Introduction: “Tzachi Hanegbi, member of the Knesset, Likud, and former Israeli minister of intelligence, addresses The Washington Institute’s 2013 Soref Symposium. Thursday, May 9, 2013.”
The concept of “integrity” constitutes a global western theme in relation to the Islamic Small Wars.
In essence, the west anchors itself in empiricism, talks policy in the open, and the broader and more inclusive the conversation in participation, comprehension, and reach, the better for mankind.
The cited video, accessible worldwide with exception existing only in states too autocratic or too fragile and tender (or all three) provides a good example of the intellectual process. It has breadth and depth and may be viewed as easily in Riyadh or Islamabad as it is accessible in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
In this video, the Jewish question, oh my, actually comes up in the final minutes.
I may remind readers, Chomsky’s disingenuous rhetoric notwithstanding, that all of the world’s states contain a something-majority, whether Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim or something else: count on the world’s one Jewish-majority state surviving as such, and that specifically as the center of a global ethnic and religious commune with its heart ever in Jerusalem and its body in the spirit of the Land of Israel.
The unspoken truth is that the Palestinians, the country’s largest ethnic group, have developed a profound hatred of the regime and view the Hashemites as occupiers of eastern Palestine—intruders rather than legitimate rulers. This, in turn, makes a regime change in Jordan more likely than ever. Such a change, however, would not only be confined to the toppling of yet another Arab despot but would also open the door to the only viable peace solution—and one that has effectively existed for quite some time: a Palestinian state in Jordan.
The displaced, whether from the 1948 war launched against Israel or from the latest horrors taking place today in Syria, carry with them their attitudes and beliefs about themselves (“self-concept”) and attitudes toward the greater world around them. That’s something to think about as the Syria fled has been irrevocably altered by the methods of war chosen by the Assad regime — e.g., flying air strikes against whole communities; killing noncombatants (in one parlance) / innocents (in another) without distinction from armed or known challengers; and displacing millions without accommodation.
Whether the Assads stay or go, eventually, and in part or as a whole, the Syria that existed as the enthusiasms of the “Arab Spring” approached is gone: whatever may be there, it’s missing 3.4 million of its citizens, either internally displaced or refugee.
For Putin, Syria is all too reminiscent of Chechnya. Both conflicts pitted the state against disparate and leaderless opposition forces, which over time came to include extremist Sunni Islamist groups. In Putin’s view — one that he stresses repeatedly in meetings with his U.S. and European counterparts — Syria is the latest battleground in a global, multi-decade struggle between secular states and Sunni Islamism, which first began in Afghanistan with the Taliban, then moved to Chechnya, and has torn a number of Arab countries apart.
I don’t think Putin has in any way mistaken Syria for Chechnya, but the question of how to address an Islamic front or wave differs quite between what I would glean as Obama’s vision and Russia’s hard experience.
Obama has approached “Islamist” (I’ve been told the word does not exist in Arabic) aggression with what I call the “least war possible” by showing the “hand of peace” at the start of his first administration, by wiggling away and in every which way, from Fort Hood to Boston, from addressing Quranic instructions taken seriously by such as Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others (Sura 9:29 generally suffices for one vivid example of explicit instruction and intention), and by including some key figures in his Administration, essentially absorbing and by demographics overwhelming an adverse presence.
Simply put, for Obama, so I believe, the world is larger than Islam — or an Islam as Osama Bin Laden would have it — and will wear away at the machinery set in motion by it. However, taking this tortuously slow and steady route involves slim but telling differentiation and narrowing “true targets” — as those for the drone programs — to their minimum number.
Putin, perhaps, believes that so cautious and limited an approach will not work, not that he wants to step “in it” himself.
So between the two, Obama and Putin, NATO and Russia, and their spheres of influence, and this much with blessings from Iran, which is working with the Assad regime and with Hezbollah against Israel, and from Saudi Arabia, which believes it will pick up greater and Sunni-based regional influence, Syria has become a killing field from which the peaceful strive to flee and the warriors disarmed by their own glorious assessments of themselves haven’t the courage to transform themselves away from themselves and for the betterment of mankind and the pleasure, probably, of God as well.
