Spectres of counter-revolution

 "Contrary to the misrepresentations of Assad apologists, the anti-regime forces can’t be reduced to the jihadis. A wide spectrum of political currents is involved in fighting the regime, and suspicion of Western imperialism is widespread in Syria, as elsewhere in the Middle East."

 The one decent line about Syria in the piece. Elsewhere, "Patrick Cockburn, one of the most lucid critics of Western policy in the Middle East: 'Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria,' " sounds a lot like Ernest Mandel's ludicrous scholasticism about World War II, "I would say, at the risk of putting it a bit too strongly, that the Second World War was in reality a combination of five different wars."[http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1976/xx/trots-ww2.htm] This sums up the failure of Callinicos and those like him to see what Syrians see, that the counter-revolutionary threat they most have to worry about is that of Assad's régime and the Russians; it is the Americans failure to help they are concerned about, not the threat they might pose,  

 "Counter-revolution now haunts the Arab world. But it takes diverse and confusing shapes. In Syria, for example, it appears as the regime headed up by Bashar al-Assad and as the United States, which has been threatening military action against it."