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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 10/24/19

The Empire Steps Back: Trump Withdraws From Syria - Impeachment Now Possible

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Jim Kavanagh
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It always goes to Iran .

Graham is here expressing what's actually behind the growing urgency of the neocon national-security apparatus to replace Donald Trump with Mike Pence-'cause, you know, that is what impeaching and convicting Trump will do-and why it may adversely affect Trump's chances with Republican senators.

One cannot understand what's happening in Syria, or what's happening in impeachment, or the relation between the two unless one understands the role of Israel in determining US policy and influencing US politics in general. US policy in the Middle East is completely incoherent until one understands the extent to which it's Israeli policy.

One cannot complain that Trump's Syria decision caused "chaos" without recognizing the chaos that US intervention throughout the Middle East since 2001-in Iraq, Libya, and Syria-has already caused, and was designed to cause, for the sake of Israel. Because, as Middle East Monitor reports: "the [former] chief of Israel's military intelligence, General Aviv Kochav, has said that the chaos in the Arab world favours Israel and is something that he believes should continue."

And one cannot understand what's happened and happening in Syria, and what the US politicians really think is "wrong" with Trump's decision, without placing it in the context of the US-Israeli strategy that was famously revealed by Wesley Clark (and studiously ignored by US media), to "take out seven countries" starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran."

Iran has always been the ultimate target. Syria was a stepping-stone, the part of what Israel saw as the "Tehran-Damascus-Hizbullah alliance" that became ripe for removing in 2011-2. This was made explicit in a State Department report, authored by James Rubin (Christine Amanpour's husband), that appeared in a Hillary Clinton email chain: "The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad." Or, as high-ranking Israeli officials gleefully foresaw: "Syria's fragmentation into provinces, " the formation of an Alawite district in the coastal region" a Sunni province "and "a Kurdish province in northern Syria."

That Iran has been the ultimate target is also made clear in an exceptionally important and detailed NYT report, " The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran" (published before the Syria decision), which I urge everyone to read. It chronicles how "Hawks in Israel and America have spent more than a decade agitating for war against the Islamic Republic's nuclear program," and asks "Will Trump finally deliver?" It details Benjamin Netanyahu's obsessive "personal crusade" against Iran, and his attempts to cajole, browbeat, and bluff the US into attacking Iran for the Jewish state-to the point that the US ambassador to Israel thought: "Israel might consider it an advantage to strike in the final phase of the [2012] election," believing it "could force the United States' hand to be supportive or to come in behind Israel and assist. Because otherwise, President Obama could be accused of abandoning Israel in its moment of need."

Israel used this "can't refuse Israel" ideology to make sure the Obama administration "meticulously refined" "military plans for an Iran strike" that, if he didn't use, would be a "loaded gun," "inherited" by the next president.

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Former college professor, native and denizen of New York City. Blogging at www.thepolemicist.net, from a left-socialist perspective. Also publishing on Counterpunch, The Greanville Post, Medium, Dandelion Salad, and other sites around the net. (more...)
 

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