Thread: NATO preps for new war: Syrian chief warns attack will set M

WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS

NATO preps for new war

Syrian chief warns attack will set Middle East aflame

Posted: October 04, 2011
8:50 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2011 WND

TEL AVIV – NATO troops are training in Turkey for a Turkish-led NATO invasion of Syria, a senior Syrian diplomatic official claimed to WND.

Separately, informed Middle East security officials said Russia has been inspecting Syrian forces and has been advising Syria about possible Syrian military responses should NATO attack the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The officials said Russia recently sold Syria a large quantity of Iskander ballistic missiles, and that, in light of the NATO threat, the Russian government renewed its pledge to sell Syria the advanced S-300 anti-missile system.

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The Syrian diplomatic official, meanwhile, recognized his country receives general support from Russia, but told WND that Assad's regime is concerned the European Union and U.S. may offer Russia an economic incentive to scale back Russian support for Syria.

The report comes as Assad reportedly warned yesterday he will set the Middle East on fire if NATO forces attack his country.

"If a crazy measure is taken against Damascus, I will need not more than six hours to transfer hundreds of rockets and missiles to the Golan Heights to fire them at Tel Aviv," Assad reportedly said, according to Iran's state-run Fars news agency.

Assad made the comments in a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmad Davutoglu, reported Fars.

Fars reported Davutoglu conveyed a warning from NATO and the U.S. that Syria could face an international military campaign if Assad does not halt his violent crackdown on an insurgency targeting the Syrian president’s regime.

Assad also reiterated that Damascus will call on Hezbollah in Lebanon to launch an intensive rocket and missile attack on Israel, reported Fars.

"All these events will happen in three hours, but in the second three hours, Iran will attack the U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf and the U.S. and European interests will be targeted simultaneously," Assad was quoted as saying.

While Assad’s remarks could not be immediately verified, Iran, which runs Fars, is a close partner to the Damascus government.

WND first reported in August that Assad is taking military measures to prepare for a possible U.S.-NATO campaign against his regime.

Informed Egyptian security officials told WND Assad instructed the Syrian military to be prepared for an air or ground campaign if the international community determines his pledges of reform are not enough.

Also in August, WND first reported Turkey secretly passed a message to Damascus that if it does not implement major democratic reforms, NATO may attack Assad's regime, according to Egyptian security officials.

The Egyptian security officials said the message was coordinated with NATO members, specifically with the U.S. and European Union.

The Egyptian officials said Turkish leaders, speaking for NATO, told Assad that he has until March to implement democratization that would allow free elections as well as major constitutional reforms.

Last month, Obama officially asked Assad to step down to pave the way for a democratic system in Syria.

According to informed Middle Eastern security officials speaking to WND, Assad asked his military to make specific preparations in the event of a U.S.-led NATO campaign similar to the military coalition now targeting Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

George Soros-funded doctrine with White House ties

The Libya bombings have been widely regarded as a test of a military doctrine called "Responsibility to Protect."

In his address to the nation in April explaining the NATO campaign in Libya, Obama cited the doctrine as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya.

Responsibility to Protect, or Responsibility to Act, as cited by Obama, is a set of principles, now backed by the United Nations, based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege but a responsibility that can be revoked if a country is accused of "war crimes," "genocide," "crimes against humanity" or "ethnic cleansing."

The term "war crimes" has at times been indiscriminately used by various United Nations-backed international bodies, including the International Criminal Court, or ICC, which applied it to Israeli anti-terror operations in the Gaza Strip. There has been fear the ICC could be used to prosecute U.S. troops who commit alleged "war crimes" overseas.

The Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect is the world's leading champion of the military doctrine.

As WND reported, billionaire activist George Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect. Several of the doctrine's main founders also sit on boards with Soros.

WND reported the committee that devised the Responsibility to Protect doctrine included Arab League Secretary General Amre Moussa as well as Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.

Also, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy has a seat on the advisory board of the 2001 commission that originally founded Responsibility to Protect. The commission is called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It invented the term "responsibility to protect" while defining its guidelines.

