Saturday, 7 September 2013

A response to Jon Stewart on Syria


 'If the U.S. doesn’t back the Free Syrian Army and moderate opposition players (who represent the vast majority of Syrian aspirations), Syria will soon become a lost cause: a cake that will be divided between Shia extremists (Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah, Assad militias) on one side and Sunni extremists (al-Qaeda and the like) on the other.'

Syrian Activist Speaks Out Against Airstrikes


 'Hearing people scream for ten hours a day is quite painful.'

 And I thought understatement was an English thing.

 'The answer is a political process and a move to democracy.'

 Doesn't explain how to get there.

Empowering the democratic resistance in Syria



 'The activists who picked up arms became dependent on support in money and arms to be able to continue. Few other than the Assad regime question this narrative. Yet the consequences of this dependence are often overlooked. The sources of funding for the rebels and the strings attached to them have since shaped the landscape of the armed rebellion, not the other way round. What we have in Syria is not an Islamist revolution but a popular uprising that received funding primarily from Islamist sources. Acknowledging this is essential and has far-reaching implications for defining an effective policy in the Syrian conflict.'

Suburban Syrians urge intervention to prevent further bloodshed



 ' "I don't want America to bomb Syria," Lina Sergie Attar says, but she believes a U.S. military strike, while undesirable, may be the only way to prevent further civilian bloodshed.'

06/09/2013 Newsnight



 'Is America isolated over Syria? How are the US public reacting?

 The only voice of support, from Syrian-Americans.

 "Assad is a killer.Killer. And he's killing us." '

 15 minutes in. The right-wing shock jock and the bikers are firmly against intervention.

Syrian opposition welcomes military strike against Syria



 I have my differences with the first answer, but 2 and 3 have something going for them. I note his doesn't actually address the Kurdish question in answer 2.

 Al-Masry: That means the coalition agrees to the Western military strike against the Syrian regime?
 Jarba: Yes, but on the condition to preserve the lives of civilians whether supporters or opponents. This strike will be certain and directed against military sites under the control of the regime. We bless this strike as it will destroy the vehicles which kill the Syrian people mercilessly.

 Al-Masry: In the case of the Syrian opposition succeeded in isolating Bashar al-Assad and ending the rule of the Baath Party, how will you face military wings like al-Nosra Front and Kurds and others?
 Jarba: Their turn is coming after we get rid of the big germ named Bashar al-Assad regime. I imagine that the elimination of the Assad regime would mean getting rid of 75% of those groups, because the regime is using them and we will deal with the rest.

 Al-Masry: How will you deal with these groups later, you will have to negotiate or have armed confrontation?
 Jarba: We will use the soft and harsh methods according to the need. I would like to make it clear that these are not all Syrians. Some of them are Arab and Western. I say to the Arab and Western states who consider themselves true friends of the Syrian people that Syria does not need men but needs weapon and money and a real stand in the face of this murderous regime, which has exceeded all limits against the defenseless people.

Syrian Assad Republic or Syrian Arab Republic?



 'Currently, we are facing a complex situation in Syria because of Iran's support and its allies in the area. Additionally, Russia has been supporting the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Those factors led to the delivery of the revolution to a complex stage and made Syria offer a lot of martyrs.

 Here, I think it is unlikely that the American strike will cause a radical change on the ground due to the factors in question. Up to the publication of this article, more than two hundred thousand were killed in Syria. Therefore, the negotiation between the current regime and opposition parties is not possible.

 Also, there is another problematic issue related to the radical Islamist groups among the opposition fighters which can be a bad omen for what may come after President Bashar al -Assad. Despite of all this, the Syrian Revolution will win the war against Bashar, all radical groups and extremists.'

Friday, 6 September 2013

Syrian Anarchist Challenges the Rebel/Regime Binary View of Resistance


 'If the strikes end up being tougher than what is currently being discussed, for one reason or another, and they do make a significant change on the battlefield, or do significantly weaken the Assad regime, then I think the potential negative effects will be different. I think this will lead to a future Syrians won't have a hand in determining. The US may not like Assad, but they have many times expressed that they believe that regime institutions should remain intact in order to ensure stability in a future Syria. In short, as many have noted, the US wants "Assadism without Assad."

 They want the regime without the figure of Assad, just like what they got in Egypt, when Mubarak stepped down but the "deep state" of the military remained, and just like what happened in Yemen where the US negotiated for the president to step down but for everything to remain largely the same. The problem with this is Syrians chanted, "The People Demand the Downfall of the Regime," not just Assad. There is consensus across the board, from US to Russia to Iran, that no matter what happens in Syria, regime institutions should remain intact. The same institutions that were built by the dictatorship. The same institutions that plundered Syria and provoked the popular discontent that started this uprising. The same institutions that are merely the remnants of French colonialism.

 Everyone in Syria knows that the US's preferred candidates for leadership roles in any future Syria are those Syrians who were part of the regime and then defected: Ba'athist bureaucrats turned neoliberal technocrats turned "defectors." These are the people the US would have rule Syria.'

