Imperial arrogance spells fatal over-reach for the US and Western allies

By Finian Cunningham for PRESSTV - Monday Jul 02, 201205:19 PM GMT

The United States and its Western allies are behaving increasingly like the doomed emperors of the late Roman Empire: decadent, self-indulgent and supremely arrogant.

There seems to be a reckless presumption of boundless, unilateral power. While the US and its left lieutenants, Britain and France, can claim to command the world’s fiercest military machine in the form of NATO, there is nevertheless, paradoxically, a growing sense of fragile, impotence in the face of a fast-changing world.

This past week we have seen yet another manifestation of this Roman Empire syndrome with the astoundingly arrogant conduct of the US, Britain and France at the Geneva conference on Syria. Ostensibly, the summit was called to oversee a peaceful political transition in Syria, which has been ravaged by 16 months of violence.

But the absurdity and obscenity of the Geneva meeting is that the mayhem raging in Syria has largely been inflicted on that country by the same Western powers along with their Turk and Arab proxies. Yet, these Western powers pontificated as usual about international law and respect for human rights. (Of course, the dissembling Western media provide a crucial cloak for their masters to hide what is otherwise a sickening farce.)

Since mid-March 2011, these parties have been arming, funding and directing mercenary militia groups to rip Syria apart from within. No cost in human lives and suffering is too high for the imperial powers to effect their strategic goal of regime change. No-warning car bombs in urban centres, roadside explosives, massacres of families and whole villages are part of the Western instruction manual to terrorise and subvert a sovereign country.

Civilian sources in Syria say communities are living in a state of fear from these NATO-backed foreign mercenaries and opportunistic internal criminal gangs. Families are evicted from their homes, which are then turned into sniper nests or bomb factories; shopkeepers are warned to close down their premises or see them burned to the ground. “These gangs are not Syrian. We can tell from their accents and beards that they are foreigners from Libya, Iraq, Saudi,” said one young woman from Damascus, who added that she feared her country would be turned into the NATO-induced post-apocalyptic disaster that is currently Libya.

So for the Western triumvirate of Washington, London and Paris to assume the position of drawing up a “peace plan” for Syria is as preposterous as expecting a group of arsonists to come up with proposals to quench a blaze that they have instigated.

To add insult to injury, even when the Geneva meeting over the weekend concluded with a statement on a political transition that does not exclude the incumbent Syrian President Bashar Al Assad - at the insistence of Russia and China - the imperium’s foreign ministers Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Laurent Fabius insisted that “Assad must step down”. Clinton, with magisterial arrogance, said: “Assad will still have to go… he cannot be part of Syria’s future… Russia and China will have to show him the writing on the wall.”

Indeed, Clinton gave notice that, in the wake of the Geneva summit, the US will be returning to the UN Security Council to demand more sanctions against Syria and to seek a mandate for “no fly zones” and “humanitarian corridors” - which is euphemistic language for NATO military intervention.

What we can be sure of in the coming weeks is a vice-like move by the Western powers. On the one hand, there will be an even greater escalation of violence on the ground against Syrian society by the NATO, Turkish and Arab-backed death squads. Ever since the supposed Kofi Annan peace plan was implemented on 12 April, avowedly with the support of Western powers, the NATO-backed mercenaries of the self-styled Free Syrian Army have ratcheted up the violence, making it impossible for any ceasefire to take hold. In the past week, in the run-up to the Geneva conference, the conflict and casualties surged, with explosions in Aleppo, Damascus, Hama, Homs, Dayr al Zawr and Idlib.

As Syria becomes ever more unstable and blood-soaked from NATO mercenaries, and with the Western corporate controlled media dutifully pumping out their government propaganda narrative that it is the state forces of Assad that are “massacring civilians”, the scene will be set for the diplomatic hand to tighten the vice-like grip.

The pressure on Assad to step down may become unbearable given the mounting civilian casualties and commercial mayhem inflicted by Western-backed covert war. This abdication would be unwarranted of course given the popular mandate, but the president may feel that sacrificing his office may be the only way to alleviate the pain on his people.

