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.'

All religions are suffering in the Middle East mess

 In which Eamonn McCann turns into a fucking loon. I don't think there's any element of this story that's true.*

 'In September last year, the Christian village of Saidnaya near Damascus was overrun by Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the multitude of groups fighting to overthrow the Assad dictatorship. Local people begged for and were given weapons by a Syrian army base. They then drove the Islamist rebels out. Now the US was threatening to bomb pro-Assad forces in response to a poison gas attack attributed to Assad's army. The Saidnaya Christians believed with reason that they might well be among the targets.

 "We gave you St Paul," one Christian fighter told a British news programme. "You bomb us in return."

 A Russian-brokered deal led to cancellation of the bombing. Otherwise, the US might well have bombed a Christian village because it had fought off Islamist extremists.'

*Clay Claiborne had the details. "First Assad deployed his troops and tanks at the convent on a hill in Qalamoun. Then they started bombing civilians in Qalamoun from that convent. This forced the FSA to attack the Assad forces there to stop them from slaughtering people."
[http://claysbeach.blogspot.co.uk/…/how-fsa-attack-on-conven…]

Hopes fade for ending world’s bloodiest war

 'After more than three years, the rebels are not ready to lay down their arms. “We started our revolution for dignity and peace,” he said. “Nothing has changed.” '

 Also contains quotes from Joshua Landis, "there are no good choices," showing his neutrality between Assad and the opposition, and an endorsement of Hassan Hassan's piece in Foreign Policy* this week.
*[http://www.foreignpolicy.com/…/too_big_to_fall_syria_aleppo…]

Syria 'torture' photos shown in US

 "This is something that has to matter. And you can't be numb to it."

Assad Poised to Torture and Murder 150,000 More

 “I am not a politician and I don’t like politics,” Caesar said through his translator. “I have come to you honorable Congress to give you a message from the people of Syria… What is going on in Syria is a genocidal massacre that is being led by the worst of all the terrorists, Bashar al Assad.”

Mutual struggle, mutual solidarity

 Leila Al Shami:

 'I spent a lot of time in Gaza during the first two years of the Syrian revolution. Unlike in other social contexts, where I often hesitated to talk about Syria fearful of having to deal with stupid reactions or banal analysis, in Gaza this wasn’t an issue with people I met. People in Gaza who experience terror on a daily basis never failed to ask me how my family in Syria was doing, or express their solidarity with the Syrian uprising against the terror of the Assad regime. Through their own experience, they empathized with the suffering of the Syrian people, understood their desire for freedom and supported their resistance to tyranny.'

Women and the War in Syria

 'Another activist revealed her identity under torture, and government security forces detained her at a Damascus cafe. They beat her during the night with a thick, green hose: “They slapped me on the face. They pulled me by my hair. They hit me on my feet, on my back, all over.”

 They eventually took her to a police station, where men in police uniforms sexually harassed and tortured other female detainees. She saw one woman, handcuffed and naked, alone in a cell. “Once they brought her to our cell and made her beat the other women. Her body was defaced. It was all blue,” Maisa said.'

One of the oldest Christian communities has been destroyed as the Sunni Caliphate spreads

 Where to start with Robert Fisk? Perhaps with the suggestion that it was better when the Syrian army was advancing; bombing, torturing and raping as it went.

 'For the Saudis lie behind this vast new force of the Caliphate, whose Islamist rulers have brought some of their Iraqi military assets – courtesy of George W again – to Syria and are now giving the Syrian army a tougher fight. Before the Caliphate spread to Mosul, the Syrian army was winning, or at least not losing. Now their soldiers are being executed, just like the Iraqi Shia army units captured near Mosul. And, of course, we continue to buttress this savagery in Syria.'

Children of Syria

 'Yarmouk, home to some eighteen thousand people, trapped by the siege, and the fight against rebel groups.'

 Assad's war is one that doesn't distinguish between civilians and rebels, anyone who stays in an opposition area is a target for starvation and bombing, because the régime has so little legitimacy it struggles to win any clash of arms without foreign help despite its massively superior weaponry, and so has to rely as much on inflicting as much horror as it can to force the opposition areas to depopulate. Chemical attacks aid this process too.

