“NATO brought in thousands and thousands of fighters from Libya in particular but also from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, a whole swat of countries and they’ve essentially gone to the bottom of the barrel of the al-Qaeda sort of patsy milieu in these countries and they’ve thrown them across the borders….the idea was that this was going to bring about an overwhelming assault on the Syrian state and the outcome of last week is that this did not occur that the five-pronged defensive has so far not succeeded and I think that is a real characteristic moment that NATO threw everything they had and somehow this has failed. The Syrian state did not collapse. Decay and confusion do not reign. The death squads are being mopped up in Damascus and will be mopped up in Aleppo.”
– Webster Tarpley
– NATO’s al-Qaeda wing clipped in Syria: Analyst (PressTV, July 25, 2012):
NATO has failed in trying to topple the Syrian government despite going “to the bottom of the barrel” of the al-Qaeda militants at its disposal and exerting every effort it possibly could, says an analyst.
The comment comes as Syrian Security forces have foiled repeated attempts by armed groups to infiltrate into Syrian territory from neighboring countries.The latest clashes between Syrian forces and armed groups come at a time when the anti-Syria Western regimes have been calling for President Bashar al-Assad to step down.
On July 23, foreign ministers of the Arab League called on Assad to step down after an emergency meeting in Qatar.
Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi censured the Arab League stance in a press conference in Damascus on the same day.
“All who take up weapons in the face of the state will be responded [to] in the same way,” Makdissi told reporters.
Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 and many people, including large numbers of security forces, have been killed in the turmoil.
Press TV has interviewed prominent author and historian Webster Griffin Tarpley from Washington to further discuss the issue.
What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.
Press TV: An Iraqi parliamentarian has linked the terror attacks in his country to the unrest in Syria. He says that al-Qaeda is responsible for both terror attacks both inside Iraq and Syria. So does this mean that the [Britain’s former Special Air Service] SAS, the CIA as was suggested in this report are now siding with al-Qaeda against Assad?
Tarpley: Yes, certainly and that has been the reality the entire time. We must always remember that al-Qaeda is nothing but the Arab legion of the CIA created in the early 1980s to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and if people didn’t know that they can pick up a copy of today’s Washington Post here in Washington and there is an article where the CIA is talking about their operations in Syria and it says you have to be careful because sometimes if you back a group it can turn into some kind of entity that might turn against you.
This is the way they tell the story and they cite the case of al-Qaeda, so that the US started al Qaeda, this is now in the Washington Post. I would in this case though certainly say that the Iraqi spokesman is correct.
The kinds of death squads that you see in Syria and now in Iraq today seems to me come from the same matrix they go back to the time when John Negroponte was the United States ambassador to Baghdad and you remember that Negroponte’s expertise is legendary.
Wherever he would go in Central America during the 1980s, death squads would magically spring up and when he went to Baghdad everybody expected that death squads would appear there and sure enough they did.
And these death Squads were key in starting the Sunni-Shiite civil war which relieved pressure on the US forces and his deputy ambassador Robert Ford was then assigned to Damascus over the last several years and it’s widely assumed that Ford was instrumental in bringing the death squads to Syria and this was all done under the title of the Salvadoran solution and from the very beginning Negroponte and Ford regarded Syria and Iraq as one unit. So it comes from the same matrix and the Iraqis are certainly right about that.
Press TV: Mr. Tarpley throughout the conflict, one writer was writing in an article I was reading, NATO has been waging a covert war, Washington directing everything he was saying, Israel, France and Britain also directly involved and Persian Gulf states Turkey, Jordan, even Lebanon’s March 14 alliance according to him and other Arab League countries involved in that operation. Where in all of this does Kofi Anan’s peace plan stand?
Tarpley: Kofi Anan is the smokescreen that is supposed to be used to hide, cloak the reality of all of this kind of an operation. I think what we’ve seen in the last week though is if not a turning point at least a very important moment in this entire struggle.
Military tacticians know the tactic of swarming and swarming means that you can throw a lot of inferior forces at an enemy with the point being to create chaos and confusion in which more qualified forces can then go on and take certain key points.
It looks like what was done last week was an attempt by NATO to orchestrate such a perfect storm. We had the resolution brought into the United Nations if that had passed, that would have led to a collapse of some parts of Syria. We had the attempt to launch television warfare, video fakery, the [US Deputy National Security Adviser] Ben Rhodes plan but the Syrians knew that it was coming, they have been forewarned, and they were able to work around it. There was the attempted decapitation of the Syrian leadership structure by I believe a predator drone firing a missile and not some suicide bomber coming into the building where that occurred, where the four intelligence and military leaders were slain but you’ve also got an attempt to bring down the currency which seems to have misfired.
But this question of swarming, the reports that I have now are that NATO brought in thousands and thousands of fighters from Libya in particular but also from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, a whole swat of countries and they’ve essentially gone to the bottom of the barrel of the al-Qaeda sort of patsy milieu in these countries and they’ve thrown them across the borders.
Last week we had these reports that certain border crossings to Iraq or Kurdistan and Jordan had been captured by the so called rebels and the idea was that this was going to bring about an overwhelming assault on the Syrian state and the outcome of last week is that this did not occur that the five-pronged defensive has so far not succeeded and I think that is a real characteristic moment that NATO threw everything they had and somehow this has failed. The Syrian state did not collapse. Decay and confusion do not reign. The death squads are being mopped up in Damascus and will be mopped up in Aleppo.
Press TV: Dr. Tarpley, you said earlier on, that so far the Syrian government has been able to stand against what our guests are calling the conspiracies by its enemies but how long before for instance we may see a kind of bomb attack from NATO, a kind of extended military attack or is there even such a plan for these kinds of actions if other measures fail in Syria?
Tarpley: Concerning the question of the coup which you mentioned I believe that the coup was supposed to take place last week between Wednesday and Friday and somehow this did not succeed or has not succeeded so far.
Now when you have these swarming foreign fighters, people with minimal training and low military skills if they try to take a piece of Damascus or Aleppo and hold it, a lot of them will not survive and I think right now the mopping up activities of the Syrian army mean that a significant portion of those swarming fighters have either been killed, wounded or captured, so there is not an endless supply of such people.
Now if NATO wants to escalate, to have a bombing campaign and to carve out these corridors or safe areas or coastal strips or whatever they are, that means an escalation, because that means going outside the Security Council, challenging really Russia and China- what are they going to do about it? It is widely assumed at that point that President Putin of Russia would retaliate somehow. How? nobody knows but people here in Washington are afraid to find out because they feel that there are a number of things that Putin could do that could make life very uncomfortable for the US and the British.
Now the chemical weapons story is supposed to be a way to cover an invasion with the story- well, we didn’t want to do it but we had to do it in order to secure these chemical weapons.
Maybe one way out of that is for Russia to offer small military units that could be used to secure the chemical weapon supplies and I think that might be acceptable to the Syrian government so that with a Russian garrison a small force around these places, they’d be OK. Now the other thing is the longer this goes on it creates problems for the attacking coalition, in particular Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is in many ways the most oppressive country in the whole area. It’s much worse than anything that’s been alleged about Libya or Egypt or Syria and if you got this constant revolutionary propaganda will that seep into Saudi Arabia?
Well a couple of days after the attack on the Syrian security headquarters, we’ve had an attack on the Saudi security headquarters. Deputy of [newly-appointed Saudi intelligence chief] Prince Bandar has been killed according to some accounts and that attack seems to have been meant for Prince Bandar himself. So we might see something begin to flare up in Saudi Arabia…