From the start, the induction of the Syrian revolution cum civil war seems to have been intended to weaken Iran and the threat posed by its belligerent talk in the years preceding 2011 (or so) onset of the Syrian conflict. Putin, saddled with the neglected post-Soviet relationship with Syria, got forked in what must have then seemed like a nifty move to Washington: get moderate talk from the Sunni assembly of powers and prepare “regime change” for Syria, and good ol’ Putin should go along because he backs moderation and, nominally, democracy.
Bad call.
Because Putin is himself at heart an autocrat with mafia-style kleptocratic leanings. He sees himself in his real friends, and so the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei was born and post-Soviet Russia vs NATO reestablished (you saw the European extension of that axis in Ukraine via Putin-Yanukovych and it resonates again in new Russo-Sino energy cooperation).
Assad — sometimes I refer to him as President Asshat — viewing Syria as his exclusive sandbox and unwilling to compromise or share power with The People — either consciously or not formed up a familiar nationalist vs extremist war (the same as Mubarak vs Brotherhood): Through the filter of “malignant narcissism” the President-for-Life and the Caliph of All Islam are the same person (different talk — same walk) and what was moderate in Syria found itself bereft of its own defenses, without anything equivalent to an experienced armed organizations, and compromised some by its own endemic anti-Semitic anti-western habits of mind, which may be changing in the Washington lobbying zone but I’m not in town to catch the latest drift before it appears on the web.
Whatever Putin’s true relationship with the Assad family may be, his declining cooperation with the west has facilitated Syria’s becoming a huge trap for those of “Islamist / terrorist” mentality, whether emanating from Iran or Saudi Arabia: within the psychology involved, which perhaps involves living too deeply within one’s own dream, the interests of the constituency at large are somewhat invisible and far from paramount.
Words are cheap, and I’m verbose.
Part of the “FTAC” concept was to preserve some thought even though its usefulness or value might be highly questionable all the way down to worthless. Nonetheless, autodidact blogging affords a more stable platform for online “chatyping” than the more ephemeral Facebook threads.
In this instant, the underlying suggestion is that since Putin made his move again separating Russian interests from western ones by pursuing an imperial idea of himself, Syria has been one hot oven over which Russia has been better able to control the tinderbox than America by resupplying the known quantity that is Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian constituency has been decimated in various ways, but the primary actors — the brutal dictator and equally energetic Shiite and Sunni extremists — seem to be out on the landscape happily killing one another (while Hamas, fat and corrupt, sets off rockets like firecrackers, with about the same results, and has become itself an emblem of kleptocratic moral vacuity).
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) may or may not represent the “mild, moderate, and middle” of Syrian humanity (let’s also add “modern” to that too alliterative — “mild, moderate, middle, and modern” — string.
It’s much easier — too much so — seeing the evidence of mass atrocity throughout the Syrian theater than it is seeing in potential the good tidings to come of the FSA.
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