Global Delinquents in Syria: Part 1 of 2

Then there’s 9/11. Whatever the truth of that – and I ate my share of humble pie – it greenlit the War on Terror within the West to fast track a Patriot Act (and non US equivalents) while making free with such rule-of-law fundamentals as habeas corpus.  And outside the West? As it had 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. Slaves were now sold openly on the quayside in Tripoli, the chief export was Salafist terror, and for good measure Libya was a hub for sub-Saharans desperate to reach Italy or Greece. But, hey, a pan-African vision of oil trading in gold-backed dinars [as opposed to petrodollars] was as dead as its knife-sodomised champion, and [Hillary Clinton] was dancing on the graves of both.

Now it was Syria’s turn …

US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2

Following Australian academic Tim Anderson, who in 2016 authored a book of the same name, my adjective of choice for the West’s war on Syria is “dirty”. Sold to the public as a humanitarian response to the Daraa crackdown of 2011, that war was already being planned in Washington – as General Wesley Clark discovered in 2003, and French Foreign Secretary Roland Dumas in 2009 – as early as 9/11. Since that event primed Western publics for forceful intervention in the seven Middle Eastern countries revealed by General Clark as targeted for regime change, this passage in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the 2000 policy paper of the neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC) …

The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.

… can hardly be ignored. Proof it ain’t but, when considered alongside more tangible evidence, it furnishes a motive for 9/11 as a false flag attack: an inside job or, in softer versions, an event of which a Bush administration inner caucus (Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld, say) had been forewarned but chose to allow.

In 2016 I poured scorn on the false flag thesis in all its variants. Two years later I’d changed my tune, and set out my reasons for doing so – the questions unanswered, the holes and glaring inconsistencies in official narratives up to and including the 2008 NIST Report – in my review of 9/11 Unmasked,  by Elizabeth Woodworth and the late David Griffin. ¹

9/11 was not my first about-turn. Having ignored or misread all prior indicators – in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen – my Road To Damascus awakening to empire evil was, with poetic aptness, that dirty war on Syria. Looking in the rear view mirror last year – see US Neocons & Israel’s far Right, Part 2 – I wrote:

Syria was for me transformative, almost single-handedly inspiring this site. 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.

I can also credit that dirty war for sharpening my understanding of the role played by liberal media. As I put it in February, apropos the fall of Assad:

… prior to Syria I’d yet to make a distinction which continues to confuse progressives: between on the one hand issues that matter – abortion, say, or systemic racism in the criminal justice system – but are not crucial to ruling class interests; on the other those that are.

On many matters our ‘quality’ media serve us passably well but this enables a greater lie. They must show themselves trustworthy even if it embarrasses high office. (Not only does long term capacity to manufacture consent depend on it. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust gained helps them mislead us, more by lies of omission than commission, on matters of critical concern to the power they ultimately serve. Never more so than when vilifying states and leaders in the way of empire designs.

In 2016 the propaganda blitz on the ‘regime’ of Bashar al-Assad, latest in a succession of “new Hitlers”, was at its most intensely ferocious. Not only was ‘public opinion’, as manufactured by mass media, ² taken in. So were left reformists George Monbiot and Owen Jones, and much of the Trotskyist left.

A corollary of our species need for stories (see footnote 2) is that we tend to view the world in binary terms. ³ So let me be clear: my understanding of the empire’s wars in the middle east does not hinge on men like Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad (whether Bashar or his more ruthless father) being saints. But like Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose Pan-Arab response to Anglo-French then US divide and rule had inspired them, all were demonised (notwithstanding two having been ‘our’ erstwhile friends) for reasons far removed from those sold to credulous Western audiences.

This meant deception on an industrial scale, itself reliant on Hitler’s putative maxim: the bigger the lie, the more likely to be believed. (Those who took the unanimity of media demonisation as evidence of its truth betrayed a pitiful grasp of the political economy of mass media, and of how stories headlined in a thousand outlets may have a single and by no means disinterested source. ⁴ ) While media do what they can to avoid lies of commission – risky, and arguably less effective in shaping opinion – in propaganda blitzes aimed at fast attitudinal change on matters crucial to ruling class interests, these too will be used. ⁵ Think Saddam’s WMDs. Think Assad’s fondness – inexplicable other than as comic-book villainy – for gassing children on the eve of UN Weapons Inspection visits, and when his Syrian Arab Army already had the foreign Jijadists and mercenaries “rebels” on the ropes.

But even in emergency circumstances the heavy lifting is done by lies of omission. If you know that Libyans had high standards of living under “tyrant” Gaddafi, you didn’t learn it from BBC or CNN, Guardian or New York Times. Nor that this standard of living, underwritten by a Ba’athism otherwise known as “Arab socialism”, was based on state ownership of key economic sectors – which put it in the firing line, for reasons set out with mesmerising clarity in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, of a US-led West fully signed up to Chicago School voodoo economics. ⁶

The omissions re Gaddafi’s Libya apply too to Saddam’s Iraq, and Syria under both Hafez and Bashar (though the latter, thrust reluctantly into the role by the death of his more formidable brother, was by 2011 taking the dangerous road of liberalisation ⁷ ). All three were (a) offering social welfare and industrial protectionism, (b) police states. ⁸

Western media served up horror porn on the latter, deafening silence on the former.

These things I offer as essential background. In Part 2 I will turn to the most egregious aspect of the West’s dirty war on Syria: its weaponising of Islamist terror.

