03.01.12
Road to Damascus… and on to Armageddon?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/13/road-to-damascus-and-on-to-armageddon/
Rad_Green listserv/email
CounterPunch
February 13, 2012
*“Western politicians and media are not yet fighting World War III, but
they are talking themselves into it.” *
*
Road to Damascus… and on to Armageddon?
*
*by DIANA JOHNSTONE *
*Paris*
What if pollsters put this question to citizens of the United States and
the European Union :
“Which is more important, ensuring disgruntled Islamists freedom to
overthrow the secular regime in Syria, or avoiding World War Three?”
I’ll bet that there might be a majority for avoiding World War III.
But of course, the question is never framed like that.
That would be a “realistic” question, and we Westerners from the heights of
our moral superiority have no time for vulgar “realism” in foreign policy
(except the eccentric Ron Paul, crying out in the wilderness of Republican
primaries).
Because, in the minds of our political ruling class, the United States has
the power to “make reality”, we need pay no attention to the remnants of
whatever reality we didn’t invent ourselves.
Our artificial reality is coming into collision with the reality perceived
by most or at least much of the rest of the world. The tenants of these
conflicting views of reality are armed to the teeth, including with nuclear
weapons capable of leaving the planet to insects.
Theoretically, there is a way to deal with this dangerous situation, which
has the potential of leading to World War. It is called diplomacy. People
capable of grasping unfamiliar ideas and understanding viewpoints other
than their own, examine the issues underlying conflict and use their
intelligence to work out solutions that may not be ideal but will at least
prevent things from getting worse.
There was even an organizational structure created for this: the United
Nations.
But the United States has decided that as sole superpower it doesn’t really
need to stoop to diplomacy to get what it wants, and the United Nations has
been turned into the instrument of US policy. The clearest evidence of this
was the failure of the UN Security Council to block the NATO powers’ abuse
of the ambiguous and contested Responsibility to Protect (“R2P”) doctrine
to overthrow the Libyan government by force.
Early this year, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon rejoiced that: “The world
has embraced the Responsibility to Protect – not because it is easy, but
because it is right. We therefore have a moral responsibility to push
ahead.” Morality trumps the basic UN principle of national sovereignty.
Ban Ki-moon suggests that pushing ahead with R2P is no less than the “next
test of our common humanity”, and announces: “That test is here – in Syria.”
So, the Secretary General of the UN considers the “moral responsibility” of
R2P his main guideline to the crisis in Syria.
In case there was any doubt, the Libyan example demonstrated what that
means.
A country whose rulers do not belong to the Western club made up of NATO
countries, Israel, the emirs of the Gulf states and the ruling family of
Saudi Arabia, is wracked by opposition demonstrations and armed rebellion,
with the mix of the two making it difficult to sort out which is which.
Western mainstream media hasten to tell the story according to a standard
template:
The ruler of the country is a “dictator”. Therefore, the rebels want to
get rid of him simply in order to enjoy Western-style democracy.
Therefore, the people must all be on the side of the rebels. Therefore,
when the armed forces proceed to repress the armed rebellion, what is
happening is that “the dictator is killing his own people”. Therefore, it
is the Responsibility 2 Protect of the international community (i.e. NATO)
to help the rebels in order to destroy the country’s armed forces and get
rid of (or kill) the dictator.
The happy ending comes when Hillary Clinton can shout gleefully, “We came,
we saw, he died!”
Thereupon, the country sinks into chaos, as armed bands rove, prisoners are
tortured, women are put in their place, salaries are unpaid, education and
social welfare are neglected, but oil is pumped and the West is encouraged
by its success to go on to liberate another country.
That at least was the Libyan model.
Except that in the case of Syria, things are more complicated.
Unlike Libya, Syria has a fairly strong army. Unlike Libya, Syria has a
few significant friends in the world. Unlike Libya, Syria is next door to
Israel. And above all, the diversity of religious communities within Syria
is much greater and more potentially explosive than the tribal divisions of
Libya. The notion that “the people” of Syria are unanimously united in the
desire for instant regime change is even more preposterous.