With Maher al-Assad’s behavior and character associated with his military role noted worldwide and Bashar Assad’s, Obama’s, and Putin’s inability to address it, Syria has sunk into a devouring darkness.
Putin can neither finesse this play nor simply cleave the Gordian knot presented by Syria.
Obama, if I have got a little bit of his script about right — least war possible; court, engage, and prove the western way larger and more transforming than Islam; and goad Putin toward intervention — cannot stick with it much longer, essentially abetting the Saudi expansion of influence in a war zone in which both Shiite and Sunni extremists enjoy, so far, a fair amount of free range.
If the design has been to draw such forces into Syria’s abattoir and have them lead themselves to their own deaths through grinding mutual annihilation — a rather gruesome form of cooperation, that — then all’s well: let’s just work on getting those displaced by war fed, housed, and ready to resume lives in the Syria that will be when the whole grizzly episode burns itself down to cinders.
Who, what, where, when, how, and most important, why?
In one instance, toward the end of this post, I’ve noted footage posted over the weekend but actually at least two month’s old.
The YouTube search strings were “Syria, combat, today” and “Syria, refugee crisis, today” and similar. Those yield the most recent uploads on the system, but, as suggested, not necessarily the most recent footage.
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I don’t know the posters of the above data — and it would be nice if they provided more information, not to give away their positions, but to fill in other puzzle pieces.
Whatever they — whoever — are doing Out There, the consequences of the military tit-for-tat may be other than these more notable, definite, predictable, and dispicable ends.
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Note the sectarian aspect in Lebanon as Hezbollah appears to be mobilizing and keeping Sunni and Shiite Muslims become a part of neutral humanitarian security concerns.
As noted in the previous post, some 3.4 million Syrians have been displaced by the civil.
It’s impossible, I think, to look at a MIG bombing run against a town or a rebel hit on a tank and feel any kind of hooray for one side or the other (although Maher al-Assad has probably made the best case for rebellion and revolution ever).
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Nick Paton Walsh’s piece showed up earlier on YouTube on March 6, 2013 . . . .
I haven’t the (uncompensated) energy to track each of these pieces back to their first appearance, and with the combat footage, only God knows who’s collecting and posting those recordings. Still, the principle holds: whatever the fighting may be doing for the Assad regime and for the rebels, whatever either imagine they are fighting for, what the civil war has produced is a civilian catastrophe beyond comprehension.
The numbers — those 3.4 million displaced — provide the barest frame to a story that for each displaced person has only begun.
Putin, of course, may have by way of aspects of the “malignant narcissist” just the personality fit to ignoring the suffering caused by even more malignant forces at work in Syria: the despot who won’t go; his brother who won’t go either and makes the worst of the Qaddafi family look like one of the Waltons; an opposition force peppered with Islamist leanings, the Saudi version of Islamic wisdom, and, alas Al Qaeda types.
Neither the Russia of the Czars, of the Soviet, nor of the emerging oligarchs should want to have its hands dipped in any o’ that!
Still, were Putin given leave to “fix Syria” by doing other than returning it to its former dismal state, what would he do?
What should he do?
I’m not sure I understand the post-Soviet continuation of the ghosts of the Cold War in the present atmosphere — e.g., “One of the decrees Putin issued in 2012 called on the government to seek closer ties to the United States. Ties have worsened significantly instead, with Russia expelling the U.S. Agency for International Development, cracking down on other U.S.-funded activities and each nation passing tit-for-tat punitive laws” (see “Gearan” in reference) — and it would seem Putin doesn’t “get it” either.
🙂
Treat Maher al-Assad as a separate issue from the family’s general rule;
Shepherd into power Russo-Syrian business partners representative of Syria’s demographics and channel the class toward an elections-based political process;
Marginalize the Shiite Islamist connection with Iran and Hezbollah;
Impede Saudi-backed Sunni Islamism in its zeal to control the levers of the state as Saudi outpost.
