And there you have it. Both sides still think they can win – so the war goes on. But the West is in retreat. Forget support for the rebels. Even the gutless Obama has stood up to his generals and forbidden them not to arm the good guys/bad guys.
The West Babbles on and Assad is the Winner – Robert Fisk, The Indepndent
I sniff treachery. Because – let’s be frank about it – something is going very wrong with the narrative of the Syrian war. Our Western lords and masters – as untrustworthy today as they were when they sold Poland to Stalin at Yalta – have started to talk much less about their visceral desire to destroy Bashar al-Assad and much more about their fear of the corrosive presence of al-Qa’ida within the rebel forces fighting to remove the Syrian president. As the Syrian tragedy deepens, so our moral Western policy towards the damned of this ghastly war has turned into a betrayal of its people.
The injection of Jabhat al-Nusra fighters and other proto-jihadis has fouled the secular nature of the battle so badly that Assad’s original claims that al-Qa’ida was the regime’s enemy is beginning to look frighteningly true. There have been battles between the Free Syrian Army and al-Nusra and between al-Nusra’s own commandoes.
Entire article at The Independent
If that’s his best, I’d hate to see his worst. Let’s deconstruct this a bit. Fisk excoriates western leaders for their apparently feckless concern about providing al-Qa`eda with support (an editorial position shared by this very blog!), quoting Hillary, then shifts fire to the British foreign secretary, and then comes round to admitting that things have gotten so bad that the concern now has a sound basis in fact. Well, okay then.
So the message here is that as long as one hurls the right amount of bile at the leadership, the logical underpinnings and inconsistencies matter not at all? Just another all outrage all the time schtick?
Seriously, stick a fork in it. This place is done.
Dave, hello. I saw this as a summation of the hypocracy of the US, France, and GB for all the histrionics, inclding Hillary Clinton’s “Assad must go!” tour. As for al Qaeda in Syria, Fisk implies that Assad will take care of that but mentions the tragic outcome of the misadventre, which is Al Nusra ready to set up shop in Lebanon.
It’s a matter of interpretation and I think yours is pretty good (on a few occasions, I’ve had the same problems with Fisk).
What I was really hoping was to hear your take on this piece, ecerpted below, by Brian Downing on Karzai’s recent action regaring the special forces. I have no idea what that’s about but it is very interesting.
What hypocrisy? The west has been extremely clear that they are not going to directly intervene here. Their statements and behaviour have consistently signalled that from their great power perspective the anti-Assad forces have license to operate and that they are not going move to damp things down. They are a check on other great power “interference”, nothing more. Do they want Assad to go? Sure, but not enough to do something overt and proactive. They are primarily interested in monitoring and predicting who is going to be in the ascendancy when the dust settles. If they can shape that somewhat at low cost, they will. Anything more than that is extremely unlikely and would be driven primarily by a dynamic that saw them “dragged along” by regional allies.
If folks are all bent out of shape about the level of slaughter and the ascendancy of al-Qa`eda aligned elements, well I hate to tell you, that’s what everyone – myself included – bought with our desire to avoid direct, large-scale intervention. This outcome is not a surprise, it is part and parcel of that decision. I remember being pretty vocal about that over a year ago. The sooner folks stop conveniently glossing over the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their desired policies with a veneer of vitriol aimed at the pols – who are in this instance carrying out the desired policy – the better. When it comes to foreign policies, hard-hearted empaths are a lot better than those who are serially shocked, shocked to find that violence and death are unpleasant to look at and the grist for this sort of thing.
The second paragraph makes a lot of sense.
As for the NATO power policy of “predicting and monitoring,” it is important to remember that this was not the initial policy on Syria. The clear goal at the outset was to replicate the Libyan model of regime change. The UN human rights commission step was accomplished through Assad’s sorry record. But the vital element, the “no fly zone,” didn’t pass muster due to Russia’s veto on the UN Security Council. The Libyan no fly zone quickly turned into a combined air-ground assault on Gaddafi’s forces. The rebel effort prior to that was not looking so good. After the no fly zone + sir support by the UN + NATO, the rebels moved on to victory. After the failure of the Syrian no fly zone, the NATO/GCC, things didn’t work out as planned in Syria.
Ir remains to be seen if ths reaction to the failed initiative in Syria will be the new policy in these situations. Probably. We can’t afford this anymore. Bringing troops out of Afghanistan a year early would have saved the money necessary to avoid the sequestration process ongoing. Wolf Blitzer made that point to Sen. Lindsay Graham last week. Graham’s response: We’d look weak to our enemies and leaving a year early would represented the difference between victory and defeat. But wasn’t the action there to get Bin Laden ad wasn’t he dispatched a while ago, a curious citizenry might ask.
