The West insists on maintaining the illusion that the government in Baghdad is something other than a Shia sectarian-dominated entity in the process of entering a de facto military alliance with the Iranians. This stubbornness is producing the current absurd situation in which Western air power is being used in support of Shia Islamism.
It is important to understand that this is not taking place because there is no other option for stopping the advance of the Islamic State. There is another, more effective option: direct aid to the Kurds, and to the Sunni tribes further south.
In the medieval mode, sectarian religious teleology — who wins the favor of God? How soon do we get to find out? — reaches the boundary of the ineffable: may God decide on the field of battle, and the sooner the better!
In the modern mode, the same narrative may be left to God to decide gently across millennia — or not at all: who needs must get to the end of the story in their lifetime or even want the same to arrive in their great grandchildren’s day?
BackChannels has been surprised by the tenacious hold given, so the blog shall refer to it, the “Great Sunni vs Shiite War” in Shiite circles and doubtless, whatever the proportions, in Sunni ones as well.
How is it for the west that so alien, primitive, and singular an unanswerable dispute may by ripples and waves spread to engulf the modern of two to several middle east states?
Ayatollah Khamenei’s expansion of influence, and this despite the regime’s infamous behavior in its own space, appears to proceed apace through the combined artifice of political theater — how conveniently the ISIS story links to the narrative “Assad vs The Terrorists” — and, in Yemen, just watch those Houthis go — war by proxy.
By contrast, Cockburn takes a generous view of the regime’s belated and brief confrontation with ISIS. He has pronounced Assad’s army its “main military opponent,” deserving of Western support. But facts tell a different story. According to a Carter Center study, the regime has spared ISIS in 90 percent of its attacks; and an IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center (JTIC) study finds that in 2014, the regime targeted ISIS in only 6 percent of its attacks. (ISIS in turn directed its fire on the regime in only 13 percent its operations.)
Since Aboud Dandachi laid out the shaping of the battle by Assad forces in his refreshingly honest and entertaining history and polemic, The Doctor, The Eye Doctor and Me: Analogies and Parallels Between the World of Doctor Who and the Syrian Conflict (2014), the feudal perversion of a modest pro-democracy protest in 2011 into a brutal epic one might title “Assad vs The Terrorists” has been apparent but the statistics on how it was done never so well relayed.
BackChannels (oh the bias!) commonly invokes the term “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” in place of Bashar al-Assad alone to play up the axis, its Russo-Iranian core, and define the conflict in Syria as other and greater than “civil war”, a mere internal dispute, the greater dispute being that between medieval absolute power and modern democratic distributed or popular power.
From recent correspondence — so recent, it hasn’t even been sent!
You may wish to wonder at the goodness of your country in its domestic ideals. China and Russia work differently, and what they do has probably long “leaked” into our own analyses and options.
With Iran, “War by Proxy” is obvious everywhere the regime sows chaos, death, and sorrow. This week: Yemen.
With Russia, those criminals make war and lie about it. As much has been the story of the invasion of Crimea from the start.
Who OWNS that monster Out There in Syria-Iraq (“Syriaque”?*).
That it has served Putin-Assad-Khamenei, that person that has managed to pervert a a popular people’s protest into an ineffable tragedy one might title, “Assad vs The Terrorists” (mission accomplished), points to the forbearing of barrel bombing old terrorists positions when the districts of Homs proved so much more convenient and harmless and helpless for doing so.
This month (merry one of May) has brought an example of active observation but passive response to a challenge that has morphed from a negligible horror into a military and political scourge calling to mind the possibly more gentle manners of Attila the Hun.
The story released by Fox has been picked up on the Blogosphere, and the report itself may be located and downloaded as a PDF.
While on the subject of the dismantling of Syria-Iraq boundary points, BackChannels has taken note of the strength of “nominal affiliation” and “sectarian teleology” in producing and sustaining brutal conflict in the region. The gamble on the favor of God and related glory appears to overmatch the promise of social cooperation and cohesion across sectarian lines that would produce a more sound freedom, peace, and prosperity while intellectual and social habits related to the experiences of fear and security prevail: Our People vs Those People, Sunni vs Shiite, appears to remain primary across population to some extent.
“Instead of upholding justice, the Hamas authorities and leadership have continuously encouraged and facilitated these appalling crimes against powerless individuals. Their failure to even condemn the unlawful killings, abduction and torture of perceived suspects leaves them effectively with blood on their hands,” said Philip Luther.
From the PDF of the Amnesty International Report (p. 12):
Amnesty International is concerned that the bodies and mechanisms set up by the Hamas de facto administration to carry out law enforcement and the administration of justice lack the necessary skills, independence, oversight, and accountability to ensure that the rule of law is respected for both victims and accused; to protect individuals from human rights abuses against them; to ensure that victims have access to effective mechanisms to obtain redress; and that accused persons are afforded due process. On the contrary, it seems clear that perpetrators of human rights abuses continue to enjoy impunity, and that the Hamas de facto administration lacks the political will to hold perpetrators of such crimes to account, particularly Hamas members, and to respect fundamental human rights, including the rights to life and to be free from torture.
