Ending Baathism in Syria requires a major war.
Syria has a population of 22million that is massively divided along religious and ethnic lines (10% Kurds). It has a Baathist tyranny better supported among that population than was Gadaffi who had considerable support and so a big war is in the very early stages of developing. The tyranny is very well armed and trained, and has ‘undegraded’ command and control, with massive numbers of police thugs, spies, and so forth. So, this will take some time and will involve Turkey for sure. Turkey is being quite open about being the regional power that will act if it must, and the Kurdish issue and PKK is clearly central to this.
Syria also has had a national conscription system that now leaves a great legacy of trained men who are now willing and partly able to take on the lawful tyranny in a civil war. Both sides have just observed what happened over 9mths in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt etc., in this year of continuous spring. So soldiers who are thinking about mutiny will be encouraged as the situation develops and the core forces of repression will be somewhat shaken by the visions they have just been witness to.
Fortunately for the masses of people in revolt, the Islamic cultural reality of Friday prayers and mass gatherings throughout the country to mobilize around, and the egged on or ‘shame’ factor of not being left behind when others have been brave and fought and grabbed their freedom ought not be underestimated. Confidence really ought to be up on the side of the revolution and down a bit at least among the tyranny despite its large support and vast quantities of military assets. Large scale mutiny is the most hopeful start to the next stage of ridding Syria of Baathists, but from at least the Turkish side, I can’t see how this fight can be left alone to develop as a ‘pure’ civil war for very much longer.
As I see this the Syrian army becomes muscle bound very quickly in most of the larger cities that have had the big demonstrations against Assad, and is quickly exhausted in the smaller towns especially near all the borders, and no doubt along the Euphrates river and Nth. East of that line. They are effectively an army of occupation and can obviously be spread too thin trying to hold everything so they currently are running around trying to appear to be everywhere. But spying and the in and out arresting duties of the secret police and so forth is the only way this regime can even continue to exist in huge parts of the country.
The young fighting men can and will be pissed off and fight back, as well as leave and cross the border into Turkey as we have seen in Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. They will be greeted by the soldiers that have deserted and already there as a determined rebellious armed force planning for either a long war, or rapid growth if the situation changes. This force will in the face of almost weekly reports of mass slaughter start to mount reply attacks deliberately to gain greater recognition and further stimulate recruitment. They are not refugees but a fighting force already trained and intent on overthrowing the people that they have fled from and who are still systematically killing their friends and family members, so they will find ways to fight right now and that keeps some of this fighting near the Turkish border.
The Turks are already permitting the establishment of an insurgent force and the Syrian tyranny can’t hit across the border as the Turks would respond immediately and massively. Turkey will remain the most important country able to impose the military action (similar to the NATO effort in Libya) and no other country has the stomach for this IMV. Turkey’s leadership has a vital interest identified and seems determined to advance its democratic reform program within Turkey that requires dealing with Kurdish liberation issues, and simultaneously with the current PKK that has been and still are hosted in all the neighbours.
Turkey has no territorial ambitions but regularly has crossed its borders and beat up on the PKK and is still doing so right now so it looks like the perfect storm for a war to develop.
The Syrian tyranny is continuing to systematically murder the Syrian people and can’t stop this brutality. They can’t undo the way they rule with terror police as the core to their control across a vast part of the country. They can only now exist by holding guns over the people of very many towns and villages and cities of Syria. The Syrian army is now an army of occupation that fears intervention from the far larger Turkey. The army has too much to do and is rotting so it has no prospect of stopping the small fights and the constant flight that the activities of the secret police etc., ensure will continue. Eventually it will be unable to patrol near the border for fear of hit and run, then hit and advance attacks that will be mounted near population centres. They will not be able to use air power against the freedom fighters.
No doubt if war breaks out the western international community would turn a blind eye and hope for the end of the Assad regime as one aspect of the outcomes that in some cases would happen in days of a mass Turkish incursion. The Turkish armed forces would not have to liberate large Syrian population centers, all they have to do is prevent the Syrian forces from surrounding and suppressing the people they are currently intimidating near the Turkish border and then allowing the rebel force that they currently protect in Turkish territory to return and be protected in very much larger form in Syrian territory. They would then hand over all the arms required by the new Syrian regime that they recognize and try to continue to take steps back over time as the Syrian civil war is fought. Seems straight forward but wars don’t work to plan, let alone time-tables, and other sides usually have a bit to say. What we have here in abundance is other sides.
But though I feel sure that a large war is coming and how it gets going won’t matter much this is too complex for me to get a handle on. What follows from the current suppression of the Syrian masses by the Baathists is that a war of liberation must breakout if democracy is part of the demands that are thrown on the table. These demands are on the table and Turkey must comply with the international body that approves of the end of the war. The UN determines when the end is and the new government is given the UN seat. Given that 3,000 are already dead and lots more are disappeared the war is going in one sense already.
Once Turkey gets involved then the NFZ and or destruction of the Syrian air forces in a big war comes up and NATO naval forces would also get drawn in with blockade work and U.S. spy assets etc.. The Syrian army would be rapidly isolated in large areas of Syria and then systematically destroyed if it lacks air power. If this war were to eventuate Turkey is bound to follow through and cut up the army that is spread too thin trying to hold down large population centres. That will end the period of secret police activities and see heavy arms rapidly distributed to the population that is more than willing to put them to use. That is I suppose the ideal first stage for putting a stop to the way the Baathists run Syria.
The Baathists can now enter population centers unopposed, but provided the opposition run around and avoid much fighting they can’t stay and comfortably regain control everywhere at once. Neither can they do what the Russians have done in Grozny because that will bring on the required intervention. If they can’t use heavy weapons and can’t avoid continuous small arms skirmishing then they will over time be driven from the bigger cities that are in revolt. The soldiers cant stay in their tanks and can’t avoid snipers and so the insurgents will be able to organise and grow. IMV Turkey wants to intervene and will intervene if the Baathists use air power, or they start to use the heavy weapons.
Without air power the Syrian army eventually won’t be able to enter some of the larger cities without being defeated because the supply of anti-tank weapons etc., will flood in from Turkey with the blessing of the whole world. Then the civil war will unfold and finally ought to draw in the U.S. from the Mediterranean. NATO ought to be redeploying from the Libyan theatre now. There will be much work for the A10′s.
I can’t see a ‘cheaper’ way of ending the Syrian Baathist tyranny as they are far too strong at the moment, just like the Libyan tyranny was before they were seen to be about to defeat the rebels in Benghazi and the intervention was launched. That was when I hoped for Egyptian intervention. It would have sped the liberation that has now come to Libya even without that intervention and with all the costs to the libyan people.
patrikm
Your post reads rather like that of any apologist for Imperial conquest from Rome onwards. “those savages need the civilising touch of cold steel eh”
I guess it would not occur to you that there may be ways other than Imperial genocide to “civilise the lesser races” – as they would say.
That you entirely fail to mention any of the complicating factors such as the role of Israel and the danger to Lebanon and the occupied territories astounds me,
Dalec
Syrian Baathism is a good deal less virulent than Iraqi Baathism (think Mussolini cf Hitler).
Regime is better described as Alawite than as Baathist. A major issue is that the Alawi minority (10%) was historically persecuted under non Alawi regimes and has good reason to expect persecution again once they lose power (especially as Salafis seem to be stronger in Syria than in other recent revolutions). They might even want to stage a fighting retreat to their own mountain areas and maintain autonomy.
NATO (including Turkish) intervention might conceivably take a less apocalyptic form – preventing sectarian civil war and protecting all minorities.
So far I gather the main Kurdish parties have not clearly sided with the revolution (apparently because the main revolutionary forces have not clearly accepted Kurdish demands for autonomy).
Also the Sunni merchants etc have not yet broken with the regime. Turkish and other NATO intervention might be quite decisive in speeding that break. If so, then once that part of the ruling elite breaks away, again a less major war might be required.
An indication that the regime could suddenly crack is the sheer hysteria of Assad’s claims about a regional catastrophe. The (directly contradictory) claims about Israel can be dismissed as merely standard Arab dictator rhetoric, although particularly pointless when Israel is so obviously preferring “stability” in Syria rather than yet another islamist regime surrounding it. Only people like Dalec would even pretend to take Assad’s rhetoric on this seriously, so it does sounds like the language of a regime about to crack.
Nevertheless I agree that the Syrian regime appears to have a stronger base than Gaddafi’s and it was surprising how long the fighting lasted in Libya despite the outcome having been obvious from the start. So there could well be a longer and tougher fight in Syria as patrickm suggests, despite the above counter indications.
Ok, I shouldn’t feed the troll but I can’t resist.
Can anyone, including Dalec, explain what he might mean by “danger to Lebanon and the occupied territories”?
Hamas has already distanced itself from the regime, moving its Damascus offices to Egypt. Fateh has always hated the regime for its attempts to dominate the Palestinian movement (so much so that they even sided with the Iraqi Baathists against the Syrian Baathists and used to cheer when Syrian planes were shot down in Lebanon – even though they were shot down by the Israelis).
Is Lebanon supposed to be afraid that Syria might not be able to interfere as much, or that an islamist regime in Damascus would be less likely to let arms get through to the Lebanese resistance??
Arthur; First question: How come a person who does not wholly agree with your position is a troll?
My fear is that given a large scale conflagration in Syria, Israel will no doubt use it as cover to expel all the Palestinians from the occupied territories. The re-occupation of Lebanon will be a strategic neccessity. Make no mistake the dream of a greater Israel and Israeli rule over the “untermench” Arabs in the region is not dead; it is alive and well and is strongly supported by Imperial US under the cover of “humanitarian intervention”.
A Turkish invasion of Syria? Maybe that would cause enough death and destruction to sate your appetite.
Dalec
Dalec,
thanks for sharing.
I was genuinely curious, there is no way to GUESS that somebody might believe overthrow of the Syrian dictatorship will “no doubt” result in Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from the occupied territories and re-occupation of Lebanon.
I am not in the least bit curious as to why you believe this stuff.
It is apparent that King Abdullah’s thinking re ‘his’ Jordan is to make sure that whomever leads the government has the ability and intent to change the status of Jordan as required by the peaceful pressure from the streets, and ensure a smooth transition to a fully fledged western style bourgeois democracy so that he can stay on his thrown in the manner of the British royal family. King Abdullah intends to ‘lead’ his people from 1 or 2 steps behind! Still we mustn’t complain as this is decades of progress ahead of Assad etc.
Now I now wonder if Assad sent his less Baathist Baathist troops to annex Abdullah’s realm as Saddam did to Kuwait if Steve would continue to sprout his current line over Kuwait! Nevermind thankfully after what happened to Saddam he won’t dare do it.
I suspect that Steve knows he would oppose such an invasion now and just can’t admit to getting it wrong back then. No matter we all move on; it’s just that some – like Hitchens – understand just how far they have moved on.
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=245529
King Abdullah of Jordan … the first Arab leader to explicitly ask for the embattled Syrian leader’s resignation. “I believe, if I were in his shoes, I would step down and make sure whoever comes behind me has the ability to change the status quo that we’re seeing.”
…
The Arab bloc also called on member states to withdraw their ambassadors from Syria and said new economic and political sanctions would be put into effect later this week.
…
At least 40 Syrians were killed in fighting on Monday between forces loyal to Assad and insurgents in a town near the border with Jordan, local activists said, in the first case of major armed resistance to Assad in the region.
They said troops backed by armor killed 20 people – army defectors, insurgents and civilians – in an assault on Khirbet Ghazaleh in the Hauran Plain, and in fighting that ensued near the town. A similar number of troops were killed, they added.
