{"id":9746,"date":"2013-08-28T15:19:38","date_gmt":"2013-08-28T15:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=9746"},"modified":"2013-08-28T15:19:38","modified_gmt":"2013-08-28T15:19:38","slug":"does-obama-know-hes-fighting-on-al-qaidas-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=9746","title":{"rendered":"Does Obama know he\u2019s fighting on al-Qaida\u2019s side?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"obamasmirk\"<\/a>
Too clever<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Robert Fisk.<\/p>\n

If Barack Obama decides to attack the Syrian regime, he has ensured \u2013 for the very first time in history \u2013 that the United States will be on the same side as al-Qaida.<\/p>\n

Quite an alliance! Was it not the Three Musketeers who shouted \u201cAll for one and one for all\u201d each time they sought combat? This really should be the new battle cry if \u2013 or when \u2013 the statesmen of the Western world go to war against Bashar al-Assad.<\/p>\n

The men who destroyed so many thousands on 9\/11 will then be fighting alongside the very nation whose innocents they so cruelly murdered almost exactly 12 years ago. Quite an achievement for Obama, Cameron, Hollande and the rest of the miniature warlords.<\/p>\n

This, of course, will not be trumpeted by the Pentagon or the White House \u2013 nor, I suppose, by al-Qaida \u2013 though they are both trying to destroy Bashar. So are the Nusra front, one of al-Qaida\u2019s affiliates. But it does raise some interesting possibilities.<\/p>\n

Maybe the Americans should ask al-Qaida for intelligence help \u2013 after all, this is the group with \u201cboots on the ground\u201d, something the Americans have no interest in doing. And maybe al-Qaida could offer some target information facilities to the country which usually claims that the supporters of al-Qaida, rather than the Syrians, are the most wanted men in the world.<\/p>\n

There will be some ironies, of course. While the Americans drone al-Qaida to death in Yemen and Pakistan \u2013 along, of course, with the usual flock of civilians \u2013 they will be giving them, with the help of Messrs Cameron, Hollande and the other Little General-politicians, material assistance in Syria by hitting al-Qaida\u2019s enemies. Indeed, you can bet your bottom dollar that the one target the Americans will not strike in Syria will be al-Qa\u2019ida or the Nusra front.<\/p>\n

And our own Prime Minister will applaud whatever the Americans do, thus allying himself with al-Qa\u2019ida, whose London bombings may have slipped his mind. Perhaps \u2013 since there is no institutional memory left among modern governments \u2013 Cameron has forgotten how similar are the sentiments being uttered by Obama and himself to those uttered by Bush and Blair a decade ago, the same bland assurances, uttered with such self-confidence but without quite enough evidence to make it stick.<\/p>\n

In Iraq, we went to war on the basis of lies originally uttered by fakers and conmen. Now it\u2019s war by YouTube. This doesn\u2019t mean that the terrible images of the gassed and dying Syrian civilians are false. It does mean that any evidence to the contrary is going to have to be suppressed. For example, no-one is going to be interested in persistent reports in Beirut that three Hezbollah members \u2013 fighting alongside government troops in Damascus \u2013 were apparently struck down by the same gas on the same day, supposedly in tunnels. They are now said to be undergoing treatment in a Beirut hospital. So if Syrian government forces used gas, how come Hezbollah men might have been stricken too? Blowback?<\/p>\n

And while we\u2019re talking about institutional memory, hands up which of our jolly statesmen know what happened last time the Americans took on the Syrian government army? I bet they can\u2019t remember. Well it happened in Lebanon when the US Air Force decided to bomb Syrian missiles in the Bekaa Valley on 4 December 1983. I recall this very well because I was here in Lebanon. An American A-6 fighter bomber was hit by a Syrian Strela missile \u2013 Russian made, naturally \u2013 and crash-landed in the Bekaa; its pilot, Mark Lange, was killed, its co-pilot, Robert Goodman, taken prisoner and freighted off to jail in Damascus. Jesse Jackson had to travel to Syria to get him back after almost a month amid many clich\u00e9s about \u201cending the cycle of violence\u201d. Another American plane \u2013 this time an A-7 \u2013 was also hit by Syrian fire but the pilot managed to eject over the Mediterranean where he was plucked from the water by a Lebanese fishing boat. His plane was also destroyed.<\/p>\n

Sure, we are told that it will be a short strike on Syria, in and out, a couple of days. That\u2019s what Obama likes to think. But think Iran. Think Hezbollah. I rather suspect \u2013 if Obama does go ahead \u2013 that this one will run and run. – The Independent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Robert Fisk. If Barack Obama decides to attack the Syrian regime, he has ensured \u2013 for the very first time in history \u2013 that the United States will be on the same side as al-Qaida. Quite an alliance! Was it not the Three Musketeers who shouted \u201cAll for one and one for all\u201d each … Continue reading “Does Obama know he\u2019s fighting on al-Qaida\u2019s side?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[492],"tags":[125,593,200,5618,3418,2471,5617,198],"class_list":["post-9746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-al-qaida","tag-barack-obama","tag-bashar-al-assad","tag-cameron","tag-hollande","tag-iraq","tag-liya","tag-syria"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/obamasmirk.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9748,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9746\/revisions\/9748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}