My ambivalent support for US strikes in Syria



 'Now we have people in the West who were otherwise silent enthusiastically brandishing “Hands off Syria!” placards. Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin says that the United States should “let Allah sort them out,” and online social media have pictures of unidentified U.S. servicemen holding up signs that say “I did not join up to fight with al-Qaeda in a Syrian civil war”. When I show my Syrian friends these pictures they look on with disbelief. We just cannot understand how anybody can be so ignorant.

 This time, I am the one who gets to note the irony that when the uprising started this wealthier segment of Syrian society took the longest to acknowledge that "something was happening." As for the people who from the beginning clamored the most for somebody to notice that they were being butchered in the streets, they are now the most enthusiastic supporters of a U.S. strike, come what may. It is this realization that makes me skeptical of those who oppose strikes. Maybe if we had all spoken up when the killing started, none of this would be necessary. But it is now, and the death toll and refugee count makes what is happening in our country the worst humanitarian crisis in living memory.'

Kafranbel - a message to US congress


 Appeal starts with a quote from Ronald Reagan, which isn't the worst idea when their target is the US congress. Obviously I don't agree with all this, but it makes more sense than the US strikes bringing some greater catastrophe than Assad. And as much as anybody, they deserve the chance to be heard.

A dozen bad reasons for staying out of Syria "It will only make things worse."


 'This is insidious because the truth is no one knows the ultimate effects of any sort of intervention. It gets plausibility from imagining all sorts of terrible but possible outcomes. But if you imagine such outcomes, rationality also commands that you imagine no less probable good outcomes

 Maybe Assad is on the verge of collapse, and his fall will be followed by the establishment of a democratic state, with minimal strife. Maybe there will be strife, but neighboring and Western powers will easily find allies in Syria and contain it. Maybe the "Al Qaeda" Islamists will dissolve because much of their membership simply joined up to fight Assad, and the rest fritter away their strength in infighting. Maybe a successful revolution in Syria will re-kindle the "Arab Spring" and re-invigorate the whole region. Or maybe not, but these are no less plausible outcomes than the doom-and-gloom scenarios, some of which will be examined below.

 It's also worth asking just what is meant by "making things worse". If the US delivers substantial support to the Free Syrian Army, OF COURSE things will get worse, because they will win, and before they win the fighting will intensify. After that it will get much much better, because the fighting will end. As for sectarian warfare, see below, on Islamists.'

Ohio Syrians say they're 'doing what we can' to help



 'For some Syrian-Americans in southwest Ohio, including Traboulsi, Sheatt and Basma Rabbat Akbik, U.S. military intervention is coming too late. Many say the United States should have armed rebel fighters. Still others won't speak out publicly because they fear government retribution against relatives in Syria.'

Syria Brotherhood Leader: US Position on Syria 'Negative'



 "The expected US strike on the Syrian regime is not intended to protect civilians following the Ghouta chemical massacre, but to serve US interests in the region."

It's Still a Revolution, My Friends



 'Try to remember to have some compassion for a Syrian who might be in the vicinity, before you mouth off in the abstract on the issue; we face news every day of our friends and our relatives being killed and imprisoned.'

Thursday, 5 September 2013

Netanyahu: Not true that Israel prefers Assad to rebels



 'PM refutes Times of London report; Israeli politicians shouldn't take sides for fear of diverting the debate towards Israel, says Tzipi Livni.'

Dominoes


 Cameron touches down in St. Petersburg. Is nobody worried that the Russians will blow him out of the sky? Or Obama, or Hollande? No, because it is never going to happen. They aren't going to let a faraway country about which they care little disrupt their trading relationship, let alone kick off a world war.

 We are sometimes invited to believe a much more convoluted version of this fancy, that there will be an inexorable sequence of events that reach the same result. Russia and America, we are told, have been fighting a proxy war in Syria. If the Americans bomb Syria, they will incur the Russians ire, who will give bigger and bigger guns to Assad. This in turn will provoke the Israelis, who again we are told are behind the movement to remove Assad, and their attack on Russian emplacements or deliveries will get them into a war with Russia, and then the US will come in on Israel's side.

 This is never going to happen.



 At the outset of the war with Saddam Hussein over Kuwait, the US was still suffering very much from what was called the Vietnam Syndrome, an inability to project its military power overseas, and I think that's a good thing, especially for the Central American countries frequently suffering US intervention in the 50s any time their leaders got at all leftist.

 As the name suggests, it was the impact of the Vietnam War in ripping apart American society, that made this change. There are two parts to this, the real direct impact, the 58,000 Americans sent home by the Vietnamese in body bags (by contrast the British deaths in Afghanistan stood at 444 this May), and to a lesser extent for many, the couple of million Vietnamese killed and the countries destroyed). Secondly there are the lies and stratagems used to get the public to go along with such slaughter.

 Chief among these when it came to Vietnam was the Domino Theory, that if one country was allowed to fall to communism, then one by one all the others in the region would do so. It was untrue in Vietnam for a number of reasons. There was no domino effect, except insofar as the US went on to mess up other neighbouring countries like Laos and Cambodia in their efforts to stop change in Vietnam. There was no Communist conspiracy to subvert Vietnam, a liberation movement that had based itself on the principles of the American revolution turned to Moscow, because it was the French and the Americans who were destroying their country, not Communists.



 And so for years when the Americans wanted to mess with a country, they had to do so indirectly, funding the Contras and mining Nicaragua's harbours when they took a dislike to the Sandinistas. But as Karl Marx wrote in the German Ideology:

 "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it."

