Rick Rozoff: U.S. Attack On Syria May Cause World War III

by Rick Rozoff
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
August 28, 2013

John Robles
Voice of Russia
August 28, 2013

Image by DVIDSHUB via Flickr

With what appears to an imminent Western military adventure and yet another act of aggression against a small country on the other side of the world, meaning what appears to be the upcoming unprovoked attack on the sovereign nation of Syria by the United States, Rick Rozoff spoke about the military buildup and the reasons for the West’s continued meddling in the Middle East.

Robles: Hello. This is John Robles. I’m speaking with. Rick Rozoff, the owner and manager of the Stop Nato website and mailing list. Hello, Sir.

Rozoff: Hello, John. How are you?

Robles: Not too good in light of the events that are currently taking place. As I’m sure you’re aware…

Rozoff: I think it is a very dramatic and I fear a tragic moment at which we are speaking.

Robles: And it seems like there is very little we can do or that anybody can do to influence what has apparently been in the works and a plan by those geopolitical…

Rozoff: Mad men

Robles: Mad men

Rozoff: … or evil geniuses that constitute the foreign policy elite of the United States and other western nations to complete your thought, John.

Robles: Thank you.

Rozoff: Yes. That’s exactly what I fear is the case.

Robles: Can you tell us a little bit on the military hardware aspect of this. There are not too many reports out there on that.

Rozoff: We have to keep in mind that until the people of the Mediterranean basin demand that the US pick up and leave its military, the US is always…the Pentagon is always in position to strike any nation in or near the Mediterranean Sea. But what we do know is that currently assigned to the Sixth Fleet, permanently stationed in the Mediterranean, are no fewer than four guided missile destroyers that are in the eastern part of the Mediterranean even as we speak, including one which played an instrumental role in the opening salvo of cruise missile attacks against Libya in March of 2011.

These are what are referred to in US military parlance as Arleigh Burke class destroyers. In other words they are the type that will be equipped to carry interceptor missiles, Standard Missile-3 interceptors of the sort that are part of the US missile shield that has been deployed in and around Europe and in the Middle East. We know for a fact there are four of those.

There are reports that at least one and possibly two US submarines, and these are the USS Florida and USS Georgia, are deployed off the eastern Mediterranean, each of which…by the way, the Arleigh Burke destroyers I mentioned, the four of them, are capable of carrying 70 missiles each. These include cruise as well as other missiles, but the submarines are far more deadly, far more lethal. Each of them is equipped to carry 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

One of these two I mention – USS Florida – was, you know, fired something in the neighborhood of a 100 missiles in the attack against Libya, you know also in the Mediterranean, of course, two and a half years ago. So this is what the US has in play.

Robles: Sir, they’re planning to use Tomahawks on Syria, is that correct?

Rozoff: This is what they used of course against Libya two and a half years ago, what they used against Yugoslavia in 1999, it was used against Iraq in 2003. You know, again, it’s a coward’s way of waging warfare. You don’t endanger pilots or fixed wing aircraft by flying strikes into the country. You simply fire a cruise missile.

It has devastating effect, of course. And you don’t endanger the life of any US serviceman, which in a way we have to hark back to the war against Libya again – 2011 – and the fact that after 60 days of waging war, unprovoked war, against a defenseless nation of some six million people, according to the War Power Resolution, introduced in the US Congress in the early 1970s, President Barack Obama was obligated to come before Congress and present his case for a continuation of the war. He arrogantly refused to do so,stating in his estimate it was not a war because US military personnel were not in harm’s way.

So you can wreak as much devastation, material and human, as one wants to against a smaller defenseless country, but if US servicemen aren’t in danger themselves and it doesn’t constitute a war then the president of the United States (commander-in-chief of the US armed forces), in his opinion, doesn’t feel obligated even to explain to the US Congress what he is doing. So this is what we are talking about with Syria right now.

We also have to remember that Syria and Lebanon really now are the only countries in the entire Mediterranean region that have not become US military partners, US military stooges for the most part, and that each new country that falls into the orbit of the Pentagon becomes a military base for attacks on other countries.

I’ve read reports today that the British military bases in Cyprus are being … you know are seein gwarplanes coming in. We know the Souda naval base in Crete in Greece could be used for any attack against Syria. With a change in government in Cyprus at the beginning of this year we can see an even more compliant client regime willing to do the US’s dirty work.

