organizations | BackChannels

Tags

conflict, organizations, process, rebels, Syria

I myself may have the “habit of war” as as I come to this blog every morning for a dose of my own “narcissistic supply” plus an update on “the latest” somewhere.

As the week’s mornings seem to be turning out more focused on Syria than elsewhere, online witness has been turning out a grim experience.

For war porn, the BBC has covered massacres and produced footage, which, if you search videos separately — string: “Baniyas massacre” — has been all over the web since it occurred in the first days of May (there’s even a Wikipedia page: “Bayda and Baniyas massacres“).

For dismal reading, I may not too highly recommend the BBC’s “Guide to the Syrian opposition.”

A long time somewhere else, I asked this question about Somalia: “If you were a fighter anywhere in Somalia and tired of fighting, to whom would you surrender?”

? ? ?

Call that condition anarchy.

In fact, civil war has brought anarchy to Syria, not only displacing more than 20 percent of the constituents whose lives were to have been secured by President Assad, but giving rise to internally riven opposition organizations: National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces; the Syrian National Council (SNC); National Co-ordination Committee (NCC); and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), of which the BBC notes, “The FSA leadership told the UN Human Rights Council in February that commanders in the field did not receive orders from it and currently made their own rules of engagement.”

Time to get it together?

Opposed by deeply divided and incoherent forces, the Assad regime may have cause and hope for holding out; faced by the same, Senator McCain’s cheerleader appearance notwithstanding, the west has plenty of cause for doubting the wisdom of arming an increasingly Islamist revolution.

A look around the quarter — start with Egypt, move on to Libya, revisit Iraq — tells what comes into the vacuum left by a removed dictator.

It may not be all bad, but conditions in Syria as described by the mixed and adverse motivations involved in energizing the revolution and their expression through unstable organizations and poisonous personalities — this to judge by the mosaic of anti-western, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic spew boasted on some pages — e.g., “Today, the 15th of May, marks 65 years since Palestine was partitioned and Palestinians were expelled from their land in order to create a Jewish Nationalist State, thus executing the infamous Balfour Declaration. Britain must be held primarily responsible for these continuing crimes against humanity . . . .” (Syrian National Coordinating Body “Statement on the 65th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba“) — bode ill for western do-good policy makers.

It may be one thing to give people the rope they need to hang themselves, quite another to hand some the rope they need to hang us.

While Obama and Putin move as Sumo wrestlers around it, the Assad Family’s Syria has failed, and although the family and its army may well survive with a state of some kind, it will be a long time before the scope of the tragedy as well as the breathtaking intellectual, political, social, and spiritual disarray and misguidance throughout the battle space becomes clear — and then it will take more time to get down into the true basis for that so endlessly desperate, fracturing, heartbreaking, and reckless condition.