Konflikten i Syrien

An Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, has reported that Israel is seriously considering restarting a strategically important oil pipeline that once transferred oil from the Iraqi city of Mosul to Israel's northern port of Haifa. Given the Israeli claim of a positive US approach to the plan, the Israeli project provides grounds for a theory that the ongoing war against Iraq is in part a joint US, British and Israeli design for reshaping the Middle East to serve their particular interests, including their oil requirements.

According to the daily, Israeli National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky considers the pipeline project as economically justifiable as it would reduce the country's cost of oil imports. This is currently very high, as Israel imports oil from Russia. There would also be a strategic justification for the project, as importing oil from an oil supplier in Israel's close proximity would increase its fuel security and would address its major handicap, that is, its total dependence on imported fuel from far-away suppliers. While living in the oil-rich Middle East, the Israelis cannot count on regional oil exporters because of the existing Arab-Israeli conflict. Prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution, Iran, which was on friendly terms with Israel, provided its oil requirements. That arrangement ended in 1979 when the new Iranian revolutionary regime cut ties with Israel.

Iraqi consent will be out of the question as long as the current regime of Saddam Hussein is in power. As acknowledged by the Israeli minister, a prerequisite for the project is, therefore, a new regime in Baghdad with friendly ties with Israel. However, such a regime, if ever it comes to power, will still require Syria's consent to operationalize the pipeline. Given the overall political environment in the Middle East and Israel's continued occupation of Syria's Golan Heights, the existing Syrian regime will never grant its consent as long as the status quo prevails. As stated by the Iranian government, during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) when Iraq enjoyed cordial and close relations with Israel's mentor, the United States, Israel tried, but failed, to resume the oil flow through the pipeline. Syria, a friend of Iran and an enemy of Iraq, blocked the flow of Iraqi oil.

According to the Israeli minister, the United States will back his project since the pipeline would bring Iraqi oil directly from Iraq to the Mediterranean. In such a case, the Americans could bypass the Persian Gulf for their imported Iraqi oil, while having secured access to the world's second-largest oil reserves. Especially since the early 1990s, they have repeatedly expressed their concern about over-reliance on the Persian Gulf for their oil imports, which contains more than 60 percent of the world's proven oil reserves. Given the concentration of the major oil exporters in that region, its instability could interrupt or completely stop the flow of oil by oil tankers, with a consequent major impact on the US economy, as it is so dependent on oil.

Undermining Lebanon: Bombings are part of US-Israeli strategy to sow civil war

Tensions have been building in Lebanon as a result of the events in Syria. External actors now seek to capitalize on these internal tensions in Lebanese society by igniting a new civil war of some sort.

Their specific objectives are to manipulate the Muslims of Lebanon into a fight between Shiites and Sunnis with the hope of destroying Hezbollah.

The terrorist attacks in Lebanon started with the bombing of Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh. The first attack took place in the neighborhood of Bir Al-Abed on July 9, 2013. The second twin attacks took place in the neighborhood of Al-Rouweiss on August 15, 2013. Then the Lebanese port city of Tripoli faced twin attacks outside two mosques on August 23, 2013.

Aware of the game, Hezbollah’s leadership responded by saying that the attacks are part of a strategy to get Shiites and Sunnis to fight one another and to create divisions among Muslims and Arabs. Its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah said in the bluntest of terms that the terrorist bombings in Beirut were not the work of Sunni Muslims and had nothing to do with Sunni Muslims whatsoever or any Arab nationalities. Nasrallah pointed his finger at the US and Israel instead, saying that Hezbollah was fully aware that the intelligence agencies of the US and its allies were manipulating groups like Al-Qaeda as tools to do their bidding.

In a key point, Nasrallah warned that anyone who tried to present the terrorist bombings in Beirut as the work of Sunni Muslims was an accomplice to the Israeli and US strategy to divide the region with hatred and bloodletting.

Nonetheless, what did the mainstream media of NATO and GCC countries do? NATO/GCC media outlets did just that by blaming the Sunni Muslims for the bombings in Beirut. In other words, the NATO/GCC media demonstrated their alignment with NATO/GCC foreign policy and their roles as agents of subversion trying to naturalize Shiite-Sunni animosity. They even distorted Nasrallah’s speech and Hezbollah’s position by trying to attribute blaming Sunnis for the bombing to Nasrallah and Hezbollah or they ignored the fact that he went out of his way to say that the bombings in Beirut had nothing to do with Sunnis.

The New York Times, which has been a beacon of lies ranging from the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to those now about Syrian chemical weapons, would publish an article titled “Hezbollah Makes Vow to Step Up Sunni Fight” that gave the impression that Hezbollah was fighting a sectarian war against Sunni Muslims whereas the state-run British Broadcasting Corporation would write the grossly misleading headlines “Hezbollah blames Sunnis for bomb.”

The role of the bombings is tied to the goal of neutralizing Hezbollah by entangling it in domestic fighting inside Lebanon that has largely sectarian overtones. The media’s job is to construct a narrative that makes this all look like a natural course of events, when in reality it is being politically manipulated by the US and its allies.

This type of terrorism aims at dividing communities by using destructive identity politics. It was effectively employed in Anglo-American occupied Iraq by the US and the UK. In 2005, British commandos from the SAS were even caught by Iraqi police in Basra as they were preparing to ignite explosives outside a local mosque and civilian areas in Basra. The two SAS members were even disguised as Arabs with wigs and photographs were taken of them with the explosives that they were carrying.


Their goal was to create sectarian fighting among the Iraqis, to literally turn Shia against Sunni, through acts of terrorism. In an omission of guilt, the British military resorted to attacking the police station in Basra with tanks to free the two SAS commandos and, finally, the British government would mutely pay for the damages.

The Independent carried a story in 2006 about this same strategy. The British paper wrote that the US was “trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces.”