Robles: What have you heard about Iraq, there were some statements by Iraqi officials that they were against the use of their airspace for an invasion of Syria? And then I’d like you to get into what your views on the after effects of what this invasion is going to cause.

Rozoff: It’s standard operating procedure, if you will, for countries not to openly acknowledge that they’re granting the US and its allies the right to use their air space to launch attacks. When we’re talking about the cruise missile attacks, in large part depending on where the vessel, whether a surface vessel or a submarine, is firing them, of necessity Syria has a fairly short coast line compared to Libya and to other countries. And we could count on the fact that a goodly number of the cruise missiles being fired inside Syria would have to pass over the territory of other countries: Jordan, Iraq, come most immediately to mind.

But of course, if there was plausible deniability, and they simply don’t acknowledge that…Saudi Arabia is another…that the US is firing missiles over their territory then no one is the wiser I suppose. But, in the long run, the regime that was put into power and is beholden to the United States and Baghdad says publicly and what it does in fact I think are two different things. And until there’s a larger community of nations in the world ready to stand up for peace and against armed barbarism, then no one country is going to say no to Washington for fear if nothing else it will be the next target.

And I think if you want a parallel with what’s going on right now, you’ll look at that decade that began, say, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China in 1931 and it included attack after attack on country after country by the Axis powers, by imperial Japan, by fascist Italy and by Nazi Germany, which culminated in 1940 with nations like Norway and Denmark and Greece, and Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France overrun by these hordes of militarists. For ten years the world saw this naked aggression going on and the League of Nations could not or would not do anything about it.

Robles: That’s what the United States is doing right now and the United Nations which was organized and formed to stop that from happening ever again has done nothing.

Rozoff: It is worse than has done nothing; it is in fact a complicit partner in the arrangement. The Russian government amongst others has been warning over the last 24 hours that any exacerbation of the conflict in Syria by internationalizing it, that is by having major Western military powers and their Persian Gulf allies launch military attacks inside Syria is only going to inflame, exacerbate and worsen the situation, it’s going to cause a massive conflagration not only in Syria but in the surrounding area.

Countries like Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and others are going to be pulled into this maelstrom, into this vortex, inevitably. And what we are seeing now is maybe a culmination of the decades-long so-called broader Middle East initiative of the United States which is simply to remake the political map from the nation of Mauritania on the Atlantic coast to Kazakhstan on the Chinese border and the US is going to throw this entire area into turmoil in furtherance of its own selfish and for the most part undisclosed geopolitical objectives.

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U.S. Attack On Syria May Cause World War III

by Rick Rozoff
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
August 28, 2013

John Robles
Voice of Russia
August 28, 2013

If the West is allowed to launch military aggression in Syria, using any pretext, Iran, Russia and China and the few remaining countries in the world who possess independent foreign policies will be left with no remaining buffer between themselves and the US–NATO war machine. Voice of Russia contributor Rick Rozoff spoke about this an more in the second part of an interview covering the current crisis involving US aggression against Syria.

This is John Robles, I’m speaking with Mr. Rick Rozoff, the manager and owner of the stop NATO website and mailing list.

Robles: There was a statement from China that there is a threat that this could culminate into the beginning of World War III. Can you comment on that?

Rozoff: People are using this language and I think not without justification. If the parallel we established a few minutes ago about events in Asia and Europe from 1931 to 1941, and we should mention, by the way, that at the end of that decade there was Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union with the largest invasion force in human history and, in the end, the deadliest war in human history. But if at that time world war was grounded in a series of unprovoked and, unfortunately, unopposed acts of military aggression, then the parallel certainly could be extended to include that.

A comment today by a leading prelate, a leading church official in Syria, Antoine Audo, who is the head of what is called the Chaldean Catholic Church in Syria, made precisely that statement.

He said that: If there is outside – which is to say Western and allied – military intervention inside his country, it could lead to a world war. Those are exactly his terms. And this is what he said in an interview with Vatican Radio.

Robles: What can you tell us about the region? I mean, in your opinion, for example Israel. I keep thinking that if they are going to destabilize the entire Middle East, right in the middle of it you’ve got Israel. You’ve got all these Islamic fundamentalists, extremists and terrorists and none of them are much in love with the Jewish state. How is Israel going to deal with this? Or is this part of the plan?

Rozoff: It appears to be counterintuitive but we have to recollect that the US’s second closest ally in the entire Middle Eastern region is of course Saudi Arabia, which is theocratic, it is Wahabist at root, a severe form of theocratic government, it is medieval in many respects and particularly brutal.

