In her farewell speech, outgoing US secretary of state Hillary Clinton accused Russia and Iran of “stepping up” military support for Syria and thereby adding fuel to possible regional conflict.
Her words displayed breath-taking myopia and double-think, and this from somebody who is being hailed as one of America’s brightest foreign diplomats in decades.
The first thing about Clinton’s remarks is: so what? Both Russia and Iran have long-standing mutual defense pacts with the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. If those countries are sharing military equipment and personnel then that is perfectly legal under the terms of defense agreements signed between sovereign states.
Secondly – and how is this for myopia and double-think? – just as Clinton is remonstrating with Russia and Iran, the Western powers are entering their third of sending fighter bombers, helicopter gun-ships, drones, refueling mid-tankers and cargo planes plus thousands of military personnel to the West African county of Mali to crush separatist militants. That full-scale “stepping up of military support” is headed up by France, which claims that it is responding to an ally in need – the dubious regime in Mali’s capital, Bamako.
Unlike the support given to Syria by Russia and Iran, the French and Western intervention in Mali has tenuous, if any, legal foundation. The Francophile regime in Bamako is an administration that was put in power by a military coup last April. The junta’s appointed so-called interim president, Dioucounda Traore, is an unelected French puppet with no legally constituted popular authority.
The Western powers can’t even wave a fig leaf of a United Nations Security Council mandate for their Malian interference. The UNSC vote on the issue of Mali on December 20 only gave qualified authorization for an African-led military mission under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). There was no authorization at the UNSC for a French or Western military offensive.
So, the French and latterly the British and Americans can weigh into Malian internal affairs with bombers and Special Forces – exacerbating violations by the corrupt Malian army – and this illegal military onslaught in Mali is supposedly permissible.
Whereas, Russian and Iran come to the aid of a sovereign state through a long-standing defense pact between sovereign states, and somehow this is an outrage, according to Clinton’s rational.
Speaking in Washington on Thursday, Clinton told the assembled supine press corps, “The Iranians have made it clear for some time that keeping Assad in power is one of their highest priorities. There is a lot of concern that they are increasing the quality of the weapons because Assad is using up his weaponry.”
Yes, Assad is “using up his weaponry” precisely because his country is under attack from Western-backed mercenaries.
As for Russia, Clinton went on, “The Russians are not passive bystanders in their support for Assad. We have reasons to believe that the Russians continue to supply financial and military assistance in the form of equipment to Assad.”
Again, so what? The only basis for Clinton’s condemnation is her own propagandized subjective and totally spurious logic.
Perhaps, the crescendo in Clinton’s ability for double-think was this nugget, “I personally have been warning for quite some time of the dangers associated with an increasingly lethal civil war and a potential proxy war. Therefore, I think it’s incumbent on those nations that have refused to be constructive players to reconsider their positions because the worst kind of predictions of what could happen internally and spilling over the borders of Syria are certainly within the realm of the possible now.”
These words were uttered by America’s “top diplomat” only hours after Israeli warplanes launched unprovoked deadly air strikes on the sovereign state of Syria with American hardware, foreknowledge and approval. And yet, despite this violation of the UN Charter by America’s mid-east attack dog, Clinton admonishes Russia and Iran for refusing “to be constructive players”.
For the past 22 months, Washington and its Western allies, along with Turkey and the Arab Sunni dictatorships of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have been fuelling a covert war of aggression in Syria.
Washington in particular has been funneling weapons and militants into Syria via its Arab conduits to tear that country asunder with the most vicious terrorism imaginable. Car bombings of civilian areas, including hospitals, schools and universities; the destruction of mosques and shrines; and mass executions – the latest in Aleppo this week where up to 100 bodies were pulled out of a river, bullets in the head.
Nothing and no-one is off-limits in the Western-fuelled annihilation of Syrian society. If that is being a “constructive player” then someone ought to check Clinton’s pulse to see if she is actually still alive or is she a corpse mouthing programmed drivel?
Political initiatives from the governments of Syria, Russia and Iran for a negotiated settlement to the Syrian crisis have been plentiful, yet spurned at every turn, with Western-backed violence ramped up.
The Geneva accord signed up to last June by the members of the UN Security Council calling for a transition that involved the participation of the Assad government was a baby strangled at birth by the recalcitrant Western axis of evil.
And yet given the outrageous provocation of continued Western aggression in Syria – and the very real danger of regional conflagration that that entails – Washington has the preposterous audacity to denounce Russia and Iran for not being constructive players and for assisting an ally through legal and justifiable means.
Hillary Clinton needs more than a diplomatic eye test over her view of the world. She should be sectioned for having just undergone a lobotomy that has removed any ability to think rationally or morally. How is the world meant to find peace when it is under the sway of such criminally insane people?
Make no mistake, her replacement as secretary of state, John Kerry, will be no better. For Clinton’s criminal insanity is but a symptom of a systematic mental condition in Washington. We can be sure that whatever saner words he may have espoused in the past, Kerry, as with the new defense secretary Chuck Hagel, will likewise be lobotomized to make sure they “think properly”.
Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism.
He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT onBandung Radio.
This article was originally posted at Press TV