Why Syria is kicking off again

Jihadists about to enter Aleppo, November 29

The above shows Hay’at Tahrir al-Sha – a rebranding of al-Qaeda cut-out, Jabhat al-Nusra ¹ – on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria’s second city, five days ago. That’s almost twelve years to the day after a rising star in the Obama Administration emailed his boss at the State Department:

WikiLeaks

Surprised? We shouldn’t be.

As in Afghanistan, 9/11 legitimated – as did the WMD lie and risible notion of Saddam in bed with Al Qaeda – what Nuremburg called “the supreme crime” of waging aggressive war. One which in this case laid Iraq to waste, fuelled a sectarian bloodbath and added to the lexicon of Orwellian euphemism the term, enhanced interrogation.

After Saddam came Gaddafi, as Libya was liberated from the tyranny of being Africa’s richest nation, with free healthcare for all and literacy rates higher than the West’s, to become a failed state ruled by warlords …

… next it was Syria’s turn. With ‘Arab Spring’ in full bloom, and the average Westerner clueless, it was child’s play to paint jihadists armed by the West and Riyadh, while Israeli medics tended their wounded, as freedom fighters …  By now even I, slow of uptake, had cottoned on to an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington. But what saved Syria was not steel city scribblings, nor a Western public still sold on Assad the Younger as the new “New Hitler”. What saved Syria was the aerial intervention of a revitalised Russia with Putin at the helm to (a) read the US game plan as told to [US Brigadier General] Wesley Clark and [former French Foreign Minister] Roland Dumas, (b) forestall a revival of terror in Chechnya and the ‘Stans’ when Syria’s ‘rebels’ finally went home, and (c) safeguard one of Russia’s few overseas military bases in Tartus.

US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2

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“They can’t all be making it up”, a friend chided back in 2016, when I was vigorously disputing a narrative – Assad as the new “New Hitler” – which deceived, as propaganda blitzes will, most in the West. To what end? That of manufacturing popular but horrifyingly ill informed consensus that ‘his regime’, ² being in the way of Washington designs, just Had To Go.

Actually they – systemically corrupt media lacking any ground presence in Syria – were indeed “making it up”. ³ Not because journalists set out to deceive us. Most, I’m sure, truly believe their own empire-serving screeds on matters non-negotiable to those who, behind a thinning veil of democracy, rule the US-led West.

Self-servingly credulous though they may be …

Journalists who know what’s good for them please editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors. Proprietors – whether Guardian Media Group or the Citizen Kane king-makers of Murdoch, Rothermere and Barclay Bros stripe – not only crave honours and a seat at the high table but are subject to the market discipline of advertising: and in GMG’s case the neo-feudal beneficence of wealthy patrons who need do nothing so vulgar as spell out their expectations. That they can at any moment withdraw their love and turn off the money flows is corruption enough.

Monolithic control at the Guardian?

…  few are consciously dishonest. ⁴ Those who call out writers like me as “conspiracy theorists” are wide of the mark if not actually straw-manning. I’ve gone into the mechanisms of systemic – let me stress that, systemic – media corruption here and here and here.

Back to Syria. For left-leaning liberals it helped that Owen Jones and George Monbiot, both of whom do good work on other matters – but neither of whom ‘get’ modern imperialism – gave, for reasons I set out seven years ago, their blessing to that lethally mendacious narrative. ⁵

Neither they nor anyone else with a privileged platform were heeding Syrians actually living a nightmare decidedly not of Bashar al-Assad’s making. ⁶

I am Syrian… living in Syria. We have seen horrors. It was never a revolution nor a civil war. The terrorists are sent by your goverment, the Saudis, Qatar and Turkey. Your Obama and whoever is behind him are supporting al Qaeda in a proxy war on my country. The majority here loves Assad. He has never committed a crime against his own people… The chemical attack was staged by the terrorists helped by the USA and the UK,  etc. Everyone knows that here.

Every massacre is committed by them. We were all happy in Syria: we had free school and university education available for everyone, free healthcare, no GMO, no fluoride, no chemtrails, no Rothschild IMF- controlled bank, state owned central bank which gives 11% interest, we are self-sufficient and have no foreign debt to any country or bank.