…
and this is interesting
‘But Claire Berlinski, an Istanbul based journalist and academic, said Ankara’s economic problems precluded it from playing a significant role in dealing with the crisis.
“Turkey can’t play the role the world is assigning to it. It’s a developing country with huge problems of its own,” she said by e-mail. “The economy may be ‘booming’ by international standards, but everyone knows a crash is coming.”
Berlinski added that the Euro zone crisis could well spread to Turkey, further destabilizing the country’s vulnerable economy.
Turkish authorities, she said, “need to look as if they’re on the right side with Syria, and they obviously want to look as if they’re on the American side, whatever it is. But they can’t afford to be adventurous. And frankly, I don’t blame them.”’
Last November the Syrian tyranny had the entire population of Syria intimidated and ‘good’ relations with most of its neighbors. Last week saw the Arab League, after 8 months of Syrian Arab Spring with now 3,500 plus dead civilians, force Syria’s Assad tyranny to at least (and at last) make their cheap statements about ending violence and withdrawing the tanks from the streets and releasing the arrested etc.. IMV this was a ‘reasonable’ attempt (given who is involved) to prevent the further descent into civil war. The goal of preventing this descent into civil war is a worthwhile goal despite who it is that says so.
The consequent very quick suspension from the League after the further killings is good news as is the urgent talk about applying further economic sanctions and more political pressure. The abstention of Iraq in that vote ought not be considered firm evidence of Iraqi government support for the preservation of the Assad tyranny because of other evidence that the Iraqi government have advocated that a transition from the current tyranny to a democracy be undertaken in an orderly manner whatever that means exactly.
Of the 22 members Lebanon, Yemen & Syria voted NO and Iraq abstained; 18 voted for suspension! That is a very solid understanding that the Assad regime cannot holdout as is nor reverse the direction that the mass of the Syrian people are going in, and so can’t in any long run sense win -a thus entirely preventable- civil war. The test of strength is not really required. But I would bet this test of strength will happen despite the strategic situation! Utterly revolting waste but as Mao was fond of saying ‘where the broom does not reach the dust will not vanish of it’s own accord’.
Unlike Gaddafi, Assad would I think at some point bolt for the exit if it remains an option, so I am glad it currently still is, and hope it stays that way for as long as possible, but obviously at some point this option closes because it will harm the interests of the ruling class that offers the bolt hole as their own people will hold it against them. Then his options will become an international trial (clearly he is guilty of serious crimes against his people) and so subsequently jail or death at the hands of his people. Obviously if he bolts that will speed the collapse as the army will then shatter as only Assad provides the legitimacy (and he has lost that). So I live in hope he will reflect on the fate of other tyrants of late and choose that bolt option earlier rather than later, or not at all.
This view (that Assad is doomed) despite any spin is no doubt a view shared with the other 3 countries despite their vote (as well as shared by Turkey and China, Iran and even Russia). China after the fact of the Arab League expulsion (and surprised by it no doubt) has simply been the first to throw the Assad regime under the bus. Putin/Russia will (at sometime) get around to this as well while Iran can stamp its frustrated diplomatic feet all it likes but that is really about all it can do.
No one outside Syria will fight any part of a war to try to preserve Assad.
The Arab League has tried to get onto the front foot and make it clear that it has effectively finished with Assad and so Iran and Russia can huff and puff all they like for the next few weeks or whatever, but they will not fight about this if or when a provoked Turkey finally intervenes to help the Syrian people protect themselves.
The sober truth is that if this violence spins into a larger scale of mass murder of the people demanding their human rights, more of the army will mutiny and rapidly IMV, or eventually at any rate secure the full armed control of some northern border towns. Turkey will have already been forced to increase their ‘meddling’ with the supply of weapons to a developing bourgeois democratic peoples army that pretty well only requires those arms to start to fightback and spread it’s control.
I bet those arms in large quantities are already on their way forward. Any Turkish high command will be now months down the track of planning for the start of this quite possible war, and would have what amounts to a few weeks worth of logistics and then follow up supplies well placed. This stuff is not coming by camel train but via overnight semi trailers placed forward near the border. Turkey has plenty of air power lots of troops, good access to U.S. intelligence assets that the U.S. would be happy to share, loads of buildup time and plenty of special forces.
It is now clear to everyone that the Syrian regime is strategically finished and the offer to Assad of refuge if he takes it now or at any rate ‘soon’ is not unrealistic or inappropriate. Naturally he deserves to spend the rest of his life behind bars but that is not the best way to encourage him to bring on the regimes implosion. The Arab League encouraged the regime to talk to the opposition in Cairo. Talks are now happening in Cairo with that opposition and the AL.
The question of recognition of the opposition council is now coming up even though this is still premature. The Arab League would like to keep the threatened Turkish intervention from happening against even a suspended Arab League member. But I think the only thing that can prevent that intervention now is for the Assad regime to implode. The reports of additional troops heading to Homs is not good.
I don’t think the regime can dismantle itself willingly and hand over power through a peaceful election process. Or that a big enough mutiny will occur to tip the balance in favour of the people in large parts of the country and the Assad forces withdraw from them and a new shared power and slow reform and transition situation emerge, and I don’t think Assad will bolt for quite a while but I hope I am wrong as an implosion as Assad ‘saves’ himself is possible.
That would be throne.
In August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait.
“In October 1990 the Syrian airforce backed by the US …. attacked the (Lebanese) Presidential Palace….”
Please dont lecture me on hypocracy.
Or hypocrisy
This could be big
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15752058
as could this
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/18/free-syria-army-lebanese-border
These reports are important and events are obviously moving much faster than even a month ago. Today’s news report from Libya of the capture of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who will now face a trial with a death penalty attached is every bit as important, as any news directly out of Syria, or the bordering countries; because the Arab Spring – a rolling revolution – must now be seen by the Arab masses as one ‘event’, where the various people have what Yanks used to call The Big Mo. (Momentum)
IMV the very large Syrian armed forces would have to be one of the most unstable armed forces, not to have already been dragged through a big war ever. Little more than 8 months into the end stage struggle to rid Syria of the Assad tyranny and this relatively massive force is visibly ‘spinning its wheels’. We can reasonably predict that a vast number of these soldiers will abandon the tyrant before this war ends. The troops are just not going to have the deep motivation to fight to the death as this fight goes on and probably on for quite some time.
The newly emerging western left will in the end cheer almost any intervention that finally gets launched by the Turkish government and NATO. That would be a big turn around in thinking from 2 decades ago, but the precedent of intervening in Libya’s civil war has now been set and the region is leading not NATO.
The Arab Spring is not a struggle for the lousy levels of freedom and dignity apparent in our so ‘enlightened’ western streets. Nothing so grand as the right to sleep in a tent, in a park for a month or so!
The Arabs are not struggling at the level afforded western working people under 21stC bourgeois nanny state democracy. Their spring event is at the current unreformed Islamic level of freedoms. Their current levels are only approaching western standards of almost a century ago with respect to women’s rights and gay issues …well etc.
The Arab Spring is clearly uniting the many to defeat the few and around the very simplest of demands and it has an infectious momentum. No wonder the Arab League is now effectively standing shoulder to shoulder with Turkey despite them never wanting to. This is not working out the way either planned.
This situation happened to anti-war leftists over Libya. Events suddenly found leftists standing where they had never expected to be. The Arab demands are very simple, and the Assad response to those demands has produced a completely predictable fightback. These demands really will unite the vast majority of the people in any country behind any guns they can get hold of and the way the events play out really will affect the neighbors.
All the governments following Jordan are now developing policies that concede the basic demands of the masses for politics and elections and regular transfers of governmental power. They all know this is not going to blow over and things return to the pre-Iraq election days. That’s when Syrian troops were driven from Lebanon, as on memory the very first impact of the liberation of Iraq.
Mind-numbing stability is regionally finished and even a long forgotten, though once protected, Shiek-doms stir. http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/news_content.php?id=1762300
The peoples’ of Kuwait unsurprisingly continue with some very low level struggle. (similar in a sense to Australia) That low level is still head and shoulders ahead of many in their neighbourhood, and they have been stumbling along (again much like Australia) for the 20yrs they have been free of brutal Iraqi Baathist tyranny. A Baathism we have been reminded that was far more virulent than the mass-murderous Syrian Baathism of 2011.
The whole world is trying to stop the Syrian Baathists murdering unarmed demonstrators in the thousands in 2011. The people of Kuwait carry on their struggles (economic, political, theoretical disputes) in a political environment similar to Jordan. That’s undoubtedly lower in the historical pecking order than liberated Iraq, but way ahead of Bahrain and Syria. No question of the international community having to mount a ‘no-brainer’ war (as was required this year for Libya) over Kuwait, nor even think about building a united-front of all classes to make war to end the regime, as is the current task for Syria.
Thinking about war is what progressives ought to do about the Syrian Baathists current slaughter, and that’s where we westerners will come up against a diminishing number of the usual suspects widely thought to be of the left. No doubt Fisk will soon be all over their ABC with his drivel, but the non-interventionists are shrinking.
To get to that current Kuwait reality really did require a war of liberation. It required a rejection of the politics of Bob Brown Greens, and unity with the (current Libya style) Adam Bandt type Greens. It required support for and unity with real world forces of the ruling-classes, as led by the likes of Major General Jim Molan . It required rejection of a well known style and type of anti-imperialism, as once again in 2011 displayed by Jeff Sparrow and Professor Richard Tanter.
On reflection the Libyan violence can’t but appear to the masses as anything other than a pointless waste of life and resources, and the Arab peoples’ focus is now understood to be on freedom for Syrians. The unavoidable armed struggle that’s breaking out now, when over, will also be seen to have been utterly pointless and will have a further affect on the next ‘front’. (Could be Palestine or possibly non Arab who knows)
After more than 8 months of broad and regionally contextual unrest the troops would all assume that they are going to be dragged through a big civil war, and that the neighbors will intervene at some point, as will the west in some manner. The common troops are undoubtedly as well informed about the big issues of their time and region as any ever have been, and they are already out of their barracks and widely deployed across the country wrestling with their conscience, and their self interests, and balancing that against their fears every day.
These various troops have just watched what amounts to their own potential fate over a year of Arab spring uprisings, where the powerful end up falling, and the people win progress and the army always cracks up.
The Syrian officers are mostly the isolated Alawite sect and the rank and file are mostly Sunni. These troops have to put down the mostly Sunni demonstrators and that is just not going to work for another 8 months, so it is no wonder that the Arab League has seen the future and called upon Assad to stop and talk about the transition that is coming, with or without the bloodshed.
All the troops (both officers and men) have seen the fate of the powerful army of Libya. The net and alternative mass media has not been closed. The vital issues of confidence in the cause, and in the leadership and the ability to instill fear in the opponents are not going Assad’s way. Momentum is with the rebellion.
What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me? Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Business/Lebanon/2011/Nov-22/154870-syria-eyes-iraq-lebanon-economic-lifelines.ashx#axzz1eW4UnAXN
Just a rumour but
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/212224.html
You betcha, steve owens. They’ve dusted their hands off after Libya and now all are going after Assad as the purple fingers are raised in their wake. And with the Arab League in the lead!
Then, after Assad, Iran?
Not long before a fame/fortune-seeking pseudo Left historian writes the first revisionist account connecting the dots between the Bush/Blair removal of Saddam/Baath, then war to defeat the fascist/salafis until Iraq’s constitutional democracy was safe and the subsequent departures of Mssrs Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi and soon Assad.
Truly epoch making.
