All of a sudden, “20/20 hindsight” has become more significant than Monday morning coaching: where evil has bloomed, the good of the world may need to recover the memory of its beginning.
Assad should have “leaned west”, accommodated some political challenge from his people, and come into the modern fold. Instead, he responded to an actually mild civil challenge with the barbarous arrest and torture of young students (Darra, 2011).
Shall we simply forget how it started?
The American position appears to leave Syria a Russian client without challenge, but perhaps Washington had hoped for a more modern approach to a) accommodating political challenge and b) hunting out the al-Qaeda types that got going on the troubled landscape.
Instead, effort seems to have been put into incubating and producing ISIS, and the indiscriminate bombing that has destroyed much of Aleppo and Homs has proven similarly help to energizing the very forces Assad claims to be fighting! However, the same are the weaker forces and may be chased or surrounded and destroyed IF Damascus chooses to concentrate on just that.
Ashkar, who has been posting videos of the carnage, said Syrian troops were executing civilians on the streets, including women and children. Similar allegations have been reported by other residents to the United Nations and activists in Aleppo.
In 1955, Moscow invited Syria, along with Egypt, to join a pro-Soviet pact. Turkey, a U.S. ally, mobilized troops along its southern border in an attempt to dissuade Syria from joining this pact. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov threatened Turkey not to use force against Syria, prompting Ankara to back down. The Syria-Soviet relationship was soon cemented. From 1955 to 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev provided Syria with more than $200 million in military aid to solidify the alliance and to counter U.S. influence in the region.
The front line staff of the Fourth Estate has watched not only Aleppo’s most desperate hours but many, this editor included, has caught the arc of the narrative from its start in Daraa in 2011 and then revisited the Cold War Era, Soviet Era history, and a little more Russian history to note the threads of aristocracy, barbarism, and imperial ambition coursing across the decades.
The Soviet Union dissolved 25 years ago, but the head of the “revived” Russian state is a KGB colonel who talked a billionaire into supporting his ambition to become the top official of the new state . . . and here we are witness to atrocities in which three old dictatorships — Moscow, Damascus, Tehran — share responsibility for the slaughter of innocents.
Today, Moscow represents another deep “security states” (http://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-resurrects-the-kgb-moscow-security/) with Putin as the Big Boss (AKA “Vertical of Power”) and another class of aristocrats known as “The Oligarchs”. In Syria, you may not only observe Moscow’s idea of “truth” — go ahead: have a look at RT’s or Tass’s coverage of the same obscenity — but also its disregard for God, for human dignity, and such a thing as “human rights”.
Moscow’s methods in intimidation and patronage have helped reintroduce the world to barbarism and political totalitarianism.
This blog post tells how Assad himself encouraged and incubated the development of ISIL.
Imagine turning one economically challenged and environmentally troubled middle eastern state into a complete theater of politics and war.
Imagine producing every element in that state and managing the same for political gains in the world beyond its borders.
Then put a label on the production:
Assad vs The Terrorists & Assad OR The Terrorists
Why put on such a show?
To assert the power of absolute power and demonstrate the maniacal ability to visit suffering on innocents with impunity.
To produce a terrorism center that helps goad the west toward patriotic but autocratic and xenophobic nationalism in a way that divides states and encourages the abandonment of core values, especially cultural pluralism and religious tolerance.
To blackmail the west toward choosing to having in power a tyrant as opposed to an equally criminal and tyrannical movement.
To threaten the west — the European Union and NATO — with the monetary, security, and social costs associated with mass migration infused with criminal elements.
To produce a useful tool — “The Terrorists” / ISIL and other al-Qaeda type bands and organizations — with which to demonstrate military prowess in line with a fascist state script.
Herewith, a brief listing of citations building up to the image, quite correctly, of a murderous totalitarian mentality in action in Syria.
The regime continued losing ground over the summer of 2015, provoking a direct Russian intervention in September 2015 that was explained, quite falsely, as an effort to destroy IS. Moscow trained its firepower on the mainstream armed opposition, systematically targeting the parts of the opposition supported by the West, which actually opened space for IS to expand. In July 2016, Russia even attacked US-supported forces that only fight IS.
