Waddyaknow? Syria is back in the news

In US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2, I wrote:

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. ¹ One which laid Iraq to waste.

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 …

Then it was Syria’s turn. With ‘Arab Spring’ in bloom, and most Westerners clueless, it was child’s play to paint jihadists armed by the West and Riyadh, while Israeli medics tended their wounded, as freedom fighters. Few listened when France’s former foreign minister, Roland Dumas, anticipated [Brigadier-General] Wesley Clark’s revelations …

In the Pentagon in November 2001, a senior military staff officer had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was to be part of a five-year plan against seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.

… with a bombshell of his own.

By now even I, slow of uptake, had cottoned on to an empire looking to set the Middle East on fire in the name of ‘democracy’ – and in the ashes forge a new regional order answerable to Washington. What saved Syria  was the aerial intervention of a revitalised Russia with Putin at the helm to (a) read the US game plan, (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.

(That and the ground presence of Hezbollah, also invited by Syria’s elected government – behind which even those who at Daraa had demanded greater freedom now rallied. Indeed, many now attacked Bashar for being too soft – “the old man would never have stood for it!” – on the head-choppers moderate Islamists who’d hijacked the protests.)

Well waddyaknow? Syria is back in the news. It should go without saying that I do not trust the gung-ho crowing of Britain’s warmongering Telegraph today …

.. when ‘our’ media lie not only about the causes of ‘our’ wars. (Lies which over Syria made fools not only of left leaning journalists like Owen Jones and George Monbiot – and pretty much all the Western intelligentsia – but much of the Marxist Left to boot.) They lie too or, since I dare say most journalists tell themselves and mean it that they do honest work, ² confuse reality with wishful thinking about how well ‘we’ are doing. ³

FT late on November 30, 2024

All the same, even in the fog of war I’ll hazard this much:

• Israel and the West are using the lull created by temporary ceasefire in Lebanon to attack Syria and close Iran’s supply routes to Hezbollah. To this end they are still using ISIS cut-outs moderate Islamists regardless of the consequences for Syria.

• Turkey’s ‘strategic ambiguity’ (a NATO member buying S400s and refusing to sanction Russia while growing cold on the EU, NATO’s de facto political wing in Europe) has for years informed Ankara’s risky but profitable calculations. While it pours bile of the strictly rhetorical kind on Zionist genocide, Azerbaijan crude (and likely oil looted from occupied Syria) are routed through the hub of Ceyhan, in southwest Turkey, to fuel the same …

… while other goods marked as Palestine bound play their part in supporting the racist state. And Erdoğan would not be Erdoğan if he did not seize this opportunity to strike at (a) the Kurdish YPG, (b) erstwhile friend Bashar al-Assad, by letting Islamists pour across the border into Aleppo. This from Turkish Minute yesterday:

The Aleppo offensive underscores the fragility of Syria’s political and military landscape. Former diplomat Murat suggests that Erdoğan’s strategic calculations aim to reshape the region’s power dynamics, using Turkey’s influence over HTS [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Al Qaeda cut-out formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra] and other groups as leverage. However, this approach also risks alienating allies like Russia and Iran, potentially collapsing the Astana framework.

For Assad’s regime, the stakes are existential. A combination of economic collapse, military fatigue and waning support from Russia and Iran has left Damascus ill-equipped to reclaim lost territories. Fehim Taştekin warns that the return of a divided Aleppo would mark a devastating setback for the Syrian government, undoing years of territorial consolidation.

The Aleppo offensive is more than a military operation; it is a complex geopolitical maneuver with far-reaching implications. As the dust settles, the region faces the prospect of intensified conflict, shifting alliances, and an uncertain future. The coming weeks will determine whether HTS can consolidate its gains, whether Ankara’s gambit pays off, and whether Assad’s allies (Russia and Iran) can rally to prevent further losses.

I’m suspicious of this Turkish writer’s assessment of support for Syria by Iran and Russia as “waning”, when neither can allow Damascus to fall …

Jerusalem Post, December 1st, 2024

… but his grasp of both the stakes and balance of forces is on target.

• As Russia focuses on the for her existential task of defeating Washington’s expendable proxy in the Ukraine …

… with the West’s leaders showing no sign of heeding or even grasping the extent of her escalation dominance, the war in the Middle East and that on Russia’s southwest border are merging in a way certain to bring us – since Russia could not allow regime change in Syria, nor China in Iran – to the brink of world war three.

What was it Lenin said about decades when little happens, and weeks when decades happen?

* * *

1. Convictions for “waging aggressive war” and not, as is widely thought, harder to prove culpability in the Holocaust drew death sentences at Nuremberg for Himmler, Goering, Ribbentrop, Doenitz, Jodl and Keitel.
2. 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 ideology which they imbibe as much as they contribute to, and which assures us all, 24/7 in ways gross and subtle, that west is best.
3. Witness the shifting narrative on the Ukraine – “Russia will get her ass kicked” … “it looks like a stalemate” … “how mitigate Kiev’s defeat” …