Thursday, May 30, 2013
‘UK govt lining up with Islamist radicals in Syria’
Above you can watch an interview with me on RT on the UK's neo-con government's policies towards Syria. The bully boys of Britain and France got the EU to end their arms embargo-opening the way for direct supplies of arms to 'rebel' groups. More on this story here.
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6 comments:
Excellent interview Mr. Clark. I will be reading your blog from now on. Thank you.
Peter Hitchens has put his opinion acroass in the Mail. And it's damning of Hague.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/06/what-we-do-to-syria-may-one-day-be-done-to-us.html
'Saudi Arabia is so repressive that it makes Assad’s Syria look like Switzerland. And don’t forget the places we liberated earlier, which are now sinks of violence and chaos – Iraq, Libya,
So many high ideals, so much misery and destruction. My old foe Mehdi Hasan (who understands the Muslim world better than most British journalists) rightly pointed out on ‘Question Time’ on Thursday that our policy of backing the Syrian rebels is clinically mad.
These are the very same Islamists against whom – if they are on British soil - government ministers posture and froth, demanding that they are deported, silenced, put under surveillance and the rest.
But when we meet the same people in Syria, we want to give them advanced weapons. One of these ‘activists’, a gentleman called Abu Sakkar, recently publicly sank his teeth into the bleeding heart of a freshly-slain government soldier.
I confess that I used to think highly of William Hague. I now freely admit that I was hopelessly wrong. The man has no judgement, no common sense, and is one of the worst Foreign Secretaries we have ever had, which is saying something'.
Hague Must Go.
By the way, I have been trying to make sense of this insane foreign policy of 'regime change' a lot recently too.It really does seem Syria could be what Serbia was to 1914 almost exactly a hundred years after the First World War broke out.
http://karl-naylor.blogspot.com/2013/06/syria-appalling-prospect-of-widening.html
Syria: The Appalling Prospect of Widening Conflict.
Syria could quite potentially be one of the most dangerous flash points in global history. It occupies an important location in the Middle East and is the site now, as the conflict has developed into a bloody civil war along sectarian lines,for global power politics over the ultimate control of oil and gas to be played out.
The escalation of the violence and threats of greater violence have increased in recent weeks with Hizbollah entering decisively to attack Sunni insurgent strongholds and repel their militias. Hizbollah success in this, and growing Iranian influence, would decisively destroy the West's dominant role in the Middle East.
Continued on blog.....
A clearer picture of what is actually at stake in Syria was provided by Lord Howell in 2011. He made this quite clear, as recorded in Hansard,
'There is an eastern dimension to the whole of what is happening in the Middle East. Chinese influence and investment are everywhere. Chinese warships are in the Mediterranean for the first time in several hundred years. The influence of the rising powers of Asia on the Middle East is heavy and growing. Exports from the Middle East-we are looking immediately more at the oil-producing countries to the east of the region-are increasingly going to the east. Sixty-six per cent of all oil production from Saudi Arabia goes eastwards. A large proportion of China's fossil fuel imports come from this region. This cannot be brushed aside; it is a decisive element in the unfolding pattern of Middle East reform.
As far as we are concerned, there are some energy implications, to which we should not be blind. Egypt itself is not a major energy producer but it has some oil and quite a lot of gas, which it exports through the Arab peace pipeline to Jordan, Syria and Israel. Extraordinarily-perhaps this is often overlooked-Israel relies on Egypt for between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of its daily gas supplies. The continuation of that pipeline is an extremely important element in the situation. All over the region new gas pipelines are being developed, such as the so-called Islamic gas pipeline between Iran, Iraq and Syria. We have to understand that a new pattern of energy transportation and production is emerging in the area'
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/110211-0001.htm
Anonymous: many thanks.
Karl- very interesting posts. I fear you could be right about Syria- the stakes are v.v.high. UK/France and US hell-bent on regime change regardless of human cost. PH piece on Syria/Hague was brilliant, wasn't it?
@Neil. I think that Syria really could be the tipping point where the conflict in Syria develops into a regionwide conflict on sectarian lines. In that sense it adds to the instability caused by the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The absurdity is that the US and UK tacitly allowed Shia militias to defeat the Sunni ones that were fighting them for control over Iraq in the sectarian war that arose after Saddam's state was removed by force ( 'regime change').Ethnic cleansing was involved in that.
As a result of that the Shia Iraqis are now dominant, in partnership with the Kurds,and under Maliki have moved closer towards Tehran. Many willing Shia jihadists are arriving in Syria from Baghdad.
Three months before Hagues's decision to show his preparedness to arm the 'rebels', i.e sunni fundamentalists, by getting the EU embargo removed, Baghdad approved of plans for a Iran-Iraq-Syria Pipeline from the South Pars Gas Field which Iran shares with Qatar.
Both Qatar and Saudi Arabia started to arm the Sunni fundamentalists from the outset of the Syrian civil war to forestall the rise of Iranian influence so that the UK now has to stand by this despotic rentier regime to uphold its oil ( and arms ) interests in the Middle East.
So now the UK and France, and possibly the US in future, want to redress the balance of power by arming sunni insurgents as a counter to the rise of Shia predominance they promoted in Iraq !The same tired pretexts are already being trotted out as 'Public Diplomacy"-'chemical weapons','humanitarian intervention' etc.
It is Orwellian as regards the ideological schizophrenia, doublethink, changes of the official line and proves that shoddy realpolitik has always underlain the purported humanitarian rhetoric about both Iraq and Syria.
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