It started; Lavrov already talking about a “transitional government” for Syria as a possible solution, but at the same time or from the other of his mouth, he is saying Assad will not go and any dicision about Syria’s leadership has to come from within Syria. He has already agreed to disinvite Iran to Geneva. Russia is starting a soft slide away from Assad.
Getting back to CIA business and the linked article, Kermit Roosevelt Jr (Theodore’s grandson)mentioned in the 1957 Syrian plot is the same CIA agent that was responsible for Operation Ajax to topple Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953.

Posted by: www | Jun 28 2012 18:18 utc | 3

A bit more about the planned 1957 plot by the CIA. The first successful CIA plot removed Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatly from office because he was very anti-America, anti-Israel and pro- Communist. After a brief jail term and an exile in Egypt, he returned to Syria in 1955, ran for office and was reelected President. That’s when the plot started getting hatched to remove him again, especially after the botched 1956 French-led attack on Suez the included the UK and Israel and the return of the communists in force to the ME. The CIA sent agents to Syria to bribe officers for the coup but the Syrian officers took the cash and denounced the CIA and its plot. The CIA agents were rounded up and evicted from the country and Syria joined Egypt in a federated United Arab Republic that lasted until 1963. Until then, the Baathists were second in importance to the communists in Syria. It was only in 1970 with Assad Sr taking over the country that he Alawites and Baathists really started their rule of Syria that is still in force today.

Posted by: www | Jun 28 2012 18:53 utc | 5

@Jawbone #6,
Or is Ike the fall guy?
Maybe he ruffled some feathers so the CIA disinformation agents worked Ike into their subtle disinformation stories. . . like saying the plot against Syria arose during Ike’s administration.
Really? I’m sure there was subterfuge going on long before Ike was in power.
Was just looking at this interesting story on a British spy in WWI, Aaron Aaronshon, who was mapping the region’s water sources and was important in the Zionist movement: http://www.amazon.com/Aaronsohns-Maps-Untold-Created-Middle/dp/0151011699 Some of the material the author wanted to look at was still classified after almost 100 years!
In addition to water I’m sure the West already was looking into the region’s oil. Maybe this is what is still classified after all these years?
I’m sure the CIA had interests in Syria previous to Ike’s administration.

Posted by: Walter Wit Man | Jun 28 2012 19:14 utc | 7

I certainly agree that the US does not change its spots. Plans to overthrow the Syrian regime have existed since forever.
I suspect though that the objectives have changed. In the past the aim was to put in place a pro-American regime. Now, the prospect is that the new regime will be Salafi. That’s hardly in American interests; who knows what such a regime might do?
There’s a good argument that the US doesn’t know what it’s doing. Otherwise, it must be the Israeli plan of 1982: create confusion and divide the Middle East into warring statelets.
That was what was tried in Iraq with the bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra in 2006. It didn’t work, though the parallel scheme to make Kurdistan independent has worked to a fair degree. That was my experience when I was in Erbil in November last.
This kind of ‘clever’ operation rarely finishes as the operators desire. Especially if the operators don’t know what they’re doing.
On the question of Lavrov’s interests, I do think, against you, b, that the Asad regime is failing. The problem is that he is a softy. He doesn’t want to kill his people. The war has been far from outright, and so the opposition is gaining.

Posted by: alexno | Jun 28 2012 19:19 utc | 9

>>> I recently saw allegations about the Yom Kippur war that “describes the 1973 October War as a collusive enterprise between US, Egyptian and Israeli leaders, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger.” >>>
Walt, if the Counterpunch story is true, then we have to conclude that what was written about the “Samson Option” threat that arose out of the 1973 war and that was used to blackmail the US into airlifting the much needed arms re-supply to Israel was false. We would also have to consider the arm twisting that the US did to get the Arabs to quit the war because of the Samson was also false.
Here’s another angle to what happened just before the 1973 war broke out. Whether true or not, your guess is just as good as mine; could very well be an Israeli plot to make trouble between the Arabssince it wasn’t the only time that such things were advanced:
“… On 25 September (1973), King Hussein of Jordan requested an urgent meeting with Israeli
Prime Minister Golda Meir. He flew his personal helicopter to Israel and delivered the message
that Syrian deployments were actually the precursor to war and that he expected, if war
were to come, Egypt would cooperate with Syria.13 Meir asked for an assessment of this information
from the director of AMAN, Eli Zeira, who argued that Hussein was acting on
Sadat’s behalf in an effort to bluff Israel into concessions on returning the canal. Hussein’s
warning did result in further increases of Israeli forces on the Golan but did not dissuade
Ms. Meir from departing on a planned trip to Europe the next day.14
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/navy/pmi/1973.pdf

