April 23, 2018
By Stephen Gowans
The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan, formerly of the Qatari monarchy’s mouthpiece, Al Jazeera, and a man who according to his failed application for employment at the British newspaper The Daily Mail, is in favour of “social conservativism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies” and admires “outspoken defense of faith…in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists”, has denounced Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a mass murderer. To make his case, Hasan points to the civilian fatalities that have resulted from the Syrian president’s decision to use force to defend his country against (what Hasan acknowledges are) the aggressions of rapacious US foreign policy, Saudi-backed extremists and Israeli opportunism (to use his words).
http://www.barakabooks.com/The figure of 400,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011 is widely cited, for which Syrian government forces can be directly responsible for only a fraction. Let’s assume, on no empirical basis whatever, and only for the sake of argument, that since 2011 100,000 people have died at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army. On this basis, Hasan is arguing that the 100,000 deaths that follow from Assad’s decision to defend the Syrian state mark the Syrian president as a mass murderer.
But what about at minimum 500,000 deaths brought about by a decision that had nothing whatever to do with self-defense? Would the person who made that decision not be a mass murderer?
Bill Clinton’s decision to impose sanctions on Iraq led to the deaths through disease and malnutrition of 500,000 children under the age of five, according to the UN. Unlike the rapacious, extremist and opportunist forces arrayed against Syria which threaten the state’s existence, Iraq posed no threat to the United States. Madeline Albright, Clinton’s ambassador to the UN, told Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes that the mass murder of a half million children was “worth it.” The Iraq extermination is mass murder, and Albright’s words are apology for it, on a grand and odious scale. The British blockade of Germany during WWI led to the deaths of 750,000 German civilians, and while the death toll is horrendous, it could be argued in extenuation that the blockade was undertaken in a time of crisis. The blockade Clinton imposed on Iraq wasn’t. There was no crisis. No emergency. No threat to the United States. And yet Clinton made a decision whose outcome was the death of half a million Iraqi children. And Albright said the slaughter was “worth it.”
Canada’s foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland, who has denounced Assad, recently met and exchanged views and pleasantries with Albright, who she admires. Freeland’s grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was a Nazi collaborator and “the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War.” Freeland, who “knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper” has spared her grandfather the enmity she expressed for Assad. Freeland says she admires her forebear, an apologist for Nazi mass murder, so it’s fitting she would admire Albright, an apologist for US mass murder. Chomiak’s collaboration with a viciously aggressive imperialist power (the Third Reich) anticipates his granddaughter’s collaboration with another viciously aggressive imperialist power (the US empire.)
What about the 400,000 deaths widely believed to have been produced by the Syrian conflict? Who, ultimately, is to blame? Washington has waged a long war on Syria, whose aim has been, not self-defense, but the elimination of Arab nationalists in Damascus. In pursuit of its strategic goals, Washington has imposed sanctions on Syria—the economic equivalent of an atom bomb—and has enlisted Islamists to carry out a jihad against Assad’s secular government, detailed in my book Washington’s Long War of Syria. Blame for the 400,000 deaths in Syria falls squarely on the shoulders of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, the US presidents who pursued war on Syria, neither in self-defense nor in response to an emergency, but in order to clear away an obstacle to Washington’s total domination of the Arab world (a project whose progress was assisted by Clinton’s earlier extermination of 500,000 Iraqi children.) It’s likely that these men—and Freeland too—think 400,000 deaths is worth it, and that the corpse factory that will attend the continued prosecution of the war, which is on the US agenda, is a price that’s worth it (and why not? They suffer no ill-consequences from an imperial aggression upon a country that’s too weak to strike back.)
It’s helpful for these mass murderers and their apologists that there are Mehdi Hasans around to lay the blame for Syria’s mountain of corpses on the victims of rapacious US foreign policy, rather than on its executors, where it belongs.
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