Who’s running Syria?

 'Iran is said to have trained thousands of Syrian troops and paramilitary recruits, but there is always a sectarian overtone to its efforts. The Iranians recruit pro-regime militia from Syria’s Shiite community, telling them it is a part of their duty to defend Shiite sacred sites.

 But Iran’s biggest contribution to the war has perhaps been in enlisting Lebanon’s Hezbollah in the defence of the regime. Following orders from Iran, Hezbollah has dispatched thousands of battle-hardened fighters to confront and punish the regime’s opponents. Both Hezbollah and Iran have said that without this move the Damascus regime would have fallen.

 The Iranian mindset is bonded to the Al-Assad regime not with doctrinal ties, but with deep-seated interests. The deeper the alliance between the Iranian and Syrian regimes, the more polarised the region becomes between Sunnis and Shiites.'

ISIS kills dozens of Syrian rebels after seizing two towns near Aleppo

 'ISIS, which has massacred the Yazidi community in Iraq, has killed members of other opposition groups in Syria, who were mainly members of the moderate Free Syrian Army.'

 AliTahmizian: "You know it's bad in the region when mass executions by ISIS in Deir Ezzor don't even make the news."

Omar Offendum #SYRIA

Notes from the Dark

 'With bombs exploding and under sniper fire, we trace the lives of ordinary people in war-torn Syria.'

 The Islamic State is advancing towards Aleppo, where the revolution is still dominant, not Damascus, where Assad still rules. It is taking opposition towns and villages along the way, because the Syrian people lack the means to defend themselves. When anyone says that a military struggle against Assad was a bad idea, you have to remember that it was the choice of Assad, not of the people he's killed. And the same for ISIS.

Shameless Cooke knifes Syrian people’s resistance to Assad/ISIS fascism

 Michael Karadjis:

 'Despite occasional rhetoric, the US and western powers have “completely ignored” the genocide that the Assad regime has been imposing on Syria the last 3 years, has “allowed” it all to happen, as a regime levelled every city in the country, turned the country into a giant moonscape, killed upwards of 100,000 people, turned 9 million people into refugees, gassed hundreds of sleeping children with chemical weapons, barrel-bombed Aleppo into oblivion, turned Homs into Hiroshima, tortured tens of thousands to death. None of this was worth a single air strike, evidence that Obama and his ruling class have completely ignored this situation and allowed it to happen.

 Anyone who actually knows anything about Syria knows that the Free Syrian Army, a variety of moderate Islamist militias, the Islamic Front and even Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian al-Qaida, have been at war with ISIS for at least a year. No supporters of the Syrian revolution view ISIS as having anything to do with their uprising against Assad’s tyranny; all of them regard ISIS as the other enemy alongside the regime.

 The Assad regime begins slaughtering peaceful protestors en-masse in March 2011, for months and months until they finally take up arms, then by late 2011-early 2012 Assad is already destroying Homs with massive quantities of sophisticated weaponry and by mid-2012 the regime is basically using its air force, long-range missiles, barrel-bombs etc on a daily basis, and after 3.5 years Obama hasn’t launched a sausage at the regime.

 The US never sent any arms to the secular FSA, or the moderate Islamists, or Islamic Front, or Jabhat al-Nusra, or ISIS. The only way we can say the US encouraged ISIS was precisely by not arming the FSA, because ISIS could get plenty of money and arms across the Iraq border anyway, so in comparison with the FSA, which mainly relied on weapons captured or made in back-yards, ISIS was much better armed.

 The US, like Cooke and many other leftists, are quite happy to watch the regime of Bashar Assad slaughter Syrians for years.'

Why arming Syria's rebels wouldn't have stopped ISIS

 'An insightful essay by George Washington University's Marc Lynch explains why.'

 You follow this down the rabbit hole, and you get to the claim that even John McCain thinks arming the rebels wouldn't work.

 'There’s no way to know for sure what would have happened had the United States offered more support to Syrian rebels in the summer of 2012, of course. But there are pretty strong reasons for doubting that it would have been decisive. Even Sen. John McCain was pretty clear about this at the time, arguing that arming the rebels “alone will not be decisive” and that providing weapons in the absence of safe areas protected by U.S. airpower “may even just prolong [the conflict].” '

 And then you read what John McCain says, and he thinks arming the rebels will do tremendous amount of good, it might not beat Assad completely, but still it's all good. And the implication that American machinations are more important than the actual war Assad is fighting does not really qualify as insight either.

 'First, the fact that the opposition in Syria is doing better militarily thanks to external support seems to validate what many of us have been arguing for months – that opposition forces have enough organization to be supportable, and that our support can help them to further improve their organization and command and control. This is an argument for doing more, not less, to aid rebel fighters in Syria.

 Second, while it is good that some foreign military assistance now seems to be reaching the opposition in Syria, this alone will not be decisive. It will not be sufficient to end the conflict faster. It may even just prolong it. Nearly every Syrian I speak with tells me the same thing: The longer this conflict drags on, the more radicalized it becomes, and the more it turns into a sectarian civil war with an escalating spiral of violence that Syrians alone cannot stop.

