Mideast War Danger Recedes;
Putin Emerges as Peacemaker
Special to EIR
Dec. 2—With the signing of the interim agreement between the P5+1 (UN Security Council Permanent Five plus Germany) and Iran, the immediate danger of global conflict has shifted away from the volatile Persian Gulf and Mideast region, for the time being.
As more details emerge of the extensive secret diplomacy that led to the breakthrough in Geneva at 3 a.m. on Nov. 24, it becomes more clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin has emerged as a key peacemaker. It can be expected that the radical Malthusian faction centered in the British monarchy will not sit back and allow this strategic shift to take place without attempting to block it from going any further. As the result, the war danger has shifted for now away from Southwest Asia, but has not been eliminated. And with President Barack Obama becoming more and more desperate as his Presidency sinks into a quicksand of imcompetence and scandals, the danger of an irrational move coming from the White House should not be underestimated.
It should be recalled that as recently as the beginning of September, President Obama had ordered the U.S. military to launch missile strikes on targets in Syria, and that it was only an intense mobilization of institutional war-avoidance forces, backed by an outpouring of opposition from the American public, that stopped those attacks from taking place.
At that time, President Putin played a key role in putting the chemical weapons removal issue on the table, as an alternative to Obama's "red line," and Secretary of State John Kerry preemptively accepted the Russian offer, which succeeded in thus far stopping military action. If those planned massive cruise missile strikes on Syria had taken place, there is no telling how close we would be today to general war and the potential of thermonuclear extinction.
The world remains on a very fragile footing to this day.
Progress on Syria?
At the same time, the combined efforts of Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey and others, have opened the possibility of the Iran breakthrough with the P5+1 extending into the Syria conflict.
Just hours after the Geneva P5+1 deal was signed, American, Russian, and United Nations negotiators met in Geneva to work out preliminary details of a long-awaited Geneva II conference, now scheduled for Jan. 22, 2014.
It is clear that the Syria issue was an important factor all along in the P5+1 deliberations and the secret bilateral talks taking place for months between the U.S. and Iran. According to U.S. officials, Kofi Annan, the previous UN and Arab League special envoy for Syria, who originally proposed the Geneva peace talks, was in Geneva, at the same hotel as the P5+1 delegates during the November negotiations.
The source added that the U.S. and Russian officials, including Assistant Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Russian Deputy Foreign Ministers Gennady Gatilov and Mikhail Bogdanov, are already hard at work drafting a detailed proposal for an interim power-sharing agreement between key elements of the existing Syrian "deep state" and secular factions of the opposition. As the successful P5+1 interim deal demonstrated, the key to any successful conference, is the weeks of advanced diplomatic work, particularly for a conference dealing with as difficult a subject as the nearly three-year Syrian conflict.
In fact, it has now been confirmed that the P5+1 breakthrough was preceded by months of secret bilateral talks between American and Iranian officials. It is noteworthy that President Obama's National Security Advisor Dr. Susan Rice was excluded from these crucial back-channel negotiations, which were handled by a combination of career foreign service officers, and top foreign policy aides to Vice President Joseph Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In addition to Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and an experienced arms control negotiator, the back-channel talks were quietly handled by Puneer Tawar, the long-standing top foreign policy advisor to Vice President Biden, and Jake Sullivan, ex-Secretary Clinton's head of policy planning, who now is the top national security aide to Biden.
Russia and China Targeted
U.S. intelligence sources freely acknowledge that it was the Russian and Chinese role in the P5+1 deliberations that facilitated the final signing. In the days before the resumption of the final interim talks in Geneva, Iran's President Hassan Rouhani held a critical phone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping. During that discussion, Rouhani asked the Chinese to serve as the trusted "honest brokers" if the talks in Geneva reached an impasse. The Chinese not only accepted the Iranian request. They played a crucial role in the final negotiations, as recognized by the U.S. negotiators.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that both Russia and China are now facing instability on their borders—coming from those international financial circles that are looking to exploit instability, and who are openly promoting massive population reduction through wars, famine, and disease.
In Thailand, violent "Yellow Shirt" mobs aligned with the British-backed Thai monarchy, are trying to bring down the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, which is pursuing long-dormant economic development deals with China, including for construction of the vital Kra Canal.
In Ukraine, following President Viktor Yanukovych's rejection of an Eastern Alliance agreement with the European Union, which would have further devastated what remains of the Ukrainian economy, European and American NGOs have launched a destabilization drive, aimed at bringing down the government in another anti-Russian "Orange Revolution" (see separate coverage in this issue).
What stands out in stark contrast to the Anglo-Dutch drive to create the conditions for a massive Malthusian population reduction is the growing concert of action on the part of Russia, China, and institutional forces inside the U.S. Presidency to defeat those efforts, and to forge cooperation among the world's leading powers to outflank the war drives.
What is urgently needed now is a fundamental policy shift, starting with the reinstating of Glass-Steagall in the United States. Nothing short of that action and the removal of President Obama from office can actually set the basis for genuine global peace.