'Mummy, why did everyone forget about Syria when Gaza started?'

 'Anti-Assad activists protest against a "selective internationalism" which opposes "the collective punishment and mass murder of Palestinians and Arabs in one land by one government and supporting or justifying their collective punishment and mass murder next door when a different government is the perpetrator".'

 When Ian Black says, "Reporting on it is difficult: Syrian visas for journalists are sporadic and access is strictly controlled. Reporting from the rebel side via Turkey is extremely dangerous," two things should be remembered. The régime has been happy to let in journalists that will support its narrative, or at least present it as a confusing mess we can't make any judgement of. And it is dangerous to report from the rebel side because the régime murders those journalists like Marie Colvin, who reported its massacres, and because there is no Western state really opposed to Assad, there is no particular pressure to report what is going on.

Nemesis in Iraq

 'Although the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and local revolutionary committees have fought to keep alive the vision of a secular and democratic Syria, armed Sunni jihadis, often bankrolled by Gulf sheikhdoms, have increasingly made the running militarily. '

 You would take from Callinicos' formulation that the FSA and revolutionary committees are the only good people, while he refers to the Islamists in fairly racist terms, and you wouldn't get the impression that they have done much of the fighting against Assad, just that they are a stepping stone to ISIS. That Callinicos quotes Patrick Cockburn as an authority on the politics of the region shows quite how out of touch he is with the Syrian revolution.

It's Not Complicated

Amal ThePoet Kassir:

 'So often, I come across comments of non-Syrians saying the conflict in Syria is "too complicated" now because "the enemy" isn't clear anymore, so it's not worth defending. Choosing to be ignorant does not make your confusion justified. If the conflict in Syria is too complicated for you, stop talking about ISIS, stop talking about extremists, stop saying "civil war", stop talking about how "confusing" it is.

 Your silence is the most respectful thing you can do. You are not entitled to an opinion on a country whose conflict you haven't made an effort to untangle. There are people working hard, literally every day since the War began, educating themselves to educate those around them. Do not justify your apathy by saying the conflict is too complicated for you, this is solely your laziness. I assure you, the "enemy" is quite clear.'

The truth about conspiracy theories is that some require considering

 So Cockburn thinks one example, when ISIS came in at the end of a siege with only a few dozen government soldiers left*, weighs more heavily in the evidence than the vast amount of fighting ISIS has done against the real rebels,and that their headquarters is never bombed.

 'Predictably, the western media, diplomats and the "moderate" Syrian opposition claimed that Assad not only benefited from the existence of Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra but was secretly in league with them. "Notice Isis doesn't attack government forces," people would say with shallow cynicism in Beirut, though Isis was responsible for the capture of Minnigh military air base north of Aleppo, one of the few rebel victories last year.'

 Robert Thouless writes in Straight and Crooked Thinking** of a trick used in argument of imputing to one's opponents a stronger proposition than they are defending. This is what Cockburn does here. ISIS has capitalised on the destruction wrought by Assad, and their continuity of interest means that only the real rebels have an interest in their defeat. It isn't Cockburn or the lizards, it is his insistence that the opposition in Syria is little more than the creation of the government in Washington that is the wacky conspiracy theory.

 'But it has always been an absurd exaggeration to imagine, as your true-born conspiracy theorist would hold, that Isis and al-Nusra were the creation of the government in Damascus.'
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Menagh_Air_Base]
**[http://neglectedbooks.com/Straight_and_Crooked_Thinking.pdf]

A short history of the Syrian revolution

Louis N. Proyect:

 'Progressive intellectuals, concerned citizens, and humanists were shocked on August 21st but they felt powerless. Their neutrality, under the pretext that both sides are evil, and their silences and inactivity allowed the Syrian regime to isolate and besiege the Syrian revolution. As the revolution became increasingly invisible, the regime’s narrative became more hegemonic.

 Many progressive intellectuals dismissed the revolutionary struggle of several hundred thousands Syrians in a myriad different arenas, and portrayed the situation as a civil war between Shia and Sunnis, a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, or a violent conflict between global Jihadists and a regular army. As the revolution became unthinkable, the regime propaganda turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sadly, in such a conjuncture the silence of progressive intellectuals became a license to kill Syrians.'