Posted by: www | Jun 28 2012 19:36 utc | 11

Jawbone #6, you mentioned Eisenhower and Water; Eisenhower was the first and probably last US President to really stand in the way of Israel’s theft of its neighbors’ water. But even after having stopped them, 2 years later the Israelis were back to their thievin’ ways and they never stopped since. Here’s the Eisenhower/water story:
“… Accordingly, in 1951, contrary to the armistice agreements and over the protests of U.S. and U.N. officials, the Israelis began moving military units and bulldozers into the demilitarized zone on the Syrian border. Spurred by hostilities in the area over water, in 1953, the Eisenhower Administration prepared a unified plan for the use of the Jordan River. In September 1953, Israel, in an apparent attempt to preempt the American plan, secretly began a crash program to construct a nine-mile long pipeline in the demilitarized zone to divert Jordan River waters.
When the Americans learned of Israel’s activities which included around the clock work crews, they protested and President Eisenhower went so far as to suspend vital economic aid to Israel. No announcement about the aid suspension was made at the time, perhaps to keep from drawing the ire of the Zionist lobby at home.
However, soon afterward, the Israelis launched an unrelated attack on a West Bank Jordanian village, killing 53 people which came to be known as the Kibya massacre. As a result of the ensuing furor, on October 18, 1953, the Eisenhower administration made public its cutoff of aid to Israel. Eleven days later, under the pressure from the U.S. Zionist lobby and a pledge by Israel to suspend work on the diversion project, U.S. aid was resumed. (Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, by Stephen Green, William Morrow and Co., N.Y. 1984. “The 1953 Aid Cutoff: A Parable for Our Times,” pp. 76- 93.)
Israeli work on diverting the water of the Jordan River was only temporarily suspended — perhaps for as long as two years. By 1960, however, the diversion project — which came to be known as the National Water Carrier — was complete and in fact was the target of the PLO’s first (and unsuccessful) attack in 1964. ”
For the rest of the great article on Israel’s theft of water from all its neighbors,
by Jeffrey Blankfort
http://desip.igc.org/TheftOfWater.html

Posted by: www | Jun 28 2012 20:01 utc | 13

The Israelis are notorious for their trigger reactions to threats.

Posted by: alexno | Jun 28 2012 20:07 utc | 15

Alexno, in your haste to jump to conclusions, you missed this part in post 11:
“Whether true or not, your guess is just as good as mine; could very well be an Israeli plot to make trouble between the Arabs since it wasn’t the only time that such things were advanced”
There were other versions advanced of the same event; it has Jordan warning Israel of the impending 1973 attack but those receiving the messages on the Israeli side did not relay them to their superiors in time. These were probably hatched from the first such conspiracy theory advanced about Jordan in 1947 plotting with the bad guys to let them easily win the coming war by putting up only a token resistance and in exchange, the bad guys would let them grab the West Bank without much resistance. In the middle East, a conspiracy is born every 20 minutes and you need a road map to navigate your way through them.

Posted by: www | Jun 28 2012 20:23 utc | 17

re 17
Alexno, in your haste to jump to conclusions, you missed this part in post 11:
“Whether true or not, your guess is just as good as mine; could very well be an Israeli plot to make trouble between the Arabs since it wasn’t the only time that such things were advanced”
No, I wasn’t jumping to conclusions; I realised there was a certain ironic tone to your 11. But I don’t think it’s worth being subtle. Ironising over which conspiratorial theory or another isn’t worth it; it’s clearly not the case. The Israelis had some information before the 1973 attack, late, but not so much as to provoke the minimum, an alert.

Posted by: alexno | Jun 28 2012 21:06 utc | 19

There is no reason why Russia shouldn’t support the idea of a national unity government. President Assad spoke about such a government already in his speech on January 10th, 2012:

Back to the subject of the national unity government, if we talk about the participation of the opposition and say that all the parties will take part in the government including the opposition, who do we mean by ‘opposition’? Any person can now call himself/herself ‘opposition’, and I have met some of such people and used to ask them, ‘who do you represent?’ The opposition stands for a public body, not for a person as an opponent. Now we have opposition figures and currents, but the opposition is usually an institutional body which is established by elections. For the time being, we do not have elections; so how do we define the opposition? Who takes part in that opposition, and what is the volume of their participation? We still do not have the criteria for all this. Before the next elections, we could still say that the government will take a certain form after the elections. But we want to accelerate the process and launch the contribution in the opposition before the elections. In other words, we will adopt special, rather than institutional, criteria.
We haven’t accused people of being traitors. The criteria are clear stating the establishment of a national opposition. What do we mean by ‘national government?’ We do not want an opposition that sits in embassies and receives gestures from the outside where they will be told not to have dialogue with the state or to delay the dialogue now because things are over and it is a matter of weeks before the total collapse! We do not want an opposition that sits with us and blackmails us under the title of the crisis in order to achieve personal gains. We do not want an opposition that wants to have a secret dialogue to avoid the anger of others. If we take the existing national criteria and figures, we can start to work on this government immediately now that we have understood the subject, whether they call it a ‘national unity government’ or ‘separation government’. What they choose to name it is not important at all.

