0 Crying wolf, foreign agendas and Israel's role in destabilising Syria

 

Israel's track record of fostering regional unrest is an old story. It's now a well-worn observation that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq - which dismayed the whole world and shattered US credibility in foreign affairs - was a splendid success from the perspective of its pro-Israel architects. Their core goal in promoting the war was to eliminate Iraq as a military threat to Israel and this miracle has been neatly accomplished. Oh, sure, Iraqi society is now a bomb-cratered version of its former self, but that too is a friendly outcome - insurance against a strong Iraqi state ever rising again.

It's been a dismally predictable, transparent and nasty lie by regimes under assault in the Arab Spring that the mass uprisings are being whipped up by foreign agitators - usually meaning Israel and the United States, maybe France, Europe generally, now sometimes Turkey or, heaven forfend, Al Jazeera journalists. Only the most gullible swallow these claims: their principal effect is to make the claimants look like buffoons.

Still, a government's crying wolf doesn't mean a wolf isn't around somewhere. It's equally gullible to assume that foreign agendas have no role in Syria, for example.

The flood of western money, supplies, intelligence agents, satellite and drone monitoring and promises of every kind has been lavish everywhere in the Arab Spring. They have been serving outside interests in the time-honoured way of all revolutions: identifying new clients for backroom deals, playing on big-man ambitions, fostering cupidity where it was only a seed, manipulating jealousies and fears, playing off old internecine vendettas and, the new favourite, heating up sectarian bigotry. If these machinations are more low-profile in Syria, this doesn't mean they aren't operating.

Since the end of the Cold War, Western interests have focused almost exclusively on stability, that pillar of pax economicus beloved by investment bankers, primary-product extractors and tourism developers everywhere - with one exception: the Middle East. The hypocrisy of Western democracy promotion in the Middle East has been described too much to need further mention here, but it does bear pointing out that instability is preferred by at least one key player: Israel. The interests driving this foreign involvement haven't changed in decades: the geopolitics of oil and, as a related but also self-standing issue, Israel. 

These are constants, and don't tell us much. Less obvious is the exact strategy serving these goals, particularly the subtext of ostentatious calls for "democracy". Democracy became a foreign policy goal for Western powers during the Cold War when inept dictator allies kept triggering revolutions against themselves and toppling. The real goal of "democracy" was stability: instability served only where a great power wanted to pick a fight over influence.

Israel's track record of fostering regional unrest is an old story. It's now a well-worn observation that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq - which dismayed the whole world and shattered US credibility in foreign affairs - was a splendid success from the perspective of its pro-Israel architects. Their core goal in promoting the war was to eliminate Iraq as a military threat to Israel and this miracle has been neatly accomplished. Oh, sure, Iraqi society is now a bomb-cratered version of its former self, but that too is a friendly outcome - insurance against a strong Iraqi state ever rising again.

full article:

http://www.islam21c.com/politics/4345-crying-wolf-foreign-agendas-and-israels-role-in-destabilising-syria