The Carr Center is a research center concerned with human rights located at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Samantha Power, the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights, was Carr's founding executive director and headed the institute at the time it advised in the founding of Responsibility to Protect.

With Power's center on the advisory board, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty first defined the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

Power reportedly heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the decision to bomb Libya.

Two of the global group's advisory board members, Ramesh Thakur and Gareth Evans, are the original founders of the doctrine, with the duo even coining the term "responsibility to protect."

As WND reported, Soros' Open Society Institute is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect. Also, Thakur and Evans sit on multiple boards with Soros.

Soros' Open Society is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Government sponsors include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda and the U.K.

Board members of the group include former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Ireland President Mary Robinson and South African activist Desmond Tutu. Robinson and Tutu have recently made solidarity visits to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as members of a group called The Elders, which includes former President Jimmy Carter.

Annan once famously stated, "State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined – not least by the forces of globalization and international co-operation. States are ... instruments at the service of their peoples and not vice versa."

Soros: Right to 'penetrate nation-states'

Soros himself outlined the fundamentals of Responsibility to Protect in a 2004 Foreign Policy magazine article titled "The People's Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World's Most Vulnerable Populations."

In the article Soros said, "True sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments."

"If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified," Soros wrote. "By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states' borders to protect the rights of citizens.

"In particular," he continued, "the principle of the people's sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict."

More George Soros ties

"Responsibility" founders Evans and Thakur served as co-chairmen with Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corp. Charitable Foundation, on the advisory board of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which invented the term "responsibility to protect."

In his capacity as co-chairman, Evans also played a pivotal role in initiating the fundamental shift from sovereignty as a right to "sovereignty as responsibility."

Evans presented Responsibility to Protect at the July 23, 2009, United Nations General Assembly, which was convened to consider the principle.

Thakur is a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, which is in partnership with an economic institute founded by Soros.

Soros is on the executive board of the International Crisis Group, a "crisis management organization" for which Evans serves as president-emeritus.

WND previously reported how the group has been petitioning for the U.S. to normalize ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition in Egypt, where longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak was recently toppled.

Aside from Evans and Soros, the group includes on its board Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, as well as other personalities who champion dialogue with Hamas, a violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

WND also reported the crisis group has petitioned for the Algerian government to cease "excessive" military activities against al-Qaida-linked groups and to allow organizations seeking to create an Islamic state to participate in the Algerian government.

Soros' own Open Society Institute has funded opposition groups across the Middle East and North Africa, including organizations involved in the current chaos.

'One World Order'

WND reported that doctrine founder Thakur recently advocated for a "global rebalancing" and "international redistribution" to create a "New World Order."

In a piece last March in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, "Toward a new world order," Thakur wrote, "Westerners must change lifestyles and support international redistribution."

He was referring to a United Nations-brokered international climate treaty in which he argued, "Developing countries must reorient growth in cleaner and greener directions."

In the opinion piece, Thakur then discussed recent military engagements and how the financial crisis has impacted the U.S.

"The West's bullying approach to developing nations won't work anymore – global power is shifting to Asia," he wrote.

"A much-needed global moral rebalancing is in train," he added.

Thakur continued: "Westerners have lost their previous capacity to set standards and rules of behavior for the world. Unless they recognize this reality, there is little prospect of making significant progress in deadlocked international negotiations."

Thakur contended "the demonstration of the limits to U.S. and NATO power in Iraq and Afghanistan has left many less fearful of 'superior' Western power."

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=351969

10/05/2011

Violence Escalates in Turkey

Kurds Fear New Civil War May Be Brewing

By Jürgen Gottschlich

The violence between the Kurdish PKK and Turkish security forces continues to escalate. Each day there are new victims and the risk of a civil war is rising. The future hinges on Prime Minister Erdogan -- and whether he chooses diplomacy over military confrontation.

Since the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) ended its ceasefire in July, it has returned to carrying out attacks across Turkey, killing 30 soldiers and police officers, as well as 20 civilians. Several attacks have shaken the country, including one that killed three people in the heart of Turkey's capital, Ankara; one in which four Kurdish women were killed in the city of Siirt; and the murder in the city of Batman of a pregnant woman, whose unborn child was saved in an emergency operation, only to die two days later.

