The will to dominance is compensatory and occluding.
In the Islamic Small Wars that feature deeply cruel and sadistic behavior (all sides), the psychology revolving around willfulness, a facet of power, is hard to escape. This is where things get ugly and tautological with language both expressing and inventing and reinforcing an emotional narrative in the cultural mind. It’s hard getting the little trains (trained minds) to jump their tracks and get out of it.
Here’s the thing to note about the kind of people who carry out assassinations and drive wars: they’re not representative of the humanity of the humanity surrounding themselves — at least not in the Islamic Small Wars where a very few (in Somalia, about 10,000 fighters at one time affiliate with al Shabaab) can drive a very many (in Somalia, about 2.75 million) out of their homes. On the other hand, the few are possessed of potent weapons plus war making knowledge, and they’re “social grammar” is hard to get to as, I believe, they don’t have access to it themselves.
The regional to international war: Russia (cash hungry or cash mad) — > Iran (well oiled arms buyer) — > Special Assad and Shiite Understanding | Sunni Central Expansion “<” — KSA, Qatar, UAE, etc. semi-independent coffers (the west has placed too much reliance on the state concept where it just barely applies, if at all) “<“– U.S. and NATO alliances, which make themselves deeply discomforting.
Basically, imho, Syria is Assad’s war within Putin’s sphere of influence, a part of the wreckage of neglected post-Soviet problems, and Putin, quick to relieve Khodorkovsky of aspirations involving political matters, especially corruption, essentially signaled interest in resurgent kleptocracy, at least for a while, long enough to separate Russia from the west and return Russians to the shadows of some former imperial glory. At that, Putin has succeeded, but we must note that it is neither in NATO’s or Russia’s interest to develop an Islamic island in Syria. I’d say we’re heading into the second of at least three acts in Syria — nowhere near the end of the book.
I’m calling it like a see it, and to hell with it!
🙂
Syria continues to become visible in terms suited to political science.
It’s morphed from an Arab Springy “people’s revolution” into a dynamic geopolitical blast furnace and whatever’s in it is still melting down, the best top layer either killed or siphoned off to soup lines and refugee camps, the next layer sucked in from the global Jihad and melding with whatever’s left into some deeply fractured substance boiling up death, suffering, and wreckage wherever it seeps, and the rest of the container adjusting to so many unpalatable upsets.
While President Putin trades a few political prisoners into freedom for the sake of Peace at Sochi in Time for the Games, it may be what’s happening in and to Syria that dogs him through that event.
Within the Syrian Civil War and a little bit without, the same mentality occupies chairs on either side of the board: it’s the despot Assad vs. the despotic al-Qaeda affiliates (now that they’ve disarmed more moderate forces with the combined powers of the Qur’an and “trust me trust me” wink wink over a couple of warehouses loaded with war materiel). Everyone has lost that war, partially because vacuous “winning” will turn out about being lost — as lost as the Assads with Maher and the first whiff of atrocities and war crimes to come.
In fairy tale terms, the good child, prince of his kingdom, has had to watch himself become a monster, in name or by assent or by his own orders, and everything he does, everything he tries, only draws the blood from the floor, a little bit at first on the shoes, and that washes off, but then it’s up around the ankles, and every step out of it means another splash into it, then it’s up around his waist, the family is screaming bloody murder, mad at the world, at themselves, at the puppet master with the greater civilization, which is at peace within itself at least, and their hand wringing and remonstrances notwithstanding, the horror continues rising up to the neck and seeping into their mouths, preventing them from talking straight, if ever they could, and up it rises before their eyes.
By now, it’s an everyday matter, the blood dimmed tide a familiar site, the once-thrilling uncertain exigencies of war routinized.
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“The level of human sufferings that I am witnessing with the Syria crisis is indeed without a parallel with anything else I have witnessed in my own life,” says Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Syria: ‘Unparalleled human suffering’ – Inside Syria – Al Jazeera English – 12/1/2013.
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War in Syria, violence in Syria today: house to house fighting – YouTube – 12/26/2013
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▶ Chaos and Despair in Aleppo – YouTube – 12/26/2013.
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