Third Russian – Chinese Veto Blocks the Road to World War III

Third Russian – Chinese Veto Blocks the Road to World War III


By Carla Stea


Global Research, August 2, 2012

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“They have shown only arrogance, not sincerity.” Chinese Ambassador Li Baodong, July 19, 2012, United Nations Security Council

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Following
the first Persian Gulf War, in 1990-1991, authorized by the United
Nations Security Council with the adoption of Resolution 678, permitting
“all necessary means” to be used against Iraq , the United Nations was
often pejoratively referred to as “an annex of the United States
Pentagon.” Following the series of terrorist attacks against United
Nations facilities in subsequent years, Lakhdar Brahimi, United Nations
Special Envoy and former Foreign Minister of Algeria explained this
violent hostility against the United Nations in a press conference,
stating that the United Nations was no longer regarded as impartial, but
was now perceived, in many areas of global conflict, as a party to the
conflict.


On
July 19, 2012, for the first time in United Nations history, a third
double veto was cast, by Russia and China, preventing the United Nations
from becoming a party to the conflict in Syria, and restoring
legitimacy to the United Nations as an independent and impartial
international organization, no longer an instrument beholden to and
dominated by one member state. Even more significantly, the third
Russian-Chinese veto deprived the US-NATO forces of the possibility of
claiming that their actions were supported by the international
community, and denied any moral authority to subsequent US-NATO military
action in Syria, and beyond, unmasking such military action as naked
aggression.

On July 19, Chinese Ambassador Li Baodong stated, in explanation of vote

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“We
have vigorously pushed for consensus among Security Council members
through consultations. However, draft resolution S/2012/538 submitted
by the United Kingdom , the United States and France completely
contradicts such aims…First, the draft resolution is seriously flawed,
and its unbalanced content seeks to put pressure on only one party.
Experience has shown that such a practise would not help resolve the
Syrian issue, but would only derail the matter from the political
track. It would not only further aggravate the turmoil, but also cause
it to spread to other countries of the region…During consultations on
today’s draft resolution, the sponsoring countries failed to show any
political will or cooperativeness, adopting a rigid and arrogant
approach to the reasonable basic concerns of other concerned countries
and refusing to make revisions….China has been committed to reaching a
consensus, worked hard for a smooth extension of the mandate of UNSMIS
and supported Mr. Annan’s mediation efforts. In contrast, a few
countries have been eager to interfere in the external affairs of other
countries, to fuel the flames and sow discord in complete disregard of
the possible consequences. This time they have repeated their old trick
of setting preconditions as obstacles to the extension of UNSMIS’s
mandate and have accompanied that with an invocation of Chapter VII of
the Charter and the threat of sanctions, in an attempt to change or even
repudiate the hard-won consensus reached by the action group during the
Geneva meeting. They have shown only arrogance, not sincerity during
the consultations.”

</blockquote>
Russian Ambassador Vitali Churkin stated

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“The
Western members of the Security Council refused to exclude military
intervention. Their calculations to use the Security Council of the
United Nations to further their plans of imposing their own designs on
sovereign states will not prevail. They have been pushing their own
geopolitical intentions, which have nothing in common with the
legitimate interests of the Syrian people. This has led to an
escalation of the conflict, one that has reached tragic
proportions….Their approach is especially ambiguous given what took
place yesterday in Damascus . I am referring to the grave terrorist
attack.”

</blockquote>
On
July 18, terrorists attempted a coup d’etat against the government of
Syrian President Assad, massacring his Defense Minister, General Daoud
Rajha, his Deputy and brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, and General Hassan
Turkmani, former Defense Minister. Several other senior government
ministers were critically wounded as they attended a top-level meeting
in Damascus. Though a Syrian Islamist group, Liwa al-Islam claimed
responsibility for the attack on the “crisis control room in the capital
of Damascus ,” with President Assad’s bodyguard himself detonating the
explosive, a researcher at Columbia University , Younes Abouyoub
stated: “This may be a larger intelligence operation involving foreign
intelligence services. First of all the timing of this work, the fact
that it targeted three major figures within the Syrian government, this
shows these are professionals, not amateurs…this is not the act of one
person or two, this is a very carefully planned and well-organized and
implemented operation.” War correspondent Eric Margolis added that:
“The operation was too well-prepared to be carried out by an amateur
because such a gathering of high-profile officials would normally have
the toughest security, making it impossible for a single suicide bomber
to infiltrate…there may have been explosives hidden there before the
meeting….the damage reported has far exceeded the damage that can be
caused by one man carrying a suicide vest.”

