I read of the latest massacre in Syria in the Damascas suburb of Daraya. Unlike previous reports of killings, this one has not made the headlines. Reports suggest this is a deliberate 'cleansing' operation - a Syrian My Lai or Sabra and Shatilla in the making. Robert Fisk of the Independent has been on the ground with Syrian troops and reports that some of those killed were victims of the FSA. However he is effectively embedded with the Syrian army. The Local Coordination Committees have put out corrections to his piece, saying witnesses blaming the 'Free Army' are probably too initimidated to tell the truth. This is plausible. The fog of war descends and all is confusion.
Syria appears to be falling into the category of wars where the outside looks impotently on because there is no clear strategic interest and great risks of unknown fallout from any decisive intervention. Lebanon, Bosnia, Rwanda. The blowback from Iraq and Afghanistan has arrived in Syria - leave it alone, it will only drag as in to a long and unwinnable occupation where the locals hate us and vote for our enemies. That is the real view in Langley and Whitehall, I suspect. And more so in Tel Aviv. If we cannot control the outcome, then best let both sides fight it out to stalemate, until the talking starts again. Regime destruction will create a black hole which may give rise to something inimical to western and Israeli interests. Preservation of the state is preferable, once Assad leaves or is killed, to Islamist rule.
I have been dismayed at the line taken by NWOers who see Syria as just another US / NWO destabilisation operation. People who see the world through a black and white prism of evildoers and hapless sheeple seem to lack imagination or understanding about what is happening. Not everything fits into a neat script that you find on the internet. The CIA or the Bilderberg group do not control EVERYTHING. For example, when the Arab uprisings began, it is not credible to suggest that the entire process was controlled by US intelligence and its local agents. The US was caught off guard.
If Syria was in the firing line, we would have been getting propaganda messages for weeks and months prior to the uprising. 17 months in and more than 20,000 dead, are the NWOers still insisting that this is just a CIA Mossad plot? Of course, CIA and MI6 are on the ground on the border and probably inside Syria. They maybe assisting with intelligence - that does not make this the West's fight. This is fundamentally a Syrian fight with a range of outside actors involved, primarily Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, USA, France and Britain. And of course the jihadists. Muslims in the 21st century can do solidarity better than westerners. The Spanish civil war was a long time ago. The Cubans are the only ones on the left who in the recent past put their feet on the ground to assist others under attack - and that was 20 years ago in southern Africa.
The left should not fall into the trap of backing Assad because of the West's foolish call for him to step down back at the start of the uprising. They had no right to make this call and more importantly no means to enforce it. This pushed Assad into a corner and set the terms of the conflict whereby he could blame all the trouble on the imperialists and zionists. The Assads, like all dictatorships, need useful idiots to help them peddle the myth that their regime is a bastion of antizionism and anti-imperialism. It's one of the saddest jokes of the 20th century that gangsters were able to hoodwink significant sections of their own people and those abroad into believing that their regimes were legitimate representations of the people's aspiration to self determination and freedom in the face of economic backwardness and colonialism. Yes, some revolutions in the former colonial regions could claim to have achieved this and were able to continue to do this even as the people realised that not all their aspirations had been met. Vietnam, Cuba and even China come to mind. Others, such as those of Saddam Hussein, Ethiopia's Mengistu, Idi Amin, the Kims of Korea and many other tyrants used the rhetoric of anticolonialism to justify misrule. Qadafi was one of these, although the picture is not clear cut, in that Libya did enjoy independence and economic development in the first part of his rule.
The Ba'athists of Syria have long since dropped the pretence of representing the will of the Syrian people. Ba'athism rules by terror and nationalist rhetoric. Its main achievements were stability, some development, independence from imperialism and non-sectarianism. These are not insignificant achievements. The one thing the Ba'ath, like their cousins in Saddam's Iraq, could never tolerate was any challenge to their rule. Their response has always been repression and violence. The Hama incident of 1982 in Syria was the bloodiest in the last half century in this region. It began with hundreds of regime officials killed by the Brotherhood before the crackdown by Hafez, father of Bashar, that raised Hama to the ground. Blood begat blood, then as now. The Ba'ath treat the people like cattle. They feed them and keep them but if they become troublesome, they will crush them mercilessly.
Of course, leftists in the West do not support the ideology of Islamism promoted by their longtime opponents the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither does Washington. GlobalResearch and Michel Chussodovskly have been quick to write off the entire Arab uprising as a neoliberal coup. It's too early to call it that. We have to see what happens now that Egypt's president is elected and can shape policy.
The threat of sectarianism breaking out in Syria was used by Assad from the very beginning of the uprising as a way to ensure loyalty from the Alawite, Christian and other minorities in Syria and bind them close of the regime. But for so-called progressives to support the continuance of a regime that is ready to bomb and destroy all the cities of the country, to wipe out whole villages, to kill thousands in order to maintain themselves? This is bankruptcy, moral and political.
We see an unholy alliance of ancien regime critics of the revolutions, and leftists who cannot bear to see a revolution that does not wave the flag of anti-imperialist secularism, while the children and mothers are slaughtered in the streets and called 'terrorists'. It is not for ideologues of any kind, sitting far away, to dictate the nature of any revolution. The desire for freedom from oppression is universal. One can argue that the militarisation of the uprising by the FSA and their Saudi/Qatari backers has been a disaster. But what is to be done in the face of the regime's guns? This is what many Syrians feel. I pity the Syrians, whose only friends are their fellow Muslims who want to see them free. The West have played this very badly and have played their part in creating another Iraq or Lebanon.