FB post by ‘Majd’, cited in Voices From Syria by Mark Taliano of Global Research, 2017

As for the revolutionary Left, it too – excepting a Socialist Equality Party ⁷ I part company with on other matters but not this – was deceived. Blind to empire? No, but for all it can lecture 24/7 on Lenin, on Syria most of that revolutionary Left in effect sided ⁸ with US plans for the Middle East, thereby showing – and not for the first time – the uselessness of theory when not applied – or, worse, misapplied – in praxis. This too I have explored, in a post five years ago.

Now Syria is back in the news. A distraction from Ukraine and Israel? Quite the opposite. The flare up in northwest Syria marks a fulcrum; the point at which those needless horror shows converge in ways laden with thermonuclear foreboding. As such, it should go without saying that absolutely none of our mainstream media can be trusted on what is happening, why it is happening, and where it might take us.

But on the off chance it does need saying, here’s one last general observation on the services to power rendered by media claiming to be watchdogs to the same:

On many matters the reporters, columnists and editors of ‘quality’ media serve us tolerably well but this truth enables a greater lie. Corporate media need to show themselves trustworthy even when doing so may embarrass those in high office. (Not only does their long term capacity to influence opinion and manufacture consent depend on this. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust so gained helps them mislead us, more by omission than commission, on matters critical – above all the vilifying of states and leaders in the way of empire designs – to the power they ultimately serve.

What of ideology, when reality intrudes?

Back to Syria, on which – Russian war planes and Hezbollah having thwarted regime change in 2015/16 – I’ve spent the past five days getting back up to speed. To this end I’ve consulted many sources and, if I find time, will append an annotated shortlist to this post after publication.

Of those sources – all excellent, a few outstanding – my two top picks are a forty-eight minute vlog from Brian Berletic at The New Atlas, and a 3,000 worder from Conor Gallagher at Naked Capitalism.

Brian I’ve chosen on three grounds. One is his adherence to known facts. He neither guesses nor overstates his case, but builds it from sources – frequently what lawyers call “statements against interest” – at the heart of empire. Two, he places these assessments within the broader context of a US in decline and seeking by methods ever more reckless to slow or even halt and reverse that decline. Three, in contrast to other non-corporate voices, including some I trust and otherwise respect, Brian’s tone is never other than calmly lucid. As for this offering, I have seen none with so succinct yet thorough an appraisal of why it’s all kicking off in Syria again.

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My second choice is less wide ranging, focusing as it does on the state now playing a crucial if duplicitous role. I mean of course Turkey or as I suppose I must learn to say, Turkiye. Here then and without further ado is Conor at Naked Capitalism, his headline – Erdogan Backstabs His Way Into Center of Middle East Conflict – giving a subtle clue to what follows.

As a taster, let me cite his closing paragraphs:

… Russia might want Türkiye’s cooperation on the Black Sea and economic fronts for now, but for how much longer is it deemed necessary? Put another way, at what point does the cost of catering to Erdogan outweigh the benefits?

Maybe Russia, armed with its actual wonder weapons ⁹ (as opposed to the imaginary Western ones), decides it’ll deal with the consequences of the Turkish straits being opened to NATO warships. Maybe Moscow decides it has enough other oil and gas customers, and it’ll take the hit by forgoing the exports to Türkiye and southeastern Europe. And there are other nations willing to help Russia bypass sanctions — although not in the EU customs union like Turkey.

Russia likely doesn’t want an even worse Türkiye headache at this time, but once Ukraine is eventually wrapped up, it could be bad news for Erdogan and his inner circle. It could be bad news even sooner if the majority of Turks figure out he’s playing them with all his fiery rhetoric against Israel.

We recently wrote about the potential spread of the Middle East conflict to the Caucasus region. All the major players from the Middle East conflicts are heavily involved in geopolitical maneuvering in the Caucasus. With Türkiye’s dramatic step into the ring and the Georgia color revolution attempt in full swing, ¹⁰  as well as ongoing Armenia-Azerbaijan tensions with a heavy American presence in the former, it unfortunately looks like we’re inching closer to the Caucasus becoming another theater of the increasingly global New Cold War conflict.

As ever with Naked Capitalism, should you find time to read this, as I hope you will, check out the BTL comments. The average standard of these at NC is consistently high.