Grossly
irrational, and in violation of all logic, the United Kingdom, the
United States and France claimed that the premeditated murders of Syrian
President Assad’s top security ministers justified the adoption of
resolution 2043, under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which
would have imposed sanctions against the Assad government, and opened
the way to external military action against the Syrian government.

The contortions required to arrive at this Orwellian distortion of
reality also explain the Security Council’s shameful failure to issue
any condemnation of these terrorist murders. Although the Syrian
opposition is undeniably pervaded by armed terrorists, identified by no
less an authority than United States Intelligence Chief, James Clapper,
as Al-Qaeda operatives, this did not prevent the Western Powers, the
UK, the US and France from embracing them, and opposing any Security
Council statement condemning their terrorist activities. Though Russia
had earlier advanced the specious argument that their government was not
“married” to the government of Assad, this had no impact, since even
had there been such a “marriage,” the option of divorce is available to
those honourable and principled enough to terminate a shallow, rotting
“marriage” which threatens to embroil others as “collateral damage.”
However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, on incontestable
grounds denounced the Security Council’s refusal to condemn the July 18
terrorist attacks in Damascus, and the West’s failure to divorce its
marriage to terrorism, (which began during the Carter administration
with the arming and funding of Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan).
Lavrov stated: “This is direct endorsement of terrorism. This is a
sinister position. I cannot find words to express our attitude toward
that.”

According
to The New York Times, July 24, 2012, “In February, the United States
Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper told a Congressional
hearing that there were “all the earmarks of an Al Qaeda-like attack” in
a series of bombings against security and intelligence targets in
Damascus . He and other intelligence community witnesses attributed
that to the spread into Syria of the Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda….Daniel
Byman, a counterterrorism expert who is a professor at Georgetown
University and a fellow at the Brookings Institution said it is clear
that Al Qaeda is trying to become more active in Syria . As it has
already done in Somalia and Mali , and before that in Chechnya and Yemen
, the group is trying to turn a local conflict to its advantage.
‘There’s no question Al Qaeda wants to do that, and they are actually
pretty good at this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘They’ve done well at
taking a local conflict and taking it global.’”


Despite
James Clapper’s February warning that “the series of bombings against
government security and intelligence targets in Damascus bore all the
earmarks of an Al-Qaeda-like attack,” on June 21, 2012, the front page
of The New York Times stated, in an article bylined by Eric Schmitt:


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“CIA
said to aid in steering arms to Syrian rebels…A small number of CIA
officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey , helping allies
decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive
arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and
Arab intelligence officers. The weapons, including automatic rifles,
rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are
being funnelled mostly across the Turkish border, by way of a shadowy
network of intermediaries including Syria ’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid
for by Turkey , Saudi Arabia and Qatar , the officials said.”


</blockquote>
The
German foreign intelligence service, the BND disclosed that “around 90
terror attacks that can be attributed to organizations that are close to
Al-Qaeda or jihadist groups were carried out in Syria between the end
of December and the beginning of July.” “At least three major German
newspapers – Die Welt, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Bild
have published reports attributing responsibility for the May 25
massacre in the Syrian town of Houla to anti-government rebel
forces….writing in Bild, German war correspondent Jurgen Todenhofer
accused the rebels of ‘deliberately killing civilians and then
presenting them as victims of the government.’ He described this
‘massacre-marketing strategy’ as being among the most disgusting things
that I have ever experienced in an armed conflict.’”


Following
the Russian Veto on July 19, Russian Ambassador Vitali Churkin
explicitly stated that one of the geopolitical goals of the relentless
Western attempts to destroy the Syrian government of Assad is to weaken
its ally, Iran . Ambassador Churkin stopped short of implying that the
integrity of Russia , itself, is a target of what Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov on March 12, at the Security Council, described
as “geopolitical engineering.” And this geopolitical engineering is
already far advanced. Including in Russia .

Although
living standards of the Russian people improved substantially during
Putin’s first terms as President, by the time of his re-election this
year, an opposition led by Aleksei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov had formed,
holding multiple demonstrations against both Putin’s party, United
Russia, and against Putin, himself, as re-elected President, both before
and after his election. And, of course, the aborted plans to
assassinate Putin himself, arranged by Ukranian operatives, rank high on
the list of terrorist actions targeting Russia .