Rather than counterterrorism, the actual Russian intention was to secure Assad militarily and then extinguish all workable alternatives, thereby rehabilitating Assad politically. To disguise this fact and rewrite the narrative of the intervention as one of anti-extremism, Russia’s ruler, Vladimir Putin, sought to end the major offensive phase of the intervention in March 2016 by pushing IS out of Palmyra.
Washington, DC – After more than 100 days of siege, over 2,000 airstrikes, and the closure of all hospitals in eastern Aleppo, it is with a heavy heart that SAMS announces that our facilities and staff can no longer operate in the city. Our facilities have been seized by the government, leaving too many without the critical and life-saving medical care they need.
The brutal aerial bombardment campaign over Aleppo has killed hundreds of civilians, including children and women, and forced over 50,000 people to flee their homes in the past two weeks alone. The humanitarian crisis in the eastern part of the city has reached a tipping point. Hospital have been systematically targeted with impunity. Medical personnel have been struggling to treat patients. Medical equipment and supplies have been depleted. Emergency medical evacuations have been denied.
In November, with attacks on hospitals taking place every 24 hours, all of Aleppo’s hospitals were bombed out of service.
The largest trauma hospital in Aleppo, which was supported by SAMS, was bombed out of operation despite its underground location.
In October, this facility was attacked five times in one week with illegal and unconventional weapons including, barrel bombs, bunker buster bombs, and cluster bombs.
These indiscriminate attacks on hospitals have taken an unimaginable toll on civilians- leaving more than 250,000 people, including 100,000 children, with no access to medical care. As the aerial bombardment campaign has intensified, the number of casualties and wounded civilians has reached the highest number since the beginning of the conflict in 2011. Medical personnel have been treating the overwhelming number of wounded in basements with limited resources. People are using carts to transport the wounded. Bodies of the dead are wrapped in plastic bags and left on the streets because hospitals have run out of coffins.
“A few days ago the nurses out of desperation tried to operate M2 hospital again. They went into one of the remaining basements and started two ICU beds and a small procedure room,” said Dr. Anas Moughrabieh, SAMS’s Telemedicine Chair. “They consulted me about two patients. One had minor injuries and the other one was critically injured. I asked them to prematurely give up on the latter one and I felt bad to tell them it is luxury now to care for patients with this high level of injury with limited resources. However, our medics didn’t give up on him until their location was discovered and attacked by barrel and cluster bombs.”
Since the start of the conflict in Syria, nearly half a million people have been killed, over 20,000 of them children, 11 million have been forced to flee their homes, and over one million live under the horrific conditions of siege. These astonishing numbers paint a grim picture of suffering mothers, fathers, children, and families that have been failed by the international community.
“We are shocked by the inaction of the international community that has allowed such atrocities to be committed against civilians,” said SAMS Medical Staff Member in Aleppo. “Our hospitals continue to be targeted. Now, we are hiding in basements. We feel desperate and abandoned. The UN and the international community have failed Syria.”
For nearly six years, civilians, medical workers, schools, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods have been the target of unrelenting bombardment. Innocent Syrians have been forced to endure indiscriminate and unconventional weapons that maim, chemical weapons that suffocate, and relentless sieges that starve. These war crimes continue with impunity.
“Throughout these unimaginable conditions and challenges, SAMS has continued and will continue to provide care and alleviate the suffering of civilians across Syria, regardless of their religious or political affiliations,” said SAMS’s President, Dr. Ahmad Tarakji. “Our brave medics have continued to do their job despite constant threats to their own lives. They are the true heroes and our shared duty is to protect them.”
SAMS condemns in the strongest terms the heinous attacks on civilian infrastructure in Aleppo, the inaction of the international community that has allowed innocent men, women, and children to be killed under their watch, and the vetoes from the UN member states of Russia and China of the resolution that would have allowed for a seven-day humanitarian pause. This resolution was meant to save lives. Now, more lives will be lost.
For media requests, please contact SAMS’s Media and Communications Manager, Lobna Hassairi at lobna.hassairi@sams-usa.net.