Unfortunately Assads question on the opposition’s legitimacy is still not answered.

Posted by: Antifo | Jun 28 2012 21:36 utc | 21

The 1957 story is totally false, bcs it says “the Ba’ath/Communist regime”
Baath and Communist parties were striking everyday as a radical opposition with minimal representation in the parliament and the gov.
The regime was the unique democratic Syrian regime during the century. It started with clean elections in 1954 (the winner majority was composed by two right parties: the National Party and People Party), and ended in 1958 with a conspiracy by Nasser, who was –that time- the favorite leader for both Soviets and USA, but not UK nor France.
During 1954-1958 democratic period Syrian press was 100% free. All documentations could be found in the Congress Library and deny this story.

Posted by: Damasko | Jun 28 2012 22:27 utc | 23

It appears that Russia and China were bamboozled over the Libyan resolution in the UN that led to the Nato engineered overthrow of the the Khadaffi regime. China lost big time on that one. They will use whatever diplomatic clout that they have to prevent a repeat with Syria. However, do not expect either to risk nuclear war over saving the Assad regime. If the US, UK and France push for war against Syria (using Turkey, the FSA and the oil monarchies as their tools) Russia will resist using diplomacy but it seems unreasonable for people to expect that they will enter into outright war with Nato to protect Syria. If I were a Russian FP minister I would probably be doing what they are doing — i.e. raise diplomatic roadblocks but avoid world war.
We should recognize that the US just suffered a major defeat in Iraq and probably another one in Afghanistan. Iran is the beneficiary of those defeats. The US is now trying to reverse these strategic set backs by going after Syria. We should recognize that the US and Nato have the power to cause considerable problems in the ME. A wounded beast can be one very dangerous beast. If I were China or Russia, I would just sit back and let us thrash around trying to undo the strategic set backs in Iraq and Afghanistan. No question but that the US will cause some serious damage, but it is better to let us thrash around then entering into some international world war.

Posted by: ToivoS | Jun 29 2012 1:30 utc | 25

>>> In 1948 the CIA predecessor overthrew the government of Syria. >>>
It actually happened in 1949 on May 29th, a mere 3 years after France left Syria and 2 years after the CIA was formed. It started a long line of successive militar coups that ended in 1970 with the one by Assad Sr that crystallized the Alawite/ Baathist monopoly on everything in the Syrian constitution of 1973 that included reserving 2/3 of parliamentary seats to the Baath Party. This parliamentary limitation provision (Section 8) was removed in the new constitution by the current President Assad. For those interested in a bit more about Syrian revolutions and the CIA, a good short pictorial by Andy Warner that appeared in Slate a couple of months back:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2012/04/syrian_violence_was_the_cia_involved_in_the_1949_coup_that_plunged_the_country_into_decades_of_turmoil_.html

Posted by: www | Jun 29 2012 4:30 utc | 27

rualto does not understand: :”How defeat?”
Er poor doob, the current government of Iraq is now allied with Iran. Given where the previous government of Iraq was allied, that has to be a strategic defeat for the US.

Posted by: ToivoS | Jun 29 2012 5:03 utc | 29

sure www and now they are mired in unintended consequences.
Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya are high on the failed state index and if the US and Israel’s problem are non-state actors – and they probably are – then the US and Israel have lost those wars.
Israel can win against any state actor, they lose against non state actors.
I found a fun Nasser quote:
“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.”

Posted by: somebody | Jun 29 2012 5:41 utc | 31

That was a fun quote, somebody, Nasser appeared just as preoccupied with advancing his concept of pan-Arabism as with what was happening in Egypt. In the end both lost out.
Elsewhere in the discussions on where Hamas now stands with its drifting away from Syria and inching closer to the American camp, Gaza in consultation the WB will be offering Hebrew as a second language, as an option to 9th graders and onward. The rationale behind giving students the option to take Hebrew, the language of the occupying force, in lieu of English as a second language is for people to learn the language to “better understand how the enemy thinks”. Hocus-pocus jargon aside, this is another indication of Hamas’ soft slide towards normalization with the Israelis. Don’t be surprised to see Khaled Meshaal invited to Washington in the not too distant future; he’s already half way there by having moved his offices from Damascus to Qatar. Odd contrast between Israel that’s in the process of vanishing the Arabic language from its cultural landscape while Hamas is now starting to propagate Hebrew.