Markar Esayan, a journalist with close contacts to the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), writes that Kurdish people are afraid of a return to the conflicts of the 1990s. They are afraid they will once again end up caught on the frontline between the PKK and the Turkish Army, dying in the "crossfire," as Esayan puts it. This fear is justified, he writes, since at the moment the PKK is doing everything it can "to provoke a massive reaction from the government and the army." The situation today is even more complicated than it was in the 1990s, since it is unclear where the lines in the current conflict are drawn.

While hardliners within the PKK fan the flames, another faction, including the banned organization's imprisoned former leader, Abdullah Öcalan, remains interested in finding a political solution. Inhabiting a middle ground between the two is the BDP, a legal political party that managed to win 36 seats in the Turkish parliament this June. The party boycotted the parliament, allegedly because six of its parliamentary representatives, currently in detention and awaiting trial, were forbidden by a court order from assuming office. The real reason, however, seems to be that PKK leadership can't agree on whether or not it wants to see Kurdish representation in parliament. The BDP, Esayan writes, "is under enormous pressure from the PKK and is being bounced back and forth like a tennis ball."

Outrage over Kurdish Women's Deaths

For now, the side hoping for a political solution has won out. The BDP decided, after a great deal of back and forth, to end its boycott and participate in the parliament when it reconvened on Oct. 1 after the summer recess.

One BDP representative is Leyla Zana, a politician who had barely been elected to parliament in the early 1990s before she was thrown out again and imprisoned for speaking Kurdish during her swearing in. She wasn't released until 2004. In the elections this June, Zana won a direct mandate in the Diyarbakir Province in southeastern Anatolia.

Widespread outrage in Kurdish society over the death of the four Kurdish women in September surely also played a part in the BDP's decision to end the boycott. The PKK simply shrugged and accepted the deaths as one side effect of its attacks on the police and military. For the first time in years, angry Kurds organized demonstrations, holding up signs directed at the PKK that read: "Not in my name."

Still, the Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament have difficult days ahead of them. President Abdullah Gül showed his support by receiving Selahattin Demirtas, co-leader of the BDP, at the presidential palace the same day the BDP announced the end of the boycott, and by speaking in support of a political solution in parliament on Kurdish issues. But the parliament's first vote will be a harsh initiation for BDP representatives. This week the Turkish parliament is expected to give the government legal authority to invade northern Iraq at any time. The move would allow the government to go after Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq. All parties except the BDP are expected to vote in favor of the measure.

Attacks Planned on PKK Camps in Northern Iraq

Since early September, Turkey has been preparing to follow up its air strikes earlier this year on PKK camps in northern Iraq with a large-scale ground offensive. While attending the UN General Assembly in New York last month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with both US President Barack Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to discuss possible military action. Meanwhile, Turkish diplomats in Baghdad and in Irbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq, are pushing for support in the fight against the PKK.

An invasion would destroy the hope of a political solution. PKK hardliners are hoping for precisely that, while more level-headed voices in the media are warning Erdogan not to fall into the trap.

In a major speech to parliamentary representatives from his Justice and Development Party (AKP) last week, Erdogan presented something of a double strategy. "We will fight terrorism to the very end," the prime minister declared to his party members, "but we will also negotiate with those who want a political solution."


So far, such negotiations haven't yielded results. Even those Erdogan had his intelligence chief conduct with Abdullah Öcalan in prison and with prominent PKK representatives in Oslo in 2010 have proven fruitless.

Now everything depends on how Erdogan handles the BDP representatives in the parliament. "President Gül can paint the big picture," writes Yavuz Baydar, a pro-government journalist, "but Erdogan holds in his hand the key to a solution." The question is whether or not the prime minister will set aside his harsh rhetoric against the BDP and meet key Kurdish figures halfway.

"The long overdue solution to the problem," Baydar concludes, "depends on which kind of 'playing with fire' Erdogan chooses."

Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein

http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 33,00.html

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