Point One: Apolitical Syrians victimized by the behavior of Maher al-Assad’s forces will never forgive him, and in that regard he stands as a lasting impediment to internal peace for as long as he retains his authority.
Point Two: A Syria regarded and treated as a Russian client state and buffer needs a texture suited to contemporary Russian cultural drifts and standards, and neither true despotism nor Islamism will suit that. To Putin’s credit, rather after-the-fact, his distributions of wealth have been both nepotist in some ways and socially responsible in other ways. Russia may not work very well, but it works.
Points Three and Four: Chechnya’s Islamist rebels haven’t worked out for Mother Russia; similar forces, Shiite or Sunni, won’t work any better in Syria. On this point, Putin may be laughing, for he knows Obama can’t defend the arming of Mujaheddin against an “Evil Empire” that ceased to exist 20 years ago.
Whatever else Syria may be, it ain’t Charlie Wilson’s war.
So far, however, it doesn’t seem much like Vladimir Putin’s war either.
Let’s call what the politicians do the “Bloody Dog and Pony Show” because Iran’s attempts to shuttle weapons to Hezbollah and Syrian intentions to swipe at Israel have been a part of the country’s Arab Spring Screaming since the git-go.
Politically impotent potentates like Bashar al-Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei have with their self-indulging narcissistic zeal painted themselves into corners from which they cannot grow their state’s peaceful and productive capacities but rather, and primarily, wage war against all. Their kind devour themselves but not without first inviting the destruction of everything around them.
As noted here, Syria’s chief problem has to do with the complete absence of anything good “in play” in the battle space. Who today among the civilized, contained, and reasoning should care to support, essentially, Maher al-Assad’s established and continuing sadism?
Who of contemporary western bent should care to see the mixed bag of Islamist rebels, Al Qaeda among them, prevail?
Syria has become the dense sucking black star of the Islamic Small Wars.
None should be surprised about loose chemical warheads or rebels (allegedly) mixing up their own small batches of burning chlorine-based clouds.
Wikipedia’s report of deaths-to-date ascribed to the civil war: between 69,390 and 82,130. “On 13 February 2013, the United Nations put out an estimate of 70,000 that had died in the war.”
Whatever figure you choose, it’s pretty bad.
And there’s no need to tidy up the Syrian slaughterhouse and its deep well of death with a figure – 70,000 – as fat and round as it is unfathomable: “A boy of 12 sees his best friend shot through the heart. Another of 15 is held in a cell with 150 other people, and taken out every day to be put in a giant wheel and burnt with cigarettes” (Reuters, March 13, 2013).
Presuming that most are not reading this “in-country”, imagine having that obscenity taking place in your backyard.
Countermeasures?
Fill the moats, drop the portcullis, and set free those birds with the baked clay!
All of that the Jews have done and continue to do in the defense of the children of Israel.
And truth to tell when faced with so devouring a black and burning hole in the fabric of our humanity globally as Syria has become, it is to the defense of humanity — all God’s children — for which the “Zionist entity” strikes at the weapons centers and shipments that would bring to the whole world nothing less than the same insensate burning.
Hi, X — the “Sunni world” has deep investments in the west and in western trade and concomitant cooperation with the west, so on that broad basis, I believe, it proves itself the better partner in addressing Islamic expansion. The Ayatollah, Hamas, and Hezbollah — the active sworn enemies of Israel and the west — have cursed Shiite Islam in light of western interests as well as global interests in peace.
Iran’s shipments of rockets to Syria (for relay to and use by Hezbollah as well as Assad) signals a bump in Iran’s genocidal war on the “Zionist Entity”. In the experience of the Jews, this is the work of God pulling Israel into a defensive but active position: i.e., the people have once again been threatened with annihilation, the enemy is powerful, and it has shifted from stubborn Big Talk to “arming up” on Israel’s border — and Israel, which has every right to defend herself, will not only do so, but probably, as it has for thousands of years, change the course of history a little bit for the better.
