Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., om USA:s kupper, krig och proxykrig i Mellanöstern
Pentagonrapporten om västländernas stöd till ISIS och dess katastrofala konsekvenser diskuteras i en lång artikel i den amerikanska tidskriften
Politico av Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son till justitieministern och presidentkandidaten med samma namn som mördades 1968.
Why the Arabs Don’t Want Us in Syria
http://www.politico.eu/article/why-t...l-intervention
Kennedy inleder med en detaljerad återblick på USA:s politik i Mellanöstern sedan andra världskriget. Hans tes, som han styrker med en rad exempel, samanfattas i ingressen:
They don’t hate ‘our freedoms.’ They hate that we’ve betrayed our ideals in their own countries — for oil.
Redan 1949 började den amerikanska inblandningen i Mellanöstern, då Syriens förste demokratiskt valde president störtades av CIA:
But in March 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Quwatli, hesitated to approve the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation for Al-Quwatli’s lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. pipeline, the CIA engineered a coup replacing al-Quwatli with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im.
Men det gick inte så bra:
Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, four and a half months into his regime.
Denna kupp följdes av kuppen i Iran 1953, då CIA avsatte den demokratiskt valde premiärministern Mosaddegh och installerade diktatorn Shah Reza Pahlavi i hans ställe. En kupp som så småningom slog tillbaka mot USA då Shahen störtades av den USA-fientlige Ayatollah Khomeini.
En tredje USA-stödd kupp var den som förde Saddam Hussein till makten i Irak, där CIA till och med tillhandahöll dödslistor på folk som skulle avrättas efter kuppen:
A charismatic young murderer named Saddam Hussein was one of the distinguished leaders of the CIA’s Ba’athist team. The Ba’ath Party’s Secretary, Ali Saleh Sa’adi, who took office alongside Saddam Hussein, would later say, “We came to power on a CIA train,” according to A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, by Said Aburish, a journalist and author. Aburish recounted that the CIA supplied Saddam and his cronies a murder list of people who “had to be eliminated immediately in order to ensure success.”
Även i Saddams fall gick det så småningom snett, och USA invaderade till slut Irak och avsatte den diktator man hjälpt till makten.
Amerikanska politiker med insyn förstod tidigt sambandet mellan kupperna och det alltmer utbredda USA-hatet påpekar Kennedy:
In 1957, my grandfather, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, sat on a secret committee charged with investigating the CIA’s clandestine mischief in the Mideast. The so called “Bruce-Lovett Report,” to which he was a signatory, described CIA coup plots in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Egypt, all common knowledge on the Arab street, but virtually unknown to the American people who believed, at face value, their government’s denials. The report blamed the CIA for the rampant anti-Americanism that was then mysteriously taking root “in the many countries in the world today.”
Även det blodiga proxykriget i Syrien beror ytterst på energipolitiken hävdar Kennedy. Närmare bestämt var det Qatars planer på att dra en gasledning genom Syrien till Turkiet och EU som låg bakom den syriska tragedin. Assads vägran att gå med på det blev startskottet för USA:s försök att störta honom:
In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria. It is important to note that this was well before the Arab Spring-engendered uprising against Assad.
USA:s strategi att stödja sunnimuslimska jihadister för att störta motsträviga sekulära regimer i Mellanöstern finns dokumenterad i en Pentagonrapport från 2008, alltså tre år innan proxykriget i Syrien startade:
A damning 2008 Pentagon-funded Rand report proposed a precise blueprint for what was about to happen. That report observes that control of the Persian Gulf oil and gas deposits will remain, for the U.S., “a strategic priority” that “will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war.” Rand recommended using “covert action, information operations, unconventional warfare” to enforce a “divide and rule” strategy. “The United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch a proxy campaign”.
Att USA inte hade några illusioner om vilka de "moderata" grupper som man stödde i Syrien egentligen var framgår också av Pentagonrapporten från 2012 (se TS) påpekar Kennedy:
Despite the prevailing media portrait of a moderate Arab uprising against the tyrant Assad, U.S. intelligence planners knew from the outset that their pipeline proxies were radical jihadists who would probably carve themselves a brand new Islamic caliphate from the Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq. Two years before ISIL throat cutters stepped on the world stage, a seven-page August 12, 2012, study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, obtained by the right-wing group Judicial Watch, warned that thanks to the ongoing support by U.S./Sunni Coalition for radical Sunni Jihadists, “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI (now ISIS), are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.”
Kennedy avslutar med en passionerad appell för att USA ska upphöra med imperialistisk aggression och återigen stå upp för frihet och demokrati:
Over the past seven decades, the Dulles brothers, the Cheney gang, the neocons and their ilk have hijacked that fundamental principle of American idealism and deployed our military and intelligence apparatus to serve the mercantile interests of large corporations and particularly, the petroleum companies and military contractors that have literally made a killing from these conflicts.
It’s time for Americans to turn America away from this new imperialism and back to the path of idealism and democracy. We should let the Arabs govern Arabia and turn our energies to the great endeavor of nation building at home. We need to begin this process, not by invading Syria, but by ending the ruinous addiction to oil that has warped U.S. foreign policy for half a century.
