serve as a
base for guided-missile cruisers and even aircraft carriers.
According to Russian Navy experts cited by RIA
Novosti, the facility is being renovated to serve as a
foothold for a permanent Russian naval presence in the
Mediterranean.
Moscow is aware that one of the objectives of the
colonial forces, and the United States, is to prevent

Russia from developing this important naval base. On
July 26, the news agency DNA reported that Syrian
rebels had threatened to attack Russia’s naval base. The
British- and French-backed Free Syrian Army, whose
soldiers are mostly non-Syrians and terrorists from various
nations, issued a threat: “We have a warning for the
Russian forces: If they send any more weapons that kill
our families and the Syrian people we will hit them hard
inside Syria.”
Secondly, Russia does not want to see Syria used to
re-route the energy corridors in the Caspian Basin and
the Mediterranean Basin. If Syria were to fall to the
Saudis, Qataris, and others who are avowed enemies of
Iran and Russia, these routes would be changed to reflect
a new geopolitical reality. At the expense of Iran,
oil from the Persian Gulf could also be rerouted to the
Mediterranean, through Lebanon and Syria.
Moreover, Russia is already a victim of the Saudi/
British-promoted extreme form Islamism inside
Russia. The current decade-long war in Afghanistan,
brought about and deliberately prolonged by the
United States and NATO, has enhanced the jihadi
threat in Russia’s southern flank, as well as in the
Northern Caucasus. Now, the Islamic threat has raised
its head even in the Volga region, a very important
economic area of Russia.
A full-fledged takeover of Syria by the jihadis will
further increase the jihadi threat not only to Russia,
but also to China. These guerrillas—trained, armed,
and sustained by their controllers through “charities”
and drug banks such as HSBC—have been shifted
from one area to another (from Afghanistan to Iraq,
Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, etc.) to meet their controllers’
requirements; they will no doubt be unleashed
in and around Russia and China. This is a serious
threat that neither Russia nor China can ignore, and it
has been reflected in some of the recent deliberations
of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a
Eurasian organization led by Russia and China.

The ‘Turkish Delight’
The Syrian conflict is taking place, of course, in a
region where things are already particularly unstable.
Take Turkey, for instance. Unlike the savory “Turkish
delight,” what Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayiip
Erdogan will taste soon, if Assad falls, will be most unsavory.
It is likely that Erdogan, driven by his dreams of
revival of a neo-Ottoman Empire and Turkey becoming
the leader of the Islamic world, has been blinded by the

“realities” that have been implanted on the ground. The
ingredients that concoct the most unsavory aspect of
those realities point clearly to wide-ranging regional
warfare, which could lead to the dismemberment of
Turkey in the not-too-distant future. And, that future
could be most brutal.
Erdogan’s Greater Turkey dream may lead to a
Lesser Turkey. This is the reality that Erdogan fails to
see and that his recently acquired friends in the West, as
well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, will never tell him.
While Erdogan has resorted to sending more
troops, armored personnel carriers, and missile batteries
to the Syrian border to satisfy the terrorists, whose
on-the-ground controllers operate from within Turkey,
the Kurdish groups in Turkey, some of which are
downright terrorists; plus a large number Kurds from
Iraq working under the Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK); and the pro-Assad Kurdish Democratic
Union (PYD) in Syria, have begun to coordinate
preparations to launch their demand for a separate
nation of Kurdistan. Their demand will include a
chunk of Iraq and Turkey, and a part of Syria bordering
Turkey. The terrorism and bloodshed that would
ensue from such a campaign could also lead to a
worldwide war.
As we observe the goings-on in Syria, Erdogan’s
Air Force continues to bombard the Kurds in Turkey.
None of that draws the media’s attention, but it means
one thing for sure, which is the hardening of the Kurds’
resolve to hit Turkey whenever they can.
The problem that Erdogan and his Saudi-trained
banker-President Abdullah Gul face is that they, and
their party, the AKP, have been intensely involved in
trying to undermine the Kemalist ideology in Turkey,
which has predominated since the secular rule of Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk (1923-38), the founder of the Republic
of Turkey. In order to fulfill their dream of reestablishing
an Eastern-oriented Ottoman Empire, as
opposed to Atatürk’s efforts to move Turkey toward
the West and keep it a secular nation, the first target of
Turkey’s neo-Islamists (of which Erdogan is one) was
the military. If, indeed, Erdogan achieves the goal of
weakening the military, it is a foregone conclusion that
Kurdistan will come into existence, sooner or later.
And, to his surprise, Erdogan will find that the “friends”
he aligned with in order to dismantle the Syrian regime
of Bashar al-Assad and spread chaos all around, are in
the front line, pushing the cause of an independent

Kurdistan.