A few weeks ago, couple of caricatures went viral on the
social media. In one of those caricatures, Donald Trump was depicted as a child
sitting on a chair and Putin was shown whispering something into Trump’s ears
from behind. And in the other, Steve Bannon was shown mumbling something into
Trump’s ears with a sly smile on his face.
The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures
was to show that Trump lacks the intelligence to think for himself and that he
is being played around by Putin and Bannon. Those caricatures must have
affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an extent that after that, he has
become cold towards Putin and has recently removed Bannon from the National Security
Council.
Donald Trump is an overgrown child whose vocabulary does not
extends beyond a few words like “amazing” and “tremendous,” and whose frequent
spelling mistakes on his Twitter timeline like “unpresidented” have made him a
laughing stock for journalists and academics alike. It is very easy for the
neuroscientists on the payroll of corporate media to manipulate the minds of
such puerile politicians and to lead them by the nose to toe the line of
political establishments, particularly on foreign policy matters.
It is not a coincidence that only a day before an
international conference on Syria was scheduled to be held in Brussels, a
chemical weapons attack took place in Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib governorate which
was blamed on the Syrian government by the mainstream media.
Similarly, it is not a coincidence that the Obama
Administration’s proverbial “Red Line” has been crossed in Syria only a day
after a breaking news made the headlines that the editor-in-chief of Lebanon’s al-Akhbar
newspaper, Ibrahim al-Amin, had revealed in his recent editorial [1] that Tulsi
Gabbard, the United States Representative for Hawaii whose trip to Syria in
January and meeting with Bashar al-Assad was widely reported in media, had
conveyed President Trump’s offer of cooperation to Assad during the meeting.
Apart from Tulsi Gabbard, the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki
Haley, and the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, have also stated on
the record [2] recently that defeating the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq
is the first priority of the Trump Administration and that the fate of Bashar
al-Assad is of least concern to the new administration.
In a dramatic turn of events after the chemical weapons
attack, however, the US has launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles on al-Shayrat
airfield in Homs governorate from where the Syrian plane apparently flew to the
chemical weapons strike site in Khan Sheikhoun. And Secretary Tillerson said
the US has a "very high level of confidence" that the Syrian regime
has carried out at least three attacks in recent weeks, including on Tuesday,
using Sarin and nerve gas.
Unlike dyed-in-the-wool politicians, like Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton, who cannot look past beyond the tunnel vision of political
establishments, it appeared that Donald Trump not only follows news from
conservative mainstream outlets, like Fox News, but that he has also been
familiar with alternative news perspectives, such as Breitbart’s, no matter how
racist and xenophobic.
Thus, Donald Trump is fully aware that the conflict in Syria
is a proxy war initiated by the Western political establishments and their
regional Middle Eastern allies against the Syrian government. And he is also
mindful of the fact that militants are being funded, trained and armed in the
training camps located in the Turkey-Syria border regions to the north of Syria
and the Jordan-Syria border regions to the south of Syria.
Moreover, isn’t it ironic that when the “visibly moved and
tearful” Donald Trump appeared on television to make a historic statement after
the chemical weapons’ attack that “the attack has crossed a lot lines for me,”
he was standing next to King Abdullah of Jordan who has been instrumental in
creating a carnage in Syria that has claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent
lives and displaced half of Syrian population?
According to an informative December
2013 report [3] from a newspaper affiliated with UAE’s government which
takes the side of Syrian opposition against the Syrian government, it is
clearly spelled out that Syrian militants get arms and training through a
secret command center based in the intelligence headquarters’ building in
Amman, Jordan that has been staffed by high-ranking military officials from 14
countries, including the US, European nations, Israel and the Gulf Arab States
to wage a covert war against the government in Syria.
Thus, compared to the conventional attitude of the
globalists, for an anti-status-quo administration that promised reforms and a
radically different approach to foreign affairs during the election campaign,
Donald Trump has let down his Alt-Right electoral base by conducting cruise
missile strikes in Syria and by adopting the militarist tone and tenor of his
interventionist predecessors.
As I have already mentioned that lack of understanding is
not a factor here. Donald Trump is mindful of the ground realities of the
Syrian theater of proxy wars. More than realization, it was required of him to
take a moral stand on his principles. But expecting from a morally weak and
impotent old fart to stand by his principles who was in the habit of grabbing
Miss Universe pageants by their genitals and was fond of watching prostitutes
perform “golden shower” in the presidential suites of Moscow’s five-star hotels
is a bit naïve.
The Trump Administration is fully aware that a covert war is
being waged against the Shi’a-dominated regime by the latter’s regional foes. America’s
interest in the Syrian proxy war is partly about ensuring Israel’s regional
security and partly about doing the bidding of America’s regional, Sunni
allies: Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf Arab States.
Saudi Arabia which has been vying for power as the leader of
Sunni bloc against the Shi’a-dominated Iran in the regional geopolitics was
staunchly against the invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003. The
Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein constituted a Sunni Arab bulwark against
Iran’s meddling in the Arab World.
But after Saddam was ousted from power in 2003 and
subsequently elections were held in Iraq which were swept by Shi’a-dominated
parties, Iraq has now been led by a Shi’a-majority government that has become a
steadfast regional ally of Iran. Consequently, Iran’s sphere of influence now
extends all the way from territorially-contiguous Iran and Iraq to Syria and
Lebanon.
The Saudi royal family was resentful of Iranian encroachment
on the traditional Arab heartland. Therefore, when protests broke out against
the Assad regime in Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the
Gulf Arab States along with their regional allies, Turkey and Jordan, and the
Western patrons gradually militarized the protests to dismantle the Iranian
resistance axis.
Finally, the Trump Administration found itself on the
crossroads to choose between the non-interventionist ideals of its electoral
base or to pursue the militarist, regime change policy of its predecessors in
order to protect the interests of America’s regional, Middle Eastern allies in
a power struggle for regional dominance which has spilled a lot of innocent
blood and has reduced a whole country of 22 million people to rubble, and it
has chosen the destructive path of political pragmatism over pacifist principles.
The choice was predetermined, however, because the Trump
Administration has already held several face-to-face meetings with America’s
longstanding allies, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, King Abdullah of Jordan,
Erdogan of Turkey and the heir apparent to the Saudi throne Prince Mohammad bin
Salman. An hour-long phone call to Vladimir Putin and a message of
reconciliation to Bashar al-Assad through Tulsi Gabbard were simply not enough
to revise America’s longstanding policy in the Middle East.
No comments:
Post a Comment