Guru I praise anyone who helps free the Syrian people. I however agree with Robert Fisk who stated the Syria will be decided by people in tanks rather than by people with AK47s. Where will those tanks come from? And speaking of Israel here’s a piece from someone I usually disagree with by it proves that theres some common ground with almost everyone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/opinion/israel-and-the-arab-awakening.html?src=recg
Patrick can you still see no reason why Iraq would support Assad?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/8934317/Syria-fall-of-Bashar-al-Assad-will-bring-war-to-Middle-East-warns-Iraq.html
http://larvatusprodeo.net/archives/2007/01/04/scourging-the-surge/#comment-298702 @120
January 11, 2007 at 12:28 am | Permalink
“Now the question of Saudi Arabia is interesting because social development is so bad there. But one thing is certain. The current regime is doomed. As is the Syrians and Iranians. The region is heading for change and propping up tyrants has only made things far worse. I do not know enough about Saudi Arabia to comment yet but I do know that millions of guest workers feature in the equation, as does the fact that the oil is mostly in the Shia region of Saudi Arabia. Anyway we probably have a few years for that problem to fully develop and by then there will be sufficient progress throughout the region such that all current analysis would be rendered hopelessly premature.”
I now feel sure that the Saudi ruling-elite, irrespective of them trying to arm devout Sunni in Syria, and hoping to bring into being another Sunni Islamic state- do not want mass revenge killings of Shia and any regional war. It is fortunate for the revolution that they are forced to undermine their own political arrangements by arming what must then become democratic revolutionaries. The devout that they arm will sooner or later participate in elections in Syria that are meaningful.
At the point where the Saudi ruling-elite welcome the emergence of a democratic Syria (marked by that country holding those elections) change will be ‘rapidly’ on the way for Saudi Arabia. Whatever level of war in Syria is required to bring about the revolutionary transformation that very transformation and the consequences for yet another Arab leadership will shake the resolve of the Saudi ruling elite to be brittle in resisting the demanded changes that emerge on their home front. Those demands are going to emerge from a very youthful society, tech savvy and well connected during a golden period of political progress in the ME. The revolution is advancing in Egypt. Democratic Palestine really is coming. The U.S. desperately need the war for greater Israel ended. A far more democratic Jordan is ‘odd’s on’ (if that’s the correct expression) to arrive without a war. The staggered regional development produces regular victories and examples for the broader Arab peoples’.
The new reality must spark democratic demands from the Saudi people, and these demands will be very difficult to refuse. A few years on we can predict attempts will be made to manage the Saudi transition as Jordan is currently being managed. That management, to be effective has to bring to one of the most religiously ‘fraternal’ societies for the one sect liberty for the other great sect. Liberating the Shia peoples’ within Saudi Arabia throws the old issues and their order once more on the political table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9,_%C3%A9galit%C3%A9,_fraternit%C3%A9. Bahrain at some point within this process must be surrendered to its people, despite them being majority Shia.
When the Assad regime falls and the fingers finally get stained (if that is achieved in 5 years the revolutionaries will have done well, and I fully expect them to do more than well but I am a hopeless optimist) the Iranian peoples will be hopeful and the young seething with hatred of their ruling-class and their paid thugs, and they will have Friday’s. The Saudi regime will be facing its young people every Friday as an absurdity.
First up, just to inform anyone who might not be aware and to introduce what I have been thinking about re Syria. Here is the ad for The Monthly Argument: June 14 2012.
Hi Everybody Our next debate is on the uprising against the Assad regime in Syria.
Topic: Syria: Should there be an international military intervention?
Not surprisingly, there’s good interest in this particular debate amongst Melbourne’s Syrian community – and it’s coming from those on both sides of the intervention question, so we’re expecting the issues to be hotly argued.
Date: Thursday, June 14 (debate itself starts@ 7pm, drinks and nibbles available from 6:15pm. Those wanting to attend thepre-debate buffet dinner should phone Graduate House (9347 3428) by 5:30 pm on June 8.)
Location: Melbourne University Graduate House (220 Leicester Street, Carlton).Location Map.
Speakers:
Inclined to support intervention:
Charles Richardson (philosopher, longstanding Crikey political commentator, Director at Above Quota Elections)
Strongly in favour of intervention:
Arthur Dent (formerly known as Albert Langer).
Inclined to oppose intervention:
Dr Sally Totman (Deakin University. Senior Lecturer in Middle East Studies)
Strongly against intervention:
Robert Bekhazi(Lebanese/Australian who imports alcohol and kitchenware from Syria, member of Australians for Syria)
Chairperson: Brian Pola
Some pre-debate reading/listening material from our speakers:
Robert Bekhazi:
What’s Up with Syria?(Richard Stubbs’ interview with Robert Bekhazi and Dr Benjamin Mc Queen)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fnDI2u3rew(James Carleton interviews Robert Bekhazi)
Some Syrian Australians Support the Syrian Government(Robert Bekhazi on ABC Radio Breakfast)
The Syrian MosaicEncounter. Radio National
Charles Richardson:
Syria: Counting the Cost of the West’s Stability Fetish
Violence in Syria: Bashar al-Assad makes public appearance
Russia goes its own way over Syria
Egypt’s Islamists prepare to govern
Can the peace option work in Syria?
Bahrain’s year of failed revolution
Arab spring: Saudi Arabi backs Syria rebels
Sally Totman:
Interview on Radio Adelaide Breakfast Show ( May 29 2012)
Australian Institute of International Affairs: Q&A with Dr Sally Totman
END of ADVERT
I’ve had a good look and listen to the above material.
What are we to make of the attacks against the UN inspectorate force, and the removal of bodies from the recent massacre event? What will weapons suppliers to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) the leadership of which is based in Turkey make of the events? Particularly, what will Sunni weapons suppliers make of these events? IMV the answer is obvious – weapons supplies will be ramped up all round. These events must be seen as a desperate move by a faction of the Assad supporter base that will bring on further defections and spread the civil-war that is not now imminent but underway. The events of this last month are as close as you get to the sound of the starter’s gun to the middle stage of the Syrian front of the regional revolution.
What of the ongoing stand-off artillery attacks that can now be seen every day? It’s obvious that such actions are conclusively divisive. Syria has not held together under Assad but the majority of the Syrian peoples’ are not yet armed well enough to deal with him and whatever minority his supporter base finally consists of , but the arms are flowing and the recruits are abundant for the FSA. The supportive minority have a looming problem.
The international community is not yet prepared to openly launch their part of the required war but Assad has lost control of several large cities and will not be able to regain control of them. He is not strong enough to be able to go house to house, and he will not be permitted to starve out the abundant freedom fighters, nor turn entire towns to rubble in the way that Putin destroyed Grozny. The international community that really counts has been slowly drawn into the fight. It is now clearly speaking out unconcerned with Russian or Chinese objections. Regime change is not optional, so Assad who from the beginning of the ‘Arab Spring’ was obviously strategically stuffed is starting to be abandoned by the Russians who sound exactly like the pseudo-left as they warn everyone that ‘we’ don’t want another Iraq or Libya because ‘we all know what disasters they were’.
Assuming Assad won’t quickly flee (to Russia?) how is he going to be defeated?
The Iraqi’s do not have an air-force worth comparing to Syria; or Turkey; or Saudi Arabia and won’t line up with the Iranians who do; so they can’t project any conventional power across open deserts through their and Syria’s Sunni regions and don’t want to anyway. Iraq has a defensive structure built into its armed forces as a result of what they have been up to for many years and want to get on with their own issues. The key point is that the Iraqi people have an open media so they know and hate what Assad is up to just like the rest of the world. The region of Iraq that borders Syria is Arab Sunni, and Kurdish and anti-Assad refugees are seeking refuge. Since Assad did not take the early advice from the the Iraqi government and international community nothing can now be done for him, and for the present at least for the minority that he still ‘leads’. I think the Iraq government must wash its hands of the Assad regime. If the Assad supporting minority in Syria do not begin to face the feared blow-back large scale ethnic cleansing then Iraq will not be drawn in. If the Lebanese Shia get drawn in then this situation would probably change. But the Lebanese Shia (leadership) would be wanting Assad gone and power sharing implemented now (rather than see themselves dragged through another [15years last time] war to then reach negotiations that would end in the same result).
In August 2011, Charles Richardson noted that on the issue of condemning the Assad regime ‘The most surprisingly trenchant statement, however, came from Saudi Arabia’s king Abdullah, who condemned the “killing machine and bloodshed” and bluntly declared the situation in Syria was “not acceptable”. “Either it chooses wisdom on its own or it will be pulled down into the depths of turmoil and loss,” he vowed.
Richardson was aware that; ‘…Saudi Arabia, [is] easily the most repressive state still to be relatively untouched by protests’, and believes that; ‘If revolt should break out in Saudi Arabia,however, (In the current climate, he ought to think like a well advised King, and say when revolution occurs, because blind Freddy knows that this period is the region wide ‘Arab Spring’, and the Saudi Arab people will not remain at the back of the bus for ever) there’s little doubt that the regime would be every bit as ruthless as Gaddafi and Assad have been.’
I think there’s NOW room for quite a bit of doubt. If the ‘Arab Spring’ had started in Saudi Arabia (SA) then his statement would be true. But it did not and lessons are often learned as we saw with the U.S. ruling-elite after 9/11. Demands from the peoples’ for suffrage (for both men and women) and such things as regular free and fair elections of a parliament will obviously come to SA. A youthful and well-to-do, tech equipped population profile is very important. The vast majority of these young people will obviously reject the local conservatives and follow the local ‘progressives’ (whatever that actually means in their context) who are conducting the struggle from within Islam.
Having no doubt, implies that the tiny Saudi ruling-elite can never learn from the fate of others. But I think they will do more than ask themselves if they are really doomed to violently confront the masses over these demands. They would be better off managing the introduction of this novel new system that the rest of the region is adopting. I think they are thinking hard about this stuff even now and will think about what’s to be done much harder after Assad goes down. The Saudi regime is now going to play a big roll in bringing Assad down and sooner rather than the drawn out later of a ‘pure’ civil-war
It’s fair to say that rear-guard-actions are always dragged out in one way or another however ‘… Saudis, siding with Arab rebels — first in Libya, now in Syria — is a dangerous game, but they evidently believe that they have little choice.’ They do have little choice but there is still choice, and there are ample opportunities to make new and just as catastrophic errors of judgment and or lesser mistakes for themselves later. I don’t think Richardson properly grasps the way their lack of any real choice over maintaining stability is unfolding. The Saudi King is not ‘moving quickly to cut loose those who, in his eyes, are giving autocracy a bad name’; but is obliged to assist the Sunni masses who form the majority in Syria. (After having assisted the Sunni minority in Bahrain) The Saudi King is therefore ‘no doubt’ planning for and managing change that has come to his door like it or not. The Saudi regime will most probably manage the 21st century bourgeois democratic revolution in the manner that the King of Jordan has shown the way on.
‘…the spectacle of a Saudi monarch pushing for “reforms that are not merely promises but actual reforms” induces the sort of cognitive dissonance that must give encouragement to the kingdom’s opposition forces.’ More than that, it will self evidently require changes of the regime because it will already be affecting all the subject classes.
Richardson said ‘…if you thought the west was conflicted in its response to Syria, given its long love-hate relationship with the Assads, that’s nothing compared to the consternation we’ll see in Washington if Saudi Arabia blows up.’
Bereft of a foundation solid enough to ground his understandings on, Richardson effectively just goes for a swim in the swamp, and ends up saying, well anything can happen.
The conflicted west formula is to miss the change from the U.S. ruling-elite that really counts. Did that elite change policy direction years ago? Yes they did. When Condi Rice spoke to Mubarak years ago western leftists did not take her seriously. Mubarak is now in jail! He now wishes he took her seriously. The Egyptian reform process is still unfolding just like everywhere else in the region is but the important point is that stability has been smashed and nowhere is going to return to the way the region was on 9/11/2001.
