Ron Paul on Obama's Syria WMD Claim - YouTube
Printable View
Noam Chomsky on Ron Paul's 9/11 Theories: "What He Said Is Completely Uncontroversial"Quote:
Originally Posted by Dino Velvet
Noam Chomsky on Ron Paul's 9/11 Theories: "What He Said Is Completely Uncontroversial" - YouTube
Ben, this is a thread on the crisis in Syria today, not Noam Chomsky's reactions to the televised debate of Republican candidates that is a few years old.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
:iagree::iagree::iagree:Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Ben contain your passion for Ron Paul's philosophy to the right part of the forum old buddy
http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-putin...151615653.html
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/MQ...ROPTP_2_G8.JPGQuote:
Analysis: Putin basks in isolation over Syria as Obama's charm falls flat
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/FZ...b5cec5193.jpegBy Guy Faulconbridge and Timothy Heritage | Reuters – 1 hr 35 mins ago
By Guy Faulconbridge and Timothy Heritage
ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland/MOSCOW (Reuters) - At the end of a tense two-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama - slumped over and serious - tried to lighten the mood with a joke about their favorite sports.
"And finally, we compared notes on President Putin's expertise in judo and my declining skills in basketball," the U.S. president told reporters at the G8 summit, after the two men gave formal statements emphasizing their common ground rather than their sharp differences on how to end the Syrian crisis.
"And we both agreed that as you get older it takes more time to recover," Obama said.
Putin - who folded his hands and glowered through most of the exchange - was having none of it. He waited for the audience to finish laughing, smiled icily and stuck in his spear.
"The president wants to relax me with his statement of age," retorted Putin.
Few expected any diplomatic breakthroughs from the meeting in Northern Ireland, less than a week after Obama's administration announced it would provide military support to rebels fighting Moscow's ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
But Putin - who scowled, lectured and fidgeted while resisting the forced bonhomie of the two-day summit with the leaders of world's richest nations - seemed positively to relish his isolation.
It was a vintage display of Putin's world view forged since the Soviet Union's fall in 1991: the United States will inevitably overreach, and Moscow must always step forward to demonstrate the limits of U.S. power.
His position won the former KGB spy plaudits at home, where he is trying to reassert his authority after protests and in the face of a stuttering economy.
"I think he got all the bonuses domestically. He held his head high, stood tall and did what he pledged to do - to be very firm but not confrontational," said Dmitry Trenin, a political analysts at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank.
Putin clearly calculated that he had nothing to gain by making concessions over Syria, and little to lose if Russia was further alienated in a rich nations' club where it has looked the odd-one out since it became a fully fledged member 15 years ago.
"RESET"
U.S. officials played down the rebuff, describing the Putin-Obama meeting as "businesslike" and emphasizing the common ground over a sectarian civil war in which the two presidents are now both committed to arming the opposing sides.
"We both want to see an end to the conflict. We both want to see stability. We don't want to see extremists gain a foothold," said Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser.
"I think both leaders went out of their way to underscore that they can work together on this issue," Rhodes said. "If they can project a message that they have a convergence of views as it relates to a political negotiation, that keeps the possibility, the prospect of that political track alive."
But even their one joint initiative faced a setback. One source at the summit confirmed that Syrian peace talks called last month by Moscow and Washington, initially meant to be held in June, then July - were now postponed until August at least.
The tense exchange between Putin and Obama marks full circle since the administration of the newly-elected Obama called for a "reset" in ties with Russia in 2009 after a row between the Cold War foes over Russia's 2008 war against U.S.-ally Georgia.
Obama has touted the Russia reset - in which his then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart with a big red "reset" button - as one of his signature foreign achievements. (Clinton's aides notoriously mistranslated the button and labeled it "overload" in Russian.)
WE ARE GOING TO DELIVER
Putin arrived the night before the summit and made his unrelenting position clear at a press conference with his host, Britain's David Cameron.
Putin hammered home his point that arming Syrian rebels was reckless by zeroing in on an incident from last month in which a rebel fighter was filmed biting on the entrails of an enemy.
"One does not really need to support people who not only kill their enemies but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the camera," he said as Cameron stood by.
From the outset, Putin was isolated at the summit.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused Putin of supporting "thugs" and said Syria would be discussed by the other seven powers, with Russia as a "plus one". Putin's foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov fired back, saying the Canadian's remarks came "from the position of an outside observer".
After the bilateral meeting with Obama, Putin went to a dinner in a lodge on the shore of Lough Erne where the leaders discussed Syria over a dinner of crab, fillet of beef, and whisky-laced custard.
Putin refused to accept any public declaration that could imply Assad would go. He won: the final communique on Syria did not even mention Assad's name.
He also defended Russia's arms shipments to Syria and suggested that more might be coming: "We are supplying weapons under legal contracts to the legal government. That is the government of President Assad. And if we are going to sign such contracts, we are going to deliver," he said.
Western officials still suggest that Moscow's alliance with Assad is not as strong as Putin's remarks imply. "Clearly Putin doesn't hold back with his views," said one Western official who tried to play down the disagreements.
"Don't expect Vladimir Putin to pick up the phone to Damascus and say 'the game's over'," he said. "The Russians have deliberately and utterly not tied themselves to him (Assad) as an individual and have always given themselves some wriggle room."
Western officials have suggested for months that Moscow might soon drop Assad, only to find Putin as staunch as ever, even when the war was going the rebels' way. Now, with Assad's forces having seized battlefield momentum in recent months, there seems less reason than ever for Moscow to ditch him.
Putin has another reason to want to look tough abroad, to consolidate support at home at a time when the faltering economy is hurting his standing.
"Despite the emotions, the summit was in many respects a success for Russian diplomacy," the business daily Vedomosti wrote, suggesting Russia had made no concessions and the West had shown it was not ready to act if Moscow was not on board.
Moskovsky Komsomolets, a popular daily with a reputation for catching the public mood, was more uneasy: "Putin is alone again," it wrote. "But do we need to be sorry about it?"
(Additional reporting by Andrew Osborn, Jeff Mason, Roberta Rampton and Alexei Anishchuk in Enniskillen; Editing by Peter Graff)
Russia's President Vladimir Putin gestures during a media conference
after a G8 summit at the Lough Erne golf resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland June 18, 2013.