FYI, the Syrian people started a revolution, Assad started a war

Abdulrahman al-Masri:

 'To make it clear to you, simply as it is, the Syrian people started an uprising movement demanding freedom, dignity and political participation and so, the uprising quickly switched to be a public peaceful revolution spreading all over Syria.

 Someone sarcastically said: “Ha peaceful? But what is the free army?!!”

 Yes dude, a peaceful revolution. Dear, the Free Syrian Army is basically not an army, the FSA is an idea. The creation of the FSA came because of the Assad brutally reaction towards the revolution as a few officers in the Syrian Army decided not to kill their own people and refusing taking orders asking them to become monsters. The FSA started as “The Free Officers Movement” which includes army officers who defected and wanted to protect their people, it is a defense-armed groups not an organized army that in turn does not erase the peaceful nature of the revolution.'

Syrian Civil War is being fought with homemade weapons made of gas canisters and old tank parts

 'He said that while some FSA groups are receiving supplies from Gulf states, many rebels like this group in Aleppo have received nothing. So the rebels make do with what they can cobble together themselves.'

Assad regime kills deserted soldiers in Syria

 'Twenty-three soldiers who deserted the Syrian army were killed on Thursday by Shabiha – an armed militia group from President Bashar al-Assad’s regime - in Syria's Homs.

 According to the Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC), Shabihas killed 23 soldiers by cutting their throats because they wanted to leave the Syrian army in the Al-Qabu town of Homs.'

 A régime that cuts the throats of deserters is a metaphor for its own lack of a future.

So near, so far

 Hassan Mustafa:

 "If the war ends, Assad's regime collapses and security is restored with no one like Assad in charge, I'll go back to Syria."

EU Targets Syria Commander, Oil Companies

 'However, the EU's sanctions on Syria have faced a growing number of successful legal challenges in the bloc's top courts. EU judges have repeatedly ruled against the bloc's sanctions decisions, saying the member states have failed to provide confidential evidence that could back up their claims.'

 They don't seem to be trying very hard. Can they find no evidence linking Colonel al-Hasan to the barrel bomb campaign, or do they just not care if the sanctions are applied?

Syrian death toll and extremist threat increases, but the U.S. does little

 'The Free Syrian Army forces the administration proposes to support are steadily losing ground to the regime and the Islamists. There’s a real risk that by the time the program gets off the ground — if it ever does — there will be no units left to support.

 It’s not easy at this late stage for the United States to intervene in Syria or Iraq in a way that would be constructive. But if one principle seems obvious, it is that moderate forces willing to fight the Islamic State should be aided — and quickly. Foremost among these are Syria’s secular rebels.'

Israel plays Assad and Khamenei’s game in Gaza

 I will get back to this.

 'When Israel’s government declares the Iranian and Syrian regimes responsible for arming Hamas, and when it accuses Hamas of deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way, they make it clear that when they then go on to hit only targets in Gaza, and continue to contain Gaza’s population together with a Hamas regime that by the Israel government’s own account is happy to see them bleed, then Israel is playing Assad and Khamenei’s game in Gaza.

 Assad and Khamenei are blessed to have an enemy like Israel, an enemy who will draw the world’s outrage while Assad’s helicopters and Khamenei’s militias get on with slaughtering Syrians across the border. And though Israel has repeatedly demonstrated that they have the ability to hit inside Syria, they’ll let Assad’s helicopters and Khamenei’s supply planes carry on flying.

 Syria still needs a No-Fly Zone. It would serve the Israelis’ interests too, but they don’t seem to have the wit to see it.'

The regime makes people suffer in rebel held areas

 Some bits of this are good, explaining how the régime makes things unbearable in rebel held areas, so as to polarise society so that people think they would be worse off under rebel control. But as I read more, the sense I get is not that the military resistance to Assad's war on Syria should be supported, but that the military struggle is a terrible diversion from a non-violent class struggle that could solve problems in a jiffy.