What is conflicted is not so much the U.S. Ruling-elite but ‘progressives’ who would love to support democracy BUT don’t we all know…
Mark January 10, 2007 at 10:56 pm | Permalink …
Who exactly does he imagine would replace the Saudi or Egyptian regimes if they were overthrown? Bourgeois liberals? Or Wahabbist nuts…
Even back in 2007 bourgeois democracy was all very well, but Islamist parties would form governments! So good liberals, progressives and venerable leftists could go quiet and claim that the U.S. would be too conflicted to really adopt the ‘destabilising’ policies that draining the swamp demanded. They all just had to go into denial, and mock, or remain silent rather than honestly and openly work through the issues. As we saw until Libya broke the spell for a great many, and opened up room for the real debate in reality western anti-war leftists and progressives were substantially backing right-wing ‘realist’ policies throughout the ME! Rather than recognise the region wide revolutionary consequences of liberating Iraq, we we were all told that Bush and Rice and all the talk of democracy was just the same as it ever was etc..
A very good response to that thinking came from…
Barbara B January 13, 2007 at 7:45 pm | Permalink
…
Ah well. Firstly the good news, you don’t have to be a LastSuperPower unreconstructed maoist to come to my conclusion.
…As result I maintain (a) there was nothing ever mysterious about the appearance of Islamism (b)it should never have been demonised but recognised as legitimate – and particularly so by the Left (c) that as long as some form of direct elections/empowerment of the people remains part of its government structure/ or declared policy then it should be vigorously supported by the Left and held to account if it lapses into fascism after gaining power (d) that the reactionary, totalitarian, Islamofascist wing of “Islamism” – again, no mystery in Christian development-just recall Savanarola, German National Socialism etc – should be clearly labelled for what it is by the Left and vehemently opposed at all times. That’s what demonstrations should be about, imo. In fact I can’t understand why they are not.
Chris: modernisation of the Christian world took several hundred years. You seem to think it should happen in the Middle East Muslim world overnight just because it seems so obvious and logical to you. The attitude towards women is similar to that which prevailed in Christian west in 15th century, and most Christian women internalised/defended/accepted it then just as many Muslim women do today. But the economic imperative will change this over time.
end
Assad obviously did not want to be using tanks and mass terror killing of Sunni. When the region was gripped by the old U.S. policy that supported stability, humiliation of the Arab peoples’ was the common lot. Iraqi liberation as marked by elections and real negotiations between contesting political parties launched the much delayed ‘Arab Spring’ that has shattered the fear of local tyrants. Self respect demands that peoples’ keep up with what the neighbors have. This stuff takes some years to filter through but once it starts there is only concession or repression. Friday’s won’t/can’t be dispensed with.
Richardson at the 8 month point of the Syrian front said ‘…the Syrian government has agreed to the League’s peace plan for Syria: an end to violence, withdrawal of troops from cities, release of prisoners and negotiations with the opposition.
…
The Syrian uprising has dragged on for nearly eight months with a cumulative death toll of several thousand. But although often seeming on the verge of tipping over into full-scale massacre or civil war it has not done so, and this morning’s breakthrough offers some hope that the worst might be over.’
That was foolish then and has now become self evidently so. We now know the Syrian army can’t go into the cities it’s shelling without taking heavy casualties and desertions.
This is the big difference between Syria and Libya. Assad has lacked the manic ruthlessness that Colonel Gaddafi displayed; no one really doubted that had Gaddafi gained the upper hand he would have engaged in exactly the bloodbath that he promised (just as Assad’s father did in 1982). Whatever else might have been the pros and cons of Western intervention, the need to protect civilians was all too clear.
Syria is less clear. There, Assad has at least made the effort to sound like a reformer and peace maker, deploring the violence while conspicuously failing to stop it. But as the months go by and casualties continue to mount, it becomes harder and harder to imagine a resolution that doesn’t involve a complete change of regime. The endgame in Libya will have given Syria’s opposition more confidence in demanding just that.
Well I expect Syria is clearer for Richardson today! The left ought to be calling for intervention long before ditherer in Chief Obama gets around to it. But what has Richardson been saying?
If Assad ‘… is just playing for time, hoping to wait out his opponents and reserving the option of a bloodier crackdown to come, then a Libyan-style foreign intervention may yet become an option.’
Well he has been!
‘Assad has had more genuine support among influential sections of his country’s population, then things are not so hopeless. As international sanctions start to bite, and as the regime’s reformist veneer becomes more and more transparent, that support may dwindle to the point where either Assad or those in his inner circle (not to mention his few remaining allies) see the writing on the wall.
If Western assistance can speed that process then it certainly should be given, but it’s unlikely that there’s much we can do — Turkey, Russia and of course the Arab League itself are much better placed. And while it is distressing to watch people being killed, the example of Iraq is there to remind us that untimely intervention can lead to blood and chaos on a vastly greater scale.’
Oh really! How about rethinking what has led to the current region wide revolution and admitting that it was never in prospect before the so called untimely liberation of Iraq and the destruction of the massive fascist army at the very heart of the swamp?
‘American and European concern about the violence in Syria is no doubt genuine; when protests began there it seemed as if the Americans’ first instinct was to support Assad. Great powers like stability and Assad was a classic case of “the devil you know”, but his intransigence eventually exhausted Western patience.’
The lastsuperpower writers have been explaining US policies to support ‘destabilisation’ in the region for years but IMV Richardson still does not get it and it limits his analysis!
US failure to achieve ‘…regime change in Bahrain, despite its huge military leverage there, is just another sad case of realpolitik at work.’
NO its not. This is a genuine problem for the U.S.. What it is is an indication of what it is really able to do and it can’t even get an end to the failed war for greater Israel that it has desperately needed for years. When the Shia masses gain control of their country – Bahrain – the U.S. will be required to leave and will. But it wasn’t the U.S. that propped up the regime it was the Saudi’s!
Richardson has however moved along a bit;
“Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was treated openly as a friend by the US; the policy of preferring stability to democracy was generally quite explicit, despite a short period of doubt under George Bush jnr.”
Short period of doubt?? Rice spelled it out loud and clear when she said that for sixty years my country has followed the wrong policy that failed and we are changing it! There was no short period of doubt but a comprehensive change in direction. It used to prefer stability and thus favoured tyranny just like the Israeli ruling-elite. The Israeli government still do. But there is nothing they can do about it. The U.S. kicked off the bourgeois democratic revolution and it is running!
Rather than; ‘And it can’t be denied that the policy of pursuing “stability” paid some dividends.’
it must be fully understood that the real dividend was that the peoples’ of the ME rightly hate the U.S. ruling-class (as any leftist up to and including the venerable Noam Chomsky will agree) to the extent that some people born and bred in the ‘moderate’ Arab ‘allies’ delivered 9/11 as the first fully franked installment. They came out of the U.S. sustained swamp and bit like hell. The next time they came out could be even worse. So now of course that swamp is being drained as the only way of strategically fighting the war that was declared, ready or not over a decade ago. The wrongly and stupidly named ‘war on terror.’
Rather than;
‘The intervention in Libya has put Western policy makers on the spot; they simply cannot credibly claim that massacres by Arab autocrats are none of their business.’
It has put anti-war leftists in the spotlight.
Faced with the clear requirement for escalation and all that it implies, we are fed hope that the situation won’t just descend into more bloodshed and even all out region wide war.
Charles Richardson ought to ask himself WHY there is now ‘…the much wider assertion of democracy as a norm: when challenged, even the UN now has to come down on the side of freedom. That’s a big achievement.’ Why does he still doubt that the U.S. with all its ugly past is now really backing the revolution that it stood in the way of for 60yrs? Will the U.S. ruling-elite betray the Syrian peoples’, or be part of the project to ensure they are liberated and we come to see purple-stained-fingers in yet another country? Did the U.S. fail in their war aims in Iraq as Noam Chomsky asserts, or did they succeed?
Ex Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie tell us from personal experience that the comparison between the west and Islamic world is one of life and death issues. Ayaan Hirsi Ali fears the Arab Spring turning into the Arab Winter and I suspect that fear drives the absurd position of Robert Bekhazi.
In the US the last fifty years of changes has, for southern blacks who often became ‘strange fruit’ pre WW2, seen just as dramatic changes fought for and won as what will have to be fought for across the swamp. Syria is more like these western countries were (especially the US) between the world wars – only worse. Apparently there are 18 sects in Syria yet this police state is obviously nothing like the modern, tolerant and vibrant multicultural societies that have emerged in the western world over the last sixty years or so. In the west conservatives have been beaten back on all fronts whereas conservatives are still very strong in the ME and thats specifically because the tyrannies left only the mosque as the place and Friday prayers the time to even begin to resist them.
For example elections in Syria as Robert Bekhazi freely admits are not just a joke but a complete joke where Assad gets 98% of the vote and his minority sect is openly wielding disproportionate power. Nevertheless Robert Bekhazi who claims to be a supporter of democracy is still claiming that Assad has majority support of the order of 55% on memory. It’s this claim that underpins his opposition to the armed overthrow of the Assad regime. If it were true that Assad could and would win elections his current conduct is very strange indeed but never mind that; it’s the initial point that Robert Bekhazi concedes – the point that there is massive electoral fraud that obviously cant be addressed by another election or any opinion polling provided by Assad- that requires armed resistance. It is that struggle by all democrats all progressives that must be supported. Only an armed struggle against the secret police and so on can sort this issue out. Kill them or be killed by them. Those forces involved in that very basic struggle become unavoidably associated with anyone else who is fighting against Assad democrat or not. So we have seen a multi sided war break out and the question of what ought the neighbors and the western powers do comes up.
What obviously scares Robert Bekhazi is the emergence of an Islamic dominated country. He says if you think Assad is bad what is coming is even worse. No doubt if what was going to emerge was an advanced western style country then he would be all in favor of a speedy intervention. What concerns the non-interventionists is what brings on the same line that was prominent with Gaddafi. Al Qaeda is involved and Assad has to be kept in power to stop these Islamic terrorist sorts coming to power. Al Qaeda is calling for the overthrow of Assad and that can’t be helped any more than can their bombing carry on be stopped in the short term. That truth of Al Qaeda involvement is however irrelevant.
Robert Bekhazi claims to be in favor of democracy and claims that the Syrian peoples were / are free to peacefully take to the streets and peacefully demonstrate and advocate that their admittedly corrupt government stop being corrupt. From this point on we are asked to abandon our minds and blame the current large scale violence on the Al Qaeda types and those sectarians who for years did not take to the streets. What had changed that they in 2011 did take to their streets? The obvious answer is that the young became brave and took to the streets after Friday prayers. They did not gather in small groups and build a protest movement that got bigger. They gathered in big groups at the only venue that was open to them to gather unmolested but still watched by the spies and secret police. They took to the streets when and where they were so overwhelming that the spies and police had to much work to do. Those police and spies had to come back later and work overtime and they did. Peaceful change became impossible.
Robert Bekhazi is fearful that the Sunni majority of Syria will create an Islamic state and an Arab winter will settle in on all the sects of Syria. It’s a reasonable fear held by reasonable people so the issues have to be worked through. What is the chances of a Sunni winter coming to Syria? Would the earliest western intervention help or hinder the emergence of any feared winter? Western intervention is currently underway as is intervention by neighbor governments as well as non government players. It can’t be prevented and the quicker it gets ramped up the better off the Syrian peoples will be.
