‘Friends of Syria’ summit in Istanbul seeks means of rehabilitating, rearming, and redeploying hobbled terrorist proxies.

Tony Cartalucci, Contributor

Activist Post

Note: Much of this report is based on James Corbett’s recent presentation, “R2P or: How the Left Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Wars of Imperial Aggression.”

Even with violence ebbing across Syria as order is restored, Kofi Annan is still attempting to peddle a “peace deal” between the Syrian government and militants — demanding Syrian troops be withdrawn from cities just recaptured from terrorist forces.

And as Annan seeks a reprieve for remaining militant forces, the West is meeting in neighboring Turkey, devising a method to rearm and redeploy them in order to reignite and perpetuate the bloodshed they claim they are trying to prevent.

More specifically, BBC reports in their article titled, “Syria crisis debated at Istanbul talks,” that ways are being “explored” to “step up pressure on the Syrian regime and bolster the opposition.” The report also makes mention of calls to arm the opposition. There is also funding being given by the West and the Arab League to literally “pay” terrorist to get back into the fight. Surely, placing pressure on a government that has just restored order across the country, while “bolstering” and arming the opposition will only trigger yet another round of bloodshed and violence.

Indeed the entire premise of the “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)” doctrine follows that if a nation is incapable of providing protection for its own population, it relinquishes its sovereignty to direct intervention by the “international community.” Should such a nation manage to restore order, however, the R2P doctrine along with the meddling it justifies and the window for regime change it opens no longer applies. Knowing this, and realizing the window for forcing regime change in Syria is closing, the West is actually seeking ways to perpetuate the bloodbath, not end it, until their objective of removing President Bashar al-Assad has been achieved – revealing in incredible detail the insidious nature of the so-called “humanitarian” R2P model.

This includes foreign-funding to create proxy opposition movements within targeted nations, training, equipping, and funding mobs of protesters to sow unrest, providing covert military support to ensure the survival of these proxy movements, and a series of financial and economic measures, including sanctions used to poison the will of a nation’s people against their government and foster division within ruling parties. Essentially, the violence that then predictably unfolds is cited as justification to intervene more overtly and ensure regime change is accomplished and a series of neo-liberal reforms instituted.

Setting the Stage for R2P in Syria

Years before unrest unfolded in Syria, the West had determined it would overthrow its government and replace it with a suitable client regime. In 2002, Syria was officially added to America’s “Axis of Evil,” and according to US Army General Wesley Clark during a 2007 speech, was one of many Arab regimes targeted for regime change.

As early as 2001 — R2P “doctrine” was being devised (.pdf) to use conditions of violent unrest as a pretext to intervene militarily in a any given nation, destroy it politically as well as literally, then rebuild a neo-liberal, globalist client state upon the rubble. As early as 2008, the US State Department began training armies of “activists” to then be sent back to their respective nations across the Arab World and induce violent unrest.

In an April 2011 AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.”

The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there,” (emphasis added). Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course is the “Arab Spring,” and in Syria’s case, the impetus for the current unrest threatening to unhinge the nation and invite in foreign intervention” using the R2P model.

R2P -DOA

Despite years of preparing R2P to become an institutionalized mechanism for quickly justifying and executing regime change, almost immediately when it was first rolled out against Libya, it was met with resistance, skepticism, and criticism. Claims of peaceful protesters being brutalized by Qaddafi’s troops quickly collapsed as it became known these “protesters” were heavily armed terrorists hailing from the US State Department listed Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Instead of carrying placards as the corporate-media suggested, they were brandishing machines guns, driving tanks, and even at one point piloting fighter jets.

Despite the obvious inconsistencies with the alleged narrative “justifying” R2P and the realities unfolding on the ground, the West through its military alliance NATO began its military intervention to “protect civilians.” NATO’s military campaign from the beginning, however, did not “protect civilians,” but instead provided air support for rebel assaults, intelligence and special operations assistance to rebel military units, and carried the systematic targeting and destroying of Qaddafi’s political inner circle – which included bombing the homes of Qaddafi’s family, killing his children and his grandchildren in NATO airstrikes.

Toward the end of the campaign, NATO assisted rebels in besieging Libyan cities, including Bani Walid and Sirte. This included shutting off water, electricity, food, and aid and literally starving out city residence while NATO pounded them from the air until they capitulated. In the case of Sirte, the city fought until the bitter end leaving absolute desolation. Other cities targeted included Tawarga in which the entire population of 10,000 was either exterminated or permanently exiled.

Image: The desolate Libyan city of Sirte after NATO’s months-long siege — the tragic aftermath of a UN-sanctioned “humanitarian war.”