Alternatively, the US-led NATO powers will push for “responsibility to protect” no fly zones or safe havens. In fact, the latter development is already under way with Turkey’s militarization of its southern border with Syria after the downing of the Turk warplane last week and Ankara’s warning to Damascus to keep its troops removed from the frontier. This “humanitarian intervention” by NATO will follow the Libyan precedent in which NATO becomes the air force for its proxy militias on the ground. “Responsibility to protect” will quickly transmogrify into “responsibility to bomb” the Syrian government of Assad into defeat.

All of these pernicious designs on Syria over the past 16 months and in the coming weeks are utterly criminal. The NATO interference in Syria is aimed at regime change and is an integral part of a wider military roadmap for Western hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. To be sure, rhetorical pronouncements by Washington, London and Paris on democratic principles, human rights and respect for international law are displays of the most abject cynicism and duplicity. These powers are the diametric opposite to what they proclaim to represent: they are pariah terror states that are out of control.

The destruction of Syria by Western powers is apiece with the destruction by these same powers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. News reports are coming in of the US now using drone air strikes in the West Africa country of Mali. This insatiable march to endless wars is accompanied by Western so-called democracies allying with the most repressive dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and other Arab monarchies, as well as enlisting the manpower of Al Qaeda and other shadowy Islamic extremists. The gap between Western pretentious rhetoric and grim reality has now diverged to a chasm.

As American author and analyst Webster Tarpley pointed out recently, Washington and its allies have no longer a modicum of respect for sovereignty of countries. The Western powers are on a mission to plunder the planet in a vain bid to salvage their own debt-ridden, bankrupt societies.

The seeming indifference of Western governments to the chasm in their rhetoric and reality - glaringly obvious to the rest of the world - is the mark of supreme arrogance, the Roman Empire syndrome.

But history shows that every empire has its day of reckoning. As with the Imperium Romani, the height of expansion by the Imperium Americana may also signal a fatal strain of over-reach. While its nefarious foreign military adventurism in Syria and elsewhere seems unstoppable at the moment, the latent social implosion in the US and across Europe may well herald the eventual sacking of this empire - from within.

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The true story behind the Houla Massacre

By Peter Eyre – Middle East Consultant – 8/6/2012

As we have seen so many times before  we are all now starting to understand the deceit and lies that now pan out on a daily basis in the world´s media, most of which is propaganda at its best.

However, in order to keep a more balanced approach to such spin it is our duty of care to show you the truth from time to time as and when it occurs.

It is now time for me to print the following article that you will not see in the mainline media because it reveals the truth as to what actually happened in Houla as opposed to what the west want you to believe.

I will print this story in full as I received it and hope you will all have a more balanced approach as to what really happened that terrible day and how the west continue to push for intervention having now exposed a second massacre that appears to be a re run of the previous one.
Obviously to wage war you have to have justification and so the west are trying every possible way to create a false flag incident so that they can intervene in Syria!! - Peter Eyre

The true story behind the Houla Massacre

 Opposition Terrorists “Killed Families Loyal to the Government”

Marat Musin – 7 June 2012

 Global Research Editor’s Note: This incisive report by independent Russian journalist Marat Musin dispels the lies and fabrications of the Western media. The report is based on a chronology of events as well as eyewitness accounts. Entire pro-government families in Houla were massacred. The terrorists integrated by professional mercenaries were not pro-government militia as conveyed in chorus by the mainstream media, they were in large part mercenaries and professional killers operating under the auspices of the self-proclaimed Free Syrian Army (FSA):

“When the rebels seized the lower checkpoint in the center of town and located next to the local police department, they began to sweep all the families loyal to the authorities in neighboring houses, including the elderly, women and children. Several families of the Al-Sayed were killed, including 20 young children and the family of the Abdul Razak. The people were killed with knives and shot at point blank range. Then they presented the murdered to the UN and the international community as victims of bombings by the Syrian army, something that was not verified by any marks on their bodies.”