Western intervention as it develops will empower a broad spectrum of political forces but particularly the political forces that unite around the Free Syrian Army. That army came into being of necessity. It has an appropriate charter and is the current leadership of the anti Assad forces that are inevitably diverse and Islamic in flavor. The FSA will grow stronger as the US, Turkey and all the others provide them with the sophisticated weapons that they require. The use of helicopter gun ships and the steady supply of such equipment to Assad by the Russians as the regime has ramped up it’s violence over the last month invites further escalation. NATO led by the US ought to intervene yesterday.
The country of Syria is younger than Australia and has never known anything but brute force. Syria has changed profoundly since Assad the elder ran the show and conducted mass murder and routine brutalities that Robert Bekhazi regrets but freely admits was real. Robert correctly points out that he did this while the West and the US most notably looked the other way! Syria had apparently changed from that by 2010 when the Assad the younger was proclaimed by many as a moderate and a modernizing reformer.
I imagine that the horrendous events that have unfolded since the Monthly Argument over Syria was organised would have changed peoples position and that plus (I anticipate) the debate itself will produce instead a positive agreement on the types of interventions that are required rather than a genuine argument for and against intervention.
To that end I have some questions for Robert Bekhazi who declares that he supports the peaceful reform of Syria into a genuine democracy where elections are not rigged and the rights of all minorities are protected under a constitution presumably up to at least the standard to be found in Iraq or perhaps better!
1.Ought the Free Syrian Army exist and if so does he approve of it’s founding declaration?
2.Ought they get weapons from any and every source without exception in the furtherance of that declaration?
3.Ought Syrian troops defect and put themselves at the service of that declaration
4.Ought Assad stand down and leave Syria and go to Russia or anywhere that he can run to?
5.Ought what remains of the Syrian army command take charge and declare a cease fire and a ‘return to barracks’ style withdrawal from offensive actions and the implement an immediate real protection of all the Syrian peoples in full co-operation with the UN Anan process and with the full intention of empowering the Syrian peoples to develop a constitution and establish a democratic system of government?
The following US view is worth a look
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303753904577452742201722640.html?mod=googlenews_wsj in particular the Related Video with ‘Assistant features editor David Feith on Russia’s abetting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’. I think the Obama elite HAS given up on the ‘reset’ with Russia formula and that even the ditherer in Chief will understand that Assad can’t be permitted to keep winning and that US forces must be forward positioned for what now looks like an inevitable intervention.
Inclined to support intervention:Charles Richardson would now I bet openly declare support for very many levels of intervention.
Yesterday’s news was that UN observers have stopped their patrols and are staying in their current locations till further notice. Today’s news is that they are being withdrawn from the front lines and the internet shows the shells still landing in Homs. The other day the Russians boasted that they are sending more ground to air missiles to Assad, and sending back some serviced, repaired (? modified, upgraded) helicopters. Putin got himself photographed inspecting attack helicopters, after Clinton made a big issue of attack helicopters being supplied to Assad. Putin has had to send some troops to ensure a bit more safety for their naval base, perhaps because the Syrian armed forces are a bit busy and can’t give any guarantees these days. Reminds me a bit of when the US back in the hey day of realist politics got thrown out of Lebanon after the spectacular bombing and a couple of hundred body bags. All this activity was happening the week before Putin is to meet the ditherer in chief at the (now quite regular) G20 crisis meeting.
It’s all tough guy Putin, both abroad and at home where the anti Putin opposition is growing (in both breadth and depth) in response to his thuggery. The two major opposition parties have apparently united and are organising behind demands for an early presidential election. That seems like a reasonably no lose situation for them because even if that demand isn’t won it will build the momentum and strengthen any movement to roll him when the full term election does come round. If Putin just rigs that election then we will see the Arab spring move on to Russia and that will be after another five years of the peoples of the world experiencing the regular downfall of tyrannies. Assad Syria will be gone by then and Putin and the Chinese will have lost more international standing as a result of them standing in the way of the Syrian masses receiving the help that they so badly need.
Anyway all the peoples’ south of Turkey’s northern border need have no fear of Putin! His revanchist policies will it’s true pointlessly kill plenty of Syrians but as a long term result both phoney ‘bourgeois democratic’ Russia (and utterly phoney ‘communist’ China) will lose more prestige and influence outside their own borders rather than return to any superpower status. The curious thing is that if it were not for the current round of bourgeois economic madness descending on the masses, the bourgeois revolution itself would not be rolling along quite as quickly as it is! Truly strange. The phoney and revoltingly opportunist ‘radical’ leftists in Greece actually make such little sense that they just got defeated by the conservative party that was running the show through the build up to the financial wreck! Nobody is making any sense at all and not a communist revolutionary in sight let alone a communist revolution. The proletariat still seem to be at the “somebody else will have to fix this” stage of denial.
Meanwhile push has come to shove over Syria and the US won’t be able to help themselves if only for the sake of kicking Putin and the Chinese in the goolies. Clinton is getting her way. The US ruling elite ought to be able to work out as easy as I can that they are on a clear winner in supporting the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Whatever the Russian thug president does he won’t be able to commit to a long war to defend Assad. If Putin can’t remember what the US did to a muscle bound Russian army in Afghanistan though arming the local Jihadists and Al Qaeda with stingers and so forth then he is going to get another lesson big-time in Syria.
This is where reasonable people start to think about the issue that arises once again. Robert Bekhazi would remind us all that the last time that the US and the Saudis were arming one side of a conflict was Afghanistan. It did not work out so well for humanity as a whole and progressives in particular. Is that what the Saudi regime is going to be up to this time round? It’s not what the Libyan, Turkish, Jordanian, US and rest of NATO will be up to! The US will be walking and chewing gum this time round.
Steve Owens said ‘Guru I praise anyone who helps free the Syrian people. I however agree with Robert Fisk who stated that Syria will be decided by people in tanks rather than by people with AK47s. Where will those tanks come from? And speaking of Israel here’s a piece from someone I usually disagree with but it proves that theres some common ground with almost everyone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/opinion/israel-and-the-arab-awakening.html?src=recg ‘
Syria will not be determined by people in tanks anymore than Vietnam was. Yet the absolute last stage of the Vietnamese war (of liberation from colonial oppression and for the holding of democratic elections mind) ended dramatically with the vision of a North Vietnamese tank smashing through the presidential gates and then the tank driver jumping out and rushing forward carrying a flag . That’s how it goes. People of the You Tube generation may get the wrong idea. Tank units do get formed but only when those tanks are surrounded with infantry. The infantry acquire the artillery. In the final analysis the infantry fought and won the war.
Today I heard that the Saudis have announced that their order of 300 advanced German tanks is to be increased to 600 and possibly 800. That is not just saying something it is doing something with a shit load of money! It has arms race stamped all over it. But an arms race with whom? What do the Saudi ruling elite think these tanks might come in handy for? Do they think like Fisk and Steve? Are they just prudently preparing for any eventuality including the possibility of a regional war? They will have to intimidate a lot of their own people anyway no matter what happens in the future and tanks do more than just a little intimidating, so perhaps 6-800 sounds like nice round number to increase their current 1200 odd number by. 2,000 fully paid for and mostly very modern tanks. But how does that compare to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Army
In Syria 2012 neither side can avoid fighting a war of men in tanks but only one side will even try to decide the issues with them and that’s because they have so many of them at present. When they do get forced to retreat to the Alawite area they are going to present a very tough nut to crack and Assad may well hold on there for some further years. In the long term tanks are very thirsty beasts prone to supply problems. Ultimately the small number of men in tanks will be defeated once more by the masses of people with their AK47s, RPG’s, Stingers and so forth. It takes a long time to do it and there are massive casualties along the way but once people’s armies get going they learn to avoid the enemy strong points melt away and reappear where the enemy is weak. The real tiger as set out in the above wiki will however become the paper tiger. It’s all there in the military writings of Mao. I just hope that this fight gets shortened with the addition of NATO ‘artillery’ to smash Assad’s as quick as is possible. Like Arthur I am very strongly in favor of intervention for the sake of the Syrians and all humanity. I would love to see Assad’s tanks and artillery etc. smashed by US A10′s as part of another NFZ war against tyranny.
Putin is both bluffing and thrashing about warning Turkey, Saudi A, and so forth to stay out of Syria. Syria is already changed and the arms flow can’t be stopped because the regions peoples’ are involved. Many of Assad troops are stuck with border duties and yet the borders are porous. His army is rotten with sectarian divisions so it must be deeply infiltrated with supporters of the Syrian peoples’ resistance.
There is only one way to resist Assad who started the killing and that is with the gun. His police thugs and spies and so forth are in some large cities and towns now being shot rather than sullenly complied with. He can no longer run a police state like Putin runs Russia. Assad has to make war on big regions and the majority of the peoples’ in Syria and this is both apparent to the world’s people and sickening to them. Putin has been making war in parts of his empire for many years but now the Russian peoples’ are growing weary of him and his methods.
When democratic Syrians do oust Assad and after the constitution and elections period the new government will require a Russian withdrawal. Russians won’t be keeping a base like the US have in Cuba. The Russians are losing more than just prestige and there is nothing they can do about it. Whatever time this revolutionary war takes to sweep aside the Assad regime a great outcome is that it will be bad news for Putin. There will be no US or NATO base replacing the Russian base either. No Ottoman, French, Russian or anyone else. That will be the end of the long era of bases in Syria. To get to there a war is underway and weapons are flowing to both sides. Naturally the Syrian revolutionaries are (as is always the case) happy to get them from anywhere and anyone they can.
After the early demonstrations met with bloody repression the fightback began just like in Libya. Now (18 months later) the old Syria is gone and the helicopter gun ships are now at work and the evidence is clear and on the net. Artillery is pounding away killing civilians every day and most young Syrians will not be happy with that so the pro Assad part of the population will continue to shrink. But after whatever period of brutal slaughter this goes for a Balkan style period of division is very probable. The armed forces continues to suffer from a rising level of defections and the following report is very encouraging http://www.albawaba.com/news/sources-senior-alawite-officers-want-oust-assad-430165
Meanwhile every Friday Islamist organised masses take to the streets and for the rest of the week work in other ways for their liberation and the FSA emerged and now stick to their knitting, so change is unfolding and has been from the start Islamist. The Friday of Dignity in Syria : The start of revolution
Christopher Hitchens, as the following article from 2007 demonstrates, was another reasonable person wrestling with Islamic issues. How are atheists to deal with this religion that’s mostly straight out of the middle ages, within the general struggle for modernity globally and across the recognised Islamic countries in particular? Modernity IS the international progressive project in more than one sense but there is widespread confusion as to who and what is capable of modernising any country that has an Islamic majority or large minority. http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_1_urbanities-steyn.html
The Islamic issue has been so disorienting that the right wing realist position of propping up tyranny rather than promoting democracy where Islamist parties could win has often been the stand of people that have otherwise thought of themselves as of the left. More often than not the anti war left and pseudo-left have simply gone silent. Rather than tell a lie they choose to say nothing and thus ‘lie’ by omission. They neglect rather than confront the issue of democracy.
Revolutionary democrats stick to our knitting March 22, 2011 at 5:05 pm and accept the protracted nature of what we have been on about since the revolution was put back on the agenda in the 21st C
There has been very great confusion over this issue over many years and this has shown up starkly over Syria. Egypt is showing a way forward. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/world/africa/islamist-candidate-is-apparent-victor-in-egypt-as-military-cements-its-powers.html
Years ago when Saddam was under UN sanctions a massive tanker industry transported oil from Iraq through Syria and off to beyond. Tens of thousands were employed in the transport of oil and nobody even attempted to stop it. Now oil products for Assad will only cross the border from Lebanon, or arrive from the sea from Iran or Russia; and then move to the far flung parts of the civil war as huge soft targets for the masses of already trained resistance fighters and their numerous untrained followers. No fuel will come from Iraq, Turkey, Jordan or through the Golan Heights from Israel. All this fuel moves around a country with the world’s greatest spy satellite system currently ‘parked’ above and at the FSA’s disposal, and the nosiest neighbours anywhere on the planet. The rest of the world is keen on stopping the fuel supply that feeds the mechanised army of Assad and it ought to be the No.1 .priority of the FSA.
