France’s chemical pre-action to propaganda defeat at Qusair
Finian Cunningham – 10 June, 13 – Strategic Culture Fondation

One of Isaac Newton’s laws of physics states that «for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction».

In light of French claims this week that Syrian state forces were guilty of having used chemical weapons, we may apply a variant of Newton’s law to the study of political diplomacy – for every action, expect an equal and opposite pre-action.

On Wednesday morning, 5 June, around 6am local time, dramatic news came out of Syria that the Syrian Arab Army had finally retaken the strategic town of Qusair. The victory followed several weeks of heavy fighting with the Western-backed militants, who had first taken occupation of the town a year ago. Backed by the Lebanese militia of Hezbollah, the Syrian army reportedly killed thousands of the anti-government militants and routed thousands more to regain full control of Qusair.

Located in the central province of Homs near the border with Lebanon, Qusair is a key transport and logistics hub for the rest of Syria, linking north and south, and providing a corridor to the Mediterranean coast. As one Syrian army commander put it before the recapture of the town this week: «Whoever controls Qusair controls the whole of Syria.»

The victory for the government forces of President Bashar al-Assad may well prove to be a turning point in the more than two-year war.

Despite the Western government and media narrative describing the violence in Syria as the result of «a popular pro-democracy uprising» that has turned into a «civil war», the weight of evidence shows a very different scenario. That is, that the conflict in Syria is mainly a result of a covert war for regime change sponsored by the chief NATO powers of Washington, London and Paris, along with their regional allies of Israel, Turkey, Jordan and the Persian Gulf Arab oil kingdoms.

Syria is, from this viewpoint, a crucial staging post for Western imperialist plans to roll over the oil-rich Middle East in order to install regimes that are pliant with Western geopolitical interests. These interests include untrammeled access to the world’s main oil and gas reserves, eventual regime change in the regional powerhouse of Iran, and the denial of vital resources and markets to the West’s global rivals of Russia and China.

The outcome of the battle for Qusair this week is therefore not just setback for anti-Assad «rebels», as the Western media like to call them, but rather it is a defeat for the NATO-led axis and its strategy for regime change in Syria and the wider region. The military and propaganda significance of this defeat cannot be underestimated, and it comes as a crucial moral boost for the Assad government in Damascus ahead of the international peace conference in Geneva that Moscow and Washington are convening, due to take place sometime over the next few weeks.

Washington, London and the former colonial power, Paris, have together invested huge political capital in this covert, criminal proxy war for regime change in Syria. The NATO states have mounted a relentless campaign to discredit the incumbent Assad government as illegitimate. Their respective foreign ministers, John Kerry, William Hague and Laurent Fabius, have repeatedly demanded President Assad to stand down, claiming that he is a despot who is unfit to govern. Those petulant demands now seem increasingly vain and, frankly, comedic.

The routing this week from Qusair of the Western-backed ragtag foreign mercenaries, including brigades from the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front, is emphatic illustration of NATO’s bankrupt agenda in Syria. This was no «noble resistance» to an encroaching despot, but rather it was the lifting of an occupying siege that had been imposed on a town of 30,000 inhabitants by Western-backed foreign gangs, which have no popular support among ordinary Syrian citizens.

If, for argument’s sake, this had been the advance of a cruel, murderous army of a cruel, murderous despot, why were there not scenes of public pandemonium and hysteria, with thousands of desperate civilians trying to escape before the fall of Qusair? On the contrary, it seems that the arriving Syrian army was welcomed by the town’s residents, relieved that the siege had finally been broken.

Some 10,000 of Qusair’s inhabitants had managed to flee months ago from the occupying militants and their withering application of Islamic fundamentalism over the past year. The mercenaries fighting in Syria come from more than 30 countries, including Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, the Russian Caucasus, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They all share, apparently, a devotion to the extremist Wahhabi ideology of Islam, which sees all other non-subscribing Muslims (the vast majority) as «infidels» to be persecuted along with Christians and non-religious. Shia Muslims and Alawites in particular are «to be wiped out», according to the recent comments of one so-called Free Syrian Army commander.

This brutish, sectarian mindset, of course, plays very well for the Western agenda of subversion and sabotage in Syria, as it did during the 1980s in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Not that you will see this unvarnished truth being reported in the Western media coverage of the conflict in Syria. Oh no, the Western governments are allegedly supporting «democracy-loving rebels» – incongruously with the help of those well-known democracy-loving regimes in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and in the news elsewhere this week, Turkey. …more