But the US has no problem and Israel has no problem reconciling support for the Jewish secular state of Israel on the one hand and for the medieval hereditary despotism in Saudi Arabia on the other. And the Obama administration, which now is once again invoking humanitarianism as an excuse for a war, has no problem at all having just completed the largest bilateral arms deal in history with Saudi Arabia.

So, I suppose the average citizen of the US and of the world is not supposed to make comparisons and see just how egregiously contradictory those policies are. And then you claim to be fighting religious extremism and on the other hand you are arming to the teeth the bastion of religious extremism in the Islamic world.

Robles: You mentioned Obama, you mentioned Egypt and the hypocrisy, and the double dealing that is going on. Have you heard anything about the fact that Obama was connected with Morsi, with the Egyptians, to the attack on the CIA installation in Benghazi where the CIA long-term agent Christopher Stevens was killed? Apparently, he was working on transferring Stinger missiles to Al Qaeda elements in Syria and Libya.

Rozoff: Yes, that’s the interpretation I’m familiar with too without being able to substantiate it of course. But nevertheless, the US was simply going from strength to strength, it slipped from one massive bombing campaign on behalf of foreign mercenaries and domestic religious extremists in Libya to spreading the Washington- as well as the Saudi-backed jihad, if you will, from Libya to Syria. And in the course of that Stevens, who incidentally was ensconced in Benghazi in the opening days of the attack against Libya in March 2011, basically, running weapons and jihadi fighters into Libya for the war against the established government of Muammar Gaddafi.

So, if the line in the Gospels about “he, who lives by the sword will perish by the sword” has any meaning, I think in the case of Mr. Stevens it is pretty obvious that what he put out in the world is what came back to get him.

Robles: What about Obama now? Some people are saying that the fact that he was actively funding Al Qaeda and they ended up killing four Americans, is it possible that even with all these illegal aggressive wars and millions of people that have been killed by Bush and Obama – is it possible that these four Americans, including Stevens, might lead to the downfall of this regime, and Obama in particular? Is that realistic?

Rozoff: I don’t think it is realistic, I think it is possible. But I believe that nobody looks too closely into matters like that. And the so-called other side, the Republican Party, which on foreign policy issues the political differences end at the shoreline, as has been remarked, and they are not going to look too closely at anything like that.

In fact, even during the two impeachment trials of Nixon in the early 1970s and Clinton at the end of the 1990s, and for that matter the Iran-Contra affair, you know, whenever one party can make some political capital out of embarrassing the other during congressional hearings, they’ll bring them right to the edge of the abyss and then pull them back out of the fear of really exposing what is going on.

I wouldn’t anticipate anything in that respect. I think, if I were a family member of one of those four killed in Benghazi that I would have strong feelings about it, I would be willing to dedicate the rest of my life to investigating what actually happened and who was ultimately responsible for that. But I wouldn’t expect anyone in our suborned and corrupt and arrogant and aloof political system to really care about the four people who were killed. And they’ll make points demagogically trying to blame somebody or other, but I don’t believe anyone has lost any sleep over the demise of Mr. Stevens and his three colleagues.

Robles: One more question. We’ve been going over this for years literally now and it looks like an invasion is just maybe hours away. Any other things you want to say about Bashar Assad and Syria?

Rozoff: I won’t characterize it as an invasion at this point any more than, say, the six-month air war against Libya two years ago was technically speaking an invasion. And it is a very common modality now. It is one that we saw I think in earnest, first of all, in 1999 with the 78-day air war against Yugoslavia, and then saw it with Libya two and a half years ago.

But what we are seeing is that on the ground a heterogeneous grouping of the so-called opposition figures, some domestic and extremists, some foreign and mercenaries are used to be the spotters on the ground and those who attack government installations, and, if possible, bring about retaliation that can then be construed as a massacre, a crime against humanity, which then provides the West – the US and its NATO allies – with the justification for a military intervention, such as the Racak events in early 1999 in Kosovo which were characterized as a massacre by the US and its allies and that led to the air war.

We saw something very similar in Libya and of course that scenario is being played out again in Syria currently. And what that permits the US and its allies to do with the overwhelming superiority and firepower, particularly in terms of missiles and aircraft, to just bombard an essentially defenseless nation which is much smaller than any of the major NATO members of course, and surely the US, with outdated and for the most part ineffectual air defenses, to bomb that country into submission on behalf of the rebel forces that have been trained and armed from outside by the US and its allies.