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1. A useful guide to the bewildering array of Islamist groups in Syria, some aligned with Hay’at Tahri al-Sha and others opposed to it, was given in 2021 by Vanessa Beeley, along with Eva Bartlett one of the vanishingly small number of Western journalists reporting from within Syria. A few days ago she reposted it as “still relevant today with regards to the terrorist ideologies in Idlib”. See On the Ground in Syria: Terrorist groups, Turkish threats & Russian overtures.
2. Observers like Media Lens, Glasgow Media Group, Jonathan Cook and Noam Chomsky have often commented on the way media influence us by their choices of words. While Washington, London and Tel Aviv house governments, Beijing, Moscow and Damascus are the seats of ‘regimes’. In the same vein, terrorists from the Balkans, Gulf States and Central Asia seeking to replace the popular, Alawite Shia leader of a secular state by a Sunni Caliphate are routinely described by BBC, Guardian et al as ‘rebels’ or ‘insurgents’ in a ‘revolution’ or ‘civil war’. And as with political propaganda’s twin sister, advertising, awareness does not make us immune. Propaganda works subliminally.
3. Key to the illusion, of armies of fiercely truth-seeking journalists arriving independently at similar conclusions, are that (a) most are now uncritical recyclers – for reasons economic, psychological and real risk of being shut out of the loop – of military intelligence talking points, (b) they cite one another in industrial scale acts of circular referencing, (c) each unproven accusation gives credence to the next: “Damascus denies doing X but we know from Y and Z that it has form on such villainy …”
4. Not only are most journalists subjectively if deludedly sincere. Their truth inversions stem more from omission than commission. At the height of the propaganda blitzes on Syria, Libya or Iraq, it would not further a journalist’s career to write, nor an editor’s to allow it, that these states may be ruthless but two were fighting existential threats while all three had a welfarism, including free healthcare and education, underpinned by the Ba’athism (“Arab socialism”) so obstructive of Washington agendas and Wall Street asset strippers. And with outrage over “Evil Assad’s barrel bombs” at full throttle, those with mortgages and families might think twice before publicly declaring these puny at the side of Israel’s white phosphorous, America’s depleted uranium. Whataboutery? If you say so, but have you noticed how this put-down – like conspiracy theorist – rose to prominence just as the crimes of empire became, thanks to Julian and Wikileaks, more widely known?
5. I can forgive many things. I’ve lauded Monbiot’s work linking ecocide to big money, while Jones has been splendid on Palestine: no mainstream journalist has gone further out on a limb since October 7 last year. I can forgive both being massively and dangerously wrong on Syria at the height of the blitz. To err is human. What I can’t forgive is their failure to either admit they were so wrong, or to defend their positions in public debate with those who, having dedicated years to finding out the truth about “our” dirty war on Syria, know what they’re talking about. I mean dissident academics like Tim Anderson, Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson. I mean whistleblowing diplomats like Craig Murray and Peter Ford. I mean ex CIA types like Philip Giraldi and journalists, like Oborne and Hitchens, a million miles from me politically but appalled by the lies. And I mean those, like Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross, her scorning by a know-nothing Owen Jones another thing I won’t lightly forgive, who live in and report from Syria. After all the harm they did, the least Owen and George can do now is retract, or fight their corner. They are doing neither.
6. I encountered some of the most stubborn insistence that Assad is evil from people who know a few expat Syrians in the West. Though usually expensively educated to at least degree level, they were untroubled by the fact that generalising from such miniscule and by definition skewed samples is epistemologically ridiculous.
7. The international Trotskyist grouping, Socialist Equality Party, hosts the World Socialist Website (wizwoz). It often puts out pieces I find excellent and for which my irritation at the mandatory final paragraph – calling for a worldwide revolution I don’t even believe they believe will happen – is a small price to pay.
8. I’ve no doubt many on the revolutionary Left would object to my saying they “effectively sided” with the US empire. But to cry “a plague on both houses” when (a) one of those houses is vastly stronger and infinitely more dangerous, and (b) their own ‘solution’ is to call for the workers of the world to unite and destroy both, is like suggesting we all pray for the Syrian people, or write sternly worded letters to the universe.
9. On “actual wonder weapons”, see my post of November 27 – Oreshnik: checkmate, or Armageddon?
10. With so much happening I’ve neglected the events, predictably misrepresented by our lovely media, fast unfolding in Georgia. I aim to put that right asap.