We call on our readers to forward this report far and wide. The massacre in Houla is being blamed on the Syrian government without a shred of evidence. The objective is not only to isolate Syria but to develop a pretext and a justification for waging an R2P humanitarian war on Syria. It is essential to reverse the tide of war propaganda which uses civilian deaths as a pretext to wage war, when those civilian deaths were carried out not by the government but by professional terrorists operating under the helm of the US-NATO supported Free Syrian Army.

[Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, Montreal, June 1, 2012
BBC Newsnight upheld this fact in a live interview on June 2, 2012; reported at end – ed]

In the weekend of May 25, 2012, at about 2 PM, big groups of fighters attacked and captured the town of Al – Hula of the Homs province. Al-Hula is made up of three regions: the village of Taldou, Kafr Laha and Taldahab, each of which had previously been home for 25-30 thousand people.
The town was attacked from the north-east by groups of bandits and mercenaries, numbering up to 700 people. The militants came from Ar-Rastan (the Brigade of al-Farouk from the Free Syrian Army led by the terrorist Abdul Razak Tlass and numbering 250), from the village of Akraba (led by the terrorist Yahya Al-Yousef), from the village Farlaha, joined by local gangsters, and from Al Hula.

The city of Ar-Rastan has long been abandoned by most civilians. Now Wahhabis from Lebanon dominate the scene, fueled with money and weapons by one of the main orchestrators of international terrorism, Saad Hariri, who heads the anti-Syrian political movement “Tayyar Al-Mustaqbal” (“Future Movement”). The road from Ar-Rastan to Al-Hula runs through Bedouin areas that remain mostly out of control of government troops, which made the militant attacks on Al Hula a complete surprise for the Syrian authorities.

When the rebels seized the lower checkpoint in the center of town and located next to the local police department, they began to sweep all the families loyal to the authorities in neighboring houses, including the elderly, women and children. Several families of the Al-Sayed were killed, including 20 young children and the family of the Abdul Razak. Many of those killed were “guilty” of the fact that they dared to change from Sunnis to Shiites. The people were killed with knives and shot at point blank range. Then they presented the murdered to the UN and the international community as victims of bombings by the Syrian army, something that was not verified by any marks on their bodies.

 The idea that the UN observers had heard artillery fire against Al-Houla in the Safir Hotel in Homs at night I consider nothing short of a bad joke. 50 kilometers lie between Homs and Al-Houla. What kind of tanks or guns has this range? Yes, there was intensive gunfire in Homs until 3 am, including heavy weapons. But, to give an example, on the night of Monday to Tuesday shooting was due to an attempt by law enforcement to regain control for a security corridor along the road to Damascus, Tarik Al-Sham.

 After a visual inspection of Al Hula it is impossible to find traces of any of fresh destruction, bombing and shelling. During the day, several attacks by gunmen are made on the last remaining soldiers at the Taldou checkpoint. Militants used heavy weapons and snipers made up of professional mercenaries were active.

Note that once, the exactly same provocation failed at Shumar (Homs) and 49 militants and women and children were killed, when it was organized just before a visit of Kofi Annan. The last provocation was immediately exposed as soon as it became known that the bodies of the previously kidnapped belonged to Alawites. This provocation also contained serious inconsistencies – the names of those killed were from people loyal to the authorities, there were no traces of bombings, etc.

However, the provocation machine is running all the same. Today, the NATO countries directly threaten to bomb Syria, and a simultaneous expulsion of Syrian diplomats has begun. As of today, there are no troops within the city of Al Hula, but there are regularly heard bursts of automatic fire, nonetheless. Moreover, it is unclear whether the militants are fighting with each other, or whether supporters of Bashar al-Assad are being cleaned out.

Militants open fire on virtually everyone who tries to get closer to the border town. Before us a UN convoy was fired upon and two armored jeeps of the UN observers were damaged, when they tried to drive up to an army checkpoint in Tal Dow. In the attack on the convoy a twenty-year-old terrorist was spotted. The fire was directed on the unprotected slopes of the first jeep, the back door of the second armored car was hooked by a fragment. There are wounded among those accompanying.