The FSA currently ‘control’ only where they move about or through and when discovered they face artillery and air attacks that they have no answer for, except further ‘dispersal’ and thus more movement; and thus more temporary control. Their job is to stay armed and in ‘control’ of their streets, and then sneak up and ‘cut the elephants tendons’, and ‘poison’ his water holes. His water hole is fuel. Assad’s army is fuel dependent. It can’t resort to fighting on foot as it is vastly outnumbered. This ought to be a war on fuel tankers not a war of tanks. Obviously shutting down the tankers quickly shuts down the tanks.
At last the ME can have a war fought about controlling the flow of oil and its products. The quicker everyone in Syria is reduced to walking around the quicker the revolution will sweep the country of the current men in tanks. The FSA will then have to fuel its newly acquired tanks and they won’t have any fuel supply problems from their Jordanian / Saudi Arabian rear as they advance. The rebels major interests are now tactical supply issues – food, weapons and munitions and medical supplies and facilities. All supplies are at the front lines in enemy hands, or on the border and the whole war depends on vulnerable fuel supplies or walking.
So what’s happening at the moment?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/world/middleeast/palestinians-in-syria-drawn-into-the-violence.html?pagewanted=all This item is on the Palestinian situation in Syria and may be of interest to others.
Over the last month the Syrian revolution has moved up a cog with the Syrian army tearing holes in itself with killings, desertions and sabotage of all sorts. Even a few Generals have now defected Video: Syrian army is ‘destroyed physically and mentally’, says …
Whether it’s 60%, or 20% of the country that the army has lost control of, what is clear is that the rebels are rapidly taking ‘full’ control in many towns and cities across the country. Formalities aside, it is the ‘FSA’ that is growing rapidly and the world’s MSM is getting out many examples of armed Syrians in their hundreds, (many with an obvious military background) at war with what is clearly a heavily mechanised army of occupation.
The attacks on the Palestinians is indicative of a regime that is imploding and undoubtedly 80%+ of the Palestinians (who have tried their best to stay out of it) will now join the revolutionary forces and later make another great contribution by helping to clean up their own political house.
The recent film footage is dramatically different to what came out of Libya and small wonder at that. There is no clear front-line instead there are lines all over the place. People are in control of where they stand and contest the ground to as far away as their ‘guns’ are effective. Assad’s army has bigger guns and an air force so he still claims to be able to contest for the whole country, but it’s not working. An example of that contest resulted in the Turks losing 2 airmen and a war plane and the Turkish government sending columns of troops to the border and warning Assad not to approach their mutual border or they will view these moves as hostile and act accordingly. The Turkish actions whatever the exact words were pretty plain ‘speaking’ if you ask me. So even when the Syrian army tactically wins, it strategically loses.
The very latest news http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/06/30/uk-syria-crisis-idUKBRE85R0CT20120630 is that the UN Security council permanent members have supposedly settled on imposing a unity government on Syria “on the basis of mutual consent”. I think it was only last week when Assad swore in a new cabinet. This big power political pontifications is obviously far too little and far too late and is going to have nothing to do with the next stage of this revolution. We can note however that China and Russia have apparently agreed to democratic elections to eventually resolve the issue. That’s a good laugh. But what else could they do? That’s how the world has been since WW2. That’s what the UN is about.
‘Peace envoy Kofi Annan said after talks in Geneva the government should include members of Assad’s administration and the Syrian opposition and that it should arrange free elections.’
RRRight.!! The report also included this more realistic comment;
Middle East analyst Hayat Alvi of the U.S. Naval War College said he doubted the Assad government would accept the plan and enforcement of it would be almost impossible.
“The U.S. and other Western powers will not find any flexibility on the part of the Syrian regime, and its allies, namely Russia,” he told Reuters from the United States.
“The proof is in the Assad regime’s continuous acts of violence against the Syrian people, even while the diplomatic wheels have been turning. The wheels clearly are going in circles without moving forward.”
It’s all going faster, but still nowhere and everybody knows that can’t last. The heavy weapons attacks on the revolutionary peoples is at the scale where intervention is rapidly ramping up and Clinton is leading the political charge with the clear demand that Assad must go.
There is no going back for Syrian people who – constituting the vast majority in their particular locale, and who are widely represented across the breadth of the country and are after 16 months of bloody struggle against the police state apparatus of spies secret police and arrests. They are now armed and in control of ‘their’ streets. Their demands – being elementary bourgeois democratic demands – will have to be met. The UN Security Council reps and NATO etc., have now all made that clear. But leaving aside the unreal mutual consent formulation, the job of removing the Assad tyranny is still to be fought through, and as part of this, the real economic sanctions on Assad are growing and countries will be policing them better as time goes on. Meanwhile the FSA is fighting across the breadth of Syria.
The Syrian state can’t send in negotiators to make demands of the rebels to go back to the way things have been in the past, nor to trust Assad into the future. That past of unrestrained tyranny is gone and this brutal thug state is just not big enough to surround these rebels and trap them in a country wide ‘prison’ and wait them out. The army is not large enough nor reliable enough for the task of shelling and starving the people into submission’ and the international community of countries will not permit it anyway. The loyal part of the army is however large enough to do exactly that policy on some strategic areas, and they eventually will in order to shape the ‘reliable’ enclave that the regime will eventually retreat to. Ethnic cleansing has become part of this war and will become Assad policy in retreat. But Assad can’t hold Damascus.
Heavy weapons are now being extensively used and intervention has started but there is still no direct intervention but I think there will be. I hope so.
The neighbouring countries and NATO will lift the level of this intervention as this humanitarian crisis deepens, and undoubtedly their actions of imposing and enforcing sanctions as well as providing the intelligence and weapons will help to ensure that it will deepen. The Assad economy is being shut down by the peoples’ struggle and the external sanctions, and neither Putin nor the Iranian theocrats can stop that and virtually nobody else out side Syria would even want to. But it’s now July 1., 2012 and the shelling goes on.
Because the ‘economy’ can’t work, the rebels will have to run out of fuel and many other supplies as well and first. Eventually the Syrian state forces will need all the fuel in the country! Then the war will enter a new stage where the logistic demands force their way to the top of the list. The demands for ‘humanitarian corridors’ have been there from the start of the UN involvement because everyone could see what is now inevitable. But the regime could not concede the humanitarian corridors without conceding the war and still can’t IMV. So we are only left with a couple of alternatives until such supply corridors eventuate and the war enters yet another stage.
The FSA currently walks across the borders and finds refuge. At some stage the neighbours principally Turkey will be drawn into ensuring safe ‘humanitarian’ rebel territory exists on the Syrian side of their border. That’s the logic when legitimate ‘…government should include members of Assad’s administration and the Syrian opposition’ the Turks will recognise the new Syrian government as soon as it controls a chunk of land on the Syrian side of their border. These regions will probably be called humanitarian corridors because they will run from the Turkish border to various towns and cities, but because the Syrian army will be excluded from that side of the ‘corridors’ (with or without a fight and over a longer or shorter period either way) the first corridors will become a rebel region, and that’s as good as being half pregnant. Once a rebel territory exists against a border the war is in a whole new phase.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/world/middleeast/refugees-in-jordan-return-to-syria-to-fight-against-assad.html?src=recg
‘Refugees International, a Washington-based refugee advocacy group, warned this month that the Syrian refugee crisis could threaten the political stability of Lebanon and Jordan.
Jordan is also dealing with persistent Arab Spring-inspired demonstrators seeking political and economic reforms.
“The longer these refugee situations continue, the more complex they become,” Mr. Harper said. “It never becomes simple.”
According to the U.N. refugee agency, several organizations have been providing financial support to the most vulnerable refugees in the border towns of Ramtha and Mafraq, while local communities are playing host to refugee families: But resources are being exhausted, and some refugees who are renting apartments are at risk of eviction because they can no longer pay the rent.
Ghalib, 33, who asked that his family name not be used for safety reasons, said he had been in Jordan for five months but was planning to return to Syria. “I have no more money to pay the rent or even for water and our life has become very difficult,” he said. “So I will be taking my family back with me and I will join the Free Syrian Army.”
The Turkish government is pointedly deploying troops close to the Syrian border and warning Assad to pull back from the border before the next clash. When there is a clash then Turkey will act. The FSA requires that border access. The FSA has no choice and so there will be clashes near that border and the prospect of Turkish casualties is very high. A part of the Syrian army in revolt or the FSA from an attack will at some stage have to take control of a border crossing and nearby village on the way to establishing a viable logistics route for any pre-humanitarian-corridor that must come into existence.
After posting I noticed an incident where Syrian helicopters approached ‘close’ to the Turkish border. The Turks ‘scrambled’ fighter aircraft and apparently the Syrians drew back. This is just the sort of case I was thinking about and the report also includes news of air strikes on the PKK in Iraq over the last few days.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/02/us-syria-crisis-turkey-idUSBRE8610NX20120702
‘Erdogan said the military’s rules of engagement had been changed and that any Syrian element approaching Turkey’s border and deemed a threat would be treated as a military target.’
IMV that means the real news is the effective establishment of a Turkish enforced No Fly Zone right along the length of the Turkish border to an unspecified depth but possibly 4 miles. Some time soon a No Fire Zone (NFZ) directed at shutting down the internationally unacceptable artillery shelling – will also be enforced along the border. At some point if Syrian elements fire within, or if their munitions land within X miles of the border it will be deemed a threat and the Assad forces will be required to desist or face attack by Turkish forces. Despite all the risks from war the Turkish ruling-elite won’t allow endless shelling of civilians and refugees (turning border towns and villages to rubble in the manner of Putin’s shelling of Grozny and as Homs is increasingly resembling) near Turkey’s borders. Syrian civilians and the unavoidably intermingled FSA will thus come under the protection of the Turkish military.
Given how events have unfolded over the last 18 months it’s hard to imagine either side backing off and therefore any clash would escalate into a full on air war, and also see the Turks move forward rapidly on land and liberate some large towns on the road towards Damsacus, and thus a tank war will be underway. Any town or village that is currently under Baathist shelling will welcome the Turkish tanks with coffee and flowers. They will thus drive on towards Homs. Violence rages in Homs, 19 killed in Syria
The western anti-war movement might hold a candlelight vigil, but Assad’s war against the people of Homs is underway right now and his war would be ended quickest with Turkish troops violently intervening. This would bring real liberation to these people. It will not enable a restored Turkish imperialism but will result in free and fair elections and a rapid Turkish withdrawal.
Back in early 2008, I never thought that Assad would fight a civil-war that he was obviously then and still is now strategically doomed in fighting! I thought he would cover himself with the glory of having negotiated the return of the Golan Heights from Israeli occupation, and then after domestic pressure built would hold and lose an election and step back. I had bought the idea that he was a reluctant but nevertheless realistic ‘reformer’ tyrant, interested in moving his country gradually; culturally; politically; and economically; westward in line with his and his wife’s life experiences.
I think that is the example of the Jordanian King.
I thought (more hoped) Assad would step back from the alternative of trying to cling to power via mass-murder, as these 2 options were the only real alternatives. Self interest I thought would see him try to avoid the Serbian leadership’s fate. Even after months of ‘unrest’, killing and repression had unfolded in Syria, (and after the fate of Gaddafi was settled) I held out hope that Assad would turn back from the failing repression but I was obviously wrong.