The ties that bind are also contemporary and personal. Two Soviet leaders — Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev — not only spent their early years in Ukraine but spoke Russian with a distinct Ukrainian accent. This historic connectedness is one reason why their post-Soviet successor, Vladimir Putin, has been able to build such wide popular support in Russia for championing — and, as he is now trying to do, recreating — “Novorossiya” (New Russia) in Ukraine.
In selling his revanchist policy to the Russian public, Putin has depicted Ukrainians who cherish their independence and want to join Europe and embrace the Western democratic values it represents as, at best, pawns and dupes of NATO — or, at worst, neo-Nazis. As a result, many Russians have themselves been duped into viewing Washington, London, and Berlin as puppet-masters attempting to destroy Russia.
Behind Hamas – Khamenei and other Islamist backers; with Khamenei, the now neo-feudal Putin; with Putin and Khamenei, the pack of old and new nationalist and nationalist-socialist parties. The “middle east conflict” has been and remains for now a much, much larger struggle than it looks. That struggle is also timeless: it is the struggle of the barbaric and malignant against the civil, the gracious, and the reparative.
I was smiling as they gave us instructions worthy of a spy movie: “Come to the bus stop… There’ll be a man in a grey suit with a rolled-up paper in his hand… Don’t approach, keep walking. He’ll catch up with you… Jump into the green taxi – it’s our driver… Delete the numbers from your mobile…”
They were careful, but exceptionally brave, and full of hope. They genuinely believed then that, in a matter of months, the ruthless, authoritarian government that had ruled Syria for decades would fall, just like Egypt’s and Tunisia’s did. They had high hopes of building a new country, a new society, governed by democratic values and the rule of law.
Damascus, SANA – President Bashar al-Assad on Monday received Foreign Affairs Minister of Belarus Vladimir Makei and the accompanying delegation.
Makei delivered to President al-Assad a letter from President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko in which he expressed his country’s support for Syria in the face of the terrorist attack targeting it, with Lukashenko expressing confidence in the Syrian people’s ability to achieve victory and overcome the crisis and asserting that Belarus is committed to developing relations with Syria in all fields.
“It is quite understandable that the Syrian army withdraws to protect large cities where much of the population is located,” said Waddah Abded Rabbo, director of Syria’s Al-Watan newspaper, which is close to the regime.
“The world must think about whether the establishment of two terrorist states is in its interests or not,” he said, in reference to IS’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, and Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front’s plans for its own “emirate” in northern Syria.
“Syndicate Red Brown Green” has been made a term of art on BackChannels for just this reason: it’s not looking good for the Assad regime’s recovery of Syria, but with a painful retrenching in the offing, it has its friends: Putin’s Russia; Khamenei’s Iran — and Putin’s Russia has a relationship with a dictatorship amenable to hosting some family with few places to go.
That day has not come yet, but while perverting a gentle 2011 challenge to its authority — this tragedy began with nonviolent protests met with the arresting and torturing of children — into a ferocious heroic narrative, “Assad vs The Terrorists”, a frame requiring the indiscriminate bombing of the innocent and allowance for the real terrorists to get their acts together in order to play their roles. The Terrorists have made it just about to the gates of state power.
Gov. Talal Barazi of the central province of Homs, which includes Palmyra, told The Associated Press Sunday that IS members have “committed mass massacres in the city of Palmyra” since they captured it on Wednesday. He said IS fighters took many civilians, including women, to unknown destinations.
Activists in the town have said that IS fighters have hunted down President Bashar Assad’s loyalist since taking the town, killing some 280 people.
As a reflection of the news with a little widening into overlooked space, i.e., Belarus, this post has turned out a bit of a patchwork: a little bit about the Syrian Civil War; a little about dictatorship and the “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” axis. So be it. There is nothing neat in the way these small wars work or in the ways powerful elites work either.
Lumping together 1.6 billion Muslims into one reviled abstraction is a disservice not only to Israel but also to Israel’s values of democracy, diversity, tolerance, and human rights. Muslims are not an abstraction. Among Muslims, you will find neighbors, friends, relatives, business partners, co-workers, and fellow citizens. Among Muslims you will also find some of the fiercest opponents of Islamist extremism. Reality is complex and often overwhelming, but it cannot be explained away by the wholesale demonization of a quarter of the world’s population.
In the political psychology, we are perhaps all a little bit full of ourselves as “locus of control” play right along with “the real Jews”, “the true church”, “final word from God” and all of that. Nonetheless, bearing legacy within ourselves from near birth (or language uptake), we each have many ways of appreciating and enjoying our ethnic and spiritual endowments without feeling compelled to conquer the rest of the world with the same.
BackChannels 