Iraq: three kinds of blowback and the threat of war stoked by western meddling

John Rees

"The most consistent element of Western policy has been support for the Free Syrian Army (FSA). This has been diplomatic, strategic, monetary and military, though the arms supply has not included heavy weaponry."
The consistent element is not giving them weapons to fight Assad and ISIS.
"The FSA and their political representatives have been duly supplicatory, repeatedly making pro-American statements, attending the imperial-generated Syrian conferences, in the hope of gaining more aid from the US and its allies."
They asked for weapons to defend themselves.
"The problem with the FSA strategy has been that it undermined their standing inside Syria. The fact that leaders of the FSA often had less standing with Syrians than with the US government undermined their credibility. The fact that they were so cravenly pro-Western further eroded support in Syria where the population, as in many Arab countries, historically contains a wide swathe of anti-colonial sentiment (indeed this is one of the ideological reserves of the Assad regime)."
This strategy was undermined, because the Americans stopped any heavy weaponry getting through, while Assad's supplies of weapons and foreign troops were unabated. Rees has consistently tried to appropriate the anti-imperialist feeling of those who want to fight Assad with the régime's narrative that it is anti-US.
"It was this hollowing out of the FSA, a direct result of Western nomination of ‘acceptable’, ‘moderate’ forces in Syria, which created a vacuum which was filled by various Islamic forces, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS).."
It was the lack of support to moderate forces that left the more extreme to fill the gap, and the very extreme to take advantage of the vacuum.
"The arms supplies from the Saudis to ISIS and others may not have been enough to defeat Assad"
ISIS has made no attempt to attack Assad, let alone defeat him. The Saudi government has not supported ISIS. Even Rees' link to Robert Fisk, who may be reliable these days in his misreporting, talks only of " the Saudi Wahhabis and Kuwaiti oligarchs". The Saudi government have their own reactionary kingdom, they don't want some idiot to mess up raking it in from oil sales by establishing their own caliphate. That's why the Saudis fight al-Qaida, even though many of us might have trouble telling the difference.
"Bombing will kill civilians, and so worsen the detestation of the West and produce more terrorists."
Assad's bombing of civilians has unsurprisingly killed many civilians, and caused millions to flee. This has worsened the detestation of the western left for refusing to support any action against it, and denying revolution is taking place at all.