Posted by: www | Jun 29 2012 6:27 utc | 33

@Walter Wit Man #4
The academic is now Professor at Nottingham University. What is strange is that the article was not published until a year later in Autumn 2004, Intelligence & National Security Vol 19 no. 3 pp401-15 (2004) – The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957 – a selective leak to the fake liberal Guardian?

Posted by: felix | Jun 29 2012 7:14 utc | 35

Re # 27
Interesting to see the pajama propaganda was being used as far back as 1949! The CIA boys just love this story.

Posted by: Walter Wit Man | Jun 29 2012 7:39 utc | 37

@Felix #35,
Another good catch.
It’s an odd leak. I don’t know if this is false or not, but it does seem like it was served to the Guardian.
I find it suspicious when many documents are found at once. This is partly why I’m suspicious of Wikileaks and Stratford document dumps. Same thing with the Al Qaeda documents found in Iraq, or wherever, in the early 2000s that conveniently laid out the whole story of Osama and al qaeda in compelling and explicit detail.
It does seem fishy the way it was discovered and leaked (and wouldn’t the government vet the information? Surely they looked at it prior to publication). But I can’t really figure out the motivation or see any obvious disinformation because as Damasco, neretva’43, and www point out above, the story sounds pretty much plausible and accurate.
Oh, it just hit me. Ike ordered assassination according to these documents. Definitely a war crime. Bush and now Obama are ordering assassinations so maybe it was leaked to to make it more acceptable by knowing that it’s been a long practice by U.S. presidents.
Oh, and it helped establish the Guardian’s credibility for the Iraq war.

Posted by: Walter Wit Man | Jun 29 2012 8:09 utc | 39

Antifo #21 quotes from Bashar Assad on 10 Jan 2012 in which Bashar said the issue of the opposition’s representative legitmacy in the political landscape was murky or unanswered. Antifo follows up with a comment that the question is still not answered today. I say, and so does Bashar today, the parliamentary elections on 7 May 2012 answered the question (plus the 26 Feb 2012 nationwide referendum on the new Constitution, which authorized the basic political institutions). The militant opposition boycotted the parliamentary elections and they will continue to boycott future elections because in elections they lose bigly as I’ve said here before many times. Here’s Bashar on 3 Jun 2012:

The parties to take part in any National Dialogue should be representatives of the people. How can we ensure that these parties represent the people or a certain segment of the people? In principle, the only basis is the elections…. When you boycott the elections, you do not boycott the state, the government or the ruling party. You boycott the people, the voters. How can any person stand in front of people and say I represent the people yet I boycott the people. This is an impossible contradiction…. Any political process which is not based on popular support doesn’t have any value in reality…. The upcoming national dialogue should be based on these principles. http://www.sana.sy/eng/21/2012/06/04/423234.htm

Posted by: Parviziyi | Jun 29 2012 8:26 utc | 41

I know that some people on this board can’t agree with my view that no foreign military intervention will happen in Syria. So here’s three more items of evidence from the past couple of days news in support of my view (I might add more items as I come across them in the future).
On 27 Jun 2012 Syrian rebels attacked the pro-government al-Ikhbariya TV station facilities in Outer Damascus in a pre-dawn raid, killing seven station employees. Later that day the USA White House spokesman Jay Carney condemned the attack. He said “We condemn all acts of violence including those targeting pro-regime elements.” http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-06/28/c_123339598.htm . Bear in mind that NATO and the USA deliberately bombed the pro-government TV station in Belgrade during the 1999 bombing of Serbia, and deliberately bombed the pro-government TV station in Tripoli during the 2011 bombing of Libya.
Erdogan, 27 Jun 2012: “We as Turkey and the Turkish nation have no intention of attacking [Syria]. We are just making provisions to stave off all threats to our unity and integrity, I mean, for defense.” http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-06/27/c_131680032.htm . See also the interview on 27 Jun 2012 with a former foreign minister of Turkey which ‘somebody’ at #20 quoted from above — the link is http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/former-turkish-foreign-minister.html
Lavrov on 28 Jun 2012 reported that there is no NATO member who desires to repeat a Libyan scenario in Syria, since such intervention would be catastrophic for the whole region, and he indicated he was making this report on the strength of communications with NATO representatives. http://www.sana.sy/eng/22/2012/06/28/428192.htm