The push at the UN for the no-fly-zone was last August. How does 17 months after the start of conflict translate into the goal at the outset being replication of Libya? Sorry, but your interpretation of events does not square with the facts on the ground. If they wanted to replicate Libya they would not have have been nearly as reticent as they have been. They have been reticent because they don’t frankly want to buy this big greasy enchilada. If the local players want to strap it on, they’d like to influence it, but they aren’t going to so obviously piss any more significant amounts of blood and treasure down a hole.
Seriously, folks need to stop using the shorthand of mapping all the other narratives onto Syria – it is its own conflict with its own specific rhythm, dynamics, and challenges. Trying to force events into a “Libya” template – which is itself usually really a re-purposed “Afghanistan” template – which is usually really a derivative of the “Iraq” template doesn’t help with understanding. These things are all historically particular and they do not generalize well.
And here I thought North Africa was “the No 1 destination for jihadists anywhere in the world today”.
I doubt that there’s any particular destination that’s clearly head and shoulders above the others, at least by metrics that really matter. The sheer numbers of foreign supporters rallying to the flag in any of these conflicts is a pretty crude metric. What really matters is the portion of the high value talent – either locally sourced or from abroad – “in behind” the local movements that is preparing the environment for acceptance of the transnational elements of the movement and their agenda and how successful they are. The Mali document makes it very clear that these are not unsophisticated people – fortunately accomplishing this sort of thing is pretty difficult, given any number of factors but particularly including that the local movements have seen what happens when the transnat zealots come to town…
I can speak a bit on the personal side of this war, since we have in-laws still living in different parts of Syria, as well as many of the family who have moved out of the country and are now refugees in different parts of the world.
Phone lines are still working now and then so we get reports on what daily life is like and how people are coping. I would say the Syrian population, which is mostly Sunni but includes a good many Shi’ites, Christians, and Alawites, plus minority sects like Dervishes, is clearly splitting along sectarian lines. This is not, at least yet, a situation similar to the war in Iraq that followed the overthrow of the other Ba’ath party. One thing that still unites most people, including many Alawites, is a hatred for Bashir al-Assad and what is left of his government. His willingness to turn his government on his own people is seen as unforgiveable. The war crimes of his troops are well-documented, including the torture of children. He has been isolated from his population for a very long time and has been forced to turn to outside help to survive, and that means bringing in mercenaries from Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Republican Guard in Iran. These troops are detested even more than Assad’s own army, because at least in the case of the Syrian armed forces, people know that the soldiers have a gun at their back and will be shot if they don’t fire upon their own people. The Lebanese and Iranians, on the other hand, are utterly ruthless simply for the fun of it, or so it seems, and they are easy to tell apart from the population by their armaments and their language. The Iranians in particular speak no Arabic and have provided the snipers that indiscriminately fire on anyone regardless of age or what they are doing.
The sentiment that Assad and his regime must go is so strong and so widely held, even among his previous supporters in the business class and Christian communities, that I would say there is no turning back. Without or without help from the West, the Syrian populace will find a way to keep the insurrection going for years.
What follows when Assad is finally ousted is anyone’s guess, but relations with Iran and Lebanon will take many generations to repair. The Chinese and Russians will be ejected immediately. This does not mean the West will be welcomed eagerly, except that Syrian society is much more secular and European-oriented than its neighbors other than Turkey. The general population does not want to see a Salafist dictatorship, even though an Islamic regime probably would be welcome. Such a regime, though, would be expected to be more on the Turkish model, and certainly not on the Iranian and Shi’ite model. I think from the Syrian perspective, that would be most people’s preferred outcome. At the moment, however, survival and continuing to fight the regime are paramount on everyone’s minds.
A many years long civil war like the one Lebanon experienced seems to this unconnected observer all too possible. I assume that the Iranians, and their ally Hizbullah Lebanon greatly fear a Sunni/Salafist/Saudi controlled Syria that then works to undermine Iran and Hizbullah Lebanon (much to Israel’s benefit.) It seems to me that because of both of their religious foundations they cannot imagine that a secular diverse state a la greater Lebanon could happen, wherein the Shias could exist side by side with the other minorities and the Sunnis. Indeed even I find that hard to imagine myself, if for no other reason than that the Sunni’s, if they can unite, have a majority in Syria where they lack it in Lebanon and Iraq. But such a course seems to be devolving into the only option for Syria, that is a state built around co-dwelling minorities with the Sunni majority, again like the Lebanese experience and similar to the situation of the Kurds and Shias in Iraq.
It’s further hard to imagine such a situation allowing Iran to continue to supply support through Syria to Hizbullah Lebanon.
Clearly such an outcome cannot happen with Assad in power. And the only way to get him to step aside would be with the insistence of Russia and Iran and maybe Hizbullah Lebanon. And full circle, they would not urge that without feeling confident that an honest confederation like that of Greater Lebanon could happen.
Excuse my ramble and thank you for your inside information.