 Finally, the Syrian opposition needs to know that the United States stands with them, and that we are willing to take risks to support them when they need it most. Our current inaction only denies us the opportunity to have influence with the forces in Syria who will one day inherit the country. And we are ceding that influence to foreign states that may not always share our interests and our values – or worse, to extremist groups that are hostile to us. Our lack of involvement in Syria is not preventing the militarization of the conflict, or lessening the risk of sectarian violence, or countering the appeal of extremist groups. All of these events are just happening without us – and without our ability to influence them.'
[https://web.archive.org/web/20140815022535/http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/speeches?ID=0090a3b8-a9d9-5ca5-382b-bd77b044b049]

Critical take on ISIS from within Syrian revolution

 Mohammed Mohsen: 

 'This is important, and touches upon what it means to isolate Syrians fighting both against Assadists and ISIS in these critical times.'

On the Road With the Refugees Walking to Europe

 'Murat fled from Syria with his parents, wife and daughter in August 2012, when Bashar al-Assad’s army started dropping barrel bombs around their home in the southern suburbs of Damascus. Murat knew that even if they survived, he would be forced to join the army and might never see his family again.'

The Rebels Are Gaining Ground in Syria

 Kenan Rahmani:

 'Having just returned from a visit to Idlib and northern Hama, I can 100% confirm what Amb. Ford is saying here. The moderate rebels are far from being "finished."

 The rebels in Idlib are gaining strength and becoming more organized. They have practically exterminated ISIS in Idlib, although sleeper cells still exist. And they are even sending fighters to Aleppo to help on that front. Meanwhile they are making steady gains against Assad and Hezbollah forces.'

On Rob Prince's hostility towards intervention in Syria

 'It would be helpful if you could direct me to a well researched piece similar to what I have written in Man behind the Curtain for al-Qaeda in Syria is Assad that lays out the evidence of SA and Qatar support for ISIS or al Nusra. No doubt there are a few rich jihad supporters in their populist that contribute to al Qaeda but I do doubt that such support comes through official channels given al Qaeda's avowed purpose of bringing down the Kingdom. Support for the revolution is necessary for them to maintain bourgeois leadership in the Arab nation and it is understood that they have contributed significantly to brigades in the FSA and IF and have shown considerable independence from the US in doing this.'

 I probably shouldn't waste any more time with people who tell us that "serious newspapers" say that Qatar backs ISIS. Reminds me of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where Dr. Jones is told that top people are working on the Ark. I tried googling the proposition, there's a report in the Mirror and elsewhere that ISIS have said they'll blow up the 2022 world cup if it's in Qatar, some stories saying that private donors in Gulf states back ISIS, and the full allegation from Lyndon Larouche and Press TV.

Guy in “ISIS photo” can’t stand ISIS

 Mouaz Moustafa:

 'It's so upsetting to keep seeing this photo among other photos calling me and the guys in the picture ISIS.

1-ISIS killed some of those in the picture.

2-I wear a kuffyiah because I'm Palestinian and take it with me everywhere.

3-ISIS killed two of my staff a 24 yr old and a 29 yr old because they work with me and my organization they were both Sunni Arabs one spoke 5 languages, ISIS called them as they consider me apostates. Those in the picture are Free Syria Army from a battalion called northern storm extreme enemies of ISIS.

4- please be informed before sharing complete BS.'

New fault lines in the Middle East

 You suspect that someone is going to talk a load of shit when their first paragraph quotes Patrick Cockburn. And then they confirm it.

 Andy Cunningham:

 'Not only did the Civil War give ISIS an opportunity to develop new military tactics, its involvement in fighting Assad has given it a steady stream of recruits from around the world.'

 And then you have an OMG does this fool really not comprehend how offensive these lies are to Syrians at the blunt end of genocide? I haven't read any further yet, and may not bother. Anindya Bhattacharyya, is this supposed to be rs21 showing support for the Syrian revolution? Because it makes me puke.

 'These developments were also encouraged by countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar that were arming and supplying ISIS until very recently.'

 Adding in Qatar shows quite how much this is not just objective apologetics for Assad, but the full pro-Damascus scumbaggery.

Obama is an unreliable ally

 Via "Obama Told Lawmakers Criticism of His Syria Policy is 'Horseshit' "*. I'm still glad that he was elected. It was astonishing that America elected a black man as president in my lifetime. I've got used to American presidents being capitalist bastards who are going to disappoint you more than you expect. I'm glad each time the debate on Syria turns to the real problem that he has not only not armed the Free Syrian Army but vetoed their attempts to obtain the weapons that can protect civilians from genocide; rather than the conspiracy theories which state that America must be behind every bad thing in the Middle East, with no basis in fact other than America being Israel's biggest supporter. Who haven't tried to get rid of Assad, and are probably grateful that Hezbollah have been distracted by their murderous campaign in Syria to bother them while they deal with Hamas.

