Syria glimpsed through the fog of war

While the well meaningly clueless, and the less well meaningly calculating, celebrate the fall of the region’s last Ba’athist government to Turkish, Israeli and Western backed terrorists risibly referred to as “rebels”, this post offers the views of three men and one woman who are neither clueless not calculating – and on both counts not celebrating.

Suppose every word our media say about Assad to be true: a huge stretch, I know, but stay with me. Could he inflict a fraction of the death, misery and mayhem the US and its partners in crime have?

Monbiot, Syria and Universalism

Westerners fed simplistic power-serving tales of Good Guys v Bad may be taken in by Al Qaeda cut-out Jabhat Al Nusra’s new look as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, your friendly neighbourhood socially inclusive head choppers moderate Islamists, but for Syria’s Christians, Jews, Druze, Alawite, Shia and most Sunni the future is bleak. A people of whom 90% live in poverty after years of sanction, oil theft, wheat theft and crippled industry – even as captagon, fentanyl and crystal meth output made their land a narco-state – now face a nightmare the like of which Ba’athist rule at its most brutal was incapable of matching.

Did the empire strike back in Syria?

I can’t recall when Iraq last made the headlines. Same goes for Libya. Both have been memory-holed: out of sight and – for a public infantilised by lies, its memory wiped clean, all capacity for nuance starved by editorial omission ¹ – out of mind too. Once the plot gets complicated, and scorched earth realities threaten Kool-Aid narratives of Bad Guys Taken Out by Good, our media move on – ‘more tea, vicar?’ – from the wreckage. ²

As do we, in search of the next fix for our addiction to manufactured incandescence.

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There’s much we can’t yet know about the fall of Damascus, though some things are clear:

• As Israeli air strikes pound western Syria – and a serial liar wanted for crimes against humanity tells the incurably credulous he has no desire to “meddle” there – the Greater (Biblical) Israel project is advanced:

The land grabs of Israel’s religious Right don’t stop at West Bank settlers who deem the bible a Deed of Entitlement to trump international law.  Take Genesis 15:18-21, defining the land granted by Jehovah (a self-avowedly “jealous God” given to psychotic episodes and not above such collective punishment as visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation) as extending “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates“.

• And insofar as Zionist advancement is US Neocon advancement, so too – on the face of it ³ – is the empire of slash and burn.
• Since that Biblical Israel, and Turkiye’s revanchist vision of Ottoman Empire Mark II, both covet the entity we know as Syria, the scene is set for two regional powers armed to the teeth to clash head on.
• A third regional power, Iran, is weakened. Since half China’s oil flows through the Hormuz Strait, US regime change in Tehran would bring the world to the brink of WW3. ⁴

• As steel city follower Dave Hansell put it, in the course of a terse exchange below the line of my last post but one:

Women, children, Shiite’s, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Palestinians, Lebanese and just about every ordinary not on the payroll denizen of the entire region are at risk from the chaos unleashed [given] public domain evidence of Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and the failed states they became after being sanctioned and bombed as a result of the self-proclaimed “Garden” ⁵ imposing regime change on what they defined as “brutal authoritarian regimes”.

Meanwhile, as my ongoing attempt to reduce the the vastness of what I can’t know, I continue to collect, juxtapose and in light of new information rejuxtapose jigsaw pieces whose accuracy I can’t be sure of. Still less can I weigh their significance with any precision.

To this end I cautiously offer those not so deluded as to be dancing in the street four ‘jigsaw pieces’, podcasts I deem the most illuminating of my finds over the past couple of days.

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Vanessa Beeley (28 minutes)

I don’t always agree with Vanessa, and in the past have thought her too uncritical of Damascus, though I never doubted her integrity. But to those not so far gone as to believe a few ‘insightful’ articles in Guardian or Economist, and/or a handful of Syrian dissidents in the West (footnote 2) trump years spent living in and reporting from Syria, she’s a vital source.

Especially here, where we get a small but telling insight into how the media propaganda blitz on Syria manufactured Western public loathing of Bashar al-Assad.

