Here is the Solution to Syria, But Why It Hasn't Happened. **MUST READ**

There is a solution to the crisis in Syria.

1) The U.S. must stop arming and training Syrian "rebels" (read: ISIS, with whom the rebels we train in Jordan and the arms we provide them, eventually wind up). Additionally, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey must stop supporting ISIS with funding, weapons shipments, and serving as a "pipeline" (Turkey) to Syria for Islamic radicals from around the world, seeking to help ISIS overthrow Assad in their quest to attain a caliphate (Muslim empire).

2) The U.S. must support the legitimate leader of Syria -- President Bashar Assad -- and the Syrian Army. He, and he alone, is capable of providing the ground troops which, according to unanimous agreement among military generals, are required to destroy ISIS in Syria.

No nation wants to put boots on the ground in Syria to battle ISIS. But there are already boots on the ground in Syria to battle ISIS -- the Syrian Army. Together with Russian air support and U.S. logistical support, the Syrian Army could wipe out "ISIS" in three months.

If the U.S. truly seeks to achieve what it claims it wants to achieve -- the destruction of ISIS -- which, besides being the primary perpetrator of the conflict in which nearly 300,000 Syrians have been killed, is also responsible for the mass immigration of Syrian refugees to Europe and the U.S.), the U.S. would support Syrian President Assad and the Syrian Army.

Why we aren't supporting Assad is the real question.

ISIS has declared war on the U.S. Not Syrian President Assad.

ISIS seeks to establish a Muslim caliphate based on radical, fundamentalist Islamic principles, as it has done in Raqqa in eastern Syria.

ISIS is at war with nearly all principles we in the West value and cherish, and have shed massive amounts of blood to defend. Assad, on the other hand, was educated in England, married an English woman of Syrian descent, studied and practiced ophthalmology, and upon assuming leadership of Syria after his brother Bassel (who had been groomed to lead Syria after their father Hafez's rule) died in a car accident, became the reluctant, yet western-inspired leader of Syria.

Yet the U.S. seeks ASSAD'S ouster; the most capable and realistic person to lead a ground war to defeat ISIS.

Which leads to the question -- constantly repeated by U.S. officials -- of why "Assad must go." U.S. leadership, and the complicit and insulating American media, want us to assume that President Bashar Assad -- the legitimate leader of Syria -- is simply another one of many Arab "tyrants" in the middle east.

This is not the case. While few would argue that reforms are needed in Syria, as they are throughout all nations of the middle east (including Israel), Bashar Assad represents a moderating, stabilizing influence in a country of diverse religions, ethnicities, and political parties; indeed arguably one of the most diverse in the middle east.

And if Assad was overthrown, do any of us doubt that resulting chaos and establishment of an ISIS ruling authority would prevail in Syria, as it has in Libya, as a result of the same policy of "regime change" we enacted there? Why are we deliberately seeking to repeat a policy in Syria that proved to destabilize the country and empower ISIS in Libya just three years ago?

Unless there's something bigger at play here. And there is. Russia.

The foreign policy of neoconservatives in the U.S. -- people such as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, Daniel Pipes, Elliot Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Dov Zakheim, David Frum, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Irving Liebowitz, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, etc. -- regarding Russia has been two-fold:

1) Surround Russia

2) Isolate Russia.

Regarding the first point, the U.S. has utilized NATO in a blatant policy of encroaching on Russia's western border. European nations which were once behind the "iron curtain" -- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania -- are now members of NATO, constituting an potential threat to Russia. (Remember, Russia has been invaded three times from the west over the last two centuries -- once by Napoleon, and twice by Germany. Is it any wonder Russia gets nervous when the largest military alliance the world has ever known advances ever steadily toward its western border?). The final straw came in 2014 when the West backed a coup in Ukraine that overthrew the elected president -- Viktor Yanukovych -- and saw a western-lackey -- Petro Poroshenko -- take power. Russia could abide by the previously mentioned countries going to the West (via their NATO memberships), but not Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia have had deep ties for centuries; at times bad, but generally a symbiotic cultural relationship. Mikhail Gorbachev's mother and wife were Ukrainian. Ukraine was Russian President Putin's line in the sand when it came to western incursion into traditionally Russian geopolitical, cultural, and strategic regions; namely Ukraine.

If point 1 was the Rubicon that had been crossed for Russia as far as its regional geopolitical stability was concerned, point 2 is, as we shall see, nothing less than an overt attempt by the U.S. to "isolate" Russia economically; namely, by attempting to destroy Russia's most lucrative export -- oil.

Russia has a contract with Europe to supply the latter with much of its energy needs. Russia has several natural gas pipelines running west to Europe, providing the energy-hungry continent with natural gas and petroleum,the former a resource of which Russia has the biggest reserves in the world.

After a brief, relative "respite" from the Cold War, the recently emboldened neoconservative movement re-focused their bullseye on Russia. To the neoconservatives, the post-Cold War world, in which the U.S. was, more or less, the sole remaining superpower, necessitated that American foreign policy become more aggressive, in its policy toward Russia and its policy of securing the world's remaining, dwindling resources, for which, as the neocons stated in their Project for the New American Century policy paper "Rebuilding America's Defenses" in 2000, would be a hard sell to the American people and a long endeavor, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor". Within a year, they got just that on September 11. Synchronicity? Coincidence? Conspiracy involving a false flag operation? That's for another discussion. We'll remain focused on the neocons' Russia policy of isolating them economically.

Here's where it gets interesting...

In 2011, a natural gas pipeline was proposed running from Qatar -- a small Sunni Muslim sheikdom jutting out off the Arabian peninsula into the Persian Gulf -- to Turkey -- a Sunni Muslim country straddling Asia and Europe, and a member of NATO. It would run through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria.