 'Last year, when we learned that Assad had used chemical weapons on his own people and in defiance of Obama’s own red line, the president asked Congress for the authorization to use military force against Syria. I worked with my colleagues to move that authorization out of the Foreign Relations Committee to the floor of the Senate. But when faced with the difficult challenge of persuading the rest of Congress to support his policy, Obama reversed course and said he no longer wanted the authority. Instead, the president jumped in the lap of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who offered a way for Assad to survive, even thrive, while turning over Syria’s declared stockpile of chemical weapons to the United Nations.

 Today, after three years of bold rhetoric divorced from reality, 170,000 Syrians are dead, and we are not innocent bystanders. The president encouraged the opposition to swallow deadly risks, then left them mostly hanging. Extremist groups from Syria have surged into Iraq, seizing key territory and resources, and are threatening to completely undo the progress of years of U.S. sacrifice.'

*[http://www.thedailybeast.com/…/exclusive-obama-told-lawmake…]

The US, IS and the conspiracy theory sweeping Lebanon

 'Instead, what Hillary Clinton has said is that the failure to help Syrian rebels led to the rise of IS.'

 One may argue about the extent to which to which she is discovering principles when it is convenient, but the people who put ISIS is a creation of the West/look at ISIS with John McCain/ISIS is a Saudi front pictures and comics on my Newsfeed are complete idiots.

Why the West is Wrong on Syria

 Razan Zaitouneh:

 'The West is using Al-Qaeda and the extremists as a pretext, yet it contributed to their ascendance and popularity by delaying its support to the Free Syrian Army, one of the opposition’s national projects that adheres to an ideology far from extremism and non-national agendas.

 The West, from the very beginning, has rejected everything the Free Army asked for, starting by refusing to deliver effective weapons or to create a no-fly zone and safe areas for civilians. Then it blamed the FSA for being divided and weak, and for the spread of the extremists.'

Note 31/3/25, original published 14th October 2013.

Barrel Bombs in Syria and Iraq

 Cesar Chelala:

 'What is happening now in Iraq definitely started in Syria. If I were al-Maliki, and seeing Assad next door using the same tactics without a slap on the wrist and gaining ground as a result, it stands to reason he would say, “Why the hell not?” '

West’s ‘mandate’ limited by national borders

 Fisk loves Assad.

 'If the road to Irbil is closed, then they’ll take the road to Aleppo or Damascus which the Americans and British will be less willing to bomb or defend – because that would mean helping the regime of Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom we must hate almost as much as we hate the Islamic State.'

Islamic State Remains Unchallenged From Its Sanctuary in Syria

 ' "They know that the U.S. won't attack them in Syria," a European diplomat based in the Middle East said in June.'

 True for the past and the present. This next bit is not true, but might be part of the weird rationalisation in Washington for trying to ignore Syria.

 'But in Syria, U.S. strikes against the Islamic State would inadvertently help the regime of President Bashar al-Assad militarily and politically legitimize Damascus at the expense of the opposition there.'

Problem

 On this morning's Wright Stuff.

 John Barnes: "Because of the support the West has given to people fighting Assad, that's created this problem."

 Matthew Wright was better, "Russia and China stopped anything being done about Assad, and that's made the problem worse," though it is a sign of what is wrong with the discourse that it isn't the lack of support given to those fighting Assad that's seen as the problem.

Salim'll tell you what it means to be a Syrian-Palestinian refugee

 'The regime operated an organized process to get rid of activists like Salim, by arresting, torturing or constantly threatening them. “It was a slow death of the civil resistance and peaceful social movement, I was at risk as everybody was!” Beside demonstrating, campaigning, and being part of political gatherings, Salim’s special crime was blogging and telling jokes about the Syrian army. In his poem “A day in Damascus”, he writes, “passing by the checkpoint, I spit on it to return some of my dignity”. He was accused by the Syrian authorities of undermining the “prestige of the state”.'

Where are the “anti-imperialists” now that Obama is bombing ISIS?

 Michael Karadjis:

 'Perhaps we should only oppose US interventions when they are just a figment of our imaginations, as opposed to ones that are actually happening in our face.

 Perhaps we should only oppose imaginary US interventions when the US shows that it is impossible to intervene without going around in a whole lot of circles like countless committee meetings, taking a war proposal to Congress for the first time in half a century etc, whereas when the US shows that you can order air strikes without all that pretense, then it is OK.

 Perhaps it should depend on the degree of imaginary “anti-imperialism” of the reactionary tyrants under real or imaginary US attack. So apparently, since the Syrian Baath regime has collaborated with US imperialism for decades, right up to the rendition and torture program of “terror” suspects on behalf of the US in very recent times, and slaughtered Palestinians and their camps and organisations and militants with a passion rivaling the Zionist regime, we should defend such a well-intentioned regime, whereas a regime like ISIS which is totally, fundamentally anti-imperialist to the core (I don’t use that as a compliment, rather it is a neutral statement), then we should not oppose a US attack.'

Air strikes can't beat ISIS but Free Syrians can!

 'Air strikes alone can't defeat ISIS. That job will require boots on the ground and those ground forces can only be supplied by the freedom fighters in the neighborhood.'

 It might be added that one reason ISIS has made advances in Eastern Syria is because Assad's forces are not bothering to oppose them, instead being redeployed to fight the rebels getting closer to the heart of the régime.

