October 18, 2019, Consortium News (USA) https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/18/pepe-escobar-the-road-to-damascus-how-the-syria-war-was-won/
Special to Consortium
News
Following
the Damascus-Kurdish alliance, Syria may become the biggest defeat for the
Central Intelligence Agency since Vietnam, says Pepe Escobar.
What is happening in Syria, following yet another
Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single
paragraph this way:
“It’s a quadruple win.
The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a
conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians –
that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia
prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process
alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.”
Syria may be the biggest
defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.
Yet that hardly begins
to tell the whole story.
Allow me to briefly
sketch in broad historical strokes how we got here.
It began with an intuition
I felt last month at the tri-border point of Lebanon, Syria and Occupied
Palestine; followed by a subsequent series of conversations in Beirut with
first-class Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Russian, French and Italian analysts;
all resting on