 And so the ideology of imperial control gets every opportunity to re-assert itself. Reagan started small, with invasions like Grenada, where a motley bunch who’d killed the Marxist leader Maurice Bishop were in charge. That the US had been implacably opposed to Bishop, invented the pretext of some supposedly threatened American medical students and invaded a Commonwealth country without even bothering to inform the Queen’s representatives, all that didn’t matter, what mattered was US force could be justified enough to secure public acquiescence



 And so back to Kuwait. We were taken into that war with a mixture of truth and lies. Kuwait really had been invaded, but it was an artificial statelet, designed to keep the oil wealth of the Gulf in the hands of a few Emirs, which the mostly rightless immigrant population had no interest in defending. But because this was a war that most of British capitalism wanted to fight, we heard the first, and not the second. Sometimes the Kuwaitis would spread some outright lies, such as the Iraqi army plucking babies from incubators. But by and large some of the basic facts, that Saddam was a nasty dictator who had invaded another country, could be fitted into a narrative that demanded action, and most people in Britain were prepared to go along with it.

 On the other side, some of the arguments against the war, such as over the nature of Kuwait, didn't really get a hearing. Some of those, such that there would be the Mother of All Battles and Saddam would destroy the world's oil supply proved not to come to pass or be counter-productive; if he's such a madman, then he needs to be dealt with.

 In fact, there was a massacre of Iraqi troops fleeing on the road to Basra, but that didn't affect the general perception that the war was a good thing. In fact as Saddam threatened to massacre opponents in the North and South of Iraq, it became a springboard for the establishment of the Responsibility To Protect doctrine, along with the genocide in Rwanda three years later.



 Now I know there are Syrians who think that R2P is the right model to apply to Syria, and that’s more understandable to me than Westerners who think they are protecting Syrians and the world by playing up the threat of US air strikes. But I think it will always be an opportunity for the US to pick and choose when to care, and in Syria it has been doing its damndest not to care. And that will always be the tendency with the Great Powers while they are exploitative capitalist states, because their foreign policy will always tend towards their own sectional interests. It is not inevitable, popular pressure and political change can work wonders sometimes. But it will never help the party of peace if their arguments aren’t in correspondence with reality, and so will by default encourage the victims of oppression to think that R2P might be their only alternative.

 For two weeks now we’ve had a media circus about what the West might do in the response to the latest chemical attack by Assad’s forces. Syrians have seen this sound and fury signify little a few times already, though the more desperate you get, the more you cling on to any hope. But any discussion of action that might arm Syrians is put on the sidelines, or bundled together with other forms of intervention. And with the media narrative following the general interest of the Western powers in staying out, the ideas that we don’t know who the rebels are, that they are all jihadis, that the Syrian uprising is a sectarian proxy war run from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel; all achieve prominence as descriptions of the situation, and they are all untrue. But that narrative isn’t going to go away and be replaced by an enthusiasm for boots on the ground, the slippery slope hypothesis, because there is a huge majority of opinion, both in the public and the establishment, against it. That isn’t suddenly going to turn around when limited strikes fail to achieve much.

 So there is no dynamic, no secret plot for regime change in Syria, which will magically take us from some token air strikes to a full-blown invasion. I defy anyone to show that there is. If we are told that there are always unforeseen consequences to military intervention, I’d say first that I don’t think air strikes are any more than a diversion, so I’d like a little more precision about what we are being asked to consider the consequences. But that given that Assad’s war on Syrians has caused 100,000+ dead, and 2 million+ refugees, and the killing and the exodus has jumped a level each time the regime has got desperate, the real killing rape and torture seems much more important than a bunch of hypotheticals, especially when those hypotheticals are based on a lazy assumption that the Iraq War is bound to be replicated. I think that because it can be shown that the American interest has been to stay out of Syria (government and business interest), that the pressure can be deduced to be in the direction of keeping them out, not pulling them in.



 And so we come to the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, which if anybody doesn’t know it, spoiler alert, when the wolf finally does come nobody believes the boy. If the Left claims that thousands will die in carpet bombing, that depleted uranium will be scattered across Syria, that American soldiers will be dying to help al-Qaida, and none of these things turn out to be true, it will discredit the Left, and because the Left does not control the media, that impression will stay for a long time, and when the US does want to intervene, the pendulum will have swung back to it being easy again for the US to do what it wants. And if the situation in Syria takes another step towards Hell, then there is a greater likelihood that American, French or British power will be brought to bear on Syria, rather than the empowerment of those rebels that we just don’t know about from what we’ve read in the press.

 It is a bit like the debate on the EU. In Greece at the moment, where the EU imposed bailout conditions are wrecking the economy and Greek lives, saying Stuff The EU may be a political necessity. But in the UK it is an irrelevant distraction to say stuff Europe, a slogan only suitable for those who want to keep immigrants out or restrict human rights. Often it is important to oppose American missile strikes, but right now it is Russian weapons, Iranian and Lebanese troops,that are killing Syrians. Why don’t the Americans threaten sanctions on Russia if they don’t stop supplying Assad with weapons? Why don’t the Americans drop the sanctions on Iran if they pull out of Syria? Those might be progressive demands.