Posted by: Parviziyi | Jun 29 2012 8:50 utc | 43

Parviziyi, I did not cite as it is pointless, you can google it, it is all over the web. It might well be urban legend, there is no way to find out. Especially after Fars News went the whole way to falsify interviews even in audio …

Posted by: somebody | Jun 29 2012 9:05 utc | 45

Lavrov said on 4 apr 2012: The opposition would not defeat the Syrian Army even if the opposition were armed to the teeth. http://www.sana.sy/eng/22/2012/04/04/410469.htm
One of the grounds why I agree with that statement is that the bulk of the Syrian Army and other security forces remain loyal to the established government and I can see no evidence that defections in more substantial numbers will be forthcoming. Some recent discussion about this dated 27 Jun 2012 is in a news article headlined “Dozens Defect From Syrian Army, But Impact Is Limited” — http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/two-hundred-defect-from-syrian-a.html
The last time an established government was successfully overthrown by an indigenous armed uprising was in the 1979 revolution in Iran. In Iran’s 1979 revolution, army divisions defected en masse, bringing with them their transportation vehicles, tanks, guns, etc. That’s what would be necessary to overthrow the government in Syria (in the absence of a foreign conquest). That hasn’t happened yet you know. On my information and belief, the generality of Syrian society supports the established government and so there can be no basis for mass defections from the army. Please ask yourself, what’s your information basis, if any, for thinking I may be mistaken? This is a question about the Syrian society, so when thinking about it you are to forget about what you know about the foreign powers and foreign media.

Posted by: Parviziyi | Jun 29 2012 9:51 utc | 47

returning to b’s post, the fact that the Guardian published those documents seems like an exposure of the current NATO strategy; the problem with assessing Us strategy has always been that there are multiple actors involved; I’m sure there are factions that oppose the “permanent war”, and seek a detente with Iran and the rest of the Middle East;
I also suspect Anonymous’ busting of Statfor is part of this competing strategies scenario, because Stratfor was part of the traditional, reality-based establishment

Posted by: claudio | Jun 29 2012 10:40 utc | 49

yeah, www, but realistically speaking most of this money will be paid to the middle men. And this money will be in accounts in Saudi Arabia, Quatar, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Israel or end up in Switzerland.
so sure you can buy an assassination or a bomb explosion, however it would be difficult to buy a sustainable uprising without real people on the ground invested in its outcome.
Syria is not new to this, they have practised for a long time, and their Secret Service (the Russian, Iranian) is up to date. I am sure the middle man find it vvery hard to find out whom they are paying for what.

Posted by: somebody | Jun 29 2012 11:23 utc | 51

Contrary to ‘www’ #48, the rebels have gotten very little money so far. I’ve talked about that before on this board. Anybody who defects from the Syrian army is taking an income loss as well as greatly increasing in his risk of getting killed.
On the question of what sort of people constitute the armed rebels, here’s a report dated 25 Jun 2012 which I take to be correct:

A month of traveling with the armed opposition in northern and central Syria reveals that it is untrue that the armed opposition draws its strength from defections of Syrian Army soldiers. While defected soldiers are among the fighters, most fighters were civilians when they volunteered to fight the Assad government. The vast majority of fighters are young men who were still in primary school when Bashar Assad came to power 12 years ago. They themselves disagree about what will happen when – not “if” – Assad is deposed. All of them are from families that are Sunni in religion. Some of them are pious, but many more are not. When the call to prayer was heard in a village in the Hama countryside, some of the armed men heeded it, but most did not. “They are poor people who have been harmed by the government. Most of them are not extremists,” said Abu Hamza, who is the leader of a group of fighters in KHAN SHEIKHOUN town between Hama city and Idlib city, and is himself a Salafi. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/06/25/153728/weeks-spent-with-syrian-rebels.html .

Posted by: Parviziyi | Jun 29 2012 11:42 utc | 53

Parviziyi, I was talking about the large sums being spent on arms, not on the $500/month some rebels are being paid. Jazeera’s Thuraya bill alone must have been astronomical.

Posted by: www | Jun 29 2012 12:40 utc | 55

Please use the formal designation of alCIAda.It helps explain our current confusion and self destruction.
Or enhances our confusion.Must be intentional.(our self destruction)

Posted by: dahoit | Jun 29 2012 16:22 utc | 57

re 50 thanks www so I can assume now that Nasser never said those things
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Copeland,_Jr.

Posted by: somebody | Jun 29 2012 19:04 utc | 59

You’re probably right, someone. Those guys are professional liars.

Posted by: www | Jun 29 2012 19:38 utc | 61