Syria Attacks? - Remember back
Syria Attacks? - Remember back when President Bush's approval rating was in the sixties and seventies, and Iraq had fallen, and Iran and Syria were being very quiet?
Notice how things start to get dicey now that the President would seem to be in a close fight with the vapid empty suit Kerry?
Think it's a coincidence?
Can you read this piece from the Belmont Club and still think so?
The piece regards the apparent kidnapping last week of two membergs of Germany's elite counterterror police unit, Grenzschutzgruppe (GSG) 9, which is operating out of Jordan to protect German interests and citizens in Iraq:
Spiegel is reporting that 2 GSG-9 personnel are missing after an ambush on a convoy between Baghdad and Amman last Wednesday. GSG-9 is the elite German counterterrorism force. The delayed release of this information means implies that a thorough search for these guys has yielded nothing, they are presumed lost and no point in keeping it hidden any longer. It has all the hallmarks of a professional counter-intelligence operation. The GSG-9 men, like the Blackwater contractors, would have been consummate professionals. Mounting surveillance on men of this caliber is nothing regular "insurgents" could do. This it implies the use of static and moving posts with first class communications to track the men. Nobody can do that but the intelligence department of a State or an extremely dangerous terrorist organization like Hizbullah. That party wants to know what we know and thinks this is the best way to do it.
Emphases were added.
Now, read this, excerpted from a subsequent posting:
When the Blackwater contractors were murdered in Fallujah, an operation some speculated was organized by Syrian Special Operations, US commanders probably saw it for the signal that it was. They had arranged media coverage of the outrage for a reason. It was followed by Shi'ite attacks on coalition bases, one attack per ally and a wave of kidnappings. Then Moqtada al-Sadr conveniently seized one of the holiest sites in Shi'ite Islam, the Golden Mosque and proclaimed he was going to die there. Two New York Times staffers were kidnapped and conveniently held in the Golden Mosque, an incident described in Belmont Club's The Time Traveller. There, they were allowed to glimpse preparations for the final stand. The script written for CENTCOM to follow was probably this (what follows is speculation). Small Marine units would rush into Fallujah to recover the Blackwater corpses and trapped themselves. The Marines would mount a desperate rescue which would create heavy civilian damage. In the meanwhile, Sadr would attack the coalition partner's bases and flee to the Golden Mosque, where his presence would be confirmed by newsmen who just happend to be to imprisoned there and later released to tell the tale. CENTCOM would destroy the mosque from which he had 'just left' or perhaps only occupied by a double. Catastrophe would follow on catastrophe, necessitating the postponement of the June 30 transfer of power.
Let's put the pieces together:
- When Iran and Syria were faced with a nation that was overwhelmingly behind the president, they became very polite - or at least stifled their more egregious external, anti-western terror activities.
- Now that these dictatorships see that the US' resolve seems to be dissipating - the vapid empty suit Kerry is winning in some polls! - they start to play the only card they have; attacks to play to the world media.
- They use their proxies in the Shi'ite population to try to create a Mogadishu on steroids - attacks on every coalition partner, kidnappings, and the scattergun attacks against the US, in hopes that it will have the same results as the attack in Somalia.
The Bush Administration is unlikely to be so manipulated - but as we saw in Spain last month, not everyone's in the same boat. For that matter, if his nation is seized with psychosis and elects John Kerry, anything is possible.
The stakes in this election are the highest of any since 1980.
Posted by Mitch at
April 12, 2004 04:54 AM
