Israeli-Saudi Alliance behind War Crimes in Syria: Ex-US Senate Candidate

“…It is chiefly this alliance (the US, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia) against Assad, Iran, and Putin's Russia, that has resulted in at least 500,000 deaths and the displacement of millions of Syrians with the meter still running. It is this alliance which has been using the American and Zionist media to falsely demonize Assad, Iran, and Russia, making false accusations about Assad and the employment of chemical weapons on his part, even while ignoring the support of the United States for the provable genocidal war crimes of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, the recent murder by Israel of over a thousand unarmed demonstrators in Gaza, and the regular employment by both the United States and Israel in recent years of white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions in several regional conflicts,” Mark Dankof, who is also a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas, told the Tasnim news agency.

He added, “…the Israeli-Saudi alliance has its fingerprints all over these illegal and criminal activities in Syria.”

Mark Dankof is a broadcaster for The Ugly Truth Podcast. Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, the son of a United States Air Force Colonel, he graduated from Valparaiso University in 1977 and from Chicago's Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1983. In recent years, he has pursued post-graduate work in systematic theology and theological German at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Formerly the 36th District Chairman of the Republican Party in King County/Seattle and later an elected delegate to Texas State Republican Conventions in 1994 and 1996, he entered the United States Senate race in Delaware in 2000 as the nominated candidate of the Constitution Party against Democratic candidate Thomas Carper and Republican incumbent William Roth.

Following is the full text of the interview:

Tasnim: Multiple places in Syria came under attack by US, British and French military forces after President Donald Trump ordered a military strike against the war-torn country early on Saturday. What is your take on the attack?

Dankof: My take on the attack is that we may all fairly conclude that Mr. Trump's foreign policy has been irretrievably hijacked by the worst elements in the Neo-Conservative, Israel First fifth column in the American government and media, and that the President has every intention of continuing to facilitate the ongoing violations of international law and American Constitutional standards that has characterized his predecessors in terms of illegitimate military actions and interventions in the Middle East that are chiefly at the behest of Israel, the central banks, and the Saudi Arabian regime that knows its own survivability depends on the continuation of the American Petrodollar as the reserve currency of the world, even as this regime continues to pursue the support of Wahhabic terrorists and extremists to destroy Iran and Shiite Muslim interests in the region. The appointments of Nikki Haley as the American Ambassador to the UN, Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, and John Bolton as the National Security Advisor to the President are classic examples of this hijacking, even as these appointments and the American war crimes in Syria underscore that Mr. Trump's "America First" campaign rhetoric in 2016 and his accompanying promises to get the United States out of Syria and these other Middle Eastern military interventions is now but a proven pack of lies.

The salient fact is this: The United States has had a long history of employing false flag incidents, provocations, and deliberately falsified media spins to sell and justify its ignition of a series of wars. The "Spanish sinking" of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor to begin the Spanish-American War; the Lusitania incident at the outset of World War I; the real circumstances of FDR's deliberate arrangements from October 1940 onward to compel the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor; the actions of the United States in South Korea from 1945-48 in support of the Rhee regime in Seoul which set the stage for the Korean War between 1950-53; the Operation Northwoods plan to start a war with Castro's Cuba in the early 1960s (proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by President Kennedy); the phony Gulf of Tonkin resolution which began overt American military intervention in Vietnam; the October 1990 employment of Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, to give false and rehearsed testimony to the American Congress directed and coached by the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm on how Iraqi soldiers were taking Kuwaiti children out of hospital incubators to induce death; the deliberately false claims of the American government as to who and what was behind the September 11, 2001 attacks; and the outlandish claims of George W. Bush and Colin Powell complete with falsified "intelligence," that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was necessary because of Saddam Hussein's possession of "Weapons of Mass Destruction," are all classic examples of this. These many lies in history preceded the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011, where Seymour Hersh and others have subsequently proven that the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey were importing, training, and supplying the Wahhabic extremists of every label being used against the Assad regime in an attempt to overthrow him. It is chiefly this alliance against Assad, Iran, and Putin's Russia, that has resulted in at least 500,000 deaths and the displacement of millions of Syrians with the meter still running. It is this alliance which has been using the American and Zionist media to falsely demonize Assad, Iran, and Russia, making false accusations about Assad and the employment of chemical weapons on his part, even while ignoring the support of the United States for the provable genocidal war crimes of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, the recent murder by Israel of over a thousand unarmed demonstrators in Gaza, and the regular employment by both the United States and Israel in recent years of white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions in several regional conflicts. And it is this alliance which seeks war with Iran, for the express purpose of what John Bolton and his Zionist friends' term "regime change."

