Will Obama's Re-Election
Ensure World War III?
by Nancy Spannaus
Nov. 27—The ongoing preparations by NATO to intervene with military equipment on the border between Turkey and Syria, on the blatantly lying excuse that the deployment is necessary to defend NATO member Turkey, represent the most dramatic escalation toward a strategic confrontation between NATO and Russia in recent memory. But no one can say that he or she had not been warned.
For months prior to the Nov. 6 U.S. Presidential elections, U.S. statesman Lyndon LaRouche laid out the strategic danger clearly: If President Barack Obama, a tool of the British Empire, is re-elected, that will represent a major step toward World War III. And so it has occurred. Within a mere three weeks after that election, the NATO grouping of which Obama is the decisive part, has escalated its efforts to arm the Syrian terrorist opposition; lent its support to the Israeli government's latest genocidal assault on Gaza; and now, all but determined to deploy Patriot missiles on the Turkish-Syrian border, which military experts—and the Russian leadership—understand to be the first step toward creating a provocative no-fly zone in northern Syria.
Russia and China have long indicated their determination to oppose such a "new Libya" scenario, even if such opposition requires military means. But now that Obama has been reconfirmed in office, his British controllers have decided to test the limits of what they will tolerate, and are thus driving the world to the edge of a thermonuclear confrontation.
Indeed, British Prime Minister David Cameron himself launched the escalation in Syria the day after Obama's re-election, a move that was linked to that event by a spokesman for the British military think tank the Royal United Services Institute. Analyst Shashank Joshi told AP:
"With the re-election of Obama, what you have is a strong confidence on the British side that the U.S. administration will be engaged more on Syria from the get-go."
Could such a confrontation happen between now and the inauguration? If the U.S. Congress and independent patriotic leaders decide to sit back and let Obama do what he wills, as they have indicated they will, it may indeed. Despite the fact that the President is in a weakened political position, due to his lying incompetence or worse on the murder of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, Congressmen, particularly Democrats, are by and large acting as idiots with their heads in the sand.
If leaders internationally do not change this behavior, and soon, we could be headed for global suicide.
The 'Patriot-3' Gambit
NATO foreign ministers will meet on Dec. 4-5 to make the final approval for the Turkish-requested deployment of a battery of Patriot-3 missiles on the Turkey-Syria border. There is virtually no chance the approval will be denied. NATO officials have already arrived in Turkey to survey for possible sites, and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has repeatedly stated that NATO will treat the request as urgent, and give it the highest priority.
The only countries which have the Patriots to deploy—along with skilled personnel—are Germany, The Netherlands, and the United States. Attention has focused on Germany as a prime supplier, and the German cabinet is scheduled to approve the deployment next week as well. While there is a political uproar among some parties in Parliament against the deployment, which might involve as many as 170 German personnel, no one expects the Parliament to veto the move.
The provocative nature of this deployment is transparent. There is no Syrian military threat to Turkey which the Patriot defensive batteries could defend against; the only potential use for the Patriots is against Syrian aircraft or missiles within Syrian territory—thus as enforcers of a NATO-policed no-fly zone with Syria. While NATO spokesmen have repeatedly denied that this is their intention, that is the only purpose which makes any sense of the deployment.
But the Patriot deployment cannot be seen in isolation from two other aspects of potential upcoming NATO involvement.
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First, Hurriyet DailyNews.com reported Nov. 23 that Turkey has not "excluded" the use of NATO's Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS) aircraft with respect to Syria. "If the Supreme Allied Command Europe of NATO calls for air surveillance of Turkey, there would be no need for an additional official request to the alliance," an unnamed Turkish Defense Ministry official told Hurriyet. The official highlighted a line in the Nov. 21 Foreign Ministry statement on the request to NATO that said, "A decision has been taken to formally request NATO to support the augmentation of our national air defense by allied air defense elements." This is a pretty broad statement that could cover just about anything that is deemed necessary to "protect" Turkey.
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Second, NATO has made known that it is about to consolidate two commands that formerly had jurisdiction over NATO land operations, based in Germany and Spain, into a single Allied Land Command that will be based in, of all places, Izmir, Turkey.
Lt. Gen. Frederick "Ben" Hodges, U.S. Army, the chief of the new command, explained to Stars & Stripes Nov. 24 that the new command is responsible for ensuring readiness of NATO forces, conducting land operations, and synchronizing land force command and control. One of its prime focuses will be harnessing all of the war experience that NATO ground forces have accumulated in Afghanistan to ensure that the lessons learned won't get lost.