McCain Says Limited U.S. Strikes on Militants in Iraq Are Not Enough

 “The stated purpose — stated by the president — is to save American lives, not to stop ISIS, not to change the battlefield, not to stop ISIS from moving equipment farther into Syria to destroy the Free Syrian Army. ISIS has erased the boundary between Iraq and Syria,” Mr. McCain said. Yet the president, he said, “has failed so far to even mention Syria.”

 A lot of people are failing to mention Syria when waffling on about ISIS. But if the Free Syrian Army had received the arms it needed to defend itself against the Assad régime last year, as McCain was one of the few to argue at the time, there would be no ISIS now.

*GRAPHIC* A Typical Assad Airstrike(s)

 'People wonder why Syrians have become ‘radicalized’ or ‘extreme’ over the last 3 years of Assad’s hellish war against the people? What if you and your family faced this every single day? What would you do to protect them? To ensure their survival?

 Then a few minutes later, the same MiG fighter jet comes back to kill the rescuers.'

” I would never side with Russia against genuine popular movements in Syria or anywhere else”

 For two years the term intervention has been used to scare people with the ghost of Iraq, to stop the Syrian revolutionaries getting the aid they need. Brian Slocock independently reached the same conclusion.

 Brian Slocock:

 'I don’t like the term “intervention” – it is a classic “floating signifier” which obscures rather than clarifies rational discourse. Supplying humanitarian aid is “intervention”. I am firmly in favour of “intervention” in the form of providing arms to the Syrian opposition – especially those like effective antiaircraft weapons, that are needed to defend civilian populations. Beyond that we enter an area of difficult calculation.'

Rebels intend to continue tit-for-tat shelling of Damascus

 ' “The rebels are trying to aim at military targets in Damascus,” said the Islam Army leader, speaking from Douma, a town northeast of the capital held by the rebels and regularly targeted by regime warplanes.'

 Spot the difference. Spot the news story not heavily covered.

Now ain't the time for your tears

 Bashar al-Assad killed 1500 people, on the night of August 21st 2013, with sarin gas in Volcano rockets, fired by his troops into the Eastern suburbs of Damascus. A lot of the dead were children, because their smaller lungs could less resist asphyxiation, and because their parents had got them to sleep closer to the ground, for fear that they would die from the relentless conventional shelling of civilians by Assad’s forces.



 I remember seeing one report of a possible attack that night. Within a day or so pictures of the victims appeared on our screens. That they had no conventional wounds, but were dying in their droves, made it obvious that this was a chemical attack. Still the news reported it as a claim made by activists, with the Syrian government claiming first that no attack had occurred, then that they had found weapons in a tunnel with Islamic terrorists that they had captured. This followed the [pattern of the entire conflict. Far from there being a Western conspiracy to besmirch Assad, the media gave his excuse for murder parity of esteem. In 2011 when his forces were shooting down demonstrators outside mosques, the claim that he was fighting terrorism was met with an editorial line that we don’t know who the opposition is. When his forces were carrying out massacres like that in Houla in 2012, the lie machine gave an alternative narrative whereby the rebels had done it themselves, and the media told us that nothing is certain in the fog of war. No matter that the Assad narrative was exposed again as a lie, the news cycle moved on without a care. After Marie Colvin was killed reporting the constant shelling of civilian areas by the régime, it became difficult to report the opposition story, and most of the reporting came from those who accepted Assad’s hospitality and largely or entirely gave his version, like Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk and Jeremy Bowen.



 At the time of the sarin attack I didn’t think the lies that important to deconstruct, as they were so thin. I waited to see if anyone from the attack site challenged the idea that Assad was responsible, one thing that would indicate that any other suspect was remotely plausible, and nobody ever did. There are a number of other ways those with a knowledge of the situation on the ground could see it would be impossible for the rebels to have committed the crime, from the impossibility of one group sneaking into Damascus to fire the weapon without other fighters or civilians knowing or caring, to the absurdity of Islamic extremists carrying out false flag attacks on Muslims to get the West to intervene.



 But the genocide deniers are not working from knowledge, but as much ignorance as they can muster. Like Holocaust denial, it isn’t really purposed for itself, but to achieve a political objective, to deny the threat of the real perpetrator. In some ways Holocaust denial is more offensive, it’s designed to rehabilitate the Nazis, while today’s version is more so that its practitioners can be smartarses who can think themselves superior for seeing through the justification for another Middle East war. In some ways it is worse, the Holocaust was 70 years ago, you could see Assad’s chemical attack on your TV.
Some of the excuses for reasoning were pitiful. Tariq Ali wrote on his blog at the London Review of Books, “Cui prodest? as the Romans used to inquire. Who profits? Clearly, not the Syrian regime.” Of course it did. It frightened more opposition civilians to flight, it reinforced the belief that Assad could survive, it shifted the world’s attention to how to stop the US from intervening.



