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Barry Grey Correspondent
The agenda of the new war is the basic agenda that lay behind Washington’s first war against Iraq 23 years ago, total US control of the energy resources of the Middle East.
President Barack Obama, the man who ran for president in 2008 as an opponent of Bush’s war in Iraq is, like his predecessor, seeking to justify American military violence in that tortured land and its extension into Syria with deceit and lies.
Just a month ago, announcing the initiation of US air strikes, Obama presented them as a short-term, narrowly focused measure restricted to providing “humanitarian relief” for Yazidi refugees threatened by Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) militia and protecting US personnel in the Kurdish capital of Erbil.
Those pretexts failed to generate public support for renewed war in the Middle East and were quickly dropped.
Then came the beheading of two American journalists by ISIS.
The media ran lurid accounts of Western recruits to ISIS and an increased threat of terrorist attacks within the US.
The beheadings provided a new, made-to-order pretext, reviving “war on terror” fear-mongering, for US military intervention in the Middle East.
It was handed to American imperialism by a Sunni jihadist group that owes it existence to Washington.
ISIS is a creation of the United States. It arose out of the destruction of Iraqi society by the US military between 2003 and 2011 and the colonialist policy pursued by Washington of whipping up sectarian warfare between Sunnis and Shiites.
In Syria, the organization was directly and indirectly armed and trained by the CIA as the spearhead of the US drive to overthrow the pro-Russian and pro-Iranian regime of Bashar al-Assad and replace it with a US puppet government.
Much of its leadership has ties to American intelligence.
The war on ISIS is a camouflage for an unstated agenda.
The US is using military force to attempt once again to restructure Iraq in line with the aims of its 1991 war and its 2003 invasion, complete domination of the country’s vast oil resources.
Even more centrally, the new war is aimed at overthrowing Assad in Syria.
It is an attempt to reverse the setback Washington suffered a year ago when it had to scuttle its plans to intervene in Syria on the basis of fabricated claims of chemical weapons attacks by Assad.
The Obama administration was not able to generate any significant public support for such an attack and found itself internally divided.
Now, the same agenda is disguised as a war against ISIS with which the US has been allied in the drive for regime-change in Syria.
Administration officials are making clear in advance of Obama’s speech that he has adopted a policy of carrying out air strikes in Syria as well as Iraq. It is reported that Obama will urge Congress to authorise stepped up US military aid to so-called “rebels” in Syria.
The agenda of the new war is the basic agenda that lay behind Washington’s first war against Iraq 23 years ago, total US control of the energy resources of the Middle East.
It will continue to be pursued if Washington succeeds in toppling and likely murdering Assad (as it murdered Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya).
Washington will in short order openly resume its war drive against Iran.
The pursuit of US hegemony in the Middle East is also bound up with Washington’s war-mongering against Russia.
Last year, Russia obstructed the Obama administration’s plans to attack Syria, Moscow’s only ally in the Arab world and the site of a major Russian naval base.
The desire to remove an obstacle to US domination of the Middle East was a significant factor in the confrontation the US created with Moscow by conspiring to overthrow a pro-Russian government in Ukraine and replace it with a far-right, rabidly anti-Russian puppet regime.
This new war, like the ones that went before it, is being carried out over the heads of the American people, without any explanation or public discussion.
The decisions are made by a cabal of military and intelligence operatives in consultation with Washington think-tanks and Wall Street.
On Tuesday, Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published a commentary outlining the aims of Obama’s Wednesday night speech.
The CSIS is a key part of the nexus of government and military officials and national security think-tanks that actually shapes the life-and-death decisions, including going to war, that impact on the American and world population. On his website, which is produced for the political elite, Cordesman spelt out frankly what is being prepared. — wsws.
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