The propaganda war against Syria has been every bit as bad as the endless stream of lies we were fed about Iraq 15 years ago.

Every time I see another made up story about "chemical weapons" being used by the Syrians (or by the Russians on some random dude they'd long ago allowed to emigrate to Britain) I wonder who believes this nonsense. Judging by the comments section at the SMH and on Twitter there are a lot of skeptics about, even if the mainstream media refuses to air any dissenting opinions at all.

In the Iraq case the propaganda war seemed primarily designed to ensure control of the oil (with military industrial complex profits and the desire of the Israel lobby to destroy all other middle eastern states being the most important secondary factors). In this new war that is being pushed for the latter two factors far outweigh any energy related concerns.

I enjoyed watching Pink Floyd's Roger Waters courteously dismissing those who fall for the party line at a recent concert.

Counterpunch has a look at the unlikely presence of ex CIA director (and prominent Iraq war era neco, "geo green" and peak oil proponent) James Woolsey in Team Trump - Trump & Woolsey: Was There a Bait-and-Switch?.

The article has an interesting section on the motley collection of characters, including Dick Cheney and Rupert Murdoch, that are behind a company called genie Energy looking to exploit oil fomrations in Syria's Golan Heights region.

For voters hoping to ease global tensions and diminish the threat of World War III, Donald Trump seemed to be saying some sensible things on the campaign trail. He questioned the role of NATO, and the use of “regime change” by the U.S. against other nations. He asked why the U.S. and Russia couldn’t be partners rather than belligerents. He even questioned why the U.S. must always play the role of the world’s policeman and suggested that the U.S. should turn its attention to solving its own domestic problems. Such campaign rhetoric was unusual and likely struck a chord with some war-weary listeners.

But in early September 2016, in a move that should have received far more attention than it did, Trump appointed former CIA director James Woolsey as his senior advisor on national security issues. Woolsey – a key member of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC) – had been a strong advocate for invading Iraq in 2003 and for waging war throughout the Middle East.

I haven't seen much from Seymour Hersh in recent years (most likely because I haven't been paying attention) but this recent article in the LRB about gas attacks in Syria was interesting - The Red Line and the Rat Line

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.​＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

I was talking with a Jewish friend over my Christmas break and he expressed concern that Israel will become unimportant to the US as the shale oil boom reduces the importance of middle east to the US economy.

I'm doubtful that this will be the case (although hopefully military interventions like the Iraq war won't be repeated) - the reasoning I'm using is that while the US may be able to meet the majority of it's (declining) needs for oil using domestic production (including that from Canada) for some time, middle eastern oil will remain highly valuable for some time as Iraqi oil that can be produced for $5 per barrel has far more profit potential than US shale oil costing $80 per barrel to produce. As a result, there will always be an economic interest in interfering in the middle east (along with the leverage that is conferred over oil importers like Japan and China by controlling middle eastern supplies).

So I'm guessing Israel won't be left to their own devices by the Americans any time soon - this may change in a couple of decades time (possibly accelerated if there is a rapid shift to electric vehicles).

During the conversation we also touched on the Syrian conflict - I explained my theory that gas pipeline routes were one of the prime causes of the violence which resulted in the question being posed "why doesn't anything like this ever get written in the Australian media".

News Corp controlling 60% of the Australian media probably accounts for most of this, with Fairfax's continuing shrinkage of original reporting making matters worse. I had a quick look around to see if there was anything else but couldn't find anything other than a shallow piece at The Daily Reckoning and this post by Xavier Rizos at the ABC's "Drum" (and he is from France originally) - Power plays over the Syria war.

Despite these intolerable crimes against humanity, the situation is more complex than a fight between a 'good' rebellion and an 'evil' dictator. What initially looked like a repeat of the 2003 Iraq war is less likely to happen. 2013 is not 2003, Syria is not Iraq, and gas is not oil: this is the key to reading the new situation.

The Syrian conflict started as a domestic crisis but with significant global contributing factors.

For the past 10 years, IMF-backed reforms have caused an increase in unemployment and inequality. Falling oil revenues have cut the regime's ability to subsidise its economy, and drought possibly brought by climate change has contributed to rebellion in rural areas.

However it has now become a regional conflict tangled in the political strategy of isolating Iran, and the economic strategy of securing gas supplies.

This means that the crisis is beyond the point where the 'simple' removal of Assad would bring resolution or stop the blood bath fuelled by Qatar on one side and by Iran and Russia on the other side.

So far, judging by the way Putin has pushed his agenda, like a chess master culminating with an unprecedented op-ed in the New York Times, Russia is emerging as the winner from this war.

Following the dissolution of the USSR, the Russians realised they had lost the energy war. They had not secured access to the Middle East oil fields, which remained under American control. Vladimir Putin vowed not to repeat this mistake when he became president. He understood that gas was the new battlefield, and his weapon to win this time was going to be the giant company Gazprom. In the 1990s, it was privatised and its assets were stripped by corrupt oligarchs who transferred them to their families. Putin prosecuted them, ended this looting, and established state control of this strategic asset.

What came out of it has had a direct impact on today's war.