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Two, Ben Norton (24 minutes)

Young men like Ben Norton give me hope (likewise Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate and Brian Berletic) as voices for truth in a future I will not see but nevertheless have a stake in through my children and (imminent) grandchildren.

Ben’s assessments in Palestine, Ukraine and China Seas are long known to me so I watched with interest his take on how Israel is leveraging the fall of Syria.

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Three, Alastair Crooke (19 minutes)

Always sober in his judgment, always highly informed, Alastair needs no introduction to readers of this site. I’ll single out just one thing from his dialogue here with radical Christian and scourge of ruling class depravity, Chris Hedges.

Alex Krainer, featured for the most part in approving terms in the previous post, sees the fall of Syria as a trap – its precise nature never articulated – for the West. He says the ‘collapse’ of a Syrian Arab Army outnumbering the head choppers fourfold, when military wisdom has it that an invader must outnumber a defender threefold, is otherwise inexplicable. Alastair has a more prosaic explanation. An SAA private earned $7 a month, a general $40. A Western or Turkish bankrolled ‘moderate Islamist’ from Central Asia, the Balkans or Xinjiang gets $2000 a month. ‘Mystery’ solved, especially when we factor in an army demoralised by a collapsed economy and government in-fighting.

Though he gives no sources for those figures, Alastair has earned my trust in the time I’ve been following him, both before and after October 7 last year.

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George Galloway/Richard Medhurst (27 minutes)

Gorgeous George needs no introduction. Richard is one of three journalists (along with Sarah Wilkinson and Asa Winstanley) harassed this year by a British State alarmed by their extremist view that arming genocide is as bad as practising it. As it happens Richard, a Briton, is Syria born and a fluent Arabic speaker. I mention this because he tells us that many of the ‘rebels’ now broadcasting from ‘liberated’ Syria speak a form so bastardised that neither he nor his Arab friends can understand a word of it.

As I sardonically asked ten days ago, in a footnote to HTS’s triumph is a blow not just to Syria:

To qualify as rebels against a government, don’t we have to be its citizens? As opposed to being Central Asians or Uighurs from Xinjiang, wallets stuffed with Turkish lira?

NB this “Have it out with Galloway” podcast is longer than the 27 minutes advertised above. The whole is devoted to the Syrian disaster but the segment with Richard begins at 08:30 and ends at 35:30.

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1. Journalists who know what’s good for them please editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors. Proprietors need advertisers and/or wealthy sponsors. All are affected by dominant ideologies they imbibe as much as they daily reinforce.
2. It’s not only the empire serving narratives served up by our media which can mislead us. As I said in a footnote to Why Syria is kicking off again:

   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.

   The primacy of personal experience in reaching wider conclusions is deep ingrained. Like other traits, such as our weakness at statistical probability, for most of the 140,000 years homo sapiens sapiens has walked the earth – up to the last 10,000 in small bands of hunter-gatherers, and only in the last century with access to information from Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”  – it served us well. Now not so much.

3. Two very different schools of thought on whether Washington has scored a handsome victory – or long term own goal – in Syria’s regime change are given by Alex Krainer and Brian Berletic, featured respectively in the last post and last post but one.
4. For a quick overview of how Turkiye and Israel  now have Iran in their sights, see Caitlin Johnstone’s post yesterday. For one thing the fall of Syria to Western/Israeli backed terrorists limits Iran’s ability to supply Hezbollah and frees up the IDF. For another, the distance between Israeli airbases and Iran – a major problem for Israel in mounting heavy bombing sorties – is reduced. While neither of these factors is likely to be decisive, and the Islamic Republic’s defensive capacity is formidable even before we get to its importance to China and Russia, what is most scary is the cat and mouse game now being played. Israel and the US Neocons know that Iran, assessing an old danger freshly renewed, may make a “dash to get the bomb”. The rest we can all figure out.
5. Dave Hansell refers here to an infamously orientalist view let slip by EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell. His “Garden” is contrasted with the “Jungle” of the colonised and neo-colonised global south.