REUTERS/Matt Dunham/Pool
And we try to involve ourselves in this? How do you manage this chaos? What does Syria have to do with our national security in America?
http://news.yahoo.com/iraqi-shiites-...160318017.html
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/Dr...-MILITANTS.JPGQuote:
Iraqi Shi'ites flock to Assad's side as sectarian split widens
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/FZ...b5cec5193.jpegBy Suadad al-Salhy | Reuters – 58 mins ago
By Suadad al-Salhy
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Among the Iranian pilgrims, foreign executives and tourists in the departure lounge at Baghdad airport, a group of young Iraqis prepare to wage religious war in Syria - not for the rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad but against them.
Dressed in jeans, their hair cropped short, the 12 men awaiting their flight are Iraqi Shi'ites, among hundreds heading for what they see as a struggle to defend fellow Syrian Shi'ites and their holy sites from the mainly Sunni Muslim rebels.
Syria is splintering the Middle East along a divide between the two main denominations of Islam, becoming a battlefield in a proxy war between Assad's main regional ally, Shi'ite Iran, and his Sunni enemies in Turkey and the Gulf Arab states.
The conflict has already drawn in streams of Sunni Islamist fighters on the rebel side, while Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah is openly fighting for Assad.
Now the flow of Iraqi militiamen across the border is also casting doubt on the Shi'ite-led Baghdad government's official position of neutrality in the Syrian civil war that has killed 90,000 people in more than two years.
For Ali, 20, fighting for the Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas militia brigade meant joining his father in Syria to protect a Shi'ite shrine near Damascus from the Sunni rebels.
"It is my legitimate duty to go there and fight to defend Sayyida Zeinab Shrine," Ali told Reuters just before he left Baghdad last week. "Should we accept seeing Zeinab, the grand daughter of Prophet Mohammad, being captured again?"
As the Syrian war grinds into its third year, sectarian killings are increasing, while hardline Sunni clerics are declaring Jihad or holy war on the Shi'ites of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. All this is inciting Shi'ite militants to fight back.
Reports abound that Sunni rebels have desecrated some of Syria's many Shi'ite shrines, including the Hojr Ibn Oday sanctuary, although these are often difficult to verify due to media restrictions in Syria and the general fog of war.
In the last few months, Iraqi Shi'ite militias have begun openly recognizing their formerly clandestine role in Syria, which has helped to double their recruitment, according to militia commanders.
However, this has also exposed schisms and infighting over the leadership of the Syrian and Iraqi militants who fight alongside Assad's troops.
Many Shi'ite fighters are young volunteers like Ali, but others are Iranian-trained militiamen who honed their skills against the U.S.-led forces which occupied Iraq until 2011.
Ali and other militants from around Iraq gathered recently at the Baghdad home of Abu Zeinab, a former senior leader from the Mehdi army militia, where they spent a few nights before travelling through the Baghdad airport to Syria.
Abu Zeinab said militant leaders took care of recruitment, equipment, flight booking and expenses, securing permits from the Syrian government and sometimes coordinating the different Shi'ite militant groups.
Militants say around 50 Iraqi Shi'ites fly to Damascus every week to fight, often alongside Assad's troops or to protect the Sayyida Zeinab shrine on the outskirts of Damascus, a particularly holy place for Shi'ites.
"The numbers of volunteers have significantly increased after Sunni rebel attacks which basically were targeting Shi'ites and the Shi'ite shrines in Syria," said Abu Zeinab. "We ask clerics whom we trust to register young men who they want to fight in Syria."
GOVERNMENT ROLE?
Iraq was dominated by its Sunni minority until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but now has a government led by members of the Shi'ite majority under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. For them, Syria's upheaval is a nightmare; they believe a collapse of Assad's government will bring to power a hostile Sunni regime that will inflame Iraq's own Sunni-Shi'ite tensions.
Already sectarian attacks are resurging as al Qaeda's local wing and other Islamist Sunni insurgents regain ground in the western desert bordering Syria. Nearly 2,000 people have died in violence since April, with bombings targeting Shi'ite and Sunni mosques and neighborhoods as well as the security forces.
Iraq says it has a policy of non-interference in Syria, and keeps channels open with Assad's government and the opposition. But Western countries accuse Baghdad of turning a blind eye to support for Assad, such as allowing Iranian aircraft to use its airspace for flying military equipment to Syria.
Baghdad dismisses those charges and denies it is allowing Shi'ite militants to travel freely to Syria or giving them any logistical support.
"There has been an exaggeration of Iraqi brigades or units fighting in Syria. Really there has been a limited number of volunteers," Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters in an interview. "These volunteers have gone there without any sanction or approval or support from the government or the Iraqi regime or the political leaders."
But Iraq's domestic politics are complex and some Shi'ite parties rely heavily on Iranian support, making them more sympathetic to Tehran's position on Syria.
Privately, Shi'ite politicians, officials and militant leaders acknowledge support is provided to Assad, and that means allowing Shi'ite fighters to flow into Syria.
"Shi'ite politicians believe the best way to keep Sunni extremist fighters out of Iraq is by keeping them busy in Syria," said a Maliki adviser, who talked in condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "All the Iraqi government has done so far, is to look the other way to the militant movements from Iraq to Syria," he said.
INFIGHTING
Militants usually fly in small groups of 10-15 from Baghdad and the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, sometimes disguised as pilgrims. Their small bags may include uniforms, military equipment and sometimes pistols, militia fighters say.
Militia commanders say they have used their influence and the sympathy of Shi'ite officials in escorting fighters with their equipment through security checkpoints in Baghdad.
Most of those fighting in Syria are former members of the Mehdi army of anti-U.S. cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, or from the Badr Organization - the armed wing of ISCI political party - and the Asaib al-Haq and Kata'ib Hezbollah militias. Most are loyal to the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a religious authority, fighters and Iraqi politicians say.
Some Mehdi army fighters took refuge in Syria when Iraqi and U.S. forces crushed their group in 2007. There they formed the Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas brigade in coordination with the Syrian government and Khamenei's office in Damascus to defend the Sayyida Zeinab Shrine, militant commanders say.
Even experienced Iraqi militants had to join that brigade and fight under the command of Syrian Shabiha loyalists, who are mostly from Assad's own Alawite clan, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam. This was a condition for being permitted and equipped by the Syrian Government, Iraqi militant leaders said.
Now the rules of engagement have changed, and splits have emerged among Syrian and Iraqi Shi'ite fighters. The Iraqi Mehdi army, Asaib al-Haq and Kata'ib Hezbollah have begun fighting under the command of the Lebanese Hezbollah, which helped Assad troops to recapture the strategic town of Qusair this month.
Military discipline imposed by leaders of Asaib al-Haq and Kata'ib Hezbollah on the Iraqis has irritated the Shabiha, some Iraqi fighters say, because the Syrians had tried to take advantage of the chaos to profit financially from the fighting.
