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April 13th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda The comment comes as the Syrian state TV reported on Thursday that armed men assassinated a local government official in the al-Mazareeb town.
Press TV has conducted an interview with Jeff Steinberg of the Executive Intelligence Review, to further discuss the issue of the Syrian crisis.
The video also offers the opinions of two other guests: Ammar Waqqaf of the Syrian Social Club from London and Policy Director of Just Foreign Policy, Robert Naiman, from Urbana, IL.
The following is a rough transcription of the interview.
Press TV: Jeff Steinberg, Damascus said it reserves the right to respond in kind to any possible attack by armed groups; Russia: more time needed. It accused some Arab and Western countries of dismissing Anan’s plans as a failure.
China welcomed the ceasefire, urged armed groups to honor the truce and then we have the UK: it slammed the initiative as frustrating with the US pessimistic at best- in terms of how they viewed it. It’s almost as if the US and the UK in a way don’t want the ceasefire to work?
Steinberg: I think that’s absolutely the case. You know, I see an absolute continuity here from the time of the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein back in 2003 through the overthrow and assassination while in custody of Gaddafi last year and now on to the situation in Syria.
In all of those instances we’ve seen the British take a very strong point in support of absolute regime change. Remember the whole scandal around the sexed up Downing Street dossier, the white paper that was used as one of the chief propaganda drives for the Iraq war.
There was clearly a decision led by Britain and France that Gaddafi had to go. I think it had a lot to do with successful inroads that China was developing throughout the African continent with Gaddafi as a kind of key figure in that.
And now all of these governments are on the record of saying that the only acceptable outcome in Syria is the removal of Assad and so they’re carrying out an armed illegal invasion.
They’re financing a contra-Mujahidin-type surrogate army to overthrow the regime and this time around Russia and China said absolutely not.
Russia and China were lied to and basically manipulated into abstaining from the UN Security Council resolution that led to the overthrow militarily by foreign forces of Gaddafi in Libya and they just simply said we are not going to do it again.
Russia has strategic interests in Syria that are very well known from the Mediterranean port access Tartus, economic and military ties and for the Chinese the concept of humanitarian interventionism, the new buzzword is responsibility to protect these ideas represent a much broader fundamental assault against national sovereignty.
And so they are opposed on very principal grounds. So you have a fault line internationally and I think it should be obvious to some of the hot-head nations that are pushing this conflict to the edge that they could be mocking around with a much bigger war than simply a limited regime change operation in Syria.
This is very reminiscent and the Russians have warned this is like Europe before the Sarajevo incident that triggered World War I.
Press TV: Unless we look at the situation Jeff Steinberg in terms of how the US for example has reacted to what’s going on in Bahrain, how they reacted to what went on in Yemen.
Analyze that for us because on paper obviously they have different ideas about how all these revolutions should occur in terms of shaping it towards their political objectives. Put that into perspective for us Jeff Steinberg if you can.
Steinberg: Well, you know [retired US Army] General Wesley Clark wrote a book a couple of years ago and he has been interviewed a dozen times in the recent months and he recounted a conversation that he had with one of the leading US neo-conservatives Paul Wolfowitz back in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
And Wolfowitz said to him we have a span of about 20 years window before some other major world power emerges to challenge the United States and in that 20 year period there is a whole list of regimes that are going to be changed and he ticked a list of 6 or 7 or 8 countries which obviously included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia.
And he just said all of these countries we have a period of time and every one of these governments they sided with the Soviets during the cold war- we’re going to get rid of all of them.
And what I think is very important to bear in mind, I agree with what the speaker just said about the fault lines and things but I think it’s very important to realize that there were some lessons learned after Libya.
We had the Russia and China veto. They’re not going to give ground for a United Nations Security Council resolution to be interpreted as a green light for regime change. The Syrian government realized that the strategy that was targeting them was identical to the strategy that overthrew Gaddafi.
They wanted to create a Benghazi-type liberated zone on Syrian territory and so you had three areas heavily targeted militarily by the Syrian government. You had Homs which was a short distance from the Lebanese border; you had Idleb in the north near the Turkish border and the Daraa area down in the south near Jordan.
They cut off the prospect of creating liberated zones that would be maybe called humanitarian corridors but would be areas where an alternative government could be installed on Syrian territory, recognized by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the US, France, Britain- and it’s a whole different ball game.
So militarily the Western alliance along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey suffered a substantial military defeat and so I look at this less as fault lines emerging as I see it as a re-groupment because they suffered a major military defeat in what’s fundamentally a military regime change operation.
So I think that the Russia, China actions have set it back substantially because the Russians and Chinese see a danger of a much larger war and for the Russians it’s a war that’s not very far from their borders.
You can’t separate the Syria situation from the Iran situation and now the North Korea situation. You’ve got a global eruption of provoked confrontations that could get very easily out of control.
And you have a world war situation rather than seemingly targeted and limited regime change operations…
VG/AZ
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