Early
in 2011, Navalny had been invited to visit New York , and spoke at
widely publicized events at the New York Public Library, and other
publicly financed locations.



Recent
demonstrations in Moscow , led by Navalny and Nemtsov have the
potential to destabilize Putin’s government. When the new U.S.
Ambassador McFaul arrived in Moscow , among his first activities were
meetings with these leaders of the opposition in Russia . As suspicions
were aroused, Putin himself accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
of being a force responsible for fomenting civil unrest. Numerous
Russian intellectuals suspected United States agencies, such as the NED
and others of instigating these disturbances which threatened civil
turmoil, or worse within Russia itself. In an attempt to expose and
control foreign efforts to destabilize the Russian government, both
chambers of the Russian Parliament, including the State Duma and the
Federation Council, approved a law, signed by President Putin,
requiring externally funded NGO’s engaged in political activity in
Russia to register as foreign agents. This bill was inspired by, and
modelled upon an almost identical law in the United States , requiring
organizations operating in the United States but financed from abroad,
to register as foreign agents of the country financing their activities.


Provocations
of social and political turmoil within the Russian Federation have been
exacerbated by the Kavkaz Center website, hosted and financed in
Finland and Sweden, and instigated by Doku Umarov, listed as an
international terrorist on the United Nations Security Council Al-Qaeda
and Taliban Sanctions Committee (pursuant to Resolution 1267) for
organizing numerous terrorist activities, including the hostage taking
and massacre of hundreds of school children in Beslan in September,
2003, and the suicide-bombing at Moscow’s Domodedevo Airport on January
2011, which killed 35 people.



Umarov is also on the United Nations list of international terrorists
for his connections to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Islamic
Jihad Union, the Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs, and other
terrorist organizations. Umarov’s Kavkaz Center has been relentlessly
instigating violent Islamic separatist movements within the large Moslem
communities hitherto residing peacefully throughout the Russian
Federation .


Is
it a coincidence that on July 19, the historic day when the third
double veto was cast by Russia and China at the United Nations Security
Council, Andrew Roth reported in The New York Times:


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“
Moscow – One senior Muslim official was killed and another was wounded
in separate attacks on Thursday in the central Russian republic of
Tatarstan , an unusual outbreak of violence in an area often held up as a
model of harmonious interfaith relations. The head of Islamic
education for the region, Valiulla Yakupov was shot and killed outside
his home on Thursday morning in Kazan . Less than an hour later, Ildus
Faizov, the chief Mufti for the Tatarstan region, was hospitalized after
a bomb exploded in a car he was driving in Kazan, Russian investigators
said. Mr. Faizov, who was thrown clear of the automobile by the force
of the explosion, suffered two broken legs. Russia ’s Antiterrorism
Committee said in a statement that several motives for the attack were
being investigated, including recent statements against the growth of
religious radicalism in the Republic by the organization Mr. Faizov
runs, the Islamic Spiritual Council of Tatarstan. Rustam Minnikhanov,
the president of Tatarstan said in a statement that the attack was an
‘obvious challenge’ to the tranditional Islam supported by Mr. Faizov
and the Islamic Spiritual Council. Mr. Faizov, who was elected the
region’s chief Mufti in 2011, has championed a fight against the growth
of radicalism in the republic. In April he said in a public statement
that thousands of foreign missionaries had entered Tatarstan, and that
‘radical Muslim sects had emerged, which are ready even to kill the
local population to further their goals.’ Mr. Yakupov was also an
outspoken critic of radical Islam, and had called for a ban on Wahhabism
in Russia . In 2010, three Islamists were killed in a gun battle with
the police in the Nurlatsky region of Tatarstan, raising fears of an
armed insurgency similar to the one in Russia ’s North Caucasus .’”
NewsLanc.com stated: “The attack took place in the capital of the
most prominent, prosperous and influential Muslim republic of the
Russian Federation …What happened was in fact an assassination of the
official leaders of moderate Islam in Russia – the country with the
biggest Muslim population in Europe .”