Those disagreements erupted into a gunbattle near the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab few weeks ago between Asaib, Kata'ib and some Iraqi Mehdi Army fighters on one side and Abu Ajil, the Syrian commander of the Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas brigade, and his local followers on the other. Two Iraqi fighters and three Syrian Shabiha died in the clash, militants in Baghdad said.
A reconciliation meeting was held under orders of Khamenei's office, but divisions fester and Iraqi combatants have formed a new brigade, refusing to fight under Syrian command.
"I am not taking a salary from the Syrian government, no one has a right to treat me as a mercenary Shabiha," said Abu Sajad, a former Mehdi Armi fighter, and one of the Shi'ite leaders who established the Abu al-Fadhl al-Abbas brigade. "I won't ever fight again by the side of those who killed my brothers."
(Editing by Patrick Markey and David Stamp)
Iraqi mourners carry the coffin of Dhia Mutasharm, a Shi'ite militia fighter
killed in clashes with the Free Syrian Army, during a funeral in Basra, 420 km
(261 miles) southeast of Baghdad in this May 6, 2013 file photo.
REUTERS/Atef Hassan/Files
A powerful piece arguing against Western intervention... from a British monthly magazine called Prospect
The Syria trap
Is Britain’s plan to arm the rebels a dangerous miscalculation?
By James Harkin
Bedding down at a Syrian rebel barracks just behind the frontline in Aleppo city was never going to be easy, but it is the screaming which keeps me awake. Long choruses of anguished howls come from the other end of a narrow corridor, where the rebels I’ve eaten dinner with are setting on four unfortunates they had just detained in the street outside. Unable to sleep, I join some of the other men on the balcony outside, drinking endless pots of Arabic coffee and watching the hypnotic glow of mortar shells rising and then gently falling in the night sky.
The commander supervising the interrogation of the four men, accused of a scheme of looting and perhaps murder, tells me they’re being punched, but from the rhythm of the wailing it sounds as if they’re being pinned down and flayed. “Thieves, killers,” says one rebel. “They were pretending to be with our revolution,” sniffs another.
This is a battalion of the Free Syrian Army—the loose lattice of hundreds of tiny battalions and a few larger militias, which include the forces that Britain has decided to back in a bid to drive out the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. They are constantly changing names and personnel and, in the main, answer to no one but themselves. That this group routinely resorts to such brutal treatment of others is not surprising; almost everyone with access to a weapon in the city seems to do so, often in response to popular demand, if those people are accused of looting or working for the other side.
But western governments should think hard about whether they really understand their chosen allies before they send arms to opposition fighters, as they may do this summer. Many European countries and the United States have recognised the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the fractious and ineffectual body which claims to act as the political arm of the opposition in exile, as the “sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” But only Britain and France have argued that arming the rebels on the ground might now be a good idea. Britain, with France, successfully pushed for the European Union to lift its embargo on providing arms to the rebels from 31st May, in a bid to bring an end to the two-year conflict, which has claimed more than 80,000 lives, according to a UN estimate in May.
Their calculation is that arming these rebels—or even just threatening to do so—will pile pressure on the Assad regime. They also hope that it will freeze out other opposition fighters—above all, the Islamist militants of Jabhat al-Nusra, who recently pledged their allegiance to al Qaeda. Foreign Secretary William Hague has said: “Our priority is to get the regime in Damascus and the opposition to the negotiating table… a decision to deliver lethal weapons will depend on the course of these [talks].” Less cautiously, Laurent Fabius, his French counterpart, has talked of “a weapons imbalance because Mr Bashar al-Assad has planes, etcetera, and the resistance fighters don’t have the same means.” He added: “As much as we are working for a political solution, on the ground things have to be rebalanced.”
Adding urgency to this pitch, in the past few weeks France has said that it has evidence of the use of sarin nerve gas by the regime. To rebut one of the fiercest objections to arming the rebels from other European governments, Fabius has claimed that anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, if supplied, might be rendered useless by remote control if they fell into the “wrong hands.”
Yet any extensive encounter with rebel brigades themselves suggests these calculations are dangerously wrong. For a start, there is often little to divide the rebels Britain has chosen to back from their Islamic counterparts—and none of them have any fondness for the west. British ministers and officials have clearly spent much time in Istanbul talking to the National Coalition. The British and French notion is that they might give arms to this body, which would hand them out to the Free Syrian Army. But it is not clear they have answers to the elementary questions about whether they can control the outcome if they do indeed funnel more weapons into the Syrian warzone.
The armed rebellion—in northern and eastern Syria, particularly—is bound up with family and tribe. In July last year, in a town near the Turkish border, on the same day that the armed rebels moved their rebellion from the surrounding towns and villages into Aleppo city, a 52-year-old electrical engineer called Abdul Kareem brought me his two oldest sons to talk to. Both had started out by demonstrating against the regime, but had tired of the brutal response and thrown in their lot with a battalion of the Free Syrian Army.
They were just back from fighting to eject regime forces from Zitan, the family village just south of Aleppo. Ayham, the capable-looking battalion commander, was 25 years old; Molham was a reflective 24 year old who’d left behind an architecture degree at Aleppo University and couldn’t wait to put down his Kalashnikov and get back to his studies. Three weeks later, however, Ayham was shot dead in a regime counter-offensive in the heavily contested southern district of Salaheddine. Since the fighting broke out in Aleppo last year—(Syria’s largest city had previously seemed immune to the uprising convulsing many others)—eight members of Abdul Kareem’s extended family have been killed. All were fighting with the rebels except one—a five-year-old cousin called Khalil who’d gone missing and been found, a week later, with his throat cut.
Nearly a year later, Aleppo is caught in the same stalemate as the strategic city of Homs before it. The poor districts of the south and east are controlled by various rebel factions while regime forces are in charge of the rest; Salaheddine remains a battleground. Molham, I discovered when I met him again this year, has replaced his older brother as battalion commander. His 100 or so men occupy five different frontline positions; in between shifts they repair to impromptu barracks. One is a former school, which they have been using since September, although it is only several hundred metres away from regime forces. Shortly after I arrive, I emerge from a trip to the outside toilet to find that a sniper, seeing signs of movement, has just taken a lump out of the front door. The culprit, says Adbul Kareem, pointing in the direction from which the bullet came, is probably a fighter from Iran or the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias, which have played a big role in supporting regime forces.