 Which it was never going to do. Since the First World War there have been laws against the use of chemical weapons, and so the international community is forced to pay attention in some manner. If you deny such massacres as this, it isn’t going to stop humanitarian imperialists using massacres as an excuse for American intervention, it will rehabilitate American power as the seeming only way to stop them. The alternative, that the Syrian people be given the means to stop the massacres and remove the cause, never gets on the table, if the racist belief that those struggling against Assad are all crazy jihadis who will kill you as soon as look at you prevails. Far from the opposition being a sectarian force well-funded by Turkey and the Gulf, the Free Syrian Army and other moderate brigades were the only people in the region suffering from a lack of arms, because the truth is that they have no imperial sponsor. Their weakness has allowed Islamists to fill the gap, especially those like ISIS who merely parasite on the revolution and spent no time fighting Assad. 



 So because he had to be seen to do something, Obama declared red lines, and promised there would be action against Assad if he continued to violate them, especially by using “a whole bunch of chemical weapons”. When he did that, when the US proclaimed itself convinced that he had, nothing was done. Obama went to Congress to pass the buck, without any firm proposal as to how the US would respond, allowing the most lurid tales as to what would transpire to be circulated, and nothing was done. John McCain was one of the few to propose practical steps to fight Assad, giving anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the FSA and bombing Assad’s airfields, and he was portrayed as a dangerous warmonger for it.



 There will be demonstrations in a couple of weeks around the world to commemorate the worst massacre of the worst genocide of the 21st Century. They will be small demonstrations, because Syrians have largely been abandoned by the world. The idea that we should avoid this issue because the Western leaders are constantly inciting against Assad, and they are the bigger enemy, is a sick joke to Syrians. They have faced three years of terror, of constantly hearing of the murder of their fellow Syrians by the government, of fear that they or their relatives could always be next. They have learned to hate the Russians and Iranians who have assisted in the rape of their country. They have looked on with bemusement and anger as they are told that they are just a proxy in an American backed sectarian war, and that they need to be protected from an American attack. 



 If you have been demonstrating over Gaza, and don’t like pro-Israelis asking what about Syria, go to one of the vigils this August, and you will be able to ask them why they don’t demonstrate against massacres in Gaza or in Syria. If you can’t make it to a demonstration find some way of letting it be known that you mourn for the people of the Eastern Ghouta. Now is the time for your tears.

Airstrikes in Iraq, But Why Not Syria

 Frederic C Hof:

 'The administration—again, reflecting the president’s skepticism that anything useful can be done militarily to mitigate slaughter or promote transition in Syria—has been quick to deny that the Assad regime’s impressive portfolio of war crimes and crimes against humanity adds up to genocide. It is as if genocide—even if it involves 10,000 people—provides more of a humanitarian intervention mandate than mere mass homicide, even if it involves multiples of 10,000. One suspects the administration has used the “it’s not genocide” argument more to evade the “Never Again” dictum than to downplay the extent of the Assad regime’s depredations.'

Idlib countryside : a big demonstration to step down the regime

 'People gathered in one village and went into huge demonstration against Assad's regime and to prove it to the whole world that we are continuing our revolution to get our dream of Free Syria.'

What chemical attack? Sorry it is alleged and cannot be verified

 'On July, 11 Syrian born Welsh resident Alisar Iram wrote: They think if we kill us we die.'*

 She died recently, but left us a number of writings, including this piece about the irrationality of believing that rebels might have staged the chemical attack in Damascus last August.

 'How can these images help the Ghouta and the people of the Ghouta since the media refuses to acknowledge the responsibility of the regime and claims that the responsibility rests equally with both sides or that, against all established military convictions, the rebels might have done it to themselves. Was it a mass suicide then? And why should the Jihadists choose an area outside the control of Assad instead of choosing Assad controlled areas? It seems that the rebels have acquired very mysteriously invisible jets that can launch missiles with chemical warheads or it seems that they have reached such a high level of sophistication that they can manufacture long distance surface-to-surface missiles or super rockets carrying chemical war heads that can cover the Eastern and the Western Ghoutas alike, hitting the areas where they fight from and where their families live. Suppose the Nusra Front is behind it. If they have such capabilities why not launch chemical attacks against the army barracks of Assad scattered all around the Ghouta?'

*[http://www.arabnews.com/news/middle-east/613176]

Isis consolidates

 I've just seen this bullshit promoted by Alex Callinicos, demonstrating that Alex knows bugger all about Syria. The Free Syrian Army was the only rebel force until people realised that the US was spending its time preventing them from getting heavy weapons through Turkey or Jordan, and so people drifted towards the Islamists. Now the US has belated made a promise of substantial funding at some point in the future, but haven't delivered. The anti-tank weapons that have been delivered have made substantial differences to the brigades supplied in Idlib and elsewhere.

 Aymeen al-Tamimi I once had a polite conversation with when he was blogging at the pro-Israel Harry's Place, he's recently been getting into trouble for encouraging supporters of ISIS to get his opponent's twitter accounts suspended. What "Western diplomats admit" is their policy of hoping the Syrian revolution will go away. If there was anything like the level of weaponry provided to the opposition that Russia and Iran supply to Assad, he would have fallen long ago. Even the basic supply of anti-aircraft weaponry would stop the strategy of creating refugees by barrel bombing. But instead of this Cockburn wants us to co-operate with Assad in the hope will now fight the Islamic State. Cockburn repeats the claim that all the evidence of mutual toleration between the régime and ISIS is just a conspiracy theory. I wouldn't expect any socialist to be promoting this trash.

