Syria, another NATO war?

The United States and NATO have been waging bloody war in Afghanistan now for nearly twelve years.

Hamid Karzai’s Kabul government, on behalf of which this war supposedly is, says that NATO’s war is “unwise”.

Yet, NATO continues it. Like other unwise wars, like in Mali.

NATO seems to think that it needs more unwise wars.

This video says about itself:

(27/10/12) Al Qaeda in Syria (Al Nusra Front) hold a demonstration to celebrate Eid. The crowd are seen to carry Nusra flags and are heard to chant that they are students of Osama [Bin Laden] amid anti-Assad slogans.

By Bill Van Auken in the USA:

US, NATO prepare Syria intervention

20 March 2013

The top US commander in Europe told a Senate hearing Tuesday that the US military and NATO are drawing up plans for direct military intervention in Syria.

Adm. James Stavridis, head of the Pentagon’s European Command, speaking at a hearing by the Senate Armed Service Committee, said that the US military is “looking at a variety of options” and is “prepared if called upon to be engaged.”

Declaring that there was “no end in sight to a vicious civil war,” Stavridis told the panel that “the option of assisting the opposition forces in Syria in ways that would break the deadlock are being actively explored by NATO members,” the Washington Post reported.

The admiral added that US and NATO discussions have included providing “lethal support” to the anti-government militias and using direct military force to impose “no-fly zones” in Syria and enforce “arms embargoes” against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Asked by committee chairman Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) whether the discussions included “going after Syria’s air defenses,” Stavridis answered “Yes,” to which Levin replied, “Good.”

The exchange on Capitol Hill mirrored other developments signaling an escalation of the intervention by the Western powers, utilizing a bitter sectarian civil war to bring about regime change in Syria.

Both Britain and France have called for an emergency meeting of European Union foreign ministers this week on their demand for lifting an EU arms embargo that bars members states from directly shipping weapons to the Western-backed “rebels.”

Both Prime Minister David Cameron in London and President François Hollande in Paris have indicated that they are prepared to act unilaterally if the EU fails to bow to their demand. Germany, while carrying out its own intervention in Syria, has voiced opposition to the lifting of the ban, warning that it will escalate the bloodshed, risk arming Al Qaeda-linked forces, and potentially spread violence throughout the region.

Washington, meanwhile, has signaled its support for British and French moves to directly arm the anti-Assad forces. On Monday, US Secretary of State John Kerry declared that “the United States does not stand in the way of other countries that made a decision to provide arms, whether it’s France or Britain or others.”

In reality, the Obama administration has been intimately involved in the operations to ship arms to the Syrian anti-regime militias, setting up a CIA station near the Syrian-Turkish border to coordinate arms and aid pouring in from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this month, Washington announced that it was providing its own “non-lethal” aid to these forces, including military rations, medical kits and other gear. At the same time, it has been widely reported that US special operations troops are training anti-Assad militiamen in Jordan. The Syrian government reported this week that a force of some 300 such US-trained fighters had crossed the Jordanian border into Syria.

The bulk of the fighting against Syrian government forces, however, is being carried out by Islamist militias, the most prominent among them Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate that Washington has formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

The Syrian government reported that on Tuesday morning Western-backed insurgents fired a rocket carrying a chemical weapon into the village of Khan al-Asal near the northern city of Aleppo, killing 25 people and wounding 110. The Syrian foreign ministry issued a statement calling the attack a “dangerous escalation,” recalling its earlier warnings that such weapons could be provided to the anti-regime forces with the aim of blaming their use on the Syrian government and providing a pretext for Western intervention.