So, we are seeing that scenario played out to perfection. And the only thing missing up until now of course was the sort of Racak massacre pretext. And now we have it.

Robles: So, your final assessment on this supposed chemical attack?

Rozoff: Considering that a year ago the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces Barack Obama stated specifically, tipping his hand, tipping the hand of the West in terms of what they would use as the alleged reason for military aggression against Syria, that the use of chemical weapons was crossing a red line, and knowing that the government of Syria would commit political suicide by doing such a thing it is more than I think any sensible person would expect or could understand. And in fact, I think whatever the details are…and let’s be honest about it, it doesn’t matter what the details are. If Washington wants war, Washington is going to have war. And if it not this pretext, it is going to be another one.

Robles: I think for most sane and intelligent, and peace-loving civilized people in the world the details do matter. But when you have people and all they want is bloodshed, I guess you are right, the details don’t matter.

Rozoff: I mean they do not matter in that we could spend the few remaining hours we may have left before Damascus is in flames arguing about whether the US lies can be disproven or not, or we can try at the 11th hour to try to marshal international outrage to get this stopped before it begins. That’s my plea.

Robles: What would you tell the international community?

Rozoff: Stop it here, or it is coming to your home. After Syria, Lebanon, after Lebanon, Iran, after Iran, who knows who.

Robles: Last year it was what? Venezuela, China and Russia.

Rozoff: And two years ago it was both Libya and Ivory Coast, let’s not forget. And at this point, honestly, as we’ve talked about before, I sincerely doubt there are a dozen nations in the world, out of 194 members of the United Nations currently, that dare pursue an independent foreign policy, including explicitly, in an expressly in military manner, are not tied to the Pentagon’s evolving and expanding international military nexus.

And to have one of those dozen picked off today or tomorrow, or any time in the near future, means there are fewer and fewer left. And it is only a matter of time, seriously, before Iran, Russia and China are going to find there are no buffers left, there is nothing between them and the US-NATO war machine.

Robles: Rick, thank you very much. I’ll be speaking to you as this develops, if possible.

Audio

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600 Missiles, All Pieces In Place For U.S. Strikes On Syria

by Rick Rozoff
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Stop NATO
August 28, 2013

Press TV
August 28, 2013

The possibility of “a direct military attack” on Syria is increasing with the US deploying its “naval assets” in the eastern Mediterranean, says Rick Rozoff of Stop NATO.

“All the pieces are coming into place for what could be not only increased military threats against Syria but the possibility of a direct military attack on Syria,” Rozoff told Press TV on Tuesday.

The chance for an attack is “being complemented with the heightened deployment of US naval assets into the east of Mediterranean.”

“There are no fewer than four what are called Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers the United States has currently deployed in the east of Mediterranean,” he noted.

There are also “reports of, one for certain and possibly two, US submarines, each of which are equipped with 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles”, he added.

“So that’s a total 300 missiles there, 70 missiles apiece on the guided missile destroyers, so the total of almost 600 missiles are in the area plus aircraft carriers on each side of the Suez Canal attached to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and the Fifth Fleet in the Indian Ocean.”

A day after US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed there was “undeniable” evidence of a chemical attack in Syria, another senior US official, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Washington was ready to attack the country if President Barack Obama issues an order.

“We have moved assets in place to be able to fulfill and comply with whatever option the president wishes to take,” Hagel told the BBC on Tuesday.

Some unnamed senior American officials sounded more bellicose as they told NBC News that the US has planned to launch missile strikes against Syria “as early as Thursday”.

Also on Monday, Israeli newspaper Haaretz said the US and its Western allies may launch a military strike against Syria.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey was in Jordan on Monday to discuss Syria options with his Jordanian counterpart and other regional defense chiefs.

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see

In Rush to Strike Syria, U.S. Tried to Derail U.N. Probe by Gareth Porter

Obama’s ‘Guns of August’ by Ed Ciaccio + Take Action

Chemicals Seep Through the Cracks in Western-led Axis Against Syria by Finian Cunningham

The BBC’s Syrian Chemical Weapons Coverage: An Exercise in Imperial Deception By William Bowles (updated)

Saudi Arabia Sponsoring Terrorists Who Kill Muslims by Finian Cunningham