Saudi Arabia, Israel panic over Syria recovery

Press TV has conducted an interview with Kevin Barrett, an author and Middle East expert, in Madison about the latest developments regarding Syria.
The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.Press TV: Some are already saying that the gains that are being made by the Syrian government have – and I quote here one writer – “shattered the political and military front of the foreign-backed opposition.”
And some are saying that the Syrian insurgency is even seeing its final days. Would you go as far as saying that?
Barrett: I hope so. I think the other guest (Lawrence Korb) is correct in saying we may be getting a peaceful negotiated end to this horrible conflict, but I think he’s wrong in calling for Syria and its resources to be divided up.

That is of course what the Zionists want and they’re the ones behind the destabilization of Syria in the first place.

What’s actually happened is that the rebels played their trump card in August with a false flag chemical weapons event in al-Ghoutha that was intended to be blamed on the Assad government.
The problem was, as in the case of many false flag events, they didn’t do a very good job of pinning the blame on the intended patsy.
We just got a report from Seymour Hersh – the dean of American investigative journalism – that explained that the Obama administration apparently harbors some agents of these forces that are trying to destabilize Syria and those people were pushing Obama to use the false flag event in al-Ghoutha to bomb Syria.
And there were other forces in the US administration especially the intelligence community who said, ‘no way, this chemical weapons event looks like it came from the rebels not from the Syrian government’ and according to Seymour Hersh, that was the probable reason that the Obama administration decided not to bomb Syria.
And since then, everything has been going against the Saudi/Israeli so-called rebels in Syria and in favor of the people who are trying to get a peaceful settlement that will maintain Syria as a strong united country.
Press TV: Our guest here was saying the Syrian government, if it wasn’t involved (in the chemical gas attack of August 2012), why then did it agree to have its chemical weapons arsenal destroyed?
Barrett: Because the Syrian government has been behaving relatively reasonably at least since the early stage of the conflict.
I do think the other guest is correct, the Syrian government did make some serious mistakes at the very beginning of this crisis, when it was still mostly peaceful demonstrations, allowing these foreign forces led by, yes, the Israelis and their close allies the Saudis, to destabilize Syria.
But the fact is the Assad government since then has been the party that’s been willing to negotiate and the Russians and the Iranians have been backing that position.
The Western powers led by the Saudis and Israelis unfortunately have not been behaving reasonably. So what happened in August, this al-Rawda false flag was set up. It was a trigger, a war trigger event designed to launch a large scale US bombing attack on Syria. That was the purpose of it and it was conducted by the forces of ‘Bandar Bush’ (Bandar Bin Sultan) the head of Saudi intelligence.
And we know that now, we knew that then. It was obvious at the time that there would be no reason for Assad to launch this militarily useless alleged chemical attack on these people at the exact moment as the UN chemical weapons team arrived.
So the entire alternative media got this right. If you were reading Veteran’s Today, if you were listening to Press TV, you knew this back in August. And now anybody who reads Seymour Hersh knows it by reading the New York Times. So, Seymour Hersh is about six months behind the alternative media in getting the story right and it looks like Mr. Korb is at least six months behind Seymour Hersh.
Press TV: Our guest has said that if Assad let the people of Syria have a free vote, that Assad would be out and so he would not allow a free and fair vote. What is your response?
Barrett: The polls conducted by AlJazeera based in Qatar, where a big chunk of the Syrian rebels are getting their support, showed back in the stage of the conflict when Assad was at his lowest ebb of popularity that he was still supported by 55 percent of the Syrian people – that was in Al-Jazeera coming out of Qatar.
Today, the numbers would probably be vastly more in favor of President Assad. So I think that this notion that he wouldn’t win an election in Syria is deeply questionable.
That’s one of the problems with the propaganda coming from both sides in this crisis, which is that both sides seem to imagine that everyone shares their point of view. And that’s true to some extent for the supporters of Assad, but I think it’s been even more extreme from his opponents.
And the fact is that the majority of the people in Syria prefer Assad to the kind of chaos and destruction of their country that is the alternative if these so-called rebels, especially the leading al-Qaeda-linked rebels, take over Syria.

And the world is coming around to that opinion as well; so I think what we may see is a peace accord that will allow for internationally monitored elections, which I think Assad will likely run in and very possibly win.

Press TV: We know Israel has recently said that if it finds out that Syria is arming Hezbollah, it is going to get involved. This is a report that we’re seeing in the news today.
Do you think that there is an interest on the Israeli side as well as Saudi Arabia to get involved militarily? We know that there have been reports that Israel has already been helping the militants, but do you think we’re going to see an extended role by Saudi Arabia and Israel if they have to?
Barrett: That’s possible. Israel has bombed Syria many times in this conflict, always in support of the rebels and against the Assad government. Israel has been trying to find a way to stop the rise of Hezbollah, especially since the 2006 war, which Hezbollah essentially won.
Israel launched a campaign to try to defeat Hezbollah and in fact they, Israelis, were defeated. So, since then, Israel has been putting all of its chips in this effort to defeat the so-called axis of resistance that is Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And that’s one of the reasons I believe that Israel worked with Saudi Arabia in this effort to destabilize Syria, which I think was planned; I think these demonstrations were not entirely spontaneous, they were set off.
A lot of money was applied to this and once the demonstrations were set off and the Assad government reacted – overreacted – then the pre-planned destabilization campaign funded by billions of dollars coming from Saudi Arabia and directed in part from Israel targeted Syria and started ripping it apart.

As peace starts to break out, the Israelis are panicking. They’re panicking over this nuclear pact with Iran and they’re panicking over the success of the Assad government in Syria.

And since the Israelis, more than any other country in the world, love chaos and instability contrary to what the other guest said, one might expect them to find ways of touching off more chaos and instability by intervening much more strongly in Syria and may be even trying to start another war in Lebanon.
Press TV: Would you agree that this insurgency was moderate to begin with, but then when they saw – as our guest is suggesting – the Syria government is getting support, then the extremists stepped in [and] things got out of control?
Barrett: No, I don’t agree with that interpretation at all. I do agree that the Arab Spring was not 100 percent manufactured; it was however hijacked. It was hijacked in Bahrain when these powers that be – the Saudis the Israelis and a certain segment of the Americans, decided to use the Arab Spring to attack their enemies.
And they are the ones that directed the Arab Spring into Libya and immediately turned it into a war; then they directed the so-called Arab Spring into Syria and turned it into a war.
They destroyed the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring is dead thanks to the US, the Israelis and Saudi Arabia who turned it into a way of destabilizing countries they don’t like by military means and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
And they also murdered democracy in Egypt. We need a real Arab Spring. We need a real democracy movement across the region.