US ‘creating pretexts’ to attack Syria: Western Analyst
War hawks in Washington are using the beheading of two American journalists by ISIL terrorists in Syria as a pretext to take military action against Syrian government forces, an author and analyst in Chicago says.
US President Barack Obama and some members of Congress are “creating pretexts” to target the government of President Bashar al-Assad, not the ISIL militant group, Stephen Lendman told Press TV on Saturday.
“There are endless pretexts that can be created,” Lendman stated. “It’s astonishing that the killing by any means of two individuals, Americans or anybody else, could be a pretext for going into war, but Obama will use whatever he can get,” Lendman added.
The ISIL terrorists, who were reportedly trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012, control large parts of Syria’s northern territory. ISIL sent its fighters into neighboring Iraq in June, quickly seizing large swaths of land straddling the border between the two countries.
The ISIL terrorist organization is an “American creation” that the Obama administration is using as an “ally in Syria” and an “enemy in Iraq”, Lendman said.
“Obama (is) setting America up for getting into another war to complete what he tried to do when he began the Syrian war around March of 2011. He wants Assad ousted. He wants a pro-Western stooge government replacing it,” he explained. “Syria is Obama’s war.”
In a letter sent to Obama on Friday, US Senator Marco Rubio, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2016, wrote that the president does not need congressional approval to launch airstrikes in Syria against ISIL.
