F. William Engdahl: Is Obama arming Al Qaeda to topple Assad?

After two years of hesitating, US President Barack Obama announced he will deliver arms to the Syrian rebels, citing unverified proof that the troops of the Syrian Bashar Al-Assad government used Sarin gas against so-called opposition rebels. The Obama flip-flop is bizarre and reveals a President under enormous pressure to detonate a war whose consequences may well bring the world into a Third World War. Clinton and Netanyahu allied. According to a report in the New York Times, it was nasty pressure from former US President Bill Clinton, along with a series of nasty initiatives from Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu, Republican war-hawks like John McCain, who tipped Obama to active intervention. Even former Presidential national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, by no means a peace dove, went on US national TV to deride the Obama decision: I think our posture is baffling, there is no strategic design, we're using slogans, stated Brzezinski on MSNBC's Morning Joe Friday. It's a tragedy and it's a mess in the making. I do not see what the United States right now is trying to accomplish. He added, we are running the risk of getting into another war in the region which may last for years and I don't see any real strategic guidance to what we are doing. I see a lot of rhetoric, a lot emotion, a lot of propaganda in fact. The same Brzezinski in an interview with a Paris daily, boasted it had been his policy to arm the Mujihadeen Muslim Salafists, including a then young Saudi named Osama bin-Laden, to actually provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Also according to reliable sources close to the Pentagon, the US military is opposed to another war in the Islamic world, after suffering the debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq. That all begs the question, why now after two years of only minimal support is Obama moving to arm Syrian opposition rebels? One answer is that with major military successes in the past two months, the Assad government, allied with unprecedented support from several thousands of experienced Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, the only force to deliver Israel's IDF a major defeat in combat, and with military advisers from Russia and Iran, have been rolling back the gains of the rag tag gaggle of assorted mercenaries, terrorists, Jihadists from Libya, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and beyond. Some say that were the US to stand by and do nothing in Syria, it would mark a devastating blow to America's image as the world's unbeatable military power. That in turn would trigger a series of other nations moving to defy American demands. The irony is, however, that at this stage, the strongest and best organized of the opposition within Syria are not the Washington based Free Syrian Army but a branch organization of Al Qaeda.