Eric Zuesse

Now that Obama & ISIS are losing in Syria, a Western diplomat admits: In 2012, Russia was willing to negotiate Assad's stepping down. Washington ignored that, expecting to impose (not negotiate with Russia) a government of Washington’s (Obama’s) choosing. British officials deny diplomat’s allegations.

A major Guardian exclusive news story, on Tuesday, September 15th, headlined “West 'ignored Russian offer in 2012 to have Syria's Assad step aside’.” Their Julian Borger & Bastien Inzaurralde reported: Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari said western powers failed to seize on the proposal [for the U.S. and Russia to negotiate a replacement for Assad that would be accetable to both the U.S. and Russia].

… He said that the US, Britain and France were so convinced that the Syrian dictator was about to fall, they ignored the [Russian] proposal. “It was an opportunity lost in 2012,” Ahtisaari said in an interview. … On 22 February 2012 he was sent to meet the missions of the permanent five nations (the US, Russia, UK, France and China) at UN headquarters in New York by The Elders, a group of former world leaders advocating peace and human rights that has included Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, and former UN secretary general Kofi Annan. … [Ahtisaari said Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador] “said three things: One – we should not give arms to the opposition. Two – we should get a dialogue going between the opposition and Assad straight away. Three – we should find an elegant way for Assad to step aside.” ...

Churkin had just returned from a trip to Moscow and there seemed little doubt he was raising the proposal on behalf of the Kremlin.

Ahtisaari said he passed on the message to the American, British and French missions at the UN, but he said: “Nothing happened because I think all these, and many others, were convinced that Assad would be thrown out of office in a few weeks [i.e, that the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-Turkish-backed forces would win]” …

Sir John Jenkins – a former director of the Middle East department of the UK’s Foreign Office … [said] “The weakest point is Ahtisaari’s claim that Churkin was speaking with Moscow’s authority. I think if he had told me what Churkin had said, I would have replied I wanted to hear it from [Russian President Vladimir] Putin too before I could take it seriously.”

However, that denial not only assumes that Russia’s U.N. Ambassador didn’t represent the Kremlin, but it conflicts with Bloomberg News having headlined on 6 June 2012, “Russia Open to Syria Transition in Shift Away From Assad,” where Flavia Krause-Jackson and Henry Meyer reported that:

As Syria slides toward civil war, Russia is signaling that it no longer views President Bashar al-Assad’s position as tenable and is working with the U.S. to seek an orderly transition.
A U.S. delegation headed by Fred Hof, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s special adviser on Syria, is scheduled to meet with Russian counterparts June 8 in Moscow. They will try to forge a common approach to moving Assad aside — or even out of the country — with a goal of replacing him with someone acceptable to both sides in the conflict, according to two U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

In other words: the U.S. demanded victory for the Sunni (i.e., the Saudi-backed) Islamic forces, against the secular dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, a Shiite and ally of Shiite Iran. The U.S. was determined to crush Iran’s and Russia’s ally.

The context in which this is being revealed now is:

On September 14th in Lebanon, Now Media bannered, "Assad is staying,” and reporter Hussain Abdul-Hussain wrote:

To stem the flood of Syrian refugees into their countries, Europeans have found a solution: keep Syrian President Bashar Assad in power so that he can lock up Syrians, again, in the big prison that Syria was before 2011. And if Assad has to kill hundreds of thousands more Syrians, that would be a lesser price for Europeans to pay than the world blaming them for images of frightened, bruised and dead Syrian refugees. In Washington, word has it that National Security Advisor Susan Rice formed a committee of Syria experts, weeks ago, and tasked them with presenting her schemes of “living with Assad.”

In other words: the flood of U.S.-caused refugees from Syria into the EU (due to U.S. bombing of Assad’s forces) has forced Obama to recognize that the Western Alliance is splitting up, over this issue, and so Obama must back-peddle fast, while there still remains time and opportunity to prevent the breakup of NATO itself.

The cause of Syria’s incredible bloodshed is the bombing by U.S. President Obama. He didn’t care about the millions displaced and the hundreds of thousands killed; he was determined to defeat Russia; and his allies in this were the Saudi and Qatari royals and their Turkish fellow-Sunnis. But he, and they, have lost; so, Obama now needs to make a fundamental choice.

America’s longstanding secret alliance with the top financial backers of Islamic jihad is finally being put to the test: Will the U.S. now go with the Europeans and ally with, and admit into NATO, Russia, which has wanted and was promised NATO membership (if NATO wouldn’t simply end when the Cold War did); or will the U.S. instead remain allied with the top financial backers of Islamic jihadists, the Saudi and other Arabic oil-state royals? Europe is now siding with Russia’s Putin on Syria. Will Obama too go with Putin, or will he instead stay with Saudi King Salman, who continues his own bombings in Yemen (which are also directed against Shiites)?

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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, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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