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The
enormous significance of this terrorist attack against moderate Muslim
leaders in Tatarstan is its location on the Volga . Russia is currently
embroiled with terrorist Islamic separatist insurgencies in the South
of Russia, the North Caucasus . If terrorist insurgencies comparable to
those in Chechnya and elsewhere in Russia ’s North Caucasus erupt on
the Volga, Russia ’s East, and the gateway to the colossal oil and gas
and other mineral riches in Siberia , Russia could be trapped into wars
on two fronts, in both the southern and the eastern part of Russia .
Bashkurtistan, another Muslim republic on the Volga , could also become
infected with terrorist Islamic separatist movements. If Islamic
republics on the Volga succeed in breaking away from the Russian
Federation, Russia, the largest country on earth, could be reduced to
the size of France, from Ukraine to the Volga, losing control of the
huge oil and gas reserves east of the Volga, that currently sustain much
of the Russian economy, and provide much of Europe with its oil and
gas.


Although
Russia is existentially threatened by NATO bases surrounding its
territory, and the threat to its nuclear deterrent posed by missile
defense, it is possible that these external threats are less deadly than
the possible dismemberment of the Russian Federation threatened by the
spread of terrorist Islamic separatist movements. It is also an
interesting coincidence that the terrorist assassination of the official
leaders of moderate Islam in Russia have occurred so soon after the
establishment of the NATO transit hub on the Volga, in Ulyanovsk, close
neighbour to Tatarstan.

China,
also in the crosshairs of this Islamic terrorist insurgency, so
convenient to the Western agenda of weakening, and possibly paralyzing
the competitive power of these two global giants, Russia and China , is
threatened by the violent insurgency of its Muslim Uighur population in
Western China .


The
US-NATO countries are mired in economic crisis, which is likely to
worsen, and large-scale warfare may be perceived as a way to boost their
respective economies. It is possible that the huge risks of such
warfare may deter the wiser policy makers, in which case, the use of
“Islam as sword,” perfected by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who designed the
Carter administration policy of training, funding and arming Muslim
terrorists in Afghanistan to provoke the Soviet Union to invade, at huge
cost to its social and economic integrity, may be the weapon of choice
to erode the strength of Russia and China. Russia ’s Ambassador to
NATO, Dmitri Rogozin stated, last December, that NATO’s interference in
the so-called “Arab Spring” resulted in “Sharia law coming to previously
relatively secular states.” He asked “to what extent NATO is aware of
the fact that the coming of radical Islam to all the regions where it
projected its force is a result of its actions.”


The
“Arab Spring” has brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in every
country where it occurred. Indeed, in Egypt , Hillary Clinton was
pelted with tomatoes, and the United States blamed for bringing the
Muslim Brotherhood to power. Sharia law is the most brutal form of
capitalist domination, keeping populations terrorized and submissive
wherever it is inflicted.

There
is currently talk of dismemberment and partition of Syria, similar to
the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, and plans for the dismemberment of
Russia and China may be on the drawing board of US-NATO powers. The
Russian-Chinese veto of July 19 may have disrupted these plans, and
destroyed any moral force the US-NATO powers might have claimed for
their more overt Napoleonic militaristic adventures. Lacking moral
coherence, and the legitimacy which a supportive UN Security Council
resolution might have conferred, to buttress public relations sales of
aggression to a gullible public – a public which would ultimately pay
the cost of imperialistic wars, US-NATO itself may eventually erode from
within, as did the Napoleonic forces stopped dead in their tracks at
Borodino, in Russia in 1812.

Following that decisive battle at Borodino, the huge, but demoralized
Napoleonic army soon disintegrated, and ultimately the Napoleonic
empire, itself collapsed. Despite the most intense pressure to
capitulate, throughout the Syria crisis, the triple double-veto by
Russia and China at the UN Security Council bears comparison with
Tolstoy’s analysis of the psychological component of historic events, a
component he considered ultimately decisive.

---

It is essential that people in the UK, France and the US prevent “the
late Summer” naval WMD deployment to the Eastern Mediterraean from
occurring.

The BritishMinistry
of Defense has announced that several British warships are required “to
ensure the security” of the Olympic Games. HMS Bulwark is stationed in
Weymouth Bay for the duration of the games. HMS Illustrious
is ”currently sitting on the Thames in central London”. The deployment
of British warships including HMS Bulwark and HMS Illustrious to the
Middle East is envisaged “after” the Olympic Games.

Spread the word. Forward this article. Post it on Facebook. Prevent the warships from leaving port.

Carla Stea is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Carla Stea

Article Link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32165