 So hopefully this hoopla will be out of the way soon. The Americans will have restored the credibility of the international system by flattening a bit of metal with along with as few people as they can, most people can go back to what they’re doing, and Syrians can get on with trying to turn the tide in their favour. If the Americans were to accidentally kill Assad, something I am sure they are going to do their level best to avoid, then the personalised nature of the Assad monarchy might mean the revolution is successful in weeks rather than months. Which would mean a lot of happy and considerably more pro-American Syrians. But it would also mean the legitimation of the American killing of leaders it doesn’t like, and Kim Jong-Un might seriously finger his nuclear button (as it is , the lack of military response has meant that North Korea quiets down again each time there is an incident, because they are not really interested in fighting a war they would lose unless there is no alternative). Which is one reason I expect the Americans to stay to precision guidance, and probably stay away from central Damascus (the régime’s parade of kids on the hillside on last night’s TV are pretty safe too. I would have thought their PR might have advised against the Nazi-style salutes). 


 But if Assad finds he still can’t take all of Homs in a month’s time and still falling apart on other fronts, and decides to kill 50,000 people with gas there; the pressure for Western invasion will go critical. If the Left commentary on air strikes has been to see them as the main problem, it will be a bystander to the debate. If it correctly identifies the regime as the problem, and arming the FSA as the solution, it has a better chance at being part of the answer to the Syrian crisis and the instability that comes with it, posing a better solution than imperial imposition (which both a hawks’ invasion and the peaceniks deal with the Russians would be), and not just part of the furniture.

 On the bright side, we were told that there was no way Assad could be overthrown, and no way he would use chemical weapons because he wasn’t close to being overthrown. Clearly part of the latter assertion is false. Maybe he knows that the end is close.


Cash-Strapped Syrians Swap Chicken for Food Powder


 SD: How is the Assad regime surviving, economically?

 HA: At the beginning of the crisis, we heard some statements about the reserves in the central bank, but now no one is talking about it. The government has managed to export Syrian oil; it’s generally banned to export it. And then they have support from Russia and Iran. It’s not a secret that they have these loans. So I suppose that they can live for a long time, but for regular people suffering, it’s very hard to live. Even if the government survives and manages its expenses, at the end of the day, if the people cannot live and survive with that kind of daily financial pressure, this will be a disaster for the government.

The Student-Turned-Fighter in Douma


 'I am against a U.S. strike on Syria. What we need from America and other Western countries instead is to pressure the regime’s allies, like Russia and Iran. If you cut off the regime’s financial and logistical support, the regime will fall straight away.

 The goals of Liwa al-Islam are the same [as those of the FSA]: to remove the current government and create an alternative that would be formed by the people who have been working for it most effectively on the ground. Most of these people identify as Muslims.

 The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a shadowy organization that is not making its objectives clear. Many members of Jabhat al-Nusra, which was originally formed from less extreme groups, broke away to join ISIS, which fights even other rebel groups that differ from its own thinking. It has gathered fighters from other groups, especially foreigners. It is beginning to make some errors that cannot be tolerated.

 But the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria does not exist on the ground as it does in the media. They are concentrated in the north, where you often have foreign fighters entering from outside Syria. In Damascus and its suburbs where I am, they are practically nonexistent.'

Rush Limbaugh suspects Obama conspired with al-Qaeda to frame Bashar al-Assad



 Rush Limbaugh ain't so sure.

 ' “We could be looking at a frame job. Pretty big setup,” says Limbaugh.

 “The rebels nerve gassed themselves in order to engineer a response that takes out Bashar, putting the US on the side of Al-Qaeda,” alleges Mr. Bodansky.'

“Cleanse and Liberate!”

Syrian Revolution Digest

 From May. You can see through the faecal stuff now, or you can wait for all the reports in the world, but the truth will be the same. All fifteen areas attacked this time were occupied by rebels, what are the chances?

 'And yet, miraculously, it’s the rebels and their supporters who are being killed and displaced! Cut the bullshit!, pardon my Italian! Had rebels had access to Sarin gas and had they had the necessary knowhow to deploy it, they might have been tempted to use it during their months-long siege of various military airports that keep raining death and havoc on their communities. The fact that they haven’t reflects either a principled stand on their part, lack of access, or both, but in all cases, it makes clear that the Sarin call in Syria has been heeded by the Assadists only, not the rebels. QED.'

* n¹⁵/1, where n is the proportion of neighbourhoods held by the opposition, might be a first approximation.

Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West



 'But, they said, one of his tactics has been to promise to his fighters what he calls “the extermination” of Alawites — the minority Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs, and which Mr. Issa blames for Syria’s suffering.

 This sentiment may have driven Mr. Issa’s decision to execute his prisoners in the video, his former aide said. The soldiers had been captured when Mr. Issa’s fighters overran a government checkpoint north of Idlib in March.

 Their cellphones, the former aide said, had videos of soldiers raping Syrian civilians and looting.

 Mr. Issa declared them all criminals, he said, and a revolutionary trial was held. They were found guilty.'



 I'd suggest that the evidence is that he had them executed because they had raped civilians, and that his 300 fighters are in any case not representative of 80-85% of the rebels, and that the only reason why groups like his thrive at all is because the majority have had no funding from the West.