For two years, the violence in Syria has advanced through these cycles of attack followed by revenge massacres and creeping foreign involvement. In a way that threatens to ignite the tensions in Iraq and the region more widely, much of the killing is justified with sectarian rhetoric: Sunni against Shia. Syria has a Sunni majority, but has been ruled by the Shia Alawite sect. The rebels I talk to are Sunni—most are from the same Al-Akidi clan as Abdul Kareem, from Zitan. All, with the exception of one 50 year old who acts as a spiritual guide, and his teenage son who runs errands, are between 20 and 24 years old. Quite a few, like Molham, were university students when the conflict broke out; others, like the men who originally gave rise to the idea of a Free Syrian Army, are defectors from the regular army.
They have been taking terrible losses. A few days before I arrive, another cousin from this barracks, a 22-year-old former student at Aleppo University, was ambushed by regime forces in Al-Izaa. Molham looks weary and haunted, still trying to come to terms with everything that he’s seen. He’s forgotten all about architecture, he says: it now seems like a different world. With his men I rib him about a Swedish female journalist we met last summer and whom he obviously liked. He enjoys the joke, but has no time for women: shortly after, he apologises and leaves to go and pray. Last year, when I’d asked Abdul Kareem about the threat from Islamic extremism and al Qaeda, he’d taken offence. “My sons don’t even pray,” he’d barked, both proud and mortified. But with death a daily event, everyone prays now.
In the evening we lie around on cushions in the large schoolroom where everyone sleeps. The generator keeps failing; as we talk, we are plunged for long spells into perfect darkness. The chatter ripples with mentions of the Islamic group Jabhat al-Nusra, with whom the men have a friendly although uneasy relationship—but not the antagonistic one that you might conclude from the British and French decision to back the Free Syrian Army and oppose the supposed “extremists” of Nusra.
I’d seen many Nusra fighters on the drive into Aleppo, sometimes manning joint checkpoints with battalions working within the Free Syrian Army. At one point Abdul Kareem, who’d driven me in, asked me to stop taking pictures; Nusra, he said, might not appreciate it. The hundreds of ramshackle battalions affiliated with the Free Syrian Army still vastly outnumber Nusra, but numbers are not the issue. Stepping into the vacuum of rebel expertise and organisation, Nusra has set itself up as the special forces of the Syrian rebellion, every bit as ruthless as the pro-regime, paramilitary Shabiha (Assad supporters) on the other side.
“Everyone wants to fight, and they don’t much care who they fight with as long as they’re good,” shrugs Molham. He does offer that “if the world gave us weapons we wouldn’t need any help from these people”—the argument that seems to underpin the British and French conclusion. But as it is, he talks to Nusra regularly. Like all the other rebels I meet, he respects their religiosity and their fighting prowess and has no wish to do battle with them. Most are Syrian and good people, he says, even if many of their leaders are fanatical and Iraqi; they’ve discussed working together on operations, but nothing has come of it yet. “Our battalion,” he says with some pride, “is the only one in this city that Nusra say they respect.”
But while the Free Syrian Army rebels might want western arms, that doesn’t mean they like the west. He blames the west for everything. If they’d helped with weaponry and communication devices as they kept promising, his forces wouldn’t have needed help from Nusra or anyone else. He’s come to the conclusion that the west is playing a double game. “They hate Bashar and they hate Nusra, and they just want both their enemies to fight each other.”
Syria’s rebels are now in a dangerous bind. Having stirred the full force of a brutal regime, they badly need the battlefield skills and valour of Jabhat al-Nusra to keep their insurgency moving and protect the many civilians who supported them in the first place. But the blind fury of the Islamists of Nusra, who regard the Syrian army as infidels and Shia (and Alawite) Muslims as apostates, is pushing many Syrians back towards a discredited regime. On the walls of the school there’s little iconography associated with the revolution or the Free Syrian Army, but a great deal of Islamist imagery. “There is no God but Allah,” read several black flags on two of the classroom walls.
During the night a helicopter buzzes overhead, setting off a rebel siren and leading to a moment of panic. After regular attacks from the air, the roof of the school has been cracked open and its upper floors are glass-spattered mess; everyone sleeps in the same room on the ground floor. The sky still belongs to the regime, and the weapons at the disposal of the rebels—Kalashnikovs, a few Browning pistols and grenades—look puny in comparison. During one of the blackouts Abdul Kareem wanders out of the darkness to show me a box-like, homemade pipe bomb the men have just assembled. He does his best to chip in and tap friends and extended family abroad but the money, he says, is fast running out. “Now, zero,” he complains. “It’s all gone.”
The following day Molham takes Abdul Kareem and me to the frontline in Salaheddine. While another group of rebels drive off in the direction of the government lines, Molham inspects a homemade grenade freshly prepared for his unit from a pharmacy which has been turned into an impromptu soldering works. “What do you think of Syrian grenades?” he smiles, staring at it for over a minute, turning it around in his hands and practising throwing it.
That the rebels badly need more and better weapons is obvious. Yet given the forces ranged against them, it is not clear that it would make much difference to their campaign. He shows me where the regime launched its first air strike on rebel positions in the city: once an Islamic school, now it is concrete and twisted metal. Much of the rest of the neighbourhood is the same; like many of the most visible symbols of Syria’s armed rebellion, from Baba Amr in Homs to the towns surrounding Damascus, Salaheddine has been reduced to rubble. As the regime has retrenched in the last six months it has resorted to hurling heavy surface-to-surface missiles at areas of the north it has little hope of winning back. The previous day I’d looked around some of the places the regime forces had hit. The effect was more like an earthquake than an explosion: whole streets reduced to tiny white bricks.
The regime has healthy stocks of ballistic missiles, both Russian and Iranian, and these ones appear to have been fired from nearly 300 kilometres away in bases close to Damascus. Some rebel activists have taken to reporting their departure when they see them launched.
For all the debate among governments internationally about whether there is firm evidence that the regime has used chemical weapons, it has more than enough conventional weaponry to kill its citizens many times over. Should it ever run out, it has access to more, through the support of Russia and Iran. By unfreezing the EU embargo on supplying the rebels Britain and France have reckoned that they can call Assad’s bluff. But they have to contend with the open unease of many EU governments—and in Britain, members of parliament, where David Cameron has offered a free vote after more than 80 Conservative backbenchers demanded an opportunity to block the supply of weapons.
And Syria’s shadowy security state works best when it’s in a corner. Dark rumours of foreign plots to destabilise the country brought its ruling clique to power half a century ago, and have done much to keep it there since. That is still the regime’s best card.
