While Kerry Talks Ceasefire, US Allies Secretly Ship Grad Missiles To Syria Rebels – OpEd
The big news yesterday was that after some five hours of intense negotiation on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, an agreement was reached between the major powers on a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria within the next week.
According to the agreement:
The [International Syria Support Group] members agreed that a nationwide cessation of hostilities must be urgently implemented, and should apply to any party currently engaged in military or paramilitary hostilities against any other parties other than Daesh, Jabhat al-Nusra, or other groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council. The ISSG members commit to exercise influence for an immediate and significant reduction in violence leading to the nationwide cessation of hostilities.
Now today — just one day after the ceasefire agreement — we discover that a massive shipment of ground-to-ground “Grad” missiles has been sent by US allies (and the CIA?) to rebels fighting against the Syrian government.
Reuters reports:
‘It is excellent additional fire power for us,’ said one of the commanders, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter. The second rebel commander said the missiles were being used to hit army positions beyond the front line. ‘They give the factions longer reach,’ he said.
What are we to conclude by this dramatic turn of events? Two possibilities.
One, that since the deal is not finalized on paper the foreign powers backing regime change for Syria did not feel the need to halt the shipment and in fact may have hastened the delivery.
Two, that the “rebels” being supplied do not fall under the terms of the agreement spelled out above. In other words, the ceasefire does not apply to ISIS or al-Qaeda or affiliated forces, so perhaps the foreign Grad suppliers decided this is a two-way street: if Russia is still free to bomb the terrorist groups, then Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc. are still free to provide them weapons.
Does anyone have any confidence in this kind of ceasefire when either the “moderates” or named terrorist groups are being armed to the teeth on the eve of its implementation? Will the Russians begin to doubt the veracity of their western partners’ commitment to halting the violence in Syria when they learn of this massive weapons shipment?
This article was published by RonPaul Institute.
So many players with hidden agendas are now involved in the Syria/Iraq situation as to make negotiations futile. But make no mistake, the US, its Sunni allies, Israel and Turkey have too much at stake to back off, even via a ceasefire, the tangled mess they have created. So I don’t doubt for a minute that the US is shipping GRAD missiles to its proxies. I suppose the people at the Ron Paul Institute don’t like to say so, but the Wash. DC neo-Cons got started on re-making the Middle East for the sake of the Greater Israel project when Paul Wolfowitz promulgated his doctrine that now was the right time to get Russian influence out of the Middle East where the USSR had historically been a Cold War thorn in the side of the US, preventing it and Israel from managing the area as they pleased. So, step by step,the neo-Cons have been manufacturing one useless war after another until–voila–they have succeeded in dragging in Russia and laying the groundwork for WWIII, with NATO member Turkey actively in the game but with goals likely to be incompatible with US/Israeli goals. This is the real reason why the US reversed course on its “We hate Iran forever” program. We have an election coming up; what the US decides to do in relation to its Iranian ‘deal’ will probably be the key to its long-term goal of eliminating Russia as a world power.(All this was laid out in Z. Brzezinski’s 1997 book “The Grand Chessboard” but most Americans no longer read). I think the wild card in all this will be the fate of the American dollar in relation to our skyrocketing debt. As the old Chinese curse states: We live in interesting times. We could easily be looking at the collapse of our civilization, if it’s appropriate to still call it that. A nuclear war will pretty much destroy the Northern Hemisphere, and Russia, to be rid of which is still the neo-Con goal, has a lot of new advanced weapons, plus 10,000 “battlefield” nukes at the ready. There’s also a very high-stakes game being played with the prices of oil and the control of pipeline routes. So, at a time when the fate of the world is hanging in the balance, it appears unlikely that Ronald Reagan’s hard-liners (today’s neo-Cons)could “win” even a “limited” nuclear exchange with Russia, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.
Putin should not sign this agreement.He is winning the war,give him another 6-10 months the rebels will stop fighting or be killed.Putin is trying to let the US to save face in the Muslim world.Karry should grab the Russian offer and run with it.