Patrick Cockburn:

 'Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies have responded to the rise of Isis by descending into fantasy. They pretend they are fostering a ‘third force’ of moderate Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and Isis, though in private Western diplomats admit this group doesn’t really exist outside a few beleaguered pockets. Aymenn al-Tamimi confirms that this Western-backed opposition "is getting weaker and weaker"; he believes supplying them with more weapons won’t make much difference.'

Conspiracy theory playbook

 Michael Weiss:

 'The first car bombing of the revolution was in the Kafarsouseh district of Damascus in late December 2011, and was either carried out or facilitated by the regime as a way of reifying its propaganda about its fight against “terrorists,” not peaceful protestors. But consider how Syrian state media covered this car bombing within minutes of its occurrence. As Hanin Ghaddar, the managing editor of NOW, screen-captured at the time, the female anchor on Addounia was able to report with a straight face the “arrest of the terrorists who blew themselves up today.”

 The purpose of propaganda isn’t to convince you that a lie is true; it’s to preoccupy you with debating or debunking the lie, the better to keep the truth hidden. Conspiracy theories, which proliferate even under the most democratic of circumstances, metastasize when undemocratic regimes offer the slightest encouragement – and they always do.

 But what Putin and Assad understand is that even respectable sources of information, such as mainstream Western news organizations, are duty-bound to relay “both sides of the story,” however superficially absurd one side may be. In this way do CNN, the BBC and The New York Times get conscripted as unwitting agents of influence in the dissemination of all manner of nonsense about the origins of protest movements, chemical weapons attacks, or murder of civilians aboard commercial airliners.'

Aleppo’s Real-Life Soap Opera

 'They chose their subject matter, said Hadi, because of the shortfalls of the international media’s reporting on Syria. The government’s draconian restrictions on the movement of foreign journalists inside the country, coupled with the increasing dangers of reporting in the rebel-held areas, mean that the plight of the ordinary people who remain in the opposition-controlled quarters of Aleppo is barely being reported any more.'

Turning our backs on Syrian atrocities

 'The Syrian conflict will be remembered as a strategic watershed for American foreign policy. When the rebellion was a broad, non-radical uprising — the dead in Caesar’s photos — President Obama did almost nothing to help. When radical groups gained momentum, it became an excuse for further inaction, because America didn’t want to create jihadists. We got the jihadists anyway, who are now causing regional havoc. At every stage, Obama defended his policy with false choices and flanking attacks on straw men: Any critics of his minimalism wanted Marines in Damascus. And when he eventually adopted the policy recommended by many of his critics — aid to the responsible rebels — it was very late. Obama has consistently complained about American powerlessness in Syria and, through risk aversion and delay, has ensured that powerlessness.'

Some fear world losing interest in deadly conflict

 Did the world ever care? Was the struggle in Syria ever at the front of the minds of the international community, or just ways of avoiding any responsibility for it?

 'There is a real concern that the daily slaughter being perpetuated by the Assad regime has suddenly become accepted by the international community as the new normal.'

The killing is not over but is Israel losing the battle to crush Gaza?

 John Rees' bullshit of the day:

 'In Syria the Western courting and promotion of the Free Syrian Army helped to destabilise the original Syrian rising against Assad and created the vacuum into which Gulf State backed ISIS forces then stepped.'

Stand By Me

 A hundred years ago today, the German Socialist Party fraction in the Reichstag voted in favour of war credits to support the German war effort in the world war just starting. We see a lot on the TV at the moment about how men died doing their duty, not so much on how it was an imperialist slaughter. I think there are parallels in the way much of the Left has betrayed the principle of internationalism in abandoning the Syrian revolution to its fate, and misidentifying the problem there.

 Though we might start with a couple of differences. Firstly, the ideologically committed left has nothing like the influence it did a hundred years ago. Then its actions shaped the world, now it's important to get this right, not for the world's sake, but for the sake of the left. Already you can see the Syria conflict being thrown in the face of those who only choose to demonstrate over Gaza. I saw Abdel Bari Atwan being taunted about this on Dateline a couple of weeks ago, and thought it would be so much easier for him if he'd attended one demonstration in favour of the revolution in Syria. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, not due to the machinations of the Emir of Qatar and John McCain, but because of Assad's army and bands of thugs and Iranians and Hezbollah killing Syrians with Russian munitions from Russian vehicles. If you as an individual didn't protest against these things in the last year, fine, you had other priorities in your politics. But if you are a political tendency that didn't bother to protest against those things, it will be thrown in your face from now until Kingdom Come. And it will only get worse as the horrors of Assad's war to destroy Syria become more public. If you don't know what the Caesar photos are about, find out. If you know what they are, but think their mention moralism or a hoax emanating from the Pentagon, there is a dustbin of history for such conspiracy theorists which can be an interesting place, and I hope you enjoy it. But nobody will take your politics seriously when you can't even acknowledge a tyranny or the revolution against it.

