WASHINGTON”I was visiting Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States in the spring of 2011 when the phone on his desk rang.
“The hotline,” he said. “Sorry, I have to take this call.”
As he listened, his expression grew darker and darker. Finally, he banged down the phone and exploded: “Another US drone attack that killed our people. We were never warned the attack was coming. We are supposed to be US allies!”
This strongly pro-American ambassador was wrong. While the US hails Pakistan as a key non-NATO ally, America treats it like an occupied country. Islamabad’s government is left to observe increasing drone attacks and CIA ground operations with deepening embarrassment and helplessness.
Many Pakistanis tend to believe the US more or less occupied their nation after 9/11.
The Pakistani leader who allowed this to happen, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has reportedly admitted that the US demanded he allow them to use Pakistan’s army, air bases, ports, intelligence service, and airspace”or face war. Musharraf quickly caved in to the US ultimatum, something a tough predecessor, Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, would likely have rejected.
As US drone attacks intensify in Pakistan’s tribal belt and inside Afghanistan, President Asif Ali Zardari’s government, supported by Washington and sustained by US dollars, keeps imploring the US to halt the attacks that are enraging Pakistanis. Senior Pakistani diplomats have been warning that the drone strikes that keep killing civilians are fueling Pakistani extremist groups and humiliating its armed forces.
Islamabad has attempted to show some independence by halting US-NATO truck convoys from Karachi to Afghanistan for seven months after a deadly US air attack last November that killed at least two dozen of their soldiers.
But $1 billion of American aid to Islamabad was unfrozen after the blockade was recently lifted. The dollars are flowing again, many of them thought to be headed right back out into Swiss, Dubaian, or Singaporean bank accounts.
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A senior Syrian government spokesman has confirmed that his nation possesses chemical weapons and might employ them against a “foreign aggressor.”
Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime just managed to shoot itself in both feet, provide ammunition to Syria’s enemies, and give them yet another excuse to intervene in its raging civil war.
Western governments and media that have become cheerleaders for Syria’s rebels went into full trumpet mode, issuing dire warnings of Syria’s “threat of weapons of mass destruction.” Israeli and US officials warned they might have to seize Syria’s chemical arsenal lest it fall into the hands of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Shades of Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s WMDs.
The bumbling Damascus regime was too inept to explain that Syria had acquired a limited arsenal of chemical weapons over the past twenty years to counter Israel’s tactical nuclear weapons. Western media barely mentioned this important point.
During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Moscow informed Damascus that Israel was readying tactical nuclear-armed missiles, land mines, and bombs to halt what looked like a Syrian armored breakthrough on the Golan Heights. Damascus was also targeted by Israeli nuclear weapons. Syria determined to obtain a limited deterrent to forestall any future such nuclear threats.
Syria’s arsenal of mustard, cyanide, and nerve gas is loaded into air-delivered bombs, short-range Scud or SS-21 missiles, or short-range artillery shells. Chemical weapons are mislabeled as weapons of mass destruction. They have limited killing power and are subject to weather conditions.
The Western media’s cries of alarm ignored this fact, as they ignored the point that the lightly armed Hezbollah would likely be unable to obtain or employ such weapons even if it had them and decided to risk suicide.
In the kind of urban warfare now going on in Syria, chemical weapons would have little use. Far more effective and deadly would be the thermobaric fuel-air explosives employed by Russia, US, and Israel that rip apart the lungs of soldiers fighting from cover in ruined buildings or bunkers.
Israel has the Mideast’s largest arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Its military establishment and right-wing parties have made no secret of their yearning for revenge against Hezbollah, which inflicted a short, sharp defeat on Israel’s army in southern Lebanon in 2006. Nor have Israel’s expansionist rightists given up the ambition of former leader Ariel Sharon (who remains alive but in a deep coma) of turning Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate ruled by Maronite Christian rightists.
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