Eight minutes of You-Are-THERE!
Choose your front. Choose your side. Combat clips are all over the web these days.
That video that follows appears to be a captured Free Syria Army recording — one cannot believe the tank will not turn its turret toward the viewer, which it does two or three times toward the end, and fire (not shown).
The video’s poster ends the information section this way: “Everyone who
live in Syria does support his President Dr. Bashar Al-Assad with love
and peace, because this is what they get from the Government too.
Don’t let you get controlled by Mainstream-Media because they just spread lies.”
I really wish I could just ask Putin, “Dude President, what do you really want to do with this old client: back to the past? How fast? Forward to a broad and open secular democracy? How slowly?
The U.S. and NATO have got to be churning inside a huge ethical and moral conundrum as alliances with Saudi Arabia and Turkey provide Russia ample opportunity to pick up the reins, at minimum, for promoting an interim secular proto-democracy in Syria committed to its own authentic and (yes, even) laudable transformation.
However, at the moment, I wish I were watching this show from Mars, it looks that confused and ugly.
While the collapse of the Soviet Union has left behind the shadows and webs of its old relationships — people don’t like to go out of business, and powerful people can keep their good deals going a long time — it didn’t really leave room for doing nothing about its favorable satellite. The neglect of decades-old change got Syria to this, but the American policy response . . . “Yo! Obama! Come forward 22 years, please.”
This that I quoted earlier today haunts me:
“We won’t joke about this anymore,” one warned. “This time, it’s not a problem, but next time, women should cover their hair and behave like good Muslims.”
Until that moment, Ahmed, a journalism student at Damascus University, had believed in the revolution. But as he watched the rebel soldiers, he saw his dreams of a democratic Syria being hijacked by extremists.
President Putin:
The President of Russia has the opportunity today and like no other senior state official in history to out-American the American President.
If the Assad plan goes beyond public relations to produce a greater service level in cooperative development and human rights, if the regime can stuff its bogey anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, if it can transform itself into a more responsible state administrating entity — take the big leap beyond its familial kleptocracy and nepotism — it could come out of this in some way, although I don’t think it will be able to protect Maher al-Assad from the consequences of his army’s excessive and wild spree, so broadly and well covered in the early days.
There’s one thing I know: the war isn’t in that footage at the top of this page. It’s in the humanity, if it is there, of the one chatting about Israel in the second clip.
BackChannels 