Gentlemen, You Can't Fight In Here!

My Photo

 'It's fairly incredible to me that the press seem to be able to find endless numbers of Syrians who want us to bomb their countrymen on their behalf, but almost none who actually want to be bombed themselves.

 You'd think there would be quite a lot of Syrians who'd state publicly that they'd rather not be fragged into space dust by the force of our humanitarianism, but I guess they must be too busy to give interviews.'

 I'd guess it's because nobody is going to frag them into space dust. Idiot.

The problem with Obama’s limited response



 'The proper response now, according to Georgetown University professor Daniel Byman, is greater engagement with the Syrian rebels. Limited air strikes, he says, risk creating the impression that the United States is committed to the rebel side—raising unfulfilled hopes among them, and allowing Assad, if he prevails, to claim victory against America as well.'

Louis N. Proyect: "My slogan: a MANPAD for every FSA fighter. Make Syria a graveyard for Bashar's air force. (We used this slogan in the 60s, calling on the USSR to supply adequate anti-aircraft weaponry to North Vietnam.)"

Wednesday, 4 September 2013

"There Is No Time for Hesitation": Reflections From the Free Syrian Army

Wendy Pearlman Headshot

 'In the beginning, there were no Islamist groups in the Syrian revolution. But the situation dragged on and on. There was not enough support for the Free Syrian Army. We got weaker and external parties entered the scene. Jabhat al-Nusra started organizing, and so did the Islamic State of Iraq and Bilad as-Sham. Now these groups are stronger than we are. If we had received aid, we could have taken control in this country. Now it will be very difficult.

 Sometimes America promises to give us arms. Sometimes it says that there are terrorists among us and we have to eliminate them first. America is complicating problems for us more than solving them. It is as if wants to give Russia the freedom to send Assad all the weapons that it wants.

 Then people started to talk about the Geneva Conference. But we know the Syrian regime will enter dialogue only with the aim of wasting time. On the ground nothing will change. And how are we supposed to negotiate with a murderer? The people cannot accept a government that uses arms against them.

 America and Europe will regret its policies. One day they will realize that they lost by not supporting the Syrian people.'

Former Syria defense minister defects in break with Assad



 'When he was chief of staff he did not like the Assad family's readiness to use violence as a political tool and when demonstrators started being killed he could no longer remain a "yes man", the defector said.

 His defection will rattle the Alawite community because it will be seen as another man jumping off a sinking boat, indicating the coming fall of the regime.'

Assad Unable To Convince Putin That He Used Chemical Weapons On Syrians



 ' “Regardless of how many times he says ‘I, Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, am the one who did this’ while showing me videos of people dying of Sarin poisoning,” said Putin, adding that he remains extremely skeptical despite phone conversations in which a reportedly frustrated Assad repeats, over and over again, the step-by-step account of how he authorized the use of nerve gas to kill over 1,400 people. “We need to know all the facts before we act. I don’t care how many autopsy reports, laboratory tests, or pictures of Assad pressing a button labeled ‘chemical weapons launcher’ he sends me—before we have conclusive proof that he and not the opposition forces did this, we cannot say that Syria is in violation of international law.” '

Hesitant Obama, lucky Assad



 'What many anti-Assad countries have failed to get is that those radical groups are not in fact the embodiment of the Syrian opposition which, as accredited by the Syrian people, has been represented by the Free Syrian Army and its political arm, the Syrian National Coalition.

 Actually what gave predominance to such radical groups on the Syrian scene is the international community’s indecisiveness. Regardless of such an obscure situation, the entire world will suffer a lot from its inaction on Syria if action is a problem.'

Jon Stewart Slams Syrian Red Line



 'You can't use chemicals to kill your own people, you have to do it organically. America and the world want to make sure that Assad only uses locally-sourced long-range lead ordnance.'

 I think he's slightly mistaken to ask who would control the chemical weapons in a failed Syria, Syria is a lot more failed with Assad in charge than it would be if the revolution succeeds. He makes a point at the end that America is using a limited strike to prove its dick isn't small. Yes, but it will be the continuing instability promoted by a dying régime that would make Western intervention more likely if the revolution remains unsupported, rather than some inexorable leap when the limited strikes fail to do more than distract us from the possibility of useful action.

Noam Chomsky Weighs In On Syria Strike



 Sam Charles Hamad:

 'Chomsky recently traveled to the region to learn more about the Syria crisis, and his comments there led some to believe he was open to military intervention if negotiations failed to produce peace. "I believe you should choose the negotiating track first, and should you fail, then moving to the second option" -- backing the rebels -- "becomes more acceptable," he said.

 Of course, the "negotiations" are a fantasy, a mere carrot dangled by the Russians, while Assad wields the blood-stained stick, but at least Chomsky sees that the status quo is unsustainable for the Syrian rebels and the Syrian people. The rebels need weapons. Weapons do not grow on trees.'

We won't stand by. Obama's war can be stopped



 'More military support for the rebels is also in the frame.'

 Apart from more normally implying that there has been some already, supporting the rebels against Assad is a bad thing? Wow. Nice of Chris Nineham to state it as clearly as he does.

Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Failures in Iraq don't provide an excuse for inaction in Syria



 'Syria today is not Iraq 10 years ago. Most vitally, it is a nation in the midst of a revolution. Ordinary Syrians did not ask for this war, but the Assad regime launched it anyway. For two and a half years, Syrians have been fighting to overthrow him. For two and a half years, they have staved off one of the region’s toughest militaries. Syrians are not asking anyone else to fight this war, they are merely asking for some help. Syria is a burning building and its people are calling for help.

 Moreover, there is no ambiguity over Bashar Al Assad’s actions, as there was with Saddam. The only ambiguity is why he unambiguously used chemical weapons. But on everything else, there is no mystery: Mr Al Assad has thrown everything he has at his people, torturing, raping, murdering, and destroying his way through Syria. What ambiguity is there? In Iraq, we didn’t know what Saddam might do. Here we know exactly what Mr Al Assad is doing and we are leaving him to finish the job.

 And that’s why the hand-wringing over Syria is so astonishing. Because, while Iraq was bubbling under the surface, Syria is openly in flames. This is not the case of fighting a war of choice for undefined ends. This is a humanitarian intervention to end the massacre of civilians.'

Teenagers start filling ranks as rebel losses soar



 So has Assad's army been having any troubles recently?

 'Conscription in the Syrian Army is compulsory for all males once they reach the age of 18. But at the camp, rebel officials say theirs remains an all-volunteer force and that prospective recruits are carefully vetted.'

 John Kerry just told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "defections have gone up" from Assad's army.

Syria needs liberal capitalism, not missiles



 I think this might describe all existing states to one extent or another.

 'By contrast, the second group of countries, which include Syria, Egypt and all of the other failed states globally, have been saddled with what Acemoglu and Robinson describe as extractive political institutions. These are deliberately designed to grab the incomes and wealth generated by the economy for the benefit a small elite and are buttressed by equally extractive political institutions which have handed all the power to these same few, with limited or no checks and balances and no rule of law. In these countries, the best and often only way to get rich is to have good connections and to exploit the power of the state to crush competitors.'

UNHCR: Syria 'biggest displacement crisis of all time'



 Kevin Maguire, the associate editor of the Mirror, said on the Sky Press preview that although he was against any form of intervention (except possibly to exert diplomatic pressure on the Russians to get Assad to negotiate, the fantasist), something should be done about the refugee crisis.

 If a water main bursts, I don't think clearing up the water is a substitute for fixing the leak. That doesn't mean that I think that dropping cruise missiles on the main is a good idea. I don't think the failure of cruise missiles to fix the leak would encourage the belief that forming a coalition of the willing to invade the water main was the logical next step. The reason why there are 2 million refugees? Because they feared, with very good reason, that Assad's forces would bomb them if they stayed. If the refugee crisis gets worse, there may be unwanted foreign intervention to stop neighbouring countries collapsing. I think arming the rebels is a better idea than waiting for the crisis to get so bad that foreign intervention becomes inevitable. More foreign intervention, of course, in addition to that of the Russians, Iranians and Lebanese that have helped to create this crisis. I watched a little of Russia Today, to the point where the presenter said that she wished the best for Syria.

I Don't Want To Know

 In the first couple of months of 2009, I was a gardener in London Fields. We'd get in quite early, but then sit around in the canteen for half an hour before going out to do any work. Often we'd discuss whatever was in the Metro freesheet, which at the time was all about Israel bombing the shit out of Gaza. Everyone was appalled, especially Tony, the Jamaican who otherwise spent his time talking about how he'd have to beat up any transsexual who successfully chatted him up. Marxists call this sort of thing contradictory consciousness.

 Anyway, that's the war that crystalised my view about the proper application of the word "terror". There was a teenager on the news one day who'd managed to get out, and was explaining that anyone who could get out was doing so, because it was constantly terrifying.



 By contrast the fears of the Israelis that they would have rockets from Gaza causing the sky to fall on their heads were much more irrational. Not wholly so, but if I was asked what needed to be stopped in that war, it would be the Israeli assault. And I wouldn't think that the Israelis and their American backers were so powerful that some other solution must be found to end the war. And that it might be understandable that the Israeli public has a fear of Hamas, it doesn't mean that proposing solutions to the conflict based on that fear were going to help. Many Israelis would say that they pulled out of Gaza, and look were it got them, so the best thing to do was to squeeze Gaza until Hamas "stopped the violence". I tend to think the opposite, that even before Hamas took over Gaza they'd bombed the crap out of it, bombing the airport at the first opportunity, and so making it more likely that Hamas would come into the ascendency as Gazans felt they had nothing to lose by full spectrum resistance.

 I think there is a parallel with Syria. When we see a laundry list presented of bad things America has done elsewhere, and no attempt is made to say how likely they are to be employed in Syria, I don't think a rational argument is being presented. When we're told that the US policy cannot be altered, or that the Russians are all-powerful, I think the evidence is all to the contrary. I think I've put forward a fairly clear case for why fear of intervention in Syria is an irrational fear, because none of the Western powers wants to get involved, as shown by their behaviour over the last 2½ years. As somebody pointed out on al-Jazeera last week, if the Americans wanted to invade, they had the excuse of the failure of the Annan mission, the failure of the Arab League mission, previous chemical attacks, the list goes on. And so the debate about intervention is largely a distraction from any real solution, which would involve somebody arming the revolution.



