Conflict Zone: Why NATO War Planners Don't Care Much About Syrians

Why has everyone been consulted about the future of Syria, except the Syrians themselves, American investigative journalist Jeffrey St. Clair asks. The answer is obvious: Syrians don't matter for the Western political elite and its allies in the Middle East.

The Obama administration's foreign policy toward Syria resembles nothing so much as chaos theory, investigative journalist and editor of CounterPunch Jeffrey St. Clair notes.

However, those who have joined the 2016 Presidential race in the US are inclined to follow in Obama or George W. Bush's footsteps and that means "the show" will go on in the Middle East.

"Showing a stunning lack of judgment, Comandante Bernie Sanders says his Syrian strategy relies on the Saudis taking the lead in the fight against ISIS [Daesh]… Apparently Sanders skipped the briefing on how ISIS's apocalyptic ideology has been fueled by fire-breathing Wahhabi preachers financed by the Saudi royal family," Clair writes in his article for CounterPunch.org.

Still Hillary Clinton's Syrian war plan sounds far more sinister.

"Having not missed a minute of sleep haunted by the corpses of Libya, Mrs. Clinton is now stumping for the dismantling of Syria, using the carefully cultivated domestic anxiety over ISIS [Daesh] as the pretext," he continues.

Hillary Clinton is seeking to implement a no fly zone over Syria. The strikingly similar plan, implemented back in 2011 in Libya led to a disaster. The NATO air campaign plunged the North African country into chaos.

Apparently, Clinton has never heard the old Arab saying: "Better a century of tyranny than one day of chaos."

America's close allies in the Middle East want to take advantage of the chaos Syria and Iraq have been dragged into. Turkey has jumped at the opportunity to de facto invade Iraq. In northern Syria Turkish ultranationalists, Grey Wolves, are acting most likely under the supervision of Ankara, according to Turkish journalists.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are mulling the deployment of their soldiers in Syria in order to fight Daesh.

However, President of the Middle East Forum Daniel Pipes believes that the Gulf monarchies are more interested in helping the rebels than fighting Daesh.

"What everyone is doing is saying that they are going to fight ISIS [Daesh] but the real interest is the Syrian civil war. The issue is who controls the central government. Will it continue to be the Assad regime or the Sunni rebels, and the Sunni state of Saudi Arabia is interested in helping the rebels against the Iranian backed central regime. So ISIS is secondary it's an excuse," he said in an exclusive interview with Radio Sputnik.

While the Western political elite and their allies in the Middle East are trying to define the future of Syria, Syrians have been left out in the cold.

"Everyone has been consulted about the future of Syria, except the Syrians themselves. Why?" Clair asks.

"Because simply, Syrians don't matter. They are quite beside the point," he adds ironically.

Citing the Pulitzer-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, Clair emphasized that the subtext for the Obama administration's Syrian strategy has been, besides ousting Bashar al-Assad, geared toward "ensnaring Russians in the Levantine quagmire."

"In this comedy of terrors, the apex predators are the familiar ones circling overhead, waiting to blow Syria apart and plunder its bones," Clair concludes.