British Army Chief Warns of War with Syria

British Army Chief Warns of War with Syria British Army Chief Warns of War with Syria

July 19, 2013 • 9:55AM

General Sir David Richards, Great Britain's Chief of the Defense Staff, who retired yesterday, warned that a policy of arming the Syrian rebels or a no-fly zone would be ineffective for removing the Syrian government. In an interview in the Daily Telegraph, he said that "if you want to have the material impact on the Syrian regime's calculations that some people seek," then "ground targets" would have to be "hit."

Sir David Richards with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel

This would include taking out the government's air defense system and hitting ground targets such as tanks, as the Anglo-French-U.S. combine did in Libya. Nonetheless, a clear "political objective" in Syria would have to be defined before any military plan could be recommended. "There is a lack of international consensus on how to take this forward," he said. "We are trying to cohere [sic] the opposition groups, but they are difficult to cohere because there are many different dimensions to them.

"So it is work in progress, so I am very clear in my military advice to the government that we need to understand what the political objective is before we can sensibly recommend what military effort and forces should be applied to it. That is something we debate a lot, from the Prime Minister downwards. We also need to do this with our allies. Allies have different views on the way ahead. Understandably there is a great reluctance to see Western boots on the ground in a place like Syria."

As for a no-fly zone, he said: "If you wanted to have the material impact on the Syrian regime's calculations that some people seek, a no-fly zone per se is insufficient. You have to be able, as we did successfully in Libya, to hit ground targets. You have to establish a ground control zone. You have to take out their air defenses. You also have to make sure they can't maneuver — which means you have to take out their tanks, and their armored personnel carriers, and all the other things that are actually doing the damage.... That is rightly a huge and important decision. There are many arguments for doing so but there are many arguments for not doing so, too."

He advised that the government focus on preventing the conflict from spreading.

"We are looking at Syria much more from a regional perspective and making sure that as awful as things are there, it doesn't spread materially to other countries like Lebanon and Jordan," he said.

"I see myself as a moral soldier," he said. "I do not associate the military with wars and bloodshed in a narrow sense. I actually associate the military with doing good, with bringing down tyrants, with releasing people's ambitions for their children.

"Most people feel better as a result of what the British and their allies have done. Only history will determine the success or otherwise of some of these ventures. But it is military force that has enabled these things to happen — and we only do as our democratically-elected government asks of us."

Saudi-British-led Terrorists Are Drawing Turkey and Iraq into a Single, Spreading War

July 19, 2013 • 10:13AM

There are growing reports of outbreaks of violence in northeast Syria, where the Saudi-Britain-led terrorists are engaged in sectarian clashes involving the Kurds and the Iraqi Sunnis and Shias. These clashes expand the conflict zone, and threaten the stability of both Iraq and Turkey as well.

UN envoy to Iraq Martin Kobler told the UN Security Council on July 17 that "the battlefields are merging." He said the Syrian conflict is no longer just spilling over into Iraq, but Iraqis are reportedly taking up arms against each other inside Syria. "These countries are interrelated," Kobler stressed. "Iraq is the fault line between the Shi'ite and the Sunni world, and everything which happens in Syria, of course, has repercussions on the political landscape in Iraq."

Similar blurring of the borders has occurred in the northeastern borders of Syria and Turkey. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on July 18 that "at least 19 Al-Nusra Front (jihadist) fighters and 10 Kurds have been killed since the day before yesterday in clashes in the oil region of Hassakeh," located in northeast Syria bordering Turkey.

Also, the Voice of Russia and TASS reported on July 18, citing Kurdish Self-Defense Forces representative Ali Bashar Oumari, that 13 insurgents had been captured in the town of Ras al-Ayn in northeastern Syria, and "Six Turkish soldiers and a Chechen mercenary are among the prisoners, according to their documents," Oumari told the Lebanese Al-Ahd news website. Similar reports about clashes between Syrian Kurds and militants near the Turkey-Syria border were reported a few months ago. At that time, it was reported that militants in three tanks crossed into Syria via the Turkish border in an effort to take control of the town of Ras al-Ayn, a Kurd-dominated town.