THE just re-elected US President, Barack Obama, yesterday warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons against the NATO-supported opposition forces, saying there would be consequences if he were to do so.
The Syrian government has responded that it would never use chemical weaponry against the Syrian people.
However, any number of such denials makes not the slightest impression on Obama, who is determined that the Assad regime will be removed in order to advance the interests of the US bosses in the region and to prepare the way for the US, the UK and Israel to attack Iran and the Hezbollah movement in the Lebanon.
There is not the slightest doubt that a decisive moment is rapidly approaching for the peoples of Syria, the Middle East and the Gulf.
The President gave his warning after US officials claimed to have detected signs that Syrian forces were mixing the chemicals needed to produce sarin gas, a nerve agent banned under international rules of war.
This claim is yet another variety of the Bush-Blair WMD lie that was used to start the war with Iraq and the slaughter of 200,000 Iraqis with millions turned into refugees – a deadly process that is still continuing.
There is only one force manoeuvring WMDs and this is NATO, which has approved the deployment of Patriot missiles to Turkey’s border with Syria.
A meeting of the 28-member Alliance’s foreign ministers in Brussels has agreed this, following a request from Turkey, and has also agreed that an ‘attack’ on Turkey’s border, that will no doubt be manufactured by the ‘Syrian opposition’, will be an attack on every NATO member state.
Following Obama’s warning to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad Russia has stated that moving NATO missiles to the Syrian border would be seen as a threat to its security.
President Vladimir Putin has already warned against the missile deployment, fearing it will ‘exacerbate’ rather than ‘defuse’ tensions along the border.
Meanwhile, NATO’s ‘opposition’ ground forces inside Syria are getting huge quantities of weapons and money from Qatar and the other reactionary Gulf states that are, at the same time, busily seeking to strangle their own ‘pro-democracy’ movements.
Turkish intervention into Syria, supported by US and UK forces, using missiles and air power to establish a ‘liberated’ area that will be handed over to the Syrian opposition, masquerading as the official government and recognised by the NATO powers, may well be days or just weeks away.
Such an imperialist intervention will be fought tooth and nail by the Syrian government and the Syrian people, who will be supported by millions of people throughout the Middle East and Turkey who are opposed to the restoration of open imperialist rule, by US or Turkey or both, in the region.
Iran may well be forced to come to the conclusion that since it is the number one target, it cannot stand by and watch Syria being dismembered, which is the real imperialist programme, and has to intervene to support its Syrian ally.
Russia and China will have to decide whether to stand by and watch the slaughter as they did in Libya or arm the anti-NATO forces, or send volunteers as China did when MacArthur reached the Chinese border during the Korean war.
In fact, a decisive role will be played by the working class in the US and the UK.
British workers oppose the imperialist intervention into Syria. The trade unions must call a general strike to bring down the Cameron-led coalition if British forces try to repeat Blair’s attack on Iraq by entering Syria.
There is no other way forward except to be for the defeat of the imperialist powers, including the UK, and for the overthrow of the pro-imperialist feudal regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as part of the struggle for an imperialist-free socialist Middle East and Gulf, which would of course include the state of Palestine.