 So if somebody says, "but missile strikes are bad", my first impulse is to ask them to go back and re-read what I've written, because I haven't argued that they are good. If they say "the most important thing right now is to stop missile strikes", I want to know what exactly the problem is supposed to be, because the actual problem in Syria seems to be something quite different, and given the death and destruction wrought by Assad's forces, I think it is incumbent on those claiming that something else would be worse to make their case.

 I'm not that concerned if people don't agree. I tend to believe in a mix of free will and hard determinism, that people can make their own choices, but they'd make the same ones if history is re-run. I'm more concerned with being right than convincing other people that I am. So if anybody feels I adopt a hectoring tone in response to criticisms, it isn't intentional. Like many Syrians, I can get tired having to point out the difference between the régime and the revolutionaries trying to overthrow it. Which is a pity, as when people are most isolated, the more they need to patiently explain.

Dick Gregory: On The Syria Vote



 Thanks to Andy Wilson for drawing my attention to my piece going up on the ISN website.

[Note 18/2/25, the piece was taken down again after an intervention of the leader of the ISN, Richard Seymour]

Recycled Lies: Critique of the Kucinich letter on Syria



 'According to the official "Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013" released on 30 August 2013, they overheard Syrian military officials planning the attack three days before it happened:



 "We have intelligence that leads us to assess that Syrian chemical weapons personnel – including personnel assessed to be associated with the SSRC – were preparing chemical munitions prior to the attack. In the three days prior to the attack, we collected streams of human, signals and geospatial intelligence that reveal regime activities that we assess were associated with preparations for a chemical weapons attack.

 Syrian chemical weapons personnel were operating in the Damascus suburb of ‘Adra from Sunday, August 18 until early in the morning on Wednesday, August 21 near an area that the regime uses to mix chemical weapons, including sarin. On August 21, a Syrian regime element prepared for a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus area, including through the utilization of gas masks. Our intelligence sources in the Damascus area did not detect any indications in the days prior to the attack that opposition affiliates were planning to use chemical weapons."



 The real scandal here is that they knew about the attack ahead of time and they didn't sound a warning. They didn't go to the UN, they didn't publicly call out the Assad regime and they didn't alert the people in Damascus. They us let it happen so now we can play this blame game less 1400 souls.'

Russia Running Out of Cards on Syria



 They're not going to go all in on Syria.

 "Everything Russia wanted to ship to Syria, it has," said Ruslan Pukhov, director of CAST, a Moscow military-analysis center. "We can't do anything more."

In Syria debate, little mention of rebels



 “Syrians were starting to put their faith in American help, but it hasn’t come,” he said. “That encourages Syrians to believe that radicals like al-Qaeda are the only ones seriously willing to make sacrifices help them.”

U.S. Still Hasn't Armed Syrian Rebels



 'The Obama administration doesn't want to tip the balance in favor of the opposition for fear the outcome may be even worse for U.S. interests than the current stalemate.'

Robin Yassin-Kassab:

 'Every time you read the phrase "rebels/jihadists armed and funded by the West", remember you're reading a lie.'

 Kevin Maguire was claiming last night that David Cameron was trying to promote régime change when the arms embargo was lifted. And yet there were no arms to the rebels, just some binoculars. We're not being dragged into war on a lie, the lie is that we're being dragged into war.

Sunday, 1 September 2013

Regarding a potential military intervention in Syria



 'As such, we cannot rejoice in the imminent strike against the regime, though we understand the rationale underpinning the sentiment. In the motivation for this strike, we do not discern the pursuit of justice; nor a display of human solidarity; nor standing by the side of those who have revolted against a brutal, tyrannical regime; nor the West’s delayed sense of responsibility for the destruction of our country beyond any possible repair in the foreseeable future. The powers that be are resorting to the use of force against our local thug for their sakes and not ours. We are not saddened, but we are not happy, either...

 In short, a good strike is one that disarms the Syrian regime and deter its ability to kill Syrians and destroy their society, and the bad strike is one that saves the status of Western powers but does not impair the regime’s ability to kill and destroy.'

From The Onion



The Case For And Against Intervening In Syria

FOR:
  • It’s the right thing to do, maybe
  • Let American people finally sleep at night after years of being tormented by thoughts of innocent Syrians dying
  • Will put thousands of honest, diligent American Tomahawk cruise missiles back to work

    AGAINST:

  • Slight, almost infinitesimal chance intervention might be a completely ineffectual act that even further destabilizes the region, touching off massive anti-American sentiment while allowing jihadist radicals to take power
  • Painful memories of intervening in Rwandan genocide
  • It’s hard
  • Bashar al-Assad just had a baby. A baby!
  • Bush invaded a foreign country. If Obama invades a foreign country, he will be like Bush. It is not good to be like Bush.
  • If we ever want to patch things up with Assad, this won’t exactly make that conversation a cake walk
  • Situation might work itself out

All Or Nothing


Patrick Cockburn has a rather stupid piece under this title in the Independent.* He doesn't even address the issue of arming the rebels, just says that if a Western intervention were co-ordinated with the rebels it would incite the Russian and Iranians to fight harder. The paragraph where he mentions the struggle against Assad pretends it swiftly ceased to exist, replaced by a sectarian war against Alawites. It is a multiple distortion of the reality.
*[http://www.independent.co.uk/…/in-syria-its-a-case-of-all-o…]

Suppose They Give A War And No-one Comes?