Electoral democracy is a game played on the basis of a social contract, a
general consensus to accept the rule that whoever gets the most votes gets
to run the country. But there are societies where that consensus simply
does not exist, where distrust is too great between different sectors of
the population. That could very well be the case in Syria, where certain
minorities, including notably the Christians and Alawites, have reason to
fear a Sunni majority that could be led by Islamists who make no secret of
their hostility to other religions. Still, perhaps the time has come to
overcome that distrust and build an electoral democracy with safeguards for
minorities. However, the one sure way to set back such a move toward
democracy is a civil war, which is certain to revive and exacerbate hatred
and distrust between communities.
Last month, on this site Aisling Byrne called attention to results of a
public opinion poll funded by no less than the Qatar Foundation, which
cannot be suspected of working for the Assad regime, given the Qatar royal
family’s lead position in favor of overthrowing that regime. The key
finding was that “while most Arabs outside Syria feel the president should
resign, attitudes in the country are different. Some 55% of Syrians want
Assad to stay, motivated by fear of civil war – a specter that is not
theoretical as it is for those who live outside Syria’s borders. What is
less good news for the Assad regime is that the poll also found that half
the Syrians who accept him staying in power believe he must usher in free
elections in the near future.”
This indicates a very complex situation. Syrians want free elections, but
they prefer to have Assad stay in power to organize them. This being the
case, the Russian diplomatic efforts to try to urge the Assad regime to
speed up its reforms appear to be roughly in harmony with Syrian public
opinion.
While the Russians are urging President Assad to speed up reforms, the West
is ordering him to stop the violence (that is, order his armed forces to
give up) and resign. Neither of these exhortations is likely to be
obeyed. The Russians would almost certainly like to stop the escalation of
violence, for their own good reasons, but that does not mean they have the
power to do so. Their attempts to broker a compromise, decried and
sabotaged by Western support to the opposition, merely put them in line to
be blamed for the bloodshed they want to avoid. In a deepening civil war
situation, the regime, any regime, is most likely to figure it has to
restore order before doing anything else. And restoring order, under these
circumstances, means more violence, not less.
The order to “stop killing your own people” implies a situation in which
the dictator, like an ogre in a fairy tale, is busily devouring passive
innocents. He should stop, and then all the people would peacefully go
about their business while awaiting the free elections that will bring the
blessings of harmony and human rights. In reality, if the armed forces
withdraw from areas where there are armed rebels, that means turning those
areas over to the rebels.
And who are these rebels? We simply do not know. Someone who may know
better than we do is Osama bin Laden’s successor as head of al Qaeda, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, who is seen on a video urging Muslims in Turkey and
neighboring Arab states to back the Syrian rebels.
With uncontrolled armed groups fighting for control, the insistent Western
demand that “Assad must step down” is not really even a call for “regime
change”. It is a call for regime self-destruction.
As in Libya, the country would de facto be turned over to rival armed
groups, with those groups that are being armed covertly by NATO via Turkey
and Qatar having an advantage in hardware. However, the likely result
would be a multi-sided civil war much more horrific than the chaos in
Libya, thanks to the country’s multiple religious differences. But for the
West, however chaotic, regime self-destruction would have the immediate
advantage of depriving Iran of its potential ally on the eve of an Israeli
attack. With both Iraq and Syria neutralized by internal religious
conflict, the strangulation of Iran would be that much easier – or so the
Western strategists obviously assume.
At least initially, the drive to destroy the Assad regime relies on
subversion rather than outright military attack as in Libya. A combination
of drastic economic sanctions and support to armed rebels, including
fighters from outside, notably Libya (whoever they are), reportedly already
helped by special forces from the UK and Qatar, is expected to so weaken
the country that the Assad regime will collapse. But a third weapon in
this assault is propaganda, carried on by the mainstream media, by now
accustomed to reporting events according to the pattern: evil dictator
killing his own people. Some of the propaganda must be true, some of it is
false, but all of it is selective. The victims are all victims of the
regime, never of the rebels. The many Syrians who fear the rebels more
than the present government are of course ignored by the mainstream media,
although their protests can be found on the internet. A particular oddity
of this Syrian crisis is the way the West, so proud of its
“Judeo-Christian” heritage, is actively favoring the total elimination of
the ancient Christian communities in the Middle East. The cries of protest
that Syrian Christians rely for protection on the secular government of
Assad, in which Christians participate, and that they and other minorities
such as the Alawites may be forced to flee if the West gets its way, fall
on deaf ears.
