by Russia Today
November 21, 2011
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
[Russian reporter] Moscow has accused Western powers of stirring up tensions in the Arab world by calling for the overthrow of the Syrian regime. Now let's get more on this from an author and journalist Webster Tarpley, now joining us live from Damascus.
Thank you for coming on the program today. So Russia says that calls from certain states that the Syrian opposition should avoid talks with the government are only provoking further violence. Just for a moment here, let's listen to what the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said:
In Syria, we're now seeing a situation where the Arab League is calling for a halt to violence, and the beginning of dialogue, and Western countries and the capitals of some countries of the region, and making calls to the country, expressing recommending the opposition hold no talks with the Assad regime. It looks like a political provocation on an international scale. Yes, violence has to be stopped, but this demand has to be addressed to the authorities and the armed groups in the Syrian opposition.
[Russian reporter] So what's your take on this? Do you agree that the calls that are coming from the West are not helping to stabilize the situation in the region?
[Webster Tarpley] Surely not. Certainly Mr. Lavrov is on very firm ground there. I've just completed about a one-week fact-finding tour of the country. I've been in Homs, I've been in Tartus, Banyas, I've been in the military hospital here in Baghdad, and I can tell you what average, every-day Syrians of all ethnic groups -- Christian, Alawite, Sunni, Shiite, Druze -- what they say about this is that they are being shot at by snipers. In Homs, in particular, people complain that there are terrorist snipers who are shooting at civilians -- men, women and children -- blind terrorism, random killing, simply for the purpose of destabilizing the country. I would not call this a civil war by any stretch of the imagination. I think that's a very, very misleading term in the following sense: What you are dealing with here are death squads. You're dealing here with terror commandos, the kind of thing that everybody remembers from Argentina and Central America. This is a typical CIA method. In this case, it's a joint production of CIA, MI6, Mossad, the DGSE of the French, it's got money coming from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and it has a couple of interesting managers. The manager I think you should point to the most is a guy called Khaddam. Khaddam was the foreign minister in this country for quite a couple of decades. He's almost 80 years old. He operates from Paris. And I think he's being groomed by NATO as the new dictator of some kind of a --
[Russian reporter] Mr. Tarpley. I'm sorry to interrupt you, But if I could just jump in for a moment. It's very interesting how you bring in the issue that there are unknown snipers, there are terror commandos, death squads, with links to the West, and the West's allies in Saudi Arabia, for example. But Assad's rule is increasingly being called illegitimate. But isn't there in the U.S. and Europe a concern that getting rid of the Syrian president could just cause even more violence? For example, what we're seeing right now in Tahrir Square in Egypt.
[Webster Tarpley] Well, after Libya becoming a bloodbath with 150,000 dead, and now with Egypt showing what it was all along, there was no revolution there, it was a complete failure, and now people are beginning to understand it. Notice that nevertheless Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Rice at the United Nations are continuing to push this bankrupt, discredited model of the color revolution, the CIA-people power coup backed up by terrorist troops: people from al Qaeda, people from the Muslim Brotherhood, people from Salafist organizations and so forth. And I've heard this now from some very important religious authorities here, that there's a growing movement inside the Islamic community here which says we want reconciliation, we want law and order, we want legality, we don't want fanatics to run the show. The fanatics are being brought in by the Western powers.
[Russian reporter] So as the fanatics are coming in by the Western powers, you're seeing a fair amount of unification among the Muslims there. But let's draw some comparisons if we may. UN resolution 1973 for Libya to protect civilians there. Do you think, is the grand plan here for Syria -- that of the Western states -- to get in there for regime [change] in Syria? And if that is their plan, then what is the point? What is there to gain?
[Webster Tarpley] A very important thing is this is the most tolerant society in the Middle East. This is one place where all kinds of people live together in, I think, remarkable harmony. And again, it's a very wide variety: Moslems of all kinds, Christians of all kinds, Christian Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, Malachites, Syriacs, many, many other kinds, Druzes, Kurds, and so forth. This is a model of the peaceful coexistence of various ethnic groups.
Now the U.S. policy I think right now, is to smash the Middle East according to ethnic lines. In other words, if you can have a divide and conquer policy which says, the Christians will be kicked out of Lebanon, and the Christians will be, say, kicked out of Syria in the way they have been kicked out of Iraq -- and ironically a lot of them went to Syria -- you can get a situation where all of these countries are fatally weakened. The way in which it's introduced, if you look at Syria, the main centers of trouble are on the Turkish border, the Syrian border with Jordan, with Iraqi Kurdestan, and then with Lebanon. And I think Lebanon, thanks to Saad Hariri, may be the main one. It's a completely artificial --
[Russian reporter] I'm so sorry. We are running out of time. But if I may, with Western powers calling for restraint on both sides of Egypt, why do they only take a one-sided approach when it comes to what's going on in Syria?
[Webster Tarpley] Well, it's all the tactics of demagogy and the modulation of demagogy from one minute to the next. But what we have here in Syria is a cynical media campaign, because I've been in Homs. When you go to Homs, and you go to the Zara neighborhood, which is supposed to be the hottest point in the whole country, you find people who are pro-Assad. They're concerned, no. 1, about Mazut. They want to have heating oil, because the winter is coming and it's getting cold. And when you ask them, "What is your demand?" they say, "We want the Syrian army to come in here. We want the Syrian army posted on the roofs of the houses with helicopters and tanks to stop these snipers from killing us. Don't let these black-hooded figures" -- which is what they are -- pretending to be deserters when they are really men from Chechnya, they are from Libya, they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, foreign fighters who have been brought in here by the CIA and the other Western services, and that is what's going on. That is, I think, a very, very large part of it.
And in the city of Homs, for example, in one hospital, they were telling us it was 5 dead and 7 wounded on one day. And what was it? It's all snipers. It's all these terrorists who are shooting the civilian population. Of course, when Al Jazeera arrives, they say, "Those deaths are the responsibility of the Syrian army." That is absolute baloney. This is a Goebbels Big Lie campaign. There is no civil war here. There is no insurrection. There is no mass political movement against Assad. These are very, very limited, minor, and strictly localized phenomena. This looks nothing like Libya. I know what a civil war in a modern Arab country looks like. I've been in Libya during the summer. There's no civil war here. There's no front.
[Russian Reporter] I do say there's no civil war here as you are suggesting, this is simply about terror commandos and death squads being exported by the CIA and brought in by other western factors. But I wish we had more time for this. Author and journalist, Webster Tarpley, live from Damascus, many thanks.
[Webster Tarpley] Thank you.