For their part, the vast majority of the rebels I have met in Syria are openly contemptuous of their putative political representation abroad, with its shifting coalitions, accusing it of being in thrall to shady foreign interests and too far removed from the real fighting on the ground. It is tolerated by the rebels because they think it might win them weapons and recognition from the international community. It is highly unlikely that equipping the latter with better weapons would bring them to the bargaining table. Instead, they would redouble their efforts to finish the job—and Molham admits that his rebellion no longer defines that task as the pursuit of freedom and democracy, but of honour and revenge. “Five or 10 years,” he says. “I won’t leave. I must stand.” When I suggest a political solution he scolds me for my naivety. “All the clever people have left Syria. And for us this is not a game of chess.”
I’d heard much the same last summer, when I asked the ostensible leader of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo (and another cousin of Abdul Kareem and Molham) about his international backers in the Gulf states and the west. “They don’t give us any support, and what support they do give us is corrupt or not worth having,” he’d growled. “And in return for this they want us to make a deal with this regime. It’s not going to happen.”
It is not surprising that the Syrian rebels don’t much like the west. From the beginning many of them saw al Qaeda and Nato as more or less indistinguishable; foreign interlopers who were not to be trusted but whose protection might prove handy. The first Free Syrian Army rebels I met, in a Damascus safe house in February last year, were ordinary soldiers from farming communities who had broken from the regular army as a result of the brutal military response to civilian demonstrations in their areas. Their mission was plainly defensive; they had no real strategy about how to oust the Assad regime and had come to the meeting only to ask for more weapons. Now, they feel betrayed. European countries and the US, by continually hinting that they are about get tough on the Assad regime, flirting with different opposition alliances and implying that the regime was on the point of collapse, may have given these young men false hope—encouraged them to go out and fight, even die, in the hope that governments would come to the rescue. Whatever the west does now will, in their eyes, seem too little and too late.
Meanwhile, the west is in danger of misreading the threat from Jabhat al-Nusra. That threat is certainly real and growing, but it is to Syrians and not the west. Even if many of its leaders are foreign, the bulk of its fighters seem to be Syrian and have no appetite for international terror. While there have been flashes of tension between Nusra and Sunni tribes over resources and their puritanical edicts, the Free Syrian Army rebels are not going to turn on them because the west wants them to; Nusra, after all, has done much more to help them.
And even if we did persuade one powerful brigade of rebels to clamp down on Nusra in return for weapons, the last thing Syria needs, in a powder keg of grudges and uneasy alliances, is yet another proxy militia pitting Syrian against Syrian. The likely effect would be to blow the armed rebellion apart, and it is far from clear that “our side” would win (or that they would stay on our side if they did). And what do we do if we give our chosen rebels everything they are asking for, including a no-fly zone, and the Syrian army, with one press of its ballistic button, blows them and our weapons to smithereens? There is no appetite at all in the EU or US for committing forces; rather, the opposite.
Hague and Fabius have spoken as if their own governments are convening the talks, but they are just two small players around a very big table. Unless they can win the support of America—unlikely, given President Barack Obama’s focus on getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq, and beyond that, on Iran’s nuclear programme—their rhetoric is not going to be matched by meaningful action on the ground. The real effect of any supply of arms from an EU country would be to trigger a kind of arms race, in which countries vie to pour weapons into the crucible. Turkey, Qatar and the other Gulf states might step up their own arms deliveries to their choice of opposition rebels as they jockey for regional championship of Sunni Islam. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah would very likely respond, with greater force and conviction, the Iranians determined to protect their fellow Shia. That would aggravate sectarian fault lines, pitting militant Islamist against militant Islamist in a way that, even now, few ordinary Syrians say they want.
On our way back from Aleppo to the Turkish border, Abdul Kareem and I are forced to take a different route because of heavy fighting around one of the last remaining regime holdouts, an air base called Menagh. I find out later that some rebels were ambushed by irregular fighters who came from a nearby Shia village; several were killed, including a young friend of Abdul Kareem and his sons. The situation is becoming increasingly bleak for the rebels. Not a single division of the Syrian army, not even those largely Sunni brigades the regime is allegedly keeping in reserve because of concerns about their loyalty, have left en masse to join the rebels. The minorities and many moderate Sunnis are scared of this anarchic rebellion, but are also painfully aware that this tired, brutal regime can’t protect them forever. Some have tried hard to disentangle their communities from the battles that are being fought in their name.
After Iraq, it was predictable that the implosion of the Assad regime, authoritarian and secular, like that of Saddam Hussein, would see many Syrians retreating to their religious and ethnic identities and a rogue’s gallery of opportunists arriving to set out their stalls. Those in think tanks like to float the break-up of the Syrian state as a potential solution, but I have yet to meet a Syrian who is enthusiastic about it, or who even thinks that it will happen. The borders of the Syrian state may have been drawn up in 1916 by the British-French Sykes-Picot agreement to suit the national interests of those two countries, but they have acquired a reality over the passing decades.
If Britain and other EU countries really want to help Syrians, they would be better advised to step up humanitarian aid to the millions of displaced Syrians who urgently need it. They might also grant visas to many, like the rest of Abdul Kareem’s young family, who are living in shocking conditions in refugee camps around the country’s borders and who cannot get a visa to go anywhere else.
But what Syria needs more than anything else are honest brokers inside the country who can reach out across military lines and encourage Syrians to talk to each other—as has been done recently by Syrian Kurds trying to broker peace between Shia and Sunni communities. It is much easier said than done, of course, but it remains the only way to separate the regime from its people. It is also the only course that can now bring Syria and the whole region back from the sectarian catastrophe towards which it is thundering, and squeeze out the extremists and proxies on both sides.
After so many tens of thousands of deaths, it would be even more cruel if a popular movement for self-determination should end with the country slipping beyond anyone’s control.
James Harkin's reportage, "War Against All: The Struggle for Northern Syria," is published as an e-book. He will take up a visiting fellowship at the Reuters Institute, Oxford University, in the autumn
And an equally powerful argument from an American magazine, the New York Review of Books
Stay Out of Syria!
JUNE 20, 2013
David Bromwich
After the troubling revelations of the May 8 Senate hearing on Benghazi, much remains unclear about the attack that killed four Americans last September. Were the killers aiming to prove the incompetence of American power? Or was the assault directed more specifically against CIA operations? How did the White House, the State Department, and the CIA all agree to say so early and wrongly that the attack could have been the spontaneous action of a crowd infuriated by an anti-Muslim video? Why did the administration delete from its talking points the mention of five similar attacks in Libya, and the fact that al-Qaeda-linked forces were known to be active in the vicinity?