I’ve mentioned many times, Usman, that there were no good guys within the Syrian “battle space” — and the “guys” outside of it, Putin and Obama, add non-Hezbollah Lebanese and then the Israelis, haven’t had a way toward dealing with any of the parties involved! In a very real sense, Syrians have been lost for a while and the effects of Saudi vs. Iran rivalry in the region have been making themselves felt.
If Syria’s rebel forces could both overrun the Assad regime _and reject the establishment of a hard Sunni line and its backers_ then Syrians might recover their state and stand for themselves instead of as proxies to NATO / Sunni / Saudi power as well as Russian / Iranian / Shiite power.
Sound impossible?
Ninety percent of the bloodshed has to do with the content of minds, and I believe minds can and will turn themselves in a good direction, but it might take some assistance to get them there.
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From the moment Maher al-Assad set loose an army absent of any apparent rules of engagement, Syria embarked on a war that could have no other end then to keep the state embroiled in conflict.
The civilian cry for justice and revenge alone would forestall peace with the state as constituted.
Of course, there’s more to the story than that posed by civil war against a despotic family.
Russia’s post-Soviet neglect of its client for all but business and defense concerns contributed to Syria’s “weak link” status in the middle east. The odd political bedfellow with an Iran beneath the Ayatollah’s black wing has only added to the Assad’s isolation. The family hasn’t really been in power in support of religious fanaticism, but that other fanatic passion for “Jew hate” has nonetheless sufficed to partially position the state as an Iranian proxy, and that in turn, plus population, has made the state a contemplated morsel for the House of Saud.
All around, Syria serves as the latest emblem of a weak state to be battered between superpowers and eaten alive by jackals.
For diplomats and professional war game enthusiasts, one might suppose that Iran’s smuggling rockets to Israel fits with some wise Pentagon planning, a conceit I would wish not the least bit true.
For the religious, this confluence of malignant forces — of grandiose messianic ambition in the person of Ayatollah Khamenei, of unsurpassed ambition and greed on the part of what my correspondent called “Sunni Islam” (which I read as Saudi Arabian ambition, expansion, and regional rivalry), of tangent involvement by Russia, the United States, and NATO — one may look to God perhaps arranging one more defensive war for the Jews and all of an Israel that with God will not tolerate in its enemy’s camps the presence of accurate and deadly rockets within range of her children.
The AlJazeera video only glances a reference, about four seconds, at the the shipping of arms between Iran and Syria. If it were an honest outfit, it would have reported on arms trafficking between Iran and Syria first, then the relationship that has made Syria partially dependent on Iranian financing and military support, and then, perhaps this is asking too much, the common bonding in Jew hate and the hatred of the “Zionist entity” that primarily serves to mask the essential impotence of the leadership of both states, an impotence etched into permanent consciousness by the blood and suffering of their own people at their own hands — a thing observable from Evin Prison to Maher al-Assad’s casual firing into passersby on an opposite street corner.
Q: Setting aside Iranian and other outside influence, do you view Shiite-Sunni rivalry and cultural-political organization of Iraqi society as modifiable or irreparably fixed?
A: It wasn’t much of a problem in the past – there was a time when Sunni and Shia Islamists cooperated against the influence of Sunni and Shia Arab nationalists. The problem of authoritarianism inevitably exposed that Sunnis controlled the top, and the rise of Islamism region wide pushed the Shiite protesters of the 1970’s to clash with the Sunni security apparatus. (The first major clash was in 1936 during which a Shiite revolt was brutally put down). The rise of Shiite Islamism in neighbouring Iran created a collusion between Arab nationalism and Sunni Islamism that persists today. Even Lebanese and Syrian Shiites and Alawis are publicly vilified as Persians in all kinds of derogatory language.
It is absolutely modifiable. But given the damage that’s been done, and the resilience of the forces driving it, it may well last for decades more.
Source note: I asked the question on a closed Facebook group, and the respondent, Abdelwahab Al Jaza’iri in Dubai, provided what I’ve accepted as a very good and distilled answer providing background for recent events in Iraq, and it is with his permission that I post the same here.
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