According to a wounded soldier: 

 “The next day, UN observers came to us at the checkpoint and as soon as they arrived, gunmen opened fire on them. And three of us were injured. One was wounded in the leg, the second – in the back, and I was hit in the hip. When the observers came, they could hear a woman who was standing next to them and cried, the woman stood and pleaded the observers’ help – to protect her from the bandits. When I was wounded, the observers watched as I fell, but none of them tried to help. Our checkpoint no longer exists. There are no civilians any longer in Taldou, only militants remain. Our relationship to the locals was excellent. They are very good to us; they called on the army to enter Taldou. We were attacked by snipers.”

Unfortunately, many of the militants are professional snipers. 100-200 meters from our group TV-crew, militants attacked a BMP that went to replace soldiers at the checkpoint. During this a soldier – draftee got a concussion and slight tangential wound in the head by a sniper bullet. Looking at the pierced Kevlar helmet, it seems he did not even realize that he survived by a miracle.

Snipers kill up to 10 soldiers and policemen at checkpoints each day. It is true, that the daily casualties of law enforcement agencies in Homs were dozens of victims daily. But, unfortunately, at 10 am, six dead soldiers were taken to the morgue. Most were killed by a shot in the head. And the day had just begun 

So, these are the names of those were killed by snipers in the early morning hours of May 29:

1. Sergeant Ibrahim Halyuf
2. Sergeant Salman Ibrahim
3. Policeman Mahmoud Danaver
4. Conscript Ali Daher
5. Sergeant Wisam Haidar
6. the dead soldier’s family name could not be clarified

The bandits even fired an automatic burst on our group of journalists, although it was clear that this is a normal filming crew, consisting of unarmed civilians.

HOW THE ATTACK BEGAN

After Friday prayers at about 2 PM on May, 25th a group from the Al Aksh clan started firing on a checkpoint of law enforcement officers from mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Returning fire from a BRDM hit the mosque, and this was the very aim to lead to a bigger provocation.

Then, two groups of militants led by the terrorist Nidal Bakkour and Al-Hassan from the Al Hallak clan, supported by a unit of mercenaries, attacked the upper checkpoint on the eastern outskirts of the city. At 15.30 the upper checkpoint was taken, and all the prisoners executed: a Sunni conscript had his throat cut, while Abdullah Shaui (Bedouin) of Deir-Zor was burned alive.

During the attack on the upper checkpoint in the east the armed men lost 25 people, which were then submitted to the UN observers, together with the 108 dead civilians – “victims of the regime”, allegedly killed by bombing and shelling of the Syrian army. As for the remaining 83 bodies, including 38 young children, they were from the families that were executed by militants. These families were all loyal to the government of Syria.

Interviews:
 
With a law enforcement officer: 

“My name is Al Khosam, I am a law enforcement officer. I served in the village of Taldou, the district of Al-Hula, a province of Homs. On Friday, our checkpoint was attacked by a large group of militants. There were thousands.

 Q: How do you protect yourself?

 Answer: A simple weapon. We had 20 people, we called support, and when they were coming for us, I was wounded, and regained consciousness in the hospital. The attackers were from Ar-Rastan and Al-Hula. Insurgents control Taldou. They burned houses and killed people by the families, because they were loyal to the government. Raped the women and killed the children.”

Interview with a wounded soldier: 

 “I am Ahmed Mahmoud al Khali. I’m from the city Manbej. Was wounded in Taldou. I come from a support group that came to the aid of our comrades, who were stationed at the checkpoint. Militants destroyed two infantry fighting vehicles and one BRDM standing at our checkpoint. We moved out to Taldou in a BMP, to pick up our wounded comrades from the checkpoint within the city. We drove them back in the BMP, and I filled in their place. And after a while the UN observers came. They came to us, we led them to the homes of families who were cut by thugs. I saw a family of three brothers and their father in the same room. In another room we found dead young children and their mother. And another one- an old man killed in this house. Only five men, women and children. The woman raped and shot in the head, I covered her with a blanket. And the commission had seen them all. They put them in the car and drove away. I do not know where they took them, probably for burial.”