Clearly NATO made a cruel mockery out of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, using it to visit catastrophic horrors upon the Libyan people, overturning a unifying national government, plunging the entire nation into division and chaos – where now bands of genocidal racists roam the country carrying out horrific and systematic atrocities while other armed militias battle each other daily as the nation is carved up into competing fiefdoms. The government in Tripoli installed by NATO after the fall of Qaddafi is currently headed by BP, Shell, and Total-funded Petroleum Institute chairman Abdurrahim el-Keib. Before el-Keib even came to power, provisional rebel leaders had already begun pawning off national assets to French, Qatari, British, and American corporations.

Syria’s Turn

Any doubt that R2P was a contrived geopolitical ploy designed solely to veil the hegemonic ambitions of globalist oligarchs was laid to rest in the rubble of Libya’s grotesque dismemberment. And despite this doctrine’s legitimacy collapsing, it has been quickly arrayed against Syria next. As in Libya, Syria’s “protesters” are in fact a mix of armed Syrian militants, foreign fighters, and terrorists provided a constant torrent of weapons and funding from NATO and its junior partners amongst the Arab League.

The unrest purposefully stoked by the West to put R2P options “on the table” is coordinated with the corporate media which spins the chaos in a lopsided fashion, portraying the violence as the Syrian government callously “slaughtering civilians.” Such tactics have already been used and exposed during the Libyan war, and like R2P itself seem to be collapsing upon their tenuous foundations.

And despite all of this, there are still calls for R2P in Syria. One article out of the Christian Science Monitor titled, “‘Responsibility to protect’: the moral imperative to intervene in Syria,” sees lawyer and former USAID official James Rudolph lecture his audience as if talking to children about the need to intervene in Syria, as if the last year of NATO-facilitated atrocities in Libya didn’t happen. We are brought right back to the beginning, with Western powers convening in Turkey faced with a Syrian government restoring order and taking R2P options “off the table.”

The lies used to sell R2P to the public, the lies still being used by the likes of Rudolph in the Christian Science Monitor, begin to ring particularly hallow as the West lays out plans to purposefully prolong the bloody conflict in Syria. The corporate-financier funded US policy think-tank Brookings Institution in their Middle East Memo #21 “Assessing Options for Regime Change (.pdf), literally says in reference to arming Syrian militants, “alternatively, the United States might calculate that it is still worthwhile to pin down the Asad regime and bleed it, keeping a regional adversary weak, while avoiding the costs of direct intervention.”



Image: Also out of the Brookings Institution, Middle East Memo #21 “Assessing Options for Regime Change (.pdf),” makes no secret that “responsibility to protect” is but a pretext for long-planned regime change.

The same Brookings Institution in another report titled “Assessing Options for Regime Change” would admit Kofi Annan’s mission to Syria is not to broker a peace deal, but rather to facilitate the establishment of “safe havens” from which the West’s campaign of destabilization can be continued:

An alternative is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under Annan’s leadership. This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power. This would, of course, fall short of U.S. goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts. –– page 4, Assessing Options for Regime Change, Brookings Institution.

Not only is it obvious that Western leaders are currently plotting in Turkey to carry out Brookings’ directives, but also that these goals, as they did in Libya, run contra to any conceivable interpretation of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. When we consider that the 2001 document, “The Responsibility to Protect,” — published by the ad hoc “International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) – consisted of members of the Fortune 500-funded International Crisis Group (Fidel Ramos, Cyril Ramaphosa), the Lowy Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and members of both Western governments and armed forces – the decade-arcing plot to disguise a global blitzkrieg of naked military conquest as a series of “humanitarian interventions” becomes painfully clear.



Image: Some of the corporate sponsors behind the Brookings Institution, from whose playbook Western leaders are following in their attempted overthrow of Syria’s government. (click image to enlarge)



Image: Just some of the corporate and “institutional” sponsors of the International Crisis Group, whose membership provided representatives that helped develop the R2P doctrine. (click image to enlarge)

The very corporations behind the development of the R2P doctrine allowing for the vicious dismemberment of Libya, are the same corporations now plundering its wealth and preparing to role it into their global hegemonic empire. It seems Syria is next and the powers that be are not concerned that their fig leaf of legitimacy has been take into the wind. Beyond that, they eye the world — Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Russia and China and their peripheries — unless we as individuals identify these corporations and find the resolve to boycott and permanently replace them.

The power they’ve used to wreak havoc across the planet is a direct result of we the people paying our monthly paychecks into their corporations and institutions. The key to undoing this unwarranted influence is to stop feeding this monster our money, time, energy, and attention.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at

Land Destroyer Report. Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.