 It has been a point made by the anti-Zionist movement for the last 60 years, that the Palestinians should not be made to suffer because of the Holocaust Jews suffered in Europe. I don't think the Syrians now rising against Bashar al-Assad are responsible for us being dragged into a war in Iraq.

 It wasn't obvious from the beginning that the WMD stories in Iraq were a complete pack of lies. For me it came at Colin Powell's UN presentation, where I had a hard time believing that he would bother to put forward such an obviously rubbish case.

 What was obvious from the beginning was that it was all about régime change, that Bush was determined to invade Iraq. So however long it took to take off, especially when what was putting it off was the assembling of hundreds of thousands of troops in the Gulf, it was going to be a massive military intervention, which even if it had had any justification, was going to have horrendous consequences.

 Ann Leslie was just saying on Sunday Morning Live (she's a Daily Mail journalist opposed to intervention in Syria) that she thought that WWII was a just war, but with WWI she is not so sure. I think that both might be best described as imperialist wars, but that while there was no real difference between the King of England and the German Kaiser, it is to retreat from reality to say that Hitler and the Nazis were no different from any other politicians.

 So I think we should take a very different attitude to Syria than we did to Iraq. Then the entire reality was about large imperial states using military force, whether that was a bad thing, which I think it was, and how they could be stopped. What has been going on in Syria is a revolution, and if you want a positive outcome, empowering the revolutionaries is the way to go.


 The policy of the "international community" (a phrase Noam Chomsky points out somewhere usually means the US and its allies, sometimes just means the Pentagon) for the last two years has been to Do Nothing, and it has been a disaster. The weakness of the FSA has encouraged the growth of radical Islamism (which to the extent they fight against Assad isn't the worst thing), has enabled Assad to carry out massacre after massacre. The torturing of Sunni opponents to make them cry out "There is no God but Bashar" has been just one way that the régime has encouraged a sectarian divide in Syria and throughout the region, and each time Assad gets a bit more desperate, as he will inevitably in a country that will never let him govern again, the massacres get worse. "Those who make a revolution half-way dig their own graves" said St.Just during the French revolution, those who insist that what is needed is a political solution through the UN with the Russians on board dig the graves of others.

 The proposal to drop a few bombs to indicate that you are a very naughty boy if you use chemical weapons are largely just a distraction from any rational debate about what can be done to help Syria. To focus on stopping it, to say it is far worse than the policy of Doing Nothing that has left Assad in charge, has strengthened the Islamists, has increased sectarian divisions, and made Syria more and more something something will have to have something done about, to the point where if no intervention is done that empowers the Syrian people, eventually one will take place that looks a lot more like Iraq.

 When the question of EU sanctions came up, probably some time last year, I remember asking Robin Yassin-Kassab if he thought they were a good idea, as there was a long record of the misuse of sanctions, such as at the moment against Iran. He replied something like that the state officials need to be stopped, and there didn't seem any other way of doing it. In the absence of any prospect that the labour movement in Europe would propose to bring about such sanctions, I thought fair enough, I don't think this is necessarily the way to go, but as it turned out, it didn't seem to be the worst thing.

 For a long time I held the position that much of the far left has finally got around to adopting, that I was against Western intervention, but for the victory of the rebels over Assad. Though even then I understood that you have to make the latter clear before it is worth saying the former. A lesson I think much of the far left has failed to learn. Have they talked to a single Syrian? The Syrian revolutionary left also says Neither Riyadh Nor Tehran, but they really don't have anything to prove.


 What is intervention? That is one of the problems with the debate. With the simplification that inevitably comes with public debate, the question is often posed as a straight yes/no. But my point is two-fold, intervention that aids the rebels is the only way to stop the spiral into a sectarian proxy war which is more likely to drag in an unwanted boots on the ground imperial intervention the longer it is allowed to fester (because that's the way the Do Nothing policy of the last two years has altered the picture). And the current 'threat' of limited bombing to deter chemical weapons use is largely a distraction, it isn't going to kill civilians the way Assad does, it isn't going to involve dropping chemical weapons the way Assad has multiple times, and so to protest about the former while ignoring the latter is utterly disproportionate. The message to Syrians is that they don't matter.

 When Obama was announcing that he will take some action on Syria, I saw someone making fun of the fact that he was flanked by the leaders of Latvia and Estonia. Nobody in the West gave much of a shit about the oppression of the Baltic states by the Russians, and so it is no surprise that they have been bastions of pro-US support ever since they achieved national independence. The situation of Syria is a little more complicated, as it is hard to reconcile the position on Israel of the US and the majority of Syrians, but I think the abandonment by the left of the principle of internationalism when it comes to Syrians means that however late US support comes, it would earn them gratitude in Syria for a generation, because others turned their backs.

 A Syrian has just told the BBC in Beirut, "I'm a Syrian revolutionary, what we need is arms not bombs." Many on the left will see that and think that's exactly what they are saying. But if you don't make it clear about the arms, many Syrians would be as happy to see the bombs drop on you. Think about it.