 The second difference is that World War One was an inter-imperialist conflict. Syria is not. The demonstrators of 2011 and the Free Syrian Army are not unconnected groups, the latter funded by the US and Saudi Arabia to spread their influence in the region. The FSA was formed spontaneously to defend the demonstrations for freedom against the snipers of the régime, and grew with the desertions of those soldiers no longer prepared to kill for Assad. To compare it to exile groups trained and implanted by the CIA or the Pentagon is just to slander, and such a lie makes everything else said subject to disbelief.

 The people who say we should ignore the Syrian conflict because our rulers demonise Assad are telling another whopper. I remember when this really did happen. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the papers were full of stories claiming he was a new Hitler, so that a war could be justified the return the region to a Western favoured reactionary monarchy, with a load of Iraqis slaughtered in the process. In 2003 there wasn't quite so much of that, the argument was more about the WMDs that he supposedly had, it being more of an after the event fallback justification that he was a bad man anyway. There has been very little of this with Syria, to put it mildly. Most of the concern has been at the scale of the humanitarian need, not with putting the blame on Assad. Obama proclaimed red lines that Assad couldn't cross, and then Assad kills a whole bunch of people with chemical weapons, and nothing is done. And the now reactionary sections of the left congratulate itself for stopping a war that was never going to happen, while they do nothing to support the victims of the war actually going on in Syria.Because the US is not invested in the Syrian opposition. There is the possibility of the intersection between their professed commitment to freedom, and the Syrian need for weapons to defend themselves. Any more voices in the public sphere ion favour of that would have helped, would help now. But those saying we have to stop Western meddling in Syria let our governments off the hook. You wouldn't have said in Russia in the 70s that the problem in Nicaragua was your government supplying arms to the FSLN. Or that you shouldn't have demonstrated against the Vietnam War in Russia in the 60s because the main enemy is at home. The Syrian conflict is a revolution in a country allied to the US' rivals. Of course they will make some propaganda over it, will provide minimal support to the political opposition, so that they will maximise their influence in a post-revolutionary Syria. But they have stopped heavy weapons going to the rebels rather than sent them. Even the weaponry sent by Saudi Arabia and Qatar has been nothing in comparison to that provided by Russia and Iran to Assad, and it is the lack not the excess that concerns Syrians still fleeing or dying from daily barrel bomb attacks.

 Those who formed the Communist International after World War One also rejected a middle group, those like Kautsky, who had suggested international mediation rather than revolution was the way to stop war. I think that Chomsky somewhere attacks those national security liberals who opposed the Vietnam War because it was bad for the US, rather than because Vietnamese were being killed into the millions. So there is also a comparison with those like the Stop The War Coalition, who desire Russia and China to restrain the US over Syria, and have generally argued against Britain's wars on the patriotic basis of their damage to the country. But I'm thinking there is more of those who equate the fight against Assad with the rejection of foreign intervention on behalf of the revolution. Despite this being the position of some revolutionaries in Syria, I think it has little appeal for most Syrians, as it simply doesn't reflect their experience. And so while it will not be found out as quickly as the outright opposition to the Syrian revolution, it will also be found out as an inadequate response.

 This is not to say that the answer is for the USAF to flatten Damascus, most obviously because that was never going to be the question. I remember someone telling me last year that all bombing is indiscriminate. It's not true. Hannan Ashrawi of the PLO was on the TV the other day, pointing out that the Israeli army cannot be excused for hitting schools in Gaza 'by accident' when it can take out individuals from an F-16. When a government is fighting a war of choice, it tends to achieve military objectives first, and accept collateral damage as a byproduct. It creates the impression of an out-of-control process that can only be stopped by the surrender of the other side. When the US was trying to do as little as possible to fulfil its humanitarian obligations, Obama goes to Congress to ask that it decide, but not spell out what would happen if it went for action, allowing the opponents of action to paint a lurid picture of being dragged into a quagmire on the side of al-Qaida, and the administration was off the hook. So if they had bombed some airfields, there is no mechanism by which that would have translated into a rerun of the Iraq invasion. It might have meant fewer bombs would have been dropped, discriminately, to force the people out of any area that Assad cannot control.

 The revolutionary left is much smaller than it once was, and those getting Syria right seem to be a handful. Which is a shame, as it may be that only a socialist society with its common ownership of the means of production can provide an alternative to a a capitalist world whose daily exploitation constantly intensifies inequality and distress with crisis and wars. Those handful are a motley bunch, and its hard to imagine most of them in the same organisations as any of the others. But for now I see their agreement over Syria as more important than any other differences, as it is only those really focused on solidarity with the Syrian people who are going to be worth a damn in the future.

The stigma of being an atheist in the US

 This just had an idea. All the leftists who spend their time having a go at Richard Dawkins, why not challenge him on how his views fit the situation in Syria? You could ask if he thinks a secular autocrat is preferable to Islamically influenced rebels; or if at the least we should reject these jihadis until they swear they are fighting only for a secular godless state. Oh I forget, that's what you all think.

