Photo: Syrian UN ambassador Bashar Ja’afari, right, during the UN General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York, Aug. 3, 2012.

PressTV has conducted an interview with author and historian, Webster Griffin Tarpley, to further discuss the issue. The following is a rough transcription of same.

Press TV: Dr. Tarpley, first of all what do you make of the situation in Syria, how worse can it get?

Tarpley: Well, I guess it can get significantly worse and certainly the events at the UN general assembly now have not helped matters. I would point out that this resolution was actually written by the Saudis, written by Saudi Arabia, unbelievable piece of hypocrisy.

I don’t know how they can do this with a straight face - an absolute monarchy, a relic of feudal barbarism, one of the most backward regimes in the world is going to give lessons to Syria - a much more advanced country.

I think this is absolutely absurd. This was also made possible by the president of the United Nations general assembly who is from Qatar. He represents the royal family there, the Thanis.

The other thing of course is the way that the resolution is written as Russian Ambassador Churkin said, it’s completely one-sided. The resolution reads as if there is no armed opposition; the armed opposition simply does not exist; there are no death squads, no terrorists; it’s just peaceful unarmed protesters - quite fantastic. This makes everything worse.

But before the US gloats too much over this result, let’s just look at some of the internals of that vote if we could. 133 countries voted for it, lots of banana republics can be induced to vote for just about anything but you had twelve countries against it, you had 31 abstaining, including India and Pakistan, large important states and then you had 17 countries that just didn’t show up; they ducked the vote; it was too wrenching for them.

We can assume that they’re not too happy with this resolution. So what you’ve got out of the 193 member states is about one third against it; two thirds for it and the ones that are against it are against it I think with much more conviction.

That would again be Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela - these are important influential states - North Korea, Syria, Belarus, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Burma and Zimbabwe. So that is certainly not a coalition to be sneezed at and I don’t think the US can gloat too much if you think about the population of the countries that were unable to support the resolution since you’ve got China and India there and Pakistan and some other big ones.

You get up to I think about 40 percent of the world’s population is against this resolution. So that’s not really one-sided. Syria is not isolated.

Press TV: Indeed, we have several key players in this Syria scenario just to mention Turkey, US and its allies but I’d like to know what role does the Iraqi Kurdistan play in here. We have the Turkish foreign minister recently going there?

Tarpley: Well, we’ve looked at Turkey over the past week as a country that’s losing a sense of reality, that is the leadership group around Erdogan and Davatgulu have lost contact with the strategic premises that have made Turkey a successful country. These were laid down by Ataturk after the First World War. You can’t be an empire, you better be a national state; don’t go meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.

So Turkey is poised I’m afraid to pay a terrible price and we have to look at Saudi Arabia, here in the United States we’re going through the 150th anniversary of the civil war that took place here, right around Washington among other places and what we’ve found was that in the second year of the civil war it got much more radicalized and I think that’s what’s happening in the Middle East.

In particular the House of Saud taking this prominent role now as the champions of democracy, are they not risking a very substantial blowback? We’ve also got the local paper in Aspen, Colorado wondering what is the fate of one of their most famous residents, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia who owns a condo in Aspen, who hasn’t been seen for the last week or two. There are reports that he succumbed to an attack on his headquarters.

When we look at the ferment in Saudi Arabia around Qatif, when we look at the agitations continuing in Bahrain, we might say that there is a very good potential that these Gulf monarchs that have been so eager to meddle and interfere in Syria and other countries, they may soon find themselves very busy at home defending the existence of their dynasties, which I think are likely to come under attack as this crisis is driven to a more and more radical form.

Press TV: We’ve seen that Russia has been a key player in this scenario. How much do you think Russia will get physically involved in this case?

Tarpley: This is hard to say. The last report we had was 11 warships dispatched to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Tartus region. There was another report in the last day or two of three more Russian warships with 360 marines on board sent to Tartus that was then officially denied but one does wonder the important thing.

I think with the Russian presence is that it’s incalculable, it cannot be predicted. President Putin is a strong leader; he is really the heart and soul of this entire international opposition. The west, the NATO powers would like to attack Syria right away but they have a feeling that Putin will find a way to retaliate.

They don’t know how, they don’t know where, when - I don’t think anybody knows but it might be a retaliation that would be very uncomfortable, very painful for the Western powers and I think that’s what’s holding this situation together, otherwise we’d be going into a regional war already.

Source: Tarpley.net / PressTV