One thing is clear. The Benghazi killings were an indirect but predictable consequence of the NATO intervention that overthrew Muammar Qaddafi. Disorder was a necessary condition of the attack. The “light footprint” of NATO was never going to be sufficient to contain the forces the war released. With the death of Qaddafi and the instability of NATO’s interim arrangements, his troops and weapons moved southward in Africa; and the evacuation of US State Department workers in Mali in January and the attack on international workers in Algeria are now widely understood to have been another fruit of the NATO action in Libya. For Americans, of course, Libya is almost forgotten, but for North Africa and the watching Arab world, it remains a vivid and disturbing memory: seven months of air attacks, with thousands of sorties, 7,700 bombs dropped or missiles launched, and uncounted civilian casualties.
The deepening violence of the Syrian civil war is also in some measure a consequence of Libya: Qaddafi’s disbanded army and unguarded weapons moved southward in Africa, but they also moved eastward to Asia. The state terror of the most “surgical” air war leaves in its wake many thousands of stateless terrorists. As Nancy Youssef pointed out in a penetrating survey on March 14 in the McClatchy newspapers (“Middle East in Turmoil 10 Years After Iraq Invasion”): “The most effective anti-Assad rebel military faction [in Syria], the Nusra Front,” is itself “a branch of al Qaida in Iraq, the same radical Islamist group that the US fought in that country and that the current Iraqi government also is battling.”
The recent past is still with us, if we take the time to look. This is the background against which one must assess the judgment of those persons—well placed in the media and the foreign policy elite—who have lately urged another violent intervention by the US in Arab lands. Three days before the Benghazi hearings, on May 5, Bill Keller published a double-length Op-Ed in The New York Times. His column was entitled “Syria Is Not Iraq,” and its moral was adequately conveyed in Keller’s final words: “Getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.”
Let us pause to remember Iraq before we follow Keller’s invitation to get over it. Almost 4,500 Americans died in Iraq, and 32,000 came home wounded. Of the numbers of Iraqi dead that would be living had the Americans not bombed, invaded, and occupied their country, reliable estimates are harder to come by, but in 2008 The New England Journal of Medicine estimated a total of 151,000 violent deaths by June 2006; and the seven years that followed have added many thousands more.
At the time of the Iraq invasion, Keller was an Op-Ed columnist and senior writer at the Times. In 2002–2003, when his newspaper’s slanted coverage of Iraq played a significant part in leading the country into war, Keller believed the Times stories based on forged or dubious evidence circulated by the Bush administration, and threw his considerable journalistic energy into support of the war. Looking back, in his May 5 Op-Ed, he speaks euphemistically of “our ill-fated adventure in Iraq”; his own part in it he calls “a humbling error of judgment” that for a time “left me gun-shy.”
But Syria is not Iraq, he says, and he now recommends the deployment of American military might against Syria. Keller’s pressing fear is that by inaction, the US may surrender its role as international leader: “Prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy.” By means of violent intervention, he believes, the tragedy can be made smaller; and he deplores the reticence of President Obama as the evasion of “a president looking for excuses to stand pat.”
There follow, in Keller’s piece, a series of elaborate distinctions intended to show that Syria presents a more soluble problem than Iraq. “In Iraq our invasion unleashed a sectarian war” whereas “in Syria, [sectarian war] is already well under way.” We ought to intervene, then, because things are already bad. The underlying assumption is that American action could not make things worse. “This time,” Keller continues, “we have allies waiting for us to step up and lead.” We did have allies, and much the same allies, in Libya, but in the thirteen hundred words of this column the word “Libya” does not occur.
The evident self-assurance of Keller’s advice on Syria was dismaying in itself; but it also confirmed a tendency that emerged in a series of recent Times articles. These news articles by several hands all bore headlines of a consistent tendency, implying that American military intervention had now become the natural upshot of events in Syria.
On April 26, for example, a story by Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt was entitled “White House Says Syria Has Used Chemical Arms.” The factual substance of the article was ambiguous, and its headline might more accurately have read: “Chemical Weapons Used in Syria. US Uncertain of Source.” Again, on May 7 the headline delivered a judgment: “White House Sticks to Cautious Path on Syria.” This would not, in most papers at most times, have qualified as a front-page story at all. That there has been no change of policy is hardly news unless a great many sensible persons are expecting a change. The headline implied that the common sense of the well-informed now favors armed intervention; yet the paper had carried the day before, in a corner of page 9, a Reuters dispatch of some significance. This was a report of a statement by a qualified investigator, Carla Del Ponte of the UN commission of inquiry on Syria, who flatly contradicted the rumors of the use of sarin by the Assad government: “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.” UN officials commented that there was “no conclusive proof” about the use of chemical weapons. Astonishingly the Reuters story was neither analyzed nor incorporated in the lead Times story of the day’s events.
In April and May, it must be said, the Times has been an extreme case. On May 7, when the Times played down the public contradiction of its own reports, a Wall Street Journal story by Naftali Bendavid confirmed the skeptical judgment about Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons by testimony from a second non-American source. The secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was said to acknowledge indications that chemical weapons may have been used but without any “confirmed, consolidated information as to who might have used [them].” On May 6, The Guardian reported that the UK defense secretary Philip Hammond “admitted that Western intelligence services would probably have to wait for a further chemical attack before gathering enough information to trace it back to the government.” A week later, on May 12, Robert Gates on Face the Nation offered a judgment of the wisdom of American intervention in Arab lands: “I thought it was a mistake in Libya,” said Gates. “And I think it is a mistake in Syria.” That verdict came with a certain authority from the person who, as defense secretary under Bush and Obama, spent much of 2007 keeping America out of war with Iran and much of Obama’s first term withdrawing American soldiers from Iraq.
Meanwhile, within Congress, the voices that led the march to war in 2003 have been clamoring against any hesitation by Obama to take military action. About John McCain, it is no satire but simple truth to say that he cannot have enough wars. On May 8, McCain published in Time a characteristic editorial, “Syria: Intervention Is in Our Interest,” which contained a list of practical suggestions. Since the column supplies answers without having asked questions, it may serve economy to list in brackets the questions that naturally occur to a mind less confident and rash:
We could train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces, as recommended last year by President Obama’s national-security team. [“Vetted” by whom and with what expertise?] We could strike Assad’s aircraft and Scud-missile launchers. [Inside Russian-built air defenses stronger than those in Libya?] We could destroy artillery and drive Assad’s forces from their posts. [All without ground forces?]