As for placing the new headquarters in Turkey, Hodges says this just makes good strategic sense. "Turkey's location from a geographic standpoint—adjacent to the Middle East, nearly adjacent to Russia—it's an important location," he says. "It sends a signal not only to Turkey and the rest of the alliance. It sends a signal to the other neighbors."
Russia Gets the Message
NATO, in following the British imperial doctrine of demanding an end to national sovereignty, is indeed sending a signal to Russia (and China), and they have gotten the message, loud and clear. Russia, in particular, is vigorously exposing NATO's lies, and demanding that it step back from the brink.
"Our concerns are rooted in the 'Chekhov's gun syndrome' that says that if a gun appears on stage in the first act, it will definitely fire by the third," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Nov. 22, the day after NATO's defense ministers met on the Turkish Patriot request. The emergence of weapons at a time when attempts are being made to resolve a conflict, creates risks not necessarily due to the scenario, but because any stockpile of weapons naturally creates threats, he explained, Russia Today reported. "Any provocation may trigger a very serious armed conflict. We want to avoid this," he said.
In a Nov. 23 press conference in Moscow, TASS reported, Lavrov further warned that "any arms stockpiling creates risks and is tempting to those who would like to bring outside forces into play." Lavrov also expressed his concerns about the deployment in a telephone conversation with NATO's Rasmussen that same day. According to a statement issued by the Foreign Ministry, Lavrov also discussed Russia's proposal to establish a direct line of communication between Ankara and Damascus "to avoid incidents."
Foreign Ministry spokesman Lukashevich had stated earlier, after Turkey made its formal request for the Patriots to NATO, that "this would not foster stability in the region," warning Turkey against "building muscle or putting the situation on such a dangerous track."
Russian commentators have been even more specific in identifying the provocative nature of the Patriot deployment. "The planned deployment by NATO countries of Patriot air defense systems on Turkey's Syria border will actually amount to an imposition of a no-fly zone for Syrian aircraft in circumvention of the UN Security Council." This is according to Vladimir Kudelev, a research fellow of the Russian Institute for Oriental Studies, reported Voice of Russia Nov. 24.
Kudelev argues that the mere presence of the Patriots will "drastically" influence events on the ground in northern Syria, because the insurgents will automatically get a 200-250-km-wide "umbrella" along the Syrian-Turkish border (Kudelev's numbers aren't quite right. The maximum range of the Patriot PAC-3 missile is actually on the order of 160 km). More importantly, the deployment of the Patriots would undermine the role of the UN Security Council, by taking another step towards creating a no-fly zone without UNSC authorization.
Another Russian analyst, journalist Stanislav Tarasov, told the Voice of Russia Nov. 24 that NATO was originally strongly against intervening in a conflict between Turkey and Syria. He argues that Turkey originally wanted to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Charter, "which means that they wanted to drag NATO into the conflict and thus ensure its military presence in the region," but NATO said "No." So, Turkey resorted to Article 4 consultations, instead.
Commentators have pointed out another dimension to the Patriot deployment that has nothing directly to do with Syria. "Moscow believes that in the case the Patriot Missile Air Defense Systems are deployed to Turkey, they can be used as one of the elements of the early warning system—that is, as one of the elements of the European missile defense system which the USA is ardently defending by now," said Turkish political analyst Barysh Adybelli Nov. 24.
The Long-Term Objective
Well-informed Washington sources have emphasized to EIR that the series of decisions being taken by NATO should be seen as part of a long-term reconfiguration of NATO's forces, which would be prepositioned to carry out operations into Africa, Eurasia, and Southwest Asia, over the long period ahead. Another way to characterize this redeployment would be as an escalation of the British imperial policy of "rings" of containment around Russia and China, with the ultimate objective of emasculating their capabilities as sovereign nation-states, and assuring the dominance of the global financial-imperialist regime into the indefinite future.
Such dominance would, as the British monarchy's spokesmen have repeatedly stated, lead rapidly to a drastic decline in the world's population, making the lives of most of humanity, as the British Empire's hired hand Thomas Hobbes once put it so concisely, "nasty, brutish, and short."
Should the leadership of Russia and China not capitulate, however, the result could very rapidly be the outbreak of thermonuclear World War III. The surest way to avoid that possibility is still to remove British tool Barack Obama from the U.S. Presidency. How much closer do we have to come to a shooting war before American patriots get the courage to act?