Now, regardless of what Assad chooses Syrian thugs can’t stop being thugs and won’t give up their guns until forced too. They are not merely serving Assad. They fight for their privileged way of life and like being thugs. They rationalise that whatever the unfortunate shortcomings or unpleasant realities of them being in positions of authority and wielding power over others, the alternative of losing that power is worse. Just as Assad has chosen for himself they will fight until they become fearful for themselves and only then cut and run. They can only be killed or surrounded and captured or forced to cut and run into areas where they are concentrated in ‘ethnic’ enclaves or until they flee the country and become someone else’s problem.
Communists have (even if we occasionally forget) always understood this reality and the saying ‘where the broom does not reach the dust will not vanish of its own accord’ best describes it.
Democratic revolutionaries, now that they are armed and fighting will pursue the thugs and unite with the FSA and the broadly uniting Syrian peoples will win because they can and will unite the many -live and let live Syrians- to defeat the few well armed thugs. So a conservative but relatively (in middle eastern terms) tolerant, non-sectarian country that is in compliance with the founding declaration of the FSA will be established. It is those very basic demands that are what the fight is all about.
With or without an intervention (that can’t come quick enough from my POV) Damascus will eventually fall to the revolutionaries and then the Balkan style enclaves will still exist for however long they last – but this war can’t stop until these ‘less vicious than Iraqi Baathist’ enclaves are over-run and democratised. That offensive stage will be a particularly difficult period and could well drag in some foolish sectarian Lebanese forces; nevertheless after the shooting finally ends Syria ought then hold together in the power sharing manner that Lebanon does currently.
Assad it seams is yet another (if less isolated) garden variety tyrant impressed by and confident with his collection of tanks. He is making day to day decisions without any apparent ability to think and act strategically. The day to day conduct of those in power is what brings this situation about. They just take one step at a time, and get through their day making that one next decision after another. Thats a process reasonably described as ‘winging it’. It is the bourgeois method and is practiced by almost every government across the planet. They can’t tell the truth to the peoples and bring their populations along in an investigation of reality. They operate differently to revolutionary governments and though they desperately need to know what is the reality of the world – because they are trying to make it continue to work- they can’t declare class interests or side with the vast majority who are the exploited proletariat and it seems to me they very often loose their way.
Despite the horrendous cost to the working peoples across the world, 20th C history has ultimately refuted the tyrants world view and slowly the weak really have become the strong and the 21st C is not about to reverse this great trend. Democratic thinking and behavior far better than on a par with Jefferson and Lincoln is the foundation of the modern working peoples strength. The working people fight big wars and the Syrian war is a big war.
As we have just seen in Egypt bourgeois democrats lead and this Syrian bourgeois democratic revolution where Islamists constitute the MAIN force but not the LEADING force and it is this reality of what the peoples are really fighting for that is what traps the Saudi Autocrats into their own backlash beginning on the morrow of free and fair Syrian elections and following the Egyptian road.
Leftists are all, by definition, pro-liberation. The only valid dispute is over how liberation is to come about and last year we saw a great debate unfold over Libya. Revolution unfolded and western intervention unfolded and theories of imperialism were put to the test. Those theories failed spectacularly. Now Libya is to hold elections!
Syria is just another country in the region that radical pro-liberation leftists had declared was the strategic target for change after 9/11 provoked the strategic shift in U.S. Ruling-elite thinking. Anti-war leftists and the outright pseudo-leftists scoffed at this theory. Radical pro-liberation leftists declared that the Iraq war was a clear rejection of post WW2, U.S. realist policies and was with the destruction of such a massive fascist military an obvious war of liberation!
But radical is a really a mealy-mouth word. Pro-liberation leftists proclaimed that the Syrian masses would come to want what the neighbours in Iraq had achieved after less than 5 years of bourgeois democratic revolution. We all knew that an ‘Arab Spring’ would sooner or later break out starting with peaceful demonstrations for very simple demands. We also all knew that eventually peacefully demonstrating masses of people would be met by police state thuggery, and have always said so. There is nothing radical about this.
I am a little stunned by the stupidity of this war and I now don’t believe that an Assad led rump enclave can survive (like say Serbia does) for ‘very’ long, but the enclave possibly can if he goes into exile soon. He ought to face a trial and he will only remain out of the dock if he is under Putin’s protection in Russia or something similar.
The FSA as it gets the upper hand will not stop advancing while he remains to be captured in any part of what was at the start of this Syria. Hillary Clinton is absolutely correct in insisting that Assad must go and in providing assistance to the opposition forces. The pseudo-left reject this as outside meddling by the U.S. ‘imperialists’. They word for word repeat the views of Putin and the Chinese that ‘only the Syrians can sort out Syrian issues’! Pseudo-left’s – as the artillery pounds on – concentrate on exposing the hypocrisy and machinations of their own “imperialists” not on liberating the Syrian peoples’.
Interventionist leftist thinking emerged from the investigation of current reality. We think that No Fly Zone’s ought to be imposed on Assad’s regime. We think no fire zones ought to be imposed and no go zones ought logically to follow. The Assad regime will face all of these impositions over the course of this civil-war. Charges under international law ought to be laid now (in this bourgeois owned and run world) and after what’s gone on they will. That’s not how it used to be.
Clinton is right to focus on the Russians and the Chinese. They will pay a price.
Some good news
http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/7/syriakurd535.htm
Is this the future for Syria?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/14/iraq-iran-ties_n_1664728.html
What are he odds on a New Persian empire rising out of the ashes of the attempt by Western Imperialism to make the ME in its image?
Why am I not surprised ?
Dalec
Dalek that is an interesting article but Im no clearer on the question of what is to be done?
All the outside actors have their own agendas.
The US has a rivalry with Russia and Assads fall would suit the US.
Saudi Arabia has a rivalry with Iran so Assads fall would suit the Saudis.
Iraqs government is dependant on the votes of a party whose militia has sent fighters to support Assad so I see liitle real assistance coming from Iraq. Im not too clear about the motivation of Turkey.
But who should we support?
Well large groups of demonstrators peacefully demanded greater democratic freedom. The regimen answered this call with bullets and tanks just as the current dictators father did.
My position is that progressives outside Syria have but one position and that is to support the democratic opposition. What is up for grabs is how to support the opposition. That the opposition is also supported by some pretty ordinary characters is but a fact of life that is beyond our control.
My position on Syria is as it was on Libya and Iraq to listen primarily to the voices I think most accurately represent the people, the democratically inclined people and then do something that makes sense.
Steve, it took hundreds of years for our rather imperfect democracy to emerge as part of the industrial revolution. Step off a bus in any small village almost any-where in the ME and you step right into the 14th century. In the cities it is not all that more advanced. When I was in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia I noted that thousands of people would gather in my suburb in (segregated M&F) circles in the parks every evening and basically pray and be preached to in the way they had been doing for many hundreds of years, even my graduate hosts would participate.
It is one thing for the blue finger brigade to blather about “democracy” in iraq for example, it is another entirely to institute economic and social structures that underpin and maintain democracy and to destroy the old reactionary institutions that will drag them back to feudaslism.. It also, BTW, a never ending struggle in established democracies to maintain and extend the freedoms and rights that have been so dearly won.
In Iraq it is clear that the people are now threatened by the possibility of a new dictatorship, it might be a “better” dictatorship than that of Saddam but a dictatorship nonethless. It is also clear that Iraq and Iran are collaborating and that both support the Assad regime.
The old feudal structures must be destroyed before any real democracy can emerge in these countries. This is a task that will take years , especially as there are many interrnational corporations who are most adept at the manipulation of existing feudal structures in order to make vast profits and most adept at assisting these regimes to cover their tracks with a thin veneer of democracy.
Dalec
Dalek, Are the people of the middle east any less prepared for democracy than were the people of India in 1947? What was the alternative? More empire?
Eygpt has had a revolution, an election and now has the potential to institutionalise democracy. What is the alternative? Invite Mubarak back?
The elections in Libya have gone very well.
Clearly achieving and maintaing democracy is an ongoing struggle. Here in South Australia we are ruled by a party that lost the popular vote as was the USA under President Bush’s first term.
Iraq is a mess but once the place had been invaded, once the people were demanding elections what alternative is there?
Syria is a mess and once Assad is gone it may continue to be a mess but what alternative is there to supporting those who are campaigning for a democratic Syria?
Steve, India is a democracy? Tell that to the Kshudras and the Dalits. Also so long as you ignore the Caste system and the corrupt feudal ruling class,systematically rigged elections etc it could be called democratic. Likewise Indonesia – also called a democracy; again democracy there is a thin veneer pasted over a totally corrupt feudal regime.
The struggle for democracy is definitely a struggle that will eventually expose and destroy the old feudal regimes, even replacing them with more open and transparent capitalist institutions the world over. However it takes time. Even established deoocracies such as the UK have active feudal remnants.
I guess my point is that the establishment of democracy by conquest and the imposition of external constraints is basically a sham. A necessary sham perhaps but not sufficient.
Dalec
Gee Dalek your a bit tough.
The Economist Intelligence Unit rates India as the 39th most democratic country in the world. OK its in the “Flawed Democracy” catagory along with South Africa and France.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/16/syria-fighting-damascus-live?newsfeed=true
Gaurdian has started a live blog about fighting in Damascus
how sad is this?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2012/jul/18/syria-crisis-damascus-diplomatic-battles-live
With the launch of operation Damascus Volcano – Syrian Earthquake by the FSA and the coordinated attack on the Assad ‘crisis cell’ command, events are moving into a stage of insurrection across vast areas of Syria. The main immediate goal could be to split the army further, concentrate the die-hard pro-Assad elements and literally enable more mass defections and then see just how much of the country the FSA ‘controls’ after a few days / weeks and then co-ordinate a few more defections and so on. The Syrian people are on the move and a refugee flood has started into Jordan and less so Turkey. Many Iraqi refugees in Syria are reported as heading back to Iraq and the Iraqi government has sent a couple of divisions to the border. Border crossings have now been seized on the Turkish border near Aleppo and into Iraq and Jordan.
Whatever happens large numbers of the Syrian army have jumped and still are jumping sides and the FSA is both working to a big picture plan and are now setting the agenda. With all the defections Assad can’t possibly know where to turn and who to trust. His immediate experience now is one of betrayal and he knows he is under close observation by at least some ‘traitors’ and so there is a high probability of him facing a personal attack. So all this will escalate the formation of the Alawite enclave and Assads withdrawal to it.
This operation is an insurrection so we will know what’s happening in days rather than months. The FSA is probably now in substantial control of not just Idlib and Homs (and many sections of the corridor between that remain under attack) but a very big part of Syria’s largest city Aleppo in the north. If they were not able to already strongly contest for the loyalty of most of the troops around Aleppo then they would probably have launched operation Aleppo Volcano. Very large demonstrations are happening in Aleppo but there are very few armed rebels currently on the streets.
Assad can hold large areas of Damascus for the present but probably not for months. However he will now loose control of the Druze south and the Kurdish nth east regions. These have been relatively quiet regions that he would have lost underground control of during the time he has been pointlessly trying to regain control in and around Homs. Assad has been seen to fail in this drawn out attempt and his regime is hated across the breadth of Syria outside his core supporters territories. After he works out who has jumped ship already Assad will have to pull in his loyalist forces. Those remaining troops are going to be required to fight along the Idlib Damascus corridor if there is enough of them and there should be or back further to back to the ‘enclave’ if there isn’t enough.
Assad has already been forced to pull in most of his loyal troops from the Golan Heights border and all other borders are leaking defections out, and arms and reorganised fighters back in, and those FSA troops are working to a coordinated big picture plan. Armored vehicles are being abandoned in many places as the people form up as fighting infantry. Assad’s capital is now having to be held down against well trained infantry backed by the masses, and a humanitarian catastrophe seems unavoidable if the city can’t be pacified quickly by the Assad loyalists (and it can’t be) or the insurgents don’t win quickly.