 The reverse is the truth. The revolution armed itself, because that was the only way to resist when the demonstrators were shot at by their government at every demonstration. When the government moved on to the massacres and rapes, it was only by military resistance that Sunni communities could be protected from a sectarian bloodbath. That's actually a truth you can find in this piece, "That means that even in the rebel areas any political activity needs to be protected," but if you didn't already know that, you wouldn't get that from here. The image is presented of a revolution that is nearly extinguished, precisely because it is all about armed men. I think a Marxist analysis would start from the fundamental instability of a régime that constantly erodes its social base, and has lost permanently the consent of most Syrians, how the position of Assad as a client of Russian imperialism leads to a coincidence of interests that might be exploited to overthrow him, how victories on the battlefield open up political opportunities to deepen the revolution, and ensure that no Syrian need ever fear torture for speaking their mind again.

Selective Internationalism: An Activist Disorder

 'The Saudi and Qatari monarchies are among the most reactionary forces in the world — are the FSA and the Islamic Front wrong or mistaken in accepting or seeking their patronage? How can any of these forces claim to be freedom fighters or revolutionaries given their backers? Don’t alliances with reactionary powers run counter to consistent internationalism?

 The erroneous assumptions embedded in these questions are that alliances are matters of morality rather than expediency, that political struggle is primarily about first principles rather than advancing the interests of living, breathing constituents, that it is impossible or impermissible for the oppressed and exploited to exploit contradictions between various camps of oppressors and exploiters to win freedom. The history of successful revolutions is a history of unusual and ugly alliances with morally revolting backers.'

Free Syrian Army Advances On Military Strongholds Near Damascus

 'The FSA forces advanced from the Ghouta area, an eastern suburb of Damascus, to Abbasiyeen Square in the capital.

 “It is unusual in recent times,” Daniel Serwer, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said. “In recent history the Syrian military and the extremists have been gaining ground and I don’t see that changing any time soon.” '

 If the FSA had the same level of weaponry as the Assad régime or the Islamic State, it would be more powerful than either, as it has the support of Syrian people, and doesn't rely on foreigners to do its fighting.

 I'm reminded of Clay Claiborne's post on the changing importance of Qusayr, Syria in the Media*:

 'For more than a year, while it was a liberated area, it was a nothing, throwaway city as far as the media was concerned. Since Hezbollah conquered it for Assad and it is back in Syria government hands, the media cannot even print Qusayr without the "the strategic city of" prefix. This is one example of how the mainstream writes to support Assad and undermine the revolution without being up front about it.'
*[http://claysbeach.blogspot.co.uk/…/the-changing-importance-…]

Aldi staff told shopper he was spending too much money on tinned food for children in Syria

 He seems to know more about Syria than all those commentators who tell us it is such a confusing situation that we have to blame Western interference for the suffering. There are people starving in Syria by the way, including Palestinians in refugee camps. Refugees because Israel forced them from their homeland, starving because Bashar al-Assad wants it that way.

 'I was buying stuff to send over to Syria. I am not from there and never really knew anything about the situation but two weeks ago I started seeing all this stuff about these poor children going without food and had to resort to eating cats.

 For me that was utterly shocking and I thought I would get as much cheap tinned food as I could to send it over there. It was nothing to do with religion.'

If the UN really wants to protect Syria’s people, stop these futile resolutions

 'The best example of the unintended consequences of the international community’s fumblings occurred last August, following the use by Assad of Sarin gas in Damascus, resulting in hundreds of deaths. When the US and Russian governments hammered out a deal on chemical weapons, Assad took this as permission to do even greater damage with conventional weapons.'

Former chief: Hezbollah as bad as takfiris

 ' “We are sorry to say that Hezbollah has been tuned into a sectarian party and a killing machine, as bad as takfiri groups, at the hands of the Iranians,” Toufaili said.

 He charged that Hezbollah’s battle was directed against Muslims for the sake of defending “the regimes of corruption and tyranny,” in reference to Syria and Iran.

 “Hezbollah’s involvement in the fighting in Syria against Syrian children and people is a main factor in igniting sectarian hostilities and animosity that only serve the Zionist enemy and its allies,” Toufaili said.'