Yet much of the recent pressure for another American intervention is coming from liberals. Senator Carl Levin, for one, cosigned with McCain a letter to the president on March 21 which urged—among other “limited military options”—the launching of “precision airstrikes” against the Syrian air force, as well as “more robust assistance” to opposition fighters believed to be unconnected with al-Qaeda. One of the tricks of persuasion of the liberal section of the war party, from Iraq through Libya to Syria, has been to aestheticize war. The Iraqi advisers of the Bush administration—Ahmed Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, and others—frequently said that American forces occupying Iraq would be “greeted with sweets and flowers.” The optimism of Bill Keller departs from that pattern to some degree, and offers elevating comparisons to dance and music: “All of this [program of military intervention] must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by a symphony of diplomacy.”
A less sanguine prognosis was suggested by Dexter Filkins in the May 13 New Yorker. Looking for reasons to intervene—though, by the end of the article, he does not seem to have found them—Filkins interviewed Fouad Ajami, but quotes him without remarking that Ajami was, as indeed he remains, an enthusiastic endorser of the war in Iraq. The same article quotes Anne-Marie Slaughter without mentioning her close association with Hillary Clinton and the strong position she took in pressing Obama to execute “regime change” in Libya. Slaughter treated Filkins to the inverted aestheticism typical of much war propaganda when she imagined a result of a Syrian chemical attack: “Syrian civilians rolling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, dying by the thousands while the United States stands by.” That fantasy of the future was challenged within days by the assessments from Del Ponte, Rasmussen, and Hammond.
The Obama administration has been strangely tentative in justifying its choice not to arm Syrian rebels: a policy that would need little defense if the president could bring himself to speak it plainly. On the use of sarin, the White House statement told of an ambiguous “chain of custody” of the prohibited chemicals: a phrase that clarifies nothing for most readers. It would have been straighter and wiser to say: “Things are in such chaos in Syria that we can’t be sure whether the government or the rebels used sarin.” Filkins himself reflects the same tentativeness: he is drawn to the idea (dimly in the background) that there should be a military solution, and if so the US should be equipped to supply it. His article—and there have been others like it—exhibits a plenitude of military speculations but is void of political analysis. To judge by what he writes, Filkins did not consult Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Pape, or any other well-known authorities whose previous warnings have proved accurate. In fact, Brzezinski recently issued a sharp admonition in Time:
The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddly-winks intervention from around the edges of the conflict—no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth—would simply make the situation worse. None of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the US. On the contrary, they would produce a more complex, undefined slide into the worst-case scenario.
Filkins’s article closes by quoting a government official who gets away with saying unchallenged that Iraq was “a crisis…that was contained.”
Contained at what cost, and for how long? The day of the Boston Marathon bombings saw seventy-five killed in Iraq, and 356 wounded: just one story, which few Americans will have read, out of dozens about the aftermath of the American occupation. Our rehearsals of our own good intentions, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and now in Syria, have swollen to the shape of a rationalized addiction. What then should the US do? Nothing, until we can do something good. But the situation could not be less promising. At present, the main support of Syrian opposition forces comes from Saudis and Qataris. The US has offered help at two removes, but lacks the intelligence to perform much more without strengthening al-Qaeda as we did in Libya. Luis Lema, in a recent editorial in Le Temps of Geneva, rightly remarked that the war is becoming “not only less and less ‘legible,’ but more and more unpredictable.”
And each day adds a new reminder of the futility of allegedly pragmatic solutions. A Times report on May 15 by Anne Barnard and Hania Mourtada (“An Atrocity in Syria, with No Victim Too Small”) told of the sectarian “cleansing” by pro-government forces of Sunni enclaves, in the village of Bayda and the city of Baniyas, both located in a mainly Alawite and Christian province. Three hundred twenty-two corpses have been identified, many of them horribly mutilated. As a pledge of retaliation, a rebel commander filmed himself “cutting out an organ of a dead pro-government fighter, biting it and promising the same fate to Alawites.” It is a saccharine optimism that says the country has begun to fall apart and a more “proactive” US could hold it together.
Syria has already largely disintegrated. The government and its Alawite and Christian supporters have secured the west, the Kurds are in the northeast, and the Islamist rebels are in the east (where the al-Nusra Front has already begun to enforce sharia law). The grossness of the chatter about intervention is suggested by a recent debate between American advisers on Syria and the “moderate” rebel forces they are best satisfied with. The question in dispute, as Phil Sands revealed in a May 9 report in The National (“America’s Hidden Agenda in Syria’s War”), turned on whether the moderates should go into combat first against the Assad loyalists, or against the al-Nusra Front whom they will eventually have to kill.
But the untold story of Syria concerns something beyond the atrocities on both sides. It has also to do with the sinews of war—the financial motive and muscle that keeps it going. A Financial Times article by Roula Khalaf and Abigail Fielding-Smith on May 17, “How Qatar Seized Control of the Syrian Revolution,” quoted persons close to the Qatari government who estimate that $3 billion has thus far been spent bankrolling the rebel groups. Sources inside Syria had guessed only a third of that. But the money must keep coming, since Qatar is buying up the loyalty of networks of rebel forces as an investment in the divided Syria of the future. This is calculated for geopolitical and economic influence, without clear religious or ideological motivation: the rulers of Qatar have no apparent common ground with the Islamist sects they are subsidizing. Nor does their involvement bode a peaceful future order: the flow of money, according to Khalaf and Fielding-Smith, “has already created many enemies inside Syria, and not just among pro-regime supporters.”
Against Qatar and Saudi Arabia stand the Shia powers including Iran and its ally Hezbollah, along with numbers of Iraqi Shiites whom the war of 2003 displaced. All these groups support the Alawites—related to Shia Islam. All of them except the Alawites are outsiders to Syria who for religious, cultural, and political reasons do not believe that they are outsiders. The US, by contrast, is seen throughout the region as a perfect outsider. The violence has now taken almost 80,000 lives, yet it remains a reasonable fear that disorders sprung from another American war could lead to still more ferocious bloodlettings. Our ally Turkey, which has supported Syrian rebels, is troubled by the prospect of separationist energy driving the Kurds of Syria to form a state of their own; and the International Crisis Group report on Syria’s Kurds (issued on January 22) contains an entire section uneasily entitled: “From Arab Uprising to Kurdish Opportunity.”
Americans for a long time have tended to think (when we think of other countries at all) that the more new nations spring up, the better. This goes with our relaxed communitarianism but bears little relation to realities elsewhere. Our latest siege of optimism, which followed the collapse of the Soviet empire, has now been given a fair trial over a quarter of a century. It has not always worked out well. Not in the Balkans, not in the former Soviet republics, and not, it seems, in the Middle East.