Syria, led by President Bashar Assad, rejected the Qatar natural gas pipeline proposal, saying Syria sought "to protect the interests of its Russian ally, which is Europe's top supplier of natural gas and oil."

Remember that the USSR was an ally and supporter of Syria during the Cold War, and Russia continues to be since then. In return, Syria has allowed Russia access to the latter's only warm water navy port in Latakia on the Syrian Mediterranean Sea coast.

Pipelines are already in place in Turkey to receive natural gas. The connecting pipeline to Qatar through Syria simply needs to be built.

Make no mistake. This "Qatari plan" to build the pipeline is nothing more than a U.S.-designed plan to have one of its puppet Gulf sheikdoms -- in this case Qatar, which wouldn't exist without U.S. Navy Fifth fleet protection and U.S. government guarantees -- replace Russia as Europe's energy supplier; not as a benefit to Europe, but, along with 1) the current U.S. sanctions on Russia as a result of supposed Russian "aggression" in Ukraine, and 2) Saudi Arabia's flooding of the oil market to drastically reduce the price of oil, thus hurting Russia's relatively homogenous oil export economy, as a tool of war against Russia's economy.

Fully aware that Americans are tired of their military fighting and dying in the middle east and Afghanistan (for what exactly?), and the immense costs these ill-advised deployments by our politicians and policy makers -- both foreign and domestic -- have had on our economy, U.S. policy has harkened back to a the 1980s -- arming a proxy army to fight our battle for us. Like the mujahideen in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua, we are now arming and training "rebels" in neighboring Jordan to fight Assad in Syria. Inevitably, and not unexpectedly, these "rebels" and the weapons we give them, wind up in the hands of "ISIS".

The blanket of plausible deniability for "ISIS" behind which U.S. neoconservative policy makers and politicians hide is more akin to a moth-hole-ridden sheet through which the truth is easily seen.

This U.S. training of Syrian "rebels" goes back at least to 2013; likely to 2012. Here's a link: [link to www.cbsnews.com]

In the above CBS News story, pay particular attention to paragraphs 4, 5, and 6. While Pentagon spokesman George Little denied the U.S. is training Syrian rebels in Jordan, he says nothing about non-official U.S. military personnel training them -- the contractors like Blackwater/Xe/Academi. More barely-veiled plausible deniability.

So when you hear U.S. officials, policy makers, Congresspersons, and the President -- as you inevitably have and will continue to -- demand that "Assad must go!", now you know why. It's not Assad's ouster we want. We want Russia's economy to buckle. And you also know why the three Muslim countries who most want Assad gone are Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

Another reason the Saudis want Assad gone is because Assad is Shi'a and is an ally of Shi'a Iran, and Iran is rapidly rising as a hegemonic power, not only in the Persian Gulf, but throughout the middle east. This is why the Saudis are fighting in Yemen. The Houthi Shi'a minority in Yemen is battling for power after the long reign of Sunni President Saleh (a puppet, basically, of the Saudis) ended in the "Yemen Spring" a few years ago. The Saudi royals are scared of the rising power of Iran economically, and the perceived challenge a powerful Iran poses to Saudi hegemony in the region. As much as Netanyahu and Likud scream and cry about Iran, it's the Saudis who most fear Iran. The Saudis want Iran crippled by any means possible, as they do Iran's strongest ally -- President Bashar Assad of Syria -- and the Shi'a Houthis in Yemen. The Saudis fear the spread of Iran's influence in both the Persian Gulf, and in with the Houthis in Yemen (at the opening of the highly and strategically ship-trafficked Red Sea).

Regarding Turkey, besides being a conduit for western proxy fighters and staging ground for western clandestine operations (see: Sibel Edmonds for elaboration on this), Turkey's demands prevent the U.S. (even if it wanted to) from fully arming the Kurds in Syria to fight ISIS, because 1) Turkey wants Assad gone; and 2) Turkey is afraid the Kurds will use the weapons given to them by the U.S. to later fight Turkey to get an independent Kurdish homeland carved out of the southeastern corner of Turkey.

With the Kurds from the east and the Syrian Army from the West, and Russia air support and U.S. logistical and diplomatic support (no need for American boots on the ground or even planes in the air), ISIS would be destroyed within 3 months in Syria. From that point, policy makers (again, if they truly wanted to destroy ISIS) might want to consider that same formula for destroying ISIS in Iraq -- Russian jets (or maybe American jets in Iraq, because of our recent experience in that country), U.S. logistical support, and then the Iraqi Army taking back villages and cities (particularly oil-rich Mosul) and leaving ISIS with no country it could consider a safe haven to metastasize.

But again, that's IF the U.S. truly wants to destroy ISIS.

Or does the U.S. want to continue to use ISIS as its proxy militia to achieve geopolitical objectives that it couldn't if it acted openly?

Russia knows its contract to supply natural gas and petroleum to Europe is as good as null and void, if Assad falls in Syria. The new leader of Syria would undoubtedly allow the pipeline to pass through Syria (the U.S. would make sure of that), and the Qatar-Turkey natural gas pipeline would replace Russia's pipelines as the energy supplier to Europe, and Russia's economy -- already hit hard by U.S. sanctions, and Saudi oil market glutting -- would be crippled further.



A question to consider...

What is the end game for the neoconservative policy toward Russia? Neoconservatives want to cripple Russia's economy, but...to what end? In order to accomplish what? Just so there won't be a major military power to oppose U.S. hegemony in the world to do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want? Would that necessarily be a good thing? Wouldn't that be akin to a dictator, but on a world-wide scale instead of merely a national scale?