A resident of Taldou on the roof of the police department:

“On Friday afternoon I was home. Hearing the shots, I came out to watch what was happening and saw that the fire came from the north side, towards the location of army checkpoint. As the army did not respond, they started to approach the homes, were subsequently the family was killed. When the army started to return fire, they used the women and children as human shields and continued firing at the checkpoint. When the army began answered, they fled. After that, the army took the surviving women and children and brought them into safety. At this time, Al Jazeera aired pictures and said that the Army committed the massacre at Al Hula. In fact, they killed the civilians and children in Al-Hula. The bandits did not allow anyone to carry out their work. They steal everything that they can get their hands on: wheat, flour, oil and gas. Most of the fighters are from the city of Ar Rastan.”

After they captured the city, they carried the bodies of their dead comrades, as well as the bodies of people and the children they killed to the mosque. They carried the bodies in KIA pickups. On May, 25th, at around 8 PM, the corpses were already in the mosque. The next day at 11 o’clock in the morning the UN observers arrived at the mosque.

Media Disinformation

To exert pressure on public opinion and change the positions of Russia and China, texts and subtitles in Russian and Chinese languages were prepared in advance, reading: “Syria – Homs – the city of Hula. A terrible massacre perpetrated by the armed forces of the Syrian regime against civilians in the town of Hula. Dozens of victims and their number is growing, mainly women and children, brutally killed by indiscriminate bombing of the CITY.”

Two days later, on May 27, after the residents’ stories and video recordings made showed that the facts do not support the allegation of shelling and bombing, the bandits’ videos had undergone significant changes. At the end of the text appeared this postscript: “And some were killed with knives.”

 Marat Musin, Olga Kulygina, Al-Hula, Syria

Original text / source: http://maramus.livejournal.com/86539.html

video: Russian
The translation is based on the impressive work of Soldatovich and Elena. Thank you very much for the translation of this text about the recent events near the Syrian city of Homs and in the area of al-Houlah.

Courtesy GlobalResearch.ca
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31184

ANNA NEWS (Original Russian) and syrianews.cc
Newsflash: Houla massacre victims “were supporters of Syrian Government”

2 June 2012

BBC’s Newsnight last night interviewed a London based Syrian businessman who stated that the families murdered by terrorists in Houla were supporters of the Syrian government, not the opposition. If correct this would make it highly unlikely that the narrative pushed by the mainstream media is true, and suggests the opposite is the case: the atrocity was committed not by the Assad regime but by the insurgents, supported by NATO, Al Qaeda and the gulf Arab dictators, and reported to be covertly armed by Turkey’s Muslim Brotherhood linked government.

The official story of the Houla massacre has changed substantially since it first broke, with unconfirmed reports from insurgents (routinely described on the BBC as activists). Version one, corroborated by at least one BBC correspondent, had it that the victims were killed by heavy weapons of the Syrian army. Version two was that villagers had been randomly killed by militias sponsored by the Assad government. Version three, the current version, concedes that most of the victims came from a few extended families.

It should not be difficult to establish who the families were loyal to: the insurgents or the Syrian government. The Syrian businessman on Newsnight stated they were related to an MP elected in recent elections which the insurgents have boycotted.

It was not clear whether the information from the Syrian businessman was expected in this live TV show. The potential bombshell was ignored by hawkish presenter Gavin Essler and high profile warmonger Paul Wolfovitz, who demanded a military attack on Syria. A UN spokesman refused Essler’s invitation to confirm that the Houla victims were killed by Syrian government forces.
If we now hear less and less about the massacre with no further details, many will conclude that the prima facie suspects for the atrocity are the insurgents, backed by NATO and the Gulf Arab dictators, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, including the BBC. This would be a classic false flag terrorist atrocity. Ironically the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Bortherhood has denounced the 9/11 attacks as a false flag atrocity organised by Israel or the CIA. In one way this would be good news: there are no logistical reasons why these people cannot be arrested, prosecuted and tried. It is established in international law that propaganda on behalf of war criminals is in itself a war crime. The fact that no-one would expect this to happen is testimony to the tacit acceptance that NATO governments and media have no real interest in human rights.

Peter Eyre – Middle East Consultant – 8/6/2012

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