Since then, Gazprom has established a quasi monopoly on gas exports to Europe. This came to Europe's attention most powerfully in winter 2009 when a dispute between Russia and Ukraine resulted in Putin ordering cuts to exports by 60 per cent overnight. It plunged the EU into an energy crisis and reinforced its paranoia about becoming a hostage of Gazprom.

This is the origin of the EU's love affair with Qatar.

Qatar possesses some of the world's largest natural gas reserves and has been financing the Syrian rebels. In fact it has become to gas what Saudi Arabia used to be to oil, which puts it on a direct collision course with Russia and Iran.

Indeed tensions are increasing between the Qatari Sunni Emirate and the Shiite Iranian Islamic Republic because of the gas fields they share right in the middle of the Persian Gulf. While international sanctions are frustrating Iran's gas exports, Qatar is emptying the shared reserves. It is shipping liquefied gas on tankers via the Strait of Hormuz, which is under the military control of Iran. To break this vulnerability, Qatar had a project to build a gas pipeline to the Mediterranean Sea via Syria.

However Assad refused to go with this Qatari project, preferring to sign a 'Pipelineistan' deal with Iran, which had a possible extension to Lebanon to reach Europe. It was supported by Moscow which wants to prevent Qatar from supplying Europe. The Syrian civil war derailed this plan and an angered Qatar has been funding the Syrian rebels in revenge.

I've been trying to ignore the beating of the war drums as the US, Britain and France attempt to build a pretext for attacking Syria (following the well trodden path they used to invade Iraq a decade ago), but the latest round of stories about chemical attacks in Damascus make it difficult to remain entirely silent.

In Iraq's case the motivation seemed to be a mix of a desire to control the oil, the seemingly insatiable appetite of the military industrial complex for new wars to keep the revenue flowing and pleasing the Israel lobby by keeping one of it's enemies in the middle east weak and under western control.

I've always held that the first of these was the dominant influence.

In Syria's case the country doesn't "float on a sea of oil" (as Paul Wolfowitz once accurately said of Iraq) so it's tempting to view the other 2 influences as the dominant ones in this case. Syria does, however, sit across some of the routes from the middle east to Europe that any potential gas pipelines could take if they wished to move gas from Iran and/or Iraq and/or Qatar to Europe, providing competition to Gazprom's dominant position in the European gas market.

It's this angle that some media reports are starting to look at, noting that Russia's support for Syria may have a strong economic basis (Ambrose Evans Pritchard recently came up with a story about the Saudi's trying to bribe Russia to abandon Assad).

The Guardian has an article looking at the gas pipeline angle - Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern.

The 2011 uprisings, it would seem - triggered by a confluence of domestic energy shortages and climate-induced droughts which led to massive food price hikes - came at an opportune moment that was quickly exploited. Leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting "collapse" of Assad's regime "from within."

So what was this unfolding strategy to undermine Syria and Iran all about? According to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to "attack and destroy the governments in 7 countries in five years", starting with Iraq and moving on to "Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran." In a subsequent interview, Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region's vast oil and gas resources.

Much of the strategy currently at play was candidly described in a 2008 US Army-funded RAND report, Unfolding the Future of the Long War (pdf). The report noted that "the economies of the industrialized states will continue to rely heavily on oil, thus making it a strategically important resource." ...

The report noted especially that Syria is among several "downstream countries that are becoming increasingly water scarce as their populations grow", increasing a risk of conflict. Thus, although the RAND document fell far short of recognising the prospect of an 'Arab Spring', it illustrates that three years before the 2011 uprisings, US defence officials were alive to the region's growing instabilities, and concerned by the potential consequences for stability of Gulf oil.

These strategic concerns, motivated by fear of expanding Iranian influence, impacted Syria primarily in relation to pipeline geopolitics. In 2009 - the same year former French foreign minister Dumas alleges the British began planning operations in Syria - Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter's North field, contiguous with Iran's South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets - albeit crucially bypassing Russia. Assad's rationale was "to protect the interests of [his] Russian ally, which is Europe's top supplier of natural gas."

Instead, the following year, Assad pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran, across Iraq to Syria, that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe from its South Pars field shared with Qatar. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the project was signed in July 2012 - just as Syria's civil war was spreading to Damascus and Aleppo - and earlier this year Iraq signed a framework agreement for construction of the gas pipelines.

The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline plan was a "direct slap in the face" to Qatar's plans. No wonder Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, in a failed attempt to bribe Russia to switch sides, told President Vladmir Putin that "whatever regime comes after" Assad, it will be "completely" in Saudi Arabia's hands and will "not sign any agreement allowing any Gulf country to transport its gas across Syria to Europe and compete with Russian gas exports", according to diplomatic sources. When Putin refused, the Prince vowed military action.

It would seem that contradictory self-serving Saudi and Qatari oil interests are pulling the strings of an equally self-serving oil-focused US policy in Syria, if not the wider region. It is this - the problem of establishing a pliable opposition which the US and its oil allies feel confident will play ball, pipeline-style, in a post-Assad Syria - that will determine the nature of any prospective intervention: not concern for Syrian life.

Looking at a map of the region many of the proposed pipelines from Iran and/or Iraq go direct from Iraq to Turkey, bypassing Syria entirely, so its not clear how much of an advantage having passage across Syria would provide - other than perhaps being more economic as the route would avoid the mountainous regions and political instability in Kurdistan.