Comment: the power sought by Assad, Putin, and Khamenei — the avatars of political absolutism and fair examples of malignant narcissists — is the power to impose suffering on others with impunity. At this hour, it appears another part of that heinous mission has been accomplished.
The last children’s hospital in besieged Aleppo has suspended operations after a brutal “double-tap” bombing.
A wave of airstrikes targeted medics in the rebel-held eastern district as they treated dozens of children who had been hit with chemical attacks.
Doctors and patients fled to the basement as more than 20 barrel bombs pounded the centre on Wednesday morning.
But less than 48 hours later two missiles tore through the unit as staff carried-out a clean-up operation.
Video footage shows the terrifying moment nurses pulled new-born babies from their incubators and fought their way through the dust and debris in search of safety.
The Independent Doctors Association, a medical group, said barrel bomb attacks had damaged two facilities it supports in eastern Aleppo — the children’s hospital and the only bloodbank in the area.
Medical facilities have regularly been hit, and sometimes completely destroyed, in the government’s fight against rebels, though Damascus and Moscow deny they target hospitals.
Doctors Without Borders said the children’s hospital and a specialized surgical hospital were hit by Wednesday’s strikes.
“Hospital staff managed to move children – including prematurely born babies – from cots and incubators to the basement of the building in order to shelter them from the bombing,” said the aid group, which sponsors both hospitals.
“You cannot imagine what we see every day: children who are coming to us as body parts. We collect the body parts and wrap them in shrouds and bury them,” said Bara’a, a nurse at one of the affected hospitals, who was present during the bombings.
“Tell the world to wake up, to wake their consciences. Where are you? When Palestine was being destroyed everyone got involved. Why are Syria’s children being forgotten? Nobody is doing anything to reduce this suffering.”
Monday saw yet another targeted strike in Syria. Not against Isis or against anyone threatening. No, the latest attack was another deplorable airstrike on a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital that was providing vital medical care to the region surrounding Maarat al-Numan.
According to a monitoring group in the area, the attack resulted in more than nine people’s deaths – including one child’s – and was carried out by Russian forces. Only two days earlier they had agreed to limit hostilities in Syria.
This was no accident. Four rockets hit the hospital: it was a targeted attack, and a cold-blooded one too.
Of the 470,000 Syrians who have been killed in this terrible war, the overwhelming majority have been killed by Assad and his allies, and that’s even truer of the civilian casualties. The United Nations in February concluded that the Assad regime had violated the laws of war in six distinct ways and committed systematized atrocities — crimes against humanity — in seven separate categories, including rape and extermination. There is no cruelty IS has committed, from sexual violence to immolation, that the regime has not at least matched and usually exceeded.
In relation to “Medieval Political Absolutism” and “Malignant Narcissism“, consider calling what Moscow-Damascus-Tehran have going in Syria the worst case of “Political Gaslighting” in history.
Readers who have made it this far with BackChannels KNOW that Assad incubated ISIL — to blackmail the west; to goad the west with refugees and a related terrorist threat; and to serve as a foil for demonstrating the latest and greatest out of Moscow’s updated military boom-boom: with Moscow central to the project, Syria has been made a win-win-win for each dictator’s ambitions and image.
BackChannels asks (along with Ukrainians) whether greater American cooperation (appeasement) with “Moscow-Tehran” will not herald the end of meaningful democracy and freedom worldwide.
Occasional Updates
3 killed & many injured after Russia bombed the hospital in Deir Sharqi, southern Idlib 4 times this morning. Hospital no longer operational pic.twitter.com/bIU4Su4UD4
“As I have repeatedly said, it is not our fault that Russian – American relations are in that poor condition.”
If you’re a BackChannels regular or an enthusiast in political psychology, you know that the “malignant narcissist” — autocrat, bully, or dictator — is never wrong.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
Lest any forget, there’s plenty of reading at hand (these days: Amazon One-Click shopping may be the next best thing) for guarding against forgetting.
Posted by The Guardian, November 9, 2016.
BackChannels has framed contemporary conflict in terms of time, i.e., whether confronting Assad or, for a domestic example, the Ku Klux Klan, the modern person is actually rejecting the reappearance of the past in his own path.