Syria appears to be falling into the category of wars where the outside looks impotently on because there is no clear strategic interest and great risks of unknown fallout from any decisive intervention. Lebanon, Bosnia, Rwanda. The blowback from Iraq and Afghanistan has arrived in Syria - leave it alone, it will only drag as in to a long and unwinnable occupation where the locals hate us and vote for our enemies. That is the real view in Langley and Whitehall, I suspect. And more so in Tel Aviv. If we cannot control the outcome, then best let both sides fight it out to stalemate, until the talking starts again. Regime destruction will create a black hole which may give rise to something inimical to western and Israeli interests. Preservation of the state is preferable, once Assad leaves or is killed, to Islamist rule.
I have been dismayed at the line taken by NWOers who see Syria as just another US / NWO destabilisation operation. People who see the world through a black and white prism of evildoers and hapless sheeple seem to lack imagination or understanding about what is happening. Not everything fits into a neat script that you find on the internet. The CIA or the Bilderberg group do not control EVERYTHING. For example, when the Arab uprisings began, it is not credible to suggest that the entire process was controlled by US intelligence and its local agents. The US was caught off guard.
If Syria was in the firing line, we would have been getting propaganda messages for weeks and months prior to the uprising. 17 months in and more than 20,000 dead, are the NWOers still insisting that this is just a CIA Mossad plot? Of course, CIA and MI6 are on the ground on the border and probably inside Syria. They maybe assisting with intelligence - that does not make this the West's fight. This is fundamentally a Syrian fight with a range of outside actors involved, primarily Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, USA, France and Britain. And of course the jihadists. Muslims in the 21st century can do solidarity better than westerners. The Spanish civil war was a long time ago. The Cubans are the only ones on the left who in the recent past put their feet on the ground to assist others under attack - and that was 20 years ago in southern Africa.
The left should not fall into the trap of backing Assad because of the West's foolish call for him to step down back at the start of the uprising. They had no right to make this call and more importantly no means to enforce it. This pushed Assad into a corner and set the terms of the conflict whereby he could blame all the trouble on the imperialists and zionists. The Assads, like all dictatorships, need useful idiots to help them peddle the myth that their regime is a bastion of antizionism and anti-imperialism. It's one of the saddest jokes of the 20th century that gangsters were able to hoodwink significant sections of their own people and those abroad into believing that their regimes were legitimate representations of the people's aspiration to self determination and freedom in the face of economic backwardness and colonialism. Yes, some revolutions in the former colonial regions could claim to have achieved this and were able to continue to do this even as the people realised that not all their aspirations had been met. Vietnam, Cuba and even China come to mind. Others, such as those of Saddam Hussein, Ethiopia's Mengistu, Idi Amin, the Kims of Korea and many other tyrants used the rhetoric of anticolonialism to justify misrule. Qadafi was one of these, although the picture is not clear cut, in that Libya did enjoy independence and economic development in the first part of his rule.
The Ba'athists of Syria have long since dropped the pretence of representing the will of the Syrian people. Ba'athism rules by terror and nationalist rhetoric. Its main achievements were stability, some development, independence from imperialism and non-sectarianism. These are not insignificant achievements. The one thing the Ba'ath, like their cousins in Saddam's Iraq, could never tolerate was any challenge to their rule. Their response has always been repression and violence. The Hama incident of 1982 in Syria was the bloodiest in the last half century in this region. It began with hundreds of regime officials killed by the Brotherhood before the crackdown by Hafez, father of Bashar, that raised Hama to the ground. Blood begat blood, then as now. The Ba'ath treat the people like cattle. They feed them and keep them but if they become troublesome, they will crush them mercilessly.
Of course, leftists in the West do not support the ideology of Islamism promoted by their longtime opponents the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither does Washington. GlobalResearch and Michel Chussodovskly have been quick to write off the entire Arab uprising as a neoliberal coup. It's too early to call it that. We have to see what happens now that Egypt's president is elected and can shape policy.
The threat of sectarianism breaking out in Syria was used by Assad from the very beginning of the uprising as a way to ensure loyalty from the Alawite, Christian and other minorities in Syria and bind them close of the regime. But for so-called progressives to support the continuance of a regime that is ready to bomb and destroy all the cities of the country, to wipe out whole villages, to kill thousands in order to maintain themselves? This is bankruptcy, moral and political.
We see an unholy alliance of ancien regime critics of the revolutions, and leftists who cannot bear to see a revolution that does not wave the flag of anti-imperialist secularism, while the children and mothers are slaughtered in the streets and called 'terrorists'. It is not for ideologues of any kind, sitting far away, to dictate the nature of any revolution. The desire for freedom from oppression is universal. One can argue that the militarisation of the uprising by the FSA and their Saudi/Qatari backers has been a disaster. But what is to be done in the face of the regime's guns? This is what many Syrians feel. I pity the Syrians, whose only friends are their fellow Muslims who want to see them free. The West have played this very badly and have played their part in creating another Iraq or Lebanon.
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