The story line of dictators killing their own people is intended primarily
to justify harsh Western measures against Syria. As in Bosnia, the media
are arousing public indignation to force the US government to do what it is
in fact already doing: arm Muslim rebels, all in the name of “protecting
civilians”.
Last December, US National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said that the “end
of the Assad regime would constitute Iran’s greatest setback in the region
yet – a strategic blow that will further shift the balance of power in the
region against Iran”. The “protection of civilians” is not the only
concern on the minds of US officials. They do think of such things as the
balance of power, in between their prayer breakfasts and human rights
speeches. However, concern with the balance of power is a luxury denied
less virtuous powers such as Russia and China. Surely the shift in the
balance of power in the region cannot be limited to a single country,
Iran. It is meant to increase the power of Israel, of course, but also the
United States and NATO. And to decrease the influence of Russia.
Thrusting Syria into helpless chaos is part of the war against Iran, but it
is also implicitly part of a drive to reduce the influence of Russia and,
eventually, China. In short, the current campaign against Syria, is
clearly in preparation for an eventual future war against Iran, but also,
obscurely, a form of long term aggression against Russia and China.
The recent Russian and Chinese veto in the Security Council was a polite
attempt to put a brake on this process. The cause of the veto was the
determination of the West to push through a resolution that would have
demanded withdrawal of Syrian government forces from contested areas
without taking into consideration the presence of armed rebel groups poised
to take over. Where the Western resolution called on the Assad regime to
“withdraw all Syrian military and armed forces from cities and towns, and
return them to their original home barracks”, the Russians wished to add:
“in conjunction with the end of attacks by armed groups against State
institutions and quarters and towns.” The purpose was to prevent armed
groups from taking advantage of the vacuum to occupy evacuated areas (as
had happened in similar circumstances in Yugoslavia during the 1990s).
Western refusal to rein in armed rebels was followed by the Russian and
Chinese veto on Febuary 4.
The veto unleashed a torrent of insults from the Western self-styled
“humanitarians”. In an obvious attempt to foster division between the two
recalcitrant powers, US spokespersons stressed that the main villain was
Russia, guilty of friendship with the Assad regime.
Russia is currently the target of an extraordinary propaganda campaign
centered on demonizing Vladimir Putin as he faces an lively campaign for
election as President. A prominent New York Times columnist attributed
Russian support to Syria to an alleged similarity between Putin and Assad.
As we saw in Yugoslavia, a leader elected in free multi-party elections is
a “dictator” when his policies displease the West. The pathetically
alcoholic Yeltsin was a Western favorite despite shooting at his
parliament. The reason was obvious: he was weak and easily manipulated.
The reason the West hates Putin is equally and symmetrically obvious: he
seems determined to defend his country’s interests against Western pressure.
The European Union has become the lapdog of the United States. This week
the European Union is continuing to impoverish the Greek people in order to
squeeze out money, among other things, lent by German and French banks to
pay for expensive modern weaponry sold to Greece by Germany and France.
Democracy in Europe is being undermined by subservience to a dogmatic
monetary policy. Unemployment and poverty threaten to destabilize more and
more member states. But what is the topic of the European Parliament’s
main monthly political debate this week? “The situation in Russia.” One
can count on orators in Strasbourg to lecture the Russians on “democracy”.
American pundits and cartoonists have totally interiorized their double
standards, so that Russia’s comparatively modest arms deliveries to Syria
can be denounced as cynical support to dictatorship, whereas gigantic US
arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are never seen as relevant
to the autocratic nature of those regimes (at most they may be criticized
on the totally fictitious grounds of being a threat to Israel). To be
“democratic”, Russia is supposed to cooperate in its own subservience to
Washington, as the United States pursues construction of a missile shield
which would theoretically give it a first-strike nuclear capability against
Russia, arms Georgia for a return war against Russia over South Ossetia,
and continues to encircle Russia with military bases and hostile alliances.
Western politicians and media are not yet fighting World War III, but they
are talking themselves into it. And their actions speak even louder than
words… notably to those who are able to understand where those actions are
leading. Such as the Russians. The West’s collective delusion of grandeur,
the illusion of the power to “make reality”, has a momentum that is leading
the world toward major catastrophe. And what can stop it?
A meteor from outer space, perhaps?
*DIANA JOHNSTONE is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and
Western Delusions
She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr*