US State Department Syria Memo: Setting the Stage for War with Russia

• US State Department Syria Memo: Setting the Stage for War with Russia
  by Bill Van Auken, http://www.wsws.org/  
  Secretary of State John Kerry met Tuesday morning with several of the State Department “diplomats” who drafted an internal dissent memo calling for the US to launch air strikes against the Syrian government, supposedly as a means of bringing an end to the five-year-old war that has claimed well over a quarter of a million lives and driven over half the Syrian population from their homes.
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  The New York Times reported that Kerry and 10 of 51 mid-level operatives who signed the memo “engaged in a surprisingly cordial conversation” over the memo, which was leaked to the media virtually before the ink on it was dry.
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  There was nothing surprising about the tone of the meeting. Traveling in Europe when the memo surfaced in the press last week, Kerry described it as “an important statement.”
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  The reality is that the policy proposed in the memo is one that Kerry has himself advocated within the Obama administration for years as a means of turning the tide in a war for regime-change that has employed Al Qaeda-linked and CIA-backed Sunni militias as proxy forces.
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  In 2013, the then-newly installed secretary of state was one of the most bellicose proponents of a direct US military intervention to topple the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad after the Obama administration declared its “red line” over the use of chemical weapons. It was Kerry who laid out the brief for war in August of that year, based on the fraudulent claim that Assad government forces were responsible for a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs.
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  The Obama administration stepped back from the threatened direct military intervention in the face of overwhelming popular opposition to another Middle East war and amid deep divisions between the US military brass, on the one hand, and the State Department and CIA, on the other, about the advisability of such an intervention.
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  Instead, the administration embraced a chemical weapons disarmament plan brokered by Moscow. Subsequently, in 2014, it launched air strikes and sent hundreds of Special Forces into Syria—in direct violation of international law—on the pretext of fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a viciously sectarian Islamist militia that Washington had tacitly supported until it overran much of Iraq, routing US-armed and trained security forces.
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  That this was a phony war was exposed by Russia’s own military intervention in Syria a year later, which succeeded—together with Syrian government troops—in dealing serious blows to both ISIS and the Al Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda Syrian outfit that Washington still protects.
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  This is the situation that has prompted the State Department dissent memo. The so-called “rebels” backed by Washington are not only in a state of shambles, but are turning the guns supplied by the CIA and the Pentagon against each other.
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  Whichever party wins, however, the incoming administration will embark on a dangerous escalation of militarism. Both the Democratic and Republican presumptive candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have expressed their support for intensified bombing, the imposition of a no-fly zone and other acts of aggression. More fundamentally, the drive to war is rooted in the steadily deepening crisis of American capitalism and the uncontainable tensions building up in US society.
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