Russia Supplants U.S. in Global War Against Jihadists

by Eric Zuesse

A meeting between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Defence Minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman (son of King Salman) ended on early Monday, October 12th. Agence France-Presse headlined “Vladimir Putin Meets Saudi Prince on ‘Political Solution’ in Syria,” and reported that, whereas the son of the Sunni fundamentalist Saudi King says that his father still insists on removing the Shiite secularist leader Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria and on ending Syria’s alliance with Shiite Iran, Prince Salman said that the Saudi King is “in favour of a political solution in Syria.” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was more forward in his statement about the meeting. He said: “The two parties confirmed that Saudi Arabia and Russia have similar objectives when it comes to Syria. Above all, it is to not let a terrorist caliphate take over the country.”

Nothing was quoted from the Saudi side about any such opposition to ‘a terrorist caliphate,’ however; the Sauds have been the chief financial backers of Islamic jihad. (And here is what their followers in Syria are actually like.)

However, the fact that the Saudi King sent his son to Russia to negotiate with Putin about Syria is yet another indication that the key player in settling the Syrian civil war is now Putin, not at all U.S. President Barack Obama.

The highly reliable German news-source, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (DWN), headlined on October 11th (translated here as) “Russia and Iran Assume Leadership Role in Iraq, without the U.S.,” and reported that Russia has, upon the request of the Iraqi government, already gone beyond its anti-jihadist operation in Syria, and has “extended the fight against terrorism into Iraq, with the express permission of the Iraqi government.”

DWN goes on to say, “In early October, the Iraqi government gave a free hand to Russia to extend the attacks against ISIS into Iraqi territory. One of the conditions for this was prior coordination of the air strikes with Iraq’s government.”

That is the same arrangement Russia has had, since the end of September, with the Syrian government. And, so, a Joint Intelligence Coordination Center (JICC) was established by Russia in Baghdad. This was announced on September 29th, when Reuters reported that, “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said … an information center was being established in Baghdad to share information between Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Russia has also agreed a separate such mechanism with Israel.”

Israel too is therefore also recognizing the handwriting on the wall, the switch from the U.S. to Russia, and is doing what it must to defeat ISIS; it’s joining behind Russia’s leadership in the effort. However, because of Israel’s hostile relationships with the other non-Russian members of the JICC, Russia has agreed to wall-off, or separate entirely, Israel’s Russian alliance, from the other nations’ Russian alliance. Russia is in a position to do this, because Russia, with its space-satellites and its other global intelligence-gathering assets, is at the hub-position on this entire intelligence gathering wheel about Syria.

All of the other nations that are participating trust Vladimir Putin’s intelligence operation, to keep each participant’s shared interests in defeating jihadists, separated from all other issues within the Russian alliance. The alliance with Russia will thus not affect their respective unrelated security-interests.

This is in Russia’s interests, because it maximally empowers Russia to crush the Saudis’ international jihadist operation, an operation that started when the U.S. and its long-time ally the Saud family, were joined together by Zbigniew Brzezinski of the U.S. Jimmy Carter Administration, to crush the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, by funding, training, and arming, “mujahideen” or fundamentalist Wahhabist Sunni (that is, Saudi) fighters to go there to kill supporters of the pro-Soviet government and other secular or non-Sunni influences there. The Sauds’ main competitor in the international oil-markets has been the leading former Soviet country, Russia.

The U.S.-Saudi alliance began in earnest in 1945, when the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cold War was just starting; and it has continued after the U.S.S.R.’s breakup, because Western oil companies and Sunni Arabic aristocrats (led by the Sauds, who had granted the Rockefellers’ oil companies the exploration-rights there) wanted the Cold War to continue even after Soviet Communism and the Soviet Union ended. This conflict is also a Western war against Shiite-majority nations, because the Sauds’ imperial ambitions are specifically jihad for a restoration of the Sunni Caliphpate but on a global level; and this is specifically the Saudi Wahhabist Salafist, the most aggressively fundamentalist, form of Sunni Islam. For examples: Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban, are all Wahhabist Salafist Muslims, and all have been funded mainly by Saudi royals.

The U.S. had started, in 1979, late in Jimmy Carter’s Administration, to arm the Saudi ‘mujahideen’ fighters who then were coming into Afghanistan to overthrow the pro-Soviet government there, so as to lure the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. “I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war’,” Carter’s National Security Adviser, David Rockefeller’s protégée (and co-Founder along with Rockefeller, of the Trilateral Commission) Brzezinski, said in a 1998 interview. After Brzezinski had succeeded at that, and the Soviet Union and its communism ended, Brzezinski has continued to advise American Presidents on what he sees as constituting the need now, to defeat Russia — a ‘need’ that U.S. President Barack Obama has strongly endorsed, such as by officially designating Russia as being by far the most “aggressive” nation of all. (Lots more ‘aggressive,’ for example, than the U.S.)

DWN continues: “Sources close to the Iraqi armed forces leadership give the current mood in the Iraqi security forces: The Russian air strikes against ISIS produced in the first week alone, more success than those of the US-led alliance in the entire last year. The establishment of a joint [Iraqi-Syrian-Iranian-Russian] intelligence-gathering center in Baghdad [the Joint Intelligence Coordination Center, or ‘JICC’] is therefore an expression of disappointed Iraqi expectations regarding the United States. … So, the US has announced that it will restrict the exchange of information with Iraq’s security forces.”

In other words: Iraq is, in a sense, switching from the U.S. side to the Russian side, in America’s resumption of its Cold War against the Soviet Union (but this time being waged by America against Russia alone).

On October 10th, Iran’s PressTV bannered, “US pulls aircraft carrier out of Persian Gulf as Russian ships enter,” and reported:

The United States has pulled the USS Theodore Roosevelt – a massive, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier – out of the Persian Gulf as Russian warships have entered the area.
For the first time since 2007, the US Navy has now no aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, according to NBC News.

The warship was withdrawn from the Persian Gulf on Thursday, a day after Russia fired 26 long-range cruise missiles from its Caspian Flotilla against terrorists in Syria, Pentagon officials said.

US military officials claimed that the aircraft carrier, which houses about 5,000 sailors and 65 fighter jets, was withdrawn because it needed to undergo maintenance.

On October 3rd, I had headlined “The Western Alliance Is Crumbling,” and explained how the Obama Administration’s bombing campaigns in 2011 in pro-Russian Libya, and in 2013 in pro-Russian Syria, had created so many refugees now pouring into Europe, that it has ended up precipitating the end of the American Century, and the start of the end of the American empire, which had been rationalized until the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of communism there, as having been instead an ideological conflict, but now is clearly exposed as having been and as still being actually an attempt to extend the American Empire (the “Western Alliance,” The Atlantic Council, NATO, CENTCOM), not only up to Russia’s borders, but into Russia itself, the juiciest natural-resources prize of all.

Obama therefore won’t likely now be able to deliver, to his financial backers, Russia and its resources, such as he had been hoping to achieve in his second term — to start privatizing Russia’s oil and other natural resources to America’s aristocrats.

Perhaps his Barack Obama Presidential Center won’t be quite as palatial as he has been hoping. Perhaps far fewer people will have to die now in order to get it up and running. Perhaps the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies won’t go to nuclear war against Russia, after all. Perhaps NATO, which should have ended when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact did, in 1991, will now soon end.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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