Tasnim: Many experts have described the attack as a “political show”. What do you think?

Dankof: The attack may indeed be fairly characterized as a "political show." It is designed to demonstrate the President's primary fealty to the Zionist State of Israel, the central banking system extant since the post-World War II Bretton Woods conference, the gas and oil pipeline interests, and the military-industrial complex. It must also be said that this attack occurred without a scintilla of evidence that a chemical attack actually occurred, or that said the chemical attack was carried out by the Assad regime. The attack preempted the arrival of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and its scheduled examination of the site of the alleged attack for substantive evidence and evaluation of the Western claims of what had allegedly transpired, claims based on the allegations of the totally discredited White Helmets and the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, both front organizations for Western Neo-Conservative ideologues in American, British, and Israeli intelligence. Additionally, the attack took place without either the explicit authorization of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) or the issuance of the so-called Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) by the United States Congress. And two other critical questions about the American, British, and French charade must be asked 1): Why on earth would Bashar al-Assad risk a chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta when his military and their Russian allies were prevailing there and elsewhere in the restoration of stability in Syria under the control of the legitimate and sovereign government of that country? I saw a satirical post on social media a few days ago that underscores how ludicrous the claims of the United States, Britain, France, and the Zionist-Saudi alliance are on this key point. The post depicts a poster of Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War. Humorously, but on point, Sun Tzu supposedly says, "When your enemy is nearly defeated, and final victory is at hand, gas your own people so that nations greater than yours will intervene and destroy you." Secondly, 2) If as Trump and his advisors claim, the American strikes hit chemical weapons factories, why were there no poisonous chemical gases distributed among the population causing horrible injuries and a massive number of deaths? We hear Robert Fisk and Paul Craig Roberts, among others questioning all this, but nary a word in the Zionist-controlled American corporate media, where these ludicrous postulates are parroted by CNN and the Washington Post, and accepted at face value by an American public that should have figured out something since the Bush and Powell Circus in 2003. It is frightening.

Tasnim: How do you see the role of Israel and Saudi Arabia in the attack?

Dankof: As previously indicated, the Israeli-Saudi alliance has its fingerprints all over these illegal and criminal activities in Syria. Former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer fully acknowledges the truth of this. He states unequivocally that the latest American military machinations in Syria are designed to prevent peace and partnership among the governments of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, as the "United States-Israel-Saudi Arabia coalition" will not allow a peaceful flourishing of these countries and their political independence from this coalition's control. Kinzer underscores that from Washington's perspective, peace in Syria is the ultimate horror scenario. Peace would mean that Russia, Iran, and Assad have won in Syria. The United States, in Kinzer's words, is determined "to prevent that, regardless of the human cost."

Tasnim: In a tweet following the attack, President Trump said, “A perfectly executed strike last night. Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished!” What was the mission?

Dankof: Trump's statement of "Mission Accomplished" brings one back in memory to the infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech of George W. Bush on May 1st, 2003 on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. If by "Mission Accomplished," Mr. Trump is signaling that the United States is going to sink even deeper in economic debt, and political and military quicksand in Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen prior to an insane American-Israeli military strike on Iran, one may deem his latest war crime in Syria a success. To the rest of us, his actions are foreboding in terms of moving the United States closer to a global conflict that may also involve Russia and potentially China. This is aside from the real prospect posited by David Stockman, that the present national American debt of $21 trillion will stand at $40 trillion a decade from now, as the American Empire moves toward being but the latest Empire in history to fade into eventual eclipse for the usual reasons.

Tasnim: What would happen if the US and its allies bomb Syria again?

Dankof: I do not believe that Vladimir Putin will stand by and allow the United States and its Israeli and Saudi allies to contravene the successful results of the Russian intervention on behalf of the sovereign government of Syria. I do not believe that he will stand by and watch an illegal and criminal American and Israeli military assault on Iran. He recognizes that to do so would be to signal his own unwillingness to defend Russian borders and Russian territory from the very real possibility of the NATO and American military buildup on his doorstep being used in an actual future invasion of his own country. Therefore, if the United States, France, and Britain continue to break international law with these actions in Syria, some response on his part will be inevitable. I recall that one of his government spokesmen said after the Trump strikes that "There will be consequences. We have a pre-arranged scenario in place." The Russian spokesman most pointedly did not spell out what that "pre-arranged scenario" entailed. Let us pray that Trump, his simian advisors, and his Israeli-Saudi allies are not reckless enough to risk finding out what that "pre-arranged scenario" is all about. But rest assured, the Russians, the Iranians, and the Chinese know what it is, and lie in wait.