With the Syrian people moving en-mass to this extent, Assad will with what’s left of his army – when he can work that out – be forced to withdraw to an Alawite enclave.
I note that FSA spokesmen specifically stated ‘all foreign officers on Syrian soil that are allied to the regime are “legitimate targets” — including Lebanese Shi’ite Hizbollah militia, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Iraqi militants, and pro-Assad Palestinian factions.’ It seams that the sting is in the tail here and it is directed at the Palestinians mostly. Both sides make much of this ouside interference but it could hardly amount to much when the situation has reached the level of insurrection in the biggest cities.
Syria was quite recently a unified country ‘run’, by fascists with a mostly sullen but compliant mix of peoples’, half of whom were ‘purchased’ and the other half intimidated but with everyone under intense police state surveillance, fear and control. This is model is obviously broken.
That unified Syria has, for some months now, ceased to exist. It stopped existing after a year of growing cycles of peaceful demonstrations followed by repression, arrests, violence of all kinds and targeted murder. When this high level of violence and intimidation failed, openly random murder in the streets was resorted to. The resulting funerals were followed by less peaceful demonstrations and so on until we have arrived at the point where the Syrian ambassador to Iraq defects. That ambassador is a Baathist party ‘Sunni tribal leader’ from the region of Syria that borders Iraq, he is not interested in living in a more religious country and nor do most of the Syrian army that is jumping ship.
The strategic position of the Alawite dictatorship in Syria is really doomed and we should all note that for many months now the Iraqi government has not taken any position that can be misunderstood as any defense of Assad, so clearly the Iraq government is not trying to preserve the Assad regime.
As for the Iranian theocracy, even if they must stick with Putin and the Chinese (and they must), they have still most probably strategically given up on Assad. Even while still appearing to support this dead duck they will still think that they would be just putting good effort after bad if they really do put effort in. They will know that they will all have to abandon ship at some point because Iran’s tyranny (as the 2nd year of the Arab Spring progresses) obviously fears their own people rebelling against their tyranny in the face of the still unfolding democratic victories elsewhere. Iranian democratic rebellion is coming for them. If the election rigging Iranian tyrants solidly jumped into a regional conflict they would have to send more of THEIR army – their supporters – to be killed and wounded, and that would have 2 effects. The first would be that they would have less supporters, and the 2nd would be that they would piss off the friends and families of their ex-supporters. They would be sure to loose any fight to preserve the Assad regime anyway and the entire effort would just tend to liberate the Iranian people all the quicker!
What progressives ought to and will support to one degree or another is intervention! The supply of weapons and intelligence is as essential as the political efforts to isolate the Assad tyranny, and what’s more that is as clear as was the supply of the same to the Vietnamese by the U.S.S.R..
The big picture is that a unified, functioning, ‘peaceful’ fascist Syria no longer existed once armed resistance became (out of necessity) a way of life for those able to acquire a gun and fight back. Armed resistance developed not out of an argument among the peoples’ over its necessity but the experience of being unarmed in the face of fascist repression over quite modest demands for a vote that actually means something. Any debate over arming took place in the obvious context of the democratic ‘spring’ in the whole region and took place first in private living rooms in response to the TV news and then very rapidly in public in discussions every Friday at the Mosque. What’s more the people know that their INTERNET and phone ‘talk’ etc., is all on record, and that they must now either win or eventually pay a backlash price for speaking out.
There had been a grand tradition, well supported by the regime, of ‘speaking out’ in demonstrations after gathering after the Friday prayers, at least when Israel was slaughtering people in Lebanon or Gaza and so on. When the Zionists were up to no good, robust demonstration could quite spontaneously take place and everyone could agree as the orderly mob moved about the streets pointlessly chanting. There were plenty of opportunities for generally agreeable demonstrations (even in foolish support of shoe throwing Iraqi journalists) when they were directed at the Great or Little Satan. But in 2011 that tradition of ‘tolerance of peaceful demonstrations’ was ‘misused’ because the people’s public chants and ‘private chats’ were directed at the ‘father’ of the country and the system. These demonstrations and social media divided those that were still happily purchased and so had functioning lives, from those that – having been inspired externally – started to feel slightly less intimidated and were concerned at how their country functioned to exclude them from any say let alone power. The demonstrators took a stand and it bears repeating that they all now know that they are on record and will pay if the state can regroup and catch up with them. Everyone now knows there is no going back!
Supply of U.S. weapons etc., obviously helps these people who can’t go back and yet some western progressives still complain of U.S. meddling!
Blow us all down, but the Syrian masses started to demand what the Great Satan had years ago enabled right next door in Iraq. BUT, the Syrian peoples’ didn’t have to mention, or even notice THAT because they could demand what the Tunisians were demanding instead! The unarmed and fully intimidated wanted free and fair elections and the rights to form political parties and all the rest so they can all talk about Libya or Egypt. No one has to notice or grow fond of the US ruling elite when Iraq holds its next round of elections but the Iranian people will notice these elections! So will the people of Saudi Arabia and the sullen masses in Bahrain.
Revolution had moved on to Syria and the lightly armed and thus less intimidated Syrians demanded these bourgeois democratic norms. The peoples’ most of all wanted to be free of an unrestrained police force, and their spies and thugs just like everywhere else in the ME wanted. They wanted a country with a separation of powers. Of course they wanted the standard of living of 21stC industrialisation, but they don’t want a Chinese or Russian style government and they never will. They want the checks and balances of a western society sure, BUT most wanted this with the ‘moral virtues’ of a conservative Islamic society. They apparently want western bourgeois democracy circa1916 without ever spelling that out and often never understanding that this is exactly what the demands are all about.
Being largely Islamic and incessantly mentioning Allah every time something bad, good or just surprising happens they tend to unsettle 21st C western progressives who are well aware of how oppressive Islamic counties like Iran and Saudi Arabia are, but they wouldn’t shock the Irish or the Russians of 1916. Constant appeals to the almighty and gathering for prayers on one day of the week seems very familiar historically speaking and utterly unremarkable. Yet the western masses have moved on so far and so relatively fast that most ‘active’ youth have no experience to reflect on and often look on in genuine fear at what seems ubiquitous Islamic carry on. In the ME God seems a lot greater when some mere mortal destroys an atheist era soviet tank with a well armed Great Satan made and supplied anti-tank missile.
IMV Assad allowed his state structure to respond to the ‘spring’ as if this was all going to be business as usual and ‘it’ did so without any Assad strategy. The automatic response developed over months was just marked by increasing brutality. The state machine led and Assad just followed and then the volume of funerals ended any doubt on both sides, and the window for Assad concessions and slow reform had come and gone. By the time Assad’s artillery was pounding away on a day by day basis he could no longer choose. The lightly armed and thus less intimidated resistance had found methods, and most importantly other ‘state’ sponsors to ensure they would become more heavily armed. The resistance is well led and is steadily and strategically building their capacity. They know the Assad regime is finished and that ‘they’ are going to eventually win their demands. With determined Turkish/US/Saudi etc support they could and can fight their war with growing confidence. They have now moved on to an insurrection but that will not end the war in the whole country.
Syria as a fascist state can no longer function without dealing with constant armed resistance. War of the oppressed against the oppressor must now continue as it has become the only way for the democratic peoples to even try to live. Wherever guns have been taken up the famous American saying ‘from my cold dead hands’ now applies. Demonstrations that now occur are protected by the armed people who worked out how to live by fighting back and killing their oppressors. Police snipers are not now run from but anticipated and hunted in advance. They are caught and shot or chased off under fire.
http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2012/07/06/the-bloodshed-continues-as-syria-awaits-implementation-of-an-impossible-peace-plan/
The regimes police and their all important spies and stooges have been dealt with in numerous places. Militias have formed up for the protection of the people and they are operating as a full time way of life. The revolutionaries are now full time ‘professionals’. Their basic job is to survive and they can only do so if they drive the enemy from their midst and enlarge the extent of their authority. They now work at this task every day and thus there is no longer any unemployment in Syria. That’s not how things stand in Libya, or in Egypt where other forms or stages of genuine bourgeois democratic revolution are just as surely underway.
The state authorities that served the formerly unchallenged fascist rulers of the united Syria are currently imploding along both ‘ethnic’ and curious political lines and so the regime has now collapsed into a more concentrated Alawite regime. Loyalist police have been widely defeated across non Alawite areas.
The fascist Assad regime still draws widespread support from the more liberal elements of the Alawite and Christian communities that fear domination from an Sunni Islamic majority, but they have lost almost all Sunni support across the political spectrum. As the high profile defections reveal even the fascist inner circle Sunni’s are jumping ship. The Syrian state seems close to ‘imploding’ but is very far from finished in a core or rump sense. My side of this war (as was predicted by everyone) is suffering far more casualties than Assad’s forces yet the rebels are still rapidly growing while Assad’s official forces continue to shrink. However I would bet ‘his’ informal forces are still growing.
Clinton is right to say the FSA led opposition is getting more effective and that time is running out for Assad but then she diplomatically says ‘but there is a chance to save the Syrian state from a catastrophic assault that would be very dangerous not only to Syria but to the region’ and here I think she is quite wrong. There are not 2 sides that could make a deal and thus call a halt to the fighting. The ‘only game in town’ called the UN Anan process was destroyed by Assad playing for time and not grabbing that plan; now Assad can’t stop his side from fighting and generally brutalising people even if he wanted to, and the FSA is not even vaguely in total control of the opposition, but they won’t stop either. So I think the assault can’t be stopped now. [well rereading this a few days later I was right about that] The Syrian civil war must go on now until all the thug elements flee or surrender. More often than not it would prove fatal to surrender in this environment so they will therefore try to withdraw, and ethnically cleansed enclaves will emerge and the war go on. The rump will have to be overrun by the FSA if Syria is to be held together so this raises the question of whether the rump has the right to self determination and so more confusion will break out among western progressives!
It looks like this war is going to be a very grim affair and though the image of a burning tank somewhere in Syria is becoming common it’s still not as common as the image of an artillery shell exploding in many Sunni towns and suburbs. That rump state will be well armed and overrunning it could be the most difficult and costly stage of the revolution. If at all possible it ought to be politically reincorporated after Assad flees to Russia and that is getting ahead of ourselves. But the democratic revolution requires that eventual reincorporation. Unincorporated it would remain a fascist state where the majority of the peoples are Syria’s most open to bourgeois democratic modernity so their inclusion is good for the revolution. How this unfolds depends on a great many variables and we would be getting ahead of ourselves to think about that just now…
BTW attacking petrol tankers of course is nothing new, this is an example of recent news in Syria;
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3fc_1341966482&comments=1
But what is sauce for the goose… on the road coming north from Pakistan
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/328717
and even more sauce yesterday on the road south from Uzbekistan
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18882034
The bourgeois democratic revolution is obviously doing very poorly in Afghanistan / Pakistan!
When the revolution erupts in Iran there will be better prospects for the peoples’ of Afghanistan. Nevertheless the revolution has to be fought and won by Afghan ‘infantry’ and one of the minor enemies of that infantry is the western anti-war movement; a major enemy is the impending capitalist crisis. The war in Afghanistan just can’t be won unless a peoples’ army is created from the very ground up. Even then it could not be won without Pakistan as a huge source of counter-revolution being shut down by a Pakistani revolution. A revolution is quite beyond external players, nevertheless the social revolutionaries and their revolution must be protected and nurtured for many more years. So far, there has been almost no revolutionary transformation even attempted in Afghanistan.