For the most part, whether involving the aggressive Muslim Brotherhood aspect in contemporary Islam, the barbarism on display in Syria — and do “thank” Assad, Putin, and Khamenei for choosing that evil path — or the Russian invasion of Crimea, one is actually aiming the finger back at the world of Medieval Political Absolute Power, i.e., AKA the divine right of rule, rule by a presumptuously superior nature, rule by thuggery, and, most certainly, unquestionable authority, or authority beyond criticism and beyond law.
Putin : Medieval Political Absolutism
vs
Trump: Modern Democratic and Checked Distribution of Political Power
Choose.
Posted by VICE News, March 3, 2014.
While “western” political success and related productivity and affluence provide for western humanism and other aspects of idealism, “eastern” barbarism and suffering have left behind a world in which fear and insecurity appear to threaten those who should be in the most confident and secure of internal psychological states. Leadership in tribal cultures and states tend toward a winner-take-all — and loser-lose-all — position in their politics, and it may be that we mistake for a better politics and ennoble with the term “realpolitik”.
Our world pays a high price in general suffering — suffering associated horrors beyond imagining — for the emotional care and feeding of its “malignant narcissists” — its most damaged bad boys, the same that make themselves known as political and war criminals.
So:
Bashar al-Assad: war criminal?
Vladimir Putin: war criminal?
Ali Khamenei: political criminal?
As a class, dictators “exceed limits” — just as Muhammad warned 🙂 — and in doing so free themselves from other normative restraints while at the same time condemning themselves to remaining in political power at any cost (always to others).
In effect, the worlds of despots become worlds of political absolutes, and if for no other reason than the near impossibility of the retreat of their authors.
If over the past five years you had been a Syrian noncombatant, would you wish to see Bashar al-Assad a) remain in power, b) exiled, or c) hung in public?
If you had been swept off the streets of Tehran and dumped in Evin Prison (say for wearing that hijab a little to far to the back — or for being Baha’i or gay or western in outlook) , or if you had had family murdered by the Iranian regime, would you care to see Ali Khamenei’s term in power a) modified, b) truncated, c) “terminated with extreme prejudice”?
Has Putin a graceful retreat today — Syria was al-Assad’s war and armies, flyers especially, make mistakes; and Ukrainian autonomy was Khrushchev’s mistake, which was made with the confidence that Kiev would remain forever bent to Moscow?
Putin may have that.
And Trump may be wise to see that Putin, the Russian State, and the Russian People (of Russia proper) have that “out” — but to horse trade Ukraine, the European Union, the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?
“Nyet” to all that!
(Liberal politics have come to mire judgment, unfortunately. Biography.com maintains a page titled “Political Criminals” but begs credulity by placing side-by-side J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, both of whom may have exceeded some boundaries in power, with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Fidel Castro, and Idi Amin all of whom plainly represent the most reckless of minds and murderous of despots).
Historian John Bew suggests that much of what stands for modern realpolitik today deviates from the original meaning of the term. Realpolitik emerged in mid-19th century Europe from the collision of the enlightenment with state formation and power politics. The concept, Bew argues, was an early attempt at answering the conundrum of how to achieve liberal enlightened goals in a world that does not follow liberal enlightened rules.
If, as the poet says, America is not the world, then the world is surely owed an apology for the lack of attention paid to what ought to have been, and are, a series of alarming developments throughout Europe and the Middle East. Perhaps appropriately, all have involved or implicated a revanchist authoritarian power for which the incoming commander in chief has repeatedly professed his admiration and which, after having done all it could to facilitate an upset American electoral outcome—“maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks,” as pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov put it Wednesday morning—offers its hearty congratulations on his victory. Meanwhile, Russia’s alleged “wet work” and maneuvering outside the United States in the last two weeks has been even more impressive.
Russia has been directly and repeatedly accused of war crimes at the UN security council in an unusually blunt session, as hopes of any form of ceasefire were flattened by the scale and ferocity of the Syrian regime’s assault on eastern Aleppo.
The war crimes accusations centred on the widespread use of bunker-busting and incendiary bombs on the 275,000 civilians living in the rebel-held east of the city, weapons that Moscow’s accusers say were dropped by Russian aircraft.
BackChannels 