By Jan Oberg

June 13, 2017

Fifteen months ago TFF predicted, grosso modo, what has now become clear in the Middle East namely a rather new power constellation. It centers around Saudi Arabia – the world’s third largest military power and main supporter of global terrorism – and its allies of Gulf States, Israel and various terrorist organisations including ISIS. See “A Sunni-Salafist-Zionist Coalition Changing Middle East?”

The main characteristics that holds this coalition or alliance together is hatred of Syria’s and Iran’s governments. The alliance is – albeit with nuances – supported by the US, England, France and Turkey and others, e.g. Denmark.

Flashback

We’ve described the liberation of Aleppo as a fundamental turning point after exactly 4 years of anti-intellectual, immoral and illegal Western policies. It started on December 12, 2012 in Marrakech with the so-called “Friends of Syria” declaring that the elected president of Syria (with over 80% in internationally monitored elections) was no longer the country’s leader. Secondly, that a new National Council had been set up there and then and – lo and behold – that that represented the Syrian people.

Here the story by The Guardian and here the story by Al-Jazeera.

Aleppo was liberated exactly – on the day – four years later, on December 12, 2016.

It’s extremely significant because it spelled the death of the Western non-sustainable policy and media narrative and because it was a turning point in the legitimate defensive struggle – according to Article 51 of the UN Charter – by Syria which on its territory as seen dozens of countries fighting a proxy war and hundreds of groups foreign fighters from almost all corners of the globe. (The only legal foreign militaries there are the Russians and the Iranians and Hezbollah as they’ve been invited by the Syrian government).

You will find numerous witness accounts and analyses of Aleppo’s liberation on the TFF blog and photo stories here since the author was in Aleppo, December 10-14, 2016 – as one of extremely few foreigners of which none Western mainstream media people who all sat in Beirut, Istanbul, Berlin or Washington.

From there they safely cabled out more or less complete lies about Bashar al-Assad’s and the Russian’s impending genocide on “the last” this and that and how everybody in Eastern Aleppo were terrified of coming back to the dictator/regime-controlled areas.

Facts are that out of around 130.000 liberated people around 90.000 were very happy to be liberated and stay while about 30.000 were taken in buses to Idlib, Raqqa and Turkey – including the pseudo-humanitarian terror-assisting White Helmets and al-Nushra fighters with their families and of course little Bana and other marketing constructed figures.

This latter perspective is one which of course has been neglected but now – with repeated US bombings of Syrian allied military forces – is beginning to surface as it should have since 2011. Listen also to former British ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, here.

Two factors have entered in the meantime.

Contours of a new alliance structure

First, the contours of a Middle Eastern or Sunni-Arab NATO and direct cooperation with NATO facilitated through Denmark’s embassy in the United Arab Emirates that we described in TFF PressInfo # 414 A & B “Trump in Riyadh – A Gulf NATO to gang up against Syria and Iran”.

His disastrous speech and attempt at gathering a series of Sunni-terrorist-supporting countries in order to gang up against Iran and Syria was predictable (see links above).

If anything, the simplicity and banality with which he spoke about the world’s complexities were, admittedly, even worse than we predicted. His personal and all his closest advisers’ Iranophobic attitudes is the only constant one can point to in substance from Trump the campaigner to Trump the president.

It bodes extremely ill for all. One of the few that could – could in principle and in practise – stop the worst from happening would be European NATO allies and the EU. The increasingly autistic US would listen to nobody but them – that is, in the best of cases.

While EU foreign policy High Rep, Federica Mogherini played a strong role in the negotiations about the nuclear deal with Iran, the JCPOA, she’ll hardly manage to steer the EU colossus with feet of clay to take decisive action. And Sec-Gen of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, is known to have no views not acquired through what might appropriately be called his “Brainwashington” training.

Secondly, a new somewhat surprising (at least we did not predict it back then) conflict between Saudi Arabia and its loyal partners on the one hand and Qatar – another staunch believer in and supporter of terrorism, not the least in Syria – but a country that has not cut relations with Iran as the Saudis would have wanted.

Again, the key to understanding it is the irrational, fake-analysis and omission-based Iranophobia and Syriaphobia.

Nothing good can possibly emerge from it except one: the self-destruction/fall of the United States Empire and, in its wake, of NATO.

A deeper military on-the-ground commitment to Syria by Western/NATO militarist countries and some kind of military action against Iran will speed up that dissolution process.

The next few years we shall – regrettably – have to see more terrible things happen. But there is also a dialectics to not be ignore – the new world that will be emerging after the death throes of that Empire and its global militarism.

And finally a little reflection:

How come that it is, continuously, single, independent individuals – diplomats, scholars and journalists – who make the most correct predictions while the huge state-financed research institutes, privately funded think (!) tanks and governments’ numerous intelligence (!) services that are taken by surprise at what most of us saw coming?

One hypothesis is “group think.” Another “commissioned” reporting that cannot tell the truth. A third is intellectual disarmament and in-breeding within the various boxes of the world destroyers and their allies.

A final one that there is too little civil courage – the courage the little boy in H. C. Andersen’s tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes displayed.