* * *

1. My sneering at 9/11 ‘truthers’ conflated two quite separate things. Marxist analyses of class society do not hinge on conspiracy, it’s true, but Marxists may not (validly) conclude from this that 9/11 was no conspiracy. Ruling class conspiracies – think Tonkin Incident – do take place, yet to this day I find Marxists refusing, as I had, to engage with factual evidence because they “know” a-priori  that 9/11 could not have been a false flag event. (And because humans are lazy, and prone to egoic investments which, once made, are jealously defended even if that subverts our powers of reason.)
2. Re the ‘manufacture of opinion’, in a May 31 post whose immediate context was the US led proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, I wrote of:

   … a species whose love of stories with strongly drawn heroes and villains likely served us well, with the occasional dark chapter, for most of the hundred and fifty millennia we’ve  walked the earth in currently recognisable form, but which makes us highly manipulable in an age of mass media systemically answerable to tiny but unprecedentedly powerful elites.

   As with its twin sister, advertising, political propaganda works best when its targets see themselves as too clever to be so manipulated. Caitlin Johnstone:

   Sure guys. Persistent campaigns to deliberately manipulate people’s minds using mass media has no effect on their decisions at all. I guess that’s why that whole “advertising” fad never made any money.

3. Also in 2016 I encountered two other manifestations of that tendency to see in binary. My refusal to endorse warmonger Hillary Clinton was frequently read, by folk who mistake America’s duopoly for a functioning democracy, as endorsement of Trump. Meanwhile on my side of the pond, many an EU “remainer”, similarly deluded, took all Brexiteers to be racist to the core.
4. “… stories headlined in a thousand outlets may have a single and far from disinterested source …”  In the dirty war on Syria such sources included “moderate Islamists”, of which more in Part 2, and the grandly titled Syrian Observatory on Human Rights, the one man outfit of a disgruntled Syrian in Coventry.
5. Do I deem most media practitioners liars and scoundrels? No. But 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 contribute to, and which assure us all, in ways gross and subtle, that west is best. Not for the first time I’ll cite a 1996 exchange between an Andrew Marr then at the BBC, and Noam Chomsky:

   Marr: How can you know I’m self censoring?

   Chomsky: I don’t say you are self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I am saying is that if you believed something different you would not be sitting in that chair.

6. That state capitalism, of which ba’athism  is an Arab variant, stood in the way of Western investors and asset strippers is beyond dispute, while Chicago School neoliberalism and IMF loan-conditionality gave threadbare cover to the larceny. But in the Middle East since the WW1 fall of the Ottoman Empire, oil is always in the picture: in Syria’s case less for her reserves than for the fact Damascus opted for a pipeline route into Europe other than that favoured by the West. Last but not least the region forms the southwestern edge of a Eurasia which, unified, now challenges Western imperialism. All these things are explored in my many posts on Syria, and in my review of Stephen Gowans 2019 publication, Israel: a beachhead in the middle east.
7. Professor Anderson’s already mentioned work, The Dirty War on Syria, documents how many of those who took to the streets of Daraa in April 2011 did so because they wanted liberalisation to go faster, but within the hard won secular state Hafez al-Assad had so ruthlessly founded. When those protests were hijacked by Sunni Islamists from, inter alia, the Gulf, Chechnya and Xinjiang, the original protestors excoriated Bashar – “the old man would never have stood for this!” – for being too placatory in his response.
8. The question of ‘police states’ forms a strand of my 2017 critique of the ‘universalism’ of George Monbiot and Owen Jones:

   As a principle, who’d argue with the universality of human rights? Not me, though I have caveats. First, let’s not define such rights narrowly. That’s so we don’t get worked up, played even, over abuses real or alleged in countries our rulers have screwed for centuries, and in a different form still are screwing, while barely registering burgeoning infant mortality by humanitarian sanction or soaring cancer rates from depleted uranium in the wake of the latest humanitarian invasion. Universalists seldom ignore the latter entirely, so broadening ‘human rights’ to take in such as welfare provision, literacy and prosperity levels makes it hard, if we’ve an ounce of intellectual rigour, to play an old get-out card. It gives less latitude for a lazy absolutism that cries ‘a plague on both houses’ while at best doing nothing, at worst giving de facto support to the America led aggression we piously deplore.

   A wider definition of human rights obliges real-world assessments which discriminate between greater and lesser abuse, and avoid specious moral equivalence. 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?

   And later in the same post:

   We in the west enjoy freedom of expression and limited democracy, fruits of a prosperity based on exploiting the global south. When progressive governments must fight for survival – as in Castro’s Cuba, Chavez’s Venezuela and Ba’athist Syria – those freedoms may jeopardise gains without which democracy and human rights are meaningless except as cover for their antithesis. I mean economic planning instead of casino capitalism. I mean healthcare and schooling for all, not just those who can afford it.

   The jeopardising factor here comes not from freedom of expression per se but its abuse by vested interests. These may be comprador capitalists, like the Venezeulan elite who gained from the impoverishment of their compatriots, who stood to lose from nationalisations that helped reduce said impoverishment, and whose near monopoly control of the media is as big an affront to meaningful democracy in that country as is its equivalent in ours. Or they may be the jihadists backed for decades by ‘our’ governments while ‘our’ media decried Hafez al-Assad’s ruthless crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood: a suppression of human rights which for all its brutality enabled Syria’s extraordinary progress on the very factors – literacy, welfare, shared prosperity on the back of state ownership of key sectors, womens’ rights and secularism – I want included in the definition before I sign up for the breezy universalism of Jones and Monbiot.