 If you want to protest that you are a supporter of the Syrian revolution, the whole revolution against Assad not just those parts that express themselves in the language of proletarian internationalism, then I apologise for the imputation of opinions you do not hold, something leftists do to Dawkins a lot; and conflating your views with those of others, which Dawkins may be doing to those with religious beliefs. I remember a radio programme years ago where it was mentioned that it's always been more dangerous to declare yourself an atheist in America than a communist. There are apparently no members of Congress prepared to declare they have no religious belief.

10,000 Bodies

 “On the one hand, it’s going to illustrate perhaps better than anything heretofore the absolute horror of what’s going on. On the other side, it raises the inevitable question: What are we actually doing about it?”

Chaos as Syria rebels raid Lebanon border town of Arsal

 The BBC continues to tell us that Assad is winning.

 'Meanwhile, Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon's Shia Muslim community are said to have taken part in an ambush on rebels inside Syria on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.
At least 50 rebels, including members of the Nusra Front, were killed in the attack in the Qalamoun area near the Lebanese border on Saturday, activists and security sources said.'

 It's harder to find out from conventional news sources that Hezbollah hasbeen suffering serious losses in its war to defend Assad.*

 'Many Hezbollah fighters have recently died in the renewed clashes against Syrian rebels on several fighting fronts in al-Qalamoun villages, as the Syrian regime claims that it is bombing the Arsal plains “to prevent terrorists' infiltration.” '

 Without the other side of the story, Michael Young's analysis** wouldn't make sense.

 'The ongoing fighting in the Qalamoun area northwest of Damascus shows the grinding nature of the Syrian conflict, and the foolishness of Hezbollah’s belief that a corner has been turned to the advantage of President Bashar Assad’s regime. A corner has indeed been turned, but what looms ahead is something far more worrisome for Hezbollah, Assad and many others.

 Lebanese sectarian relations seem manageable for now, which has been reinforced by shared Sunni and Shiite outrage with the Israeli assault on Gaza. When Nasrallah speaks about Palestine, it allows him to revert to his past persona as a unifying Arab figure, rather than as the sectarian leader he was portrayed as after Hezbollah’s entry into the Syrian conflict.

 But Hamas’ appeal to Hezbollah that it open a Lebanese front against Israel may prove embarrassing. Hezbollah has no desire to enter the Gaza war today when it is so heavily committed in Syria.'

*[https://www.albawaba.com/news/hezbollah-syria-593491]
**[https://web.archive.org/web/20140731184013/http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Columnist/2014/Jul-31/265508-the-limits-of-hezbollahs-conciliation.ashx#axzz39HR5Efjx]

Is there an 'anti-imperialist camp'? A debate (part 2)

 Michael Karadjis:

 'To compare the US invasion of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands of troops, with US policy on Syria – i.e., to refuse to send even a bullet to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) for three years while the Assad regime destroyed the entire country with every conceivable “conventional” weapon of mass destruction – is too absurd to even begin to take apart; basically, for you to even make such an impossible comparison is in itself a classic example of bogus “anti-imperialist” analysis furiously attempting to push square poles into round holes.

 It is fascinating to read a writer like Felipe, who in other ways is very lucid and logical, refer to NATO having “nearly destroyed Syria”. So apparently, the MiG fighter planes, helicopter gunships, ballistic missiles, barrel bombs, cluster bombs, incendiary bombs, tanks, artillery, starvation sieges of whole towns (and for that matter, of Palestinian refugee camps), and chemical weapons, have all been supplied to Assad by NATO! Oh, but no, you don’t mean that, do you. You simply think that the duty of “anti-imperialism” is to look the other way while a regime of mega-capitalists destroys every city of its country, including the working-class sections of Damascus and Aleppo, because condemning a capitalist regime for waging unlimited war on its working people is apparently too difficult for modern-day “anti-imperialist” analysis unless you can somehow show that imperialism is responsible.

 And so since the imperialists issue criticisms of the Syrian regime’s genocide, and arm the opposition with … the occasional supportive speech (and even those are laced with jihadist-mongering similar to that of “the left”), therefore we don’t know what to say. So we have to instead create a conspiracy, and pretend that this mass uprising of ordinary Syrians is all a foreign conspiracy involving the US, the Gulf states and al-Qaida (and some even throw in Israel for good measure despite Israel’s quite constant support for the victory of a weakened Assad).

 And what exactly has been the role of the US and NATO? As I have continually documented with a great deal of evidence over the last two years, not only has the US sent nothing of any use to the Free Syrian Army, but moreover it has moved operatives into Turkey to actively block the delivery of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles (manpads) and other advanced forms of weaponry to the rebels, when regional states had planned to send a few of these defensive weapons to the rebels to help defend their communities against Assad’s savage air war. (Assad’s air war in comparison to the Kiev regime’s air war in east Ukraine is basically an elephant-to-flea comparison). However, it has promised to maybe, perhaps, if they’re really good, to think about possibly supplying a few arms to a few “vetted” rebels if they agree to use them to launch a frontal attack on Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian wing of al-Qaida. Yet the left conspiracists would imagine that the US supports al-Nusra, in order to “destroy Syria.” You need to question your analysis when it begins to rely on total delusions like this.'