The UK's parliament voted against supporting the US in any attack, much to the dismay of Prime Minister David Cameron who wanted in on the action. French President Francois Hollande had quickly planned to join the attack but as only 36% of his people support the idea, he's now wanting to wait for the UN inspectors report before doing anything. In Canada, Harper supports military intervention but acknowledges we can and will contribute nothing. Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan also supports action but considering his government's crackdown on peaceful protestors in recent days, he is hardly an ideal source of moral support. Saudi Arabia and Israel are really the only other supporters but they have been openly against Assad for too long to be considered unbiased in this case.
So why is Obama so desperate to get rid of Assad? Until this gas attack, the US had been happy just supporting and funding the rebels. The support to use the actual US military to attack isn't there and he should have known that before talking about 'red lines' and how 'Assad must go.' Why was Obama willing to gamble on this and hope he could force another Middle Eastern war on the American people who are getting pretty weary of them?
Retired General Wesley Clark puts forward one explanation. According to him, in December after 9/11, the decision was made in the pentagon to go to war with Iraq although he wasn't told why and no evidence linking them to Al-Qaeda had come up. Soon, the plan had expanded and he read a memo from the Secretary of Defense's office that said "we were gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and then finishing off, Iran." Considering Eisenhower warned the US about the excessive power of the "military-industrial complex," it seems possible that the pentagon may be bullying Obama into using his political capital to attack these strategically important countries and ensure that they wind up with either puppet governments or fractured ones too weak to be sovereign.
Certainly an interesting idea that seems to make sense from what we've seen but is there any truth to it? Dr. Nafeez Ahmed over at The Guardian has done an excellent piece pulling apart the 2008 US Military-funded RAND report , Unfolding the Future of the Long War, which can be found here.
Due to laziness, I'll just steal a few choice quotes from Ahmed's piece:
"The economies of the industrialized states will continue to rely heavily on oil, thus making it a strategically important resource."
"The geographic area of proven oil reserves coincides with the power base of much of the Salafi-jihadist network. This creates a linkage between oil supplies and the long war that is not easily broken or simply characterized... For the foreseeable future, world oil production growth and total output will be dominated by Persian Gulf resources... The region will therefore remain a strategic priority, and this priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war."
"Divide and Rule focuses on exploiting fault lines between the various Salafi-jihadist groups to turn them against each other and dissipate their energy on internal conflicts. This strategy relies heavily on covert action, information operations (IO), unconventional warfare, and support to indigenous security forces... the United States and its local allies could use the nationalist jihadists to launch proxy IO campaigns to discredit the transnational jihadists in the eyes of the local populace... US leaders could also choose to capitalize on the 'Sustained Shia-Sunni Conflict' trajectory by taking the side of the conservative Sunni regimes against Shiite empowerment movements in the Muslim world.... possibly supporting authoritative Sunni governments against a continuingly hostile Iran."
Also interesting is that the British were preparing to attack Syria in 2009, two years before the civil war that erupted in 2011. French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas stated on French television that "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain, not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria."
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