The high-pressure bid for intervention in Syria may have come to a temporary halt. (The quickness of its start and stop recalls those weeks of March and April 2007 that witnessed an equally sudden press for war with Iran.) On May 7, John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced their plan for an international conference on Syria, possibly as early as the end of May. And barring the extreme possibilities—a White House panicked from other causes and desperate to prove its potency; another Israeli bombing of Syria that succeeds in dragging the US in—it might require a breakdown of negotiations to prompt Barack Obama to follow the militarized advice he is getting now from sources that do not include the US military.
An article on the Kerry–Lavrov meeting by Peter Beaumont in the May 5 Observer of London made clear, as no American publication yet has done, the extent of the damage to the US from the miscarriage of NATO actions in Libya. The powers outside NATO whom we must rely on—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—eventually realized that in Libya the three leading powers, France, Britain, and the US, were all bent on regime change rather than merely the enforcement of a no-fly zone. Those countries, as Beaumont pointed out, felt betrayed and they will be understandably harder to move on Syria.
The difficulty of uniting so distrustful a group will be matched, in any negotiations on Syria, by the disunity of the Arab League. They are divided between Shiite and Sunni loyalties and often further divided within. But theirs is the region that will bear the burden of the nearly one and a half million Syrians who are now refugees, most of them in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. Iranian involvement, qualified observers have said, will be necessary for a lasting peace agreement, given the role of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran in the hostilities; and by keeping Iran in the outer darkness, Obama’s lack of imagination may have served his cause as poorly as his insistence on saying again and again that “Assad must go.” A good result of negotiations would be a transitional governing body that offers Assad a slow exit, but the obstacles to such an outcome are formidable.
The refugees of the Iraq war were the great unspoken disaster of the bombing, invasion, and armed occupation of Iraq, during the first five years of our nine-year stay. Two and a half million fled that country, out of a population of 27 million. Thus far the US has admitted as immigrants 64,000: a little under 3 percent. The vast majority of those displaced lives have become the unasked responsibility of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and other Arab nations. And the scale of the crisis of the refugees from Syria is only beginning to be recognized. Of the nearly one and a half million refugees scattered by the civil war into foreign lands, 500,000 are in Jordan alone, more than half of them under the age of eighteen.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote about the millions of stateless and rightless persons cast up by the early wars of the twentieth century and the imperialist manufacture of new nations before and after World War I. A whole generation of the displaced were brought into the world so lacking in hope, so without access to elementary rights that, for them, to live within the law presented no advantage over crime and for that matter terrorism. “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Arendt wrote, “but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them.” The disasters of the twentieth century, as she judged them, had proved that a globalized order might “produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.” An end no happier, if we do not take care, awaits us down the road of the “carefully choreographed” violence and the “symphony of diplomacy” conducted by the last of the great powers.
—May 23, 2013
There are errors in both reports, in the case of both (although Bromwich's article was written in May) there were reports a few weeks ago that Jabhat al-Nusra has split with one faction supporting the union with the Islamic State of Iraq and Shams, and the other faction rejecting it. Jabhat al-Nusrat is believed to have become the al-Qaeda franchise because it was so condemned by the USA which is an unreliable source; it seems to have become as riddled with factionalism and personality cults as other Syrian rebel grouplets.
In the case of Harkin he writes:
Those in think tanks like to float the break-up of the Syrian state as a potential solution, but I have yet to meet a Syrian who is enthusiastic about it, or who even thinks that it will happen. The borders of the Syrian state may have been drawn up in 1916 by the British-French Sykes-Picot agreement to suit the national interests of those two countries, but they have acquired a reality over the passing decades.
This is factually incorrect, as the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement envisaged the Vilayet of Mosul, which is now in Iraq, as being part of the French zone of influence. The French foreign minister, Berthelot, was so hung over at the San Remo conference he signed Mosul away to the British because he wanted to go back to bed, although the French had second thoughts about it anyway because of the size of the French zone of influence. Subsequently, at Lausanne in 1922-23 and after, the Turkish government attempted to 'reclaim' Mosul for Turkey and failed -taking their revenge on Britain and France with the illegal annexation of Alexandretta in 1938-39, a province still claimed by Syria. In the end (in 192-eight the French got into Iraq through the Compagnie Francaises des Petroles (f1924, better known these days as Total) when the shareholding of the Iraq Petroleum Company was forcibly re-structured by the British.
NB: THis post has been edited to remove ultra explicit images of death.
"Rebel" group Jabhat al-Nusra beheads a Catholic Priest.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013...n_3527372.html
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1220353/th...URAD-570.jpg?6Quote:
Francois Murad, Catholic Priest 'Beheaded By Jihadist Fighters In Syria'
Huffington Post UK | By Sara C Nelson Posted: 01/07/2013 09:25 BST | Updated: 01/07/2013 16:24 BST
A Catholic priest has been killed in Syria, it has been confirmed by the official Vatican news agency.
Franciscan Father Francois Murad died after fighters linked to the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra attacked the monastery he was staying at, local sources say.
It shows a man the channel understands is the priest, sitting cross-legged with his hands bound, alongside two other men while fighters surround them chanting “Allah Akbar” (God is great).
As the first man, believed to be Father Murad, is beheaded with what appears to be a kitchen knife, several observers are seen stepping close to his body to capture close-up photographs and video.
The site claims Father Murad had been accused of collaborating with the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, though the accusations are unconfirmed.
The official report into Father Murad's death – submitted via the Fides news agency - states he died in Gassanieh, northern Syria. It claims the circumstances of his death “are not fully clear”, but confirms the monastery where he was living had been attacked by militants.
Fides states Father Murad had began the construction of a coenobitic monastery in Gassanieh, shortly after being ordained. At the start of the civil war, the structure was bombed and he moved to the convent of the Custody of the Holy Land for safety.
“Let us pray,” wrote the Custody of the Holy Land Pierbattista Pizzaballa OFM “so that this absurd and shameful war ends soon and that the people of Syria can go back to living a normal life.
"Unfortunately Syria has now become a battleground not only between Syrian forces, but also between Arab countries and the international community."
Speaking to Syria Report, he added: "The world must know that the support of gunmen by the west is helping extremists in killing Syrians. With such stances, not a single Christian will remain in the east."
In May David Cameron announced Britain is to double military support for Syrian rebels to help them withstand the "onslaught" from Assad's regime.
Archbishop Jacques Behnan Hindo, titular of the Syrian Catholic archeparchy in Hassaké-Nisibis told Fides: "The whole story of Christians in the Middle East is marked and made fruitful by the blood of the martyrs of many persecutions.
“Lately, father Murad sent me some messages that clearly showed how conscious he was of living in a dangerous situation, and offered his life for peace in Syria and around the world."
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1220176/th...IEST-570.jpg?6