Everyone has an opinion on what should we do about ISIL in Syria and Iraq. There are no easy answers, but we are being handed only two choices: outreach or isolation. Any proposal made must either fit into one box or the other, and the choice will ultimately be made in the voting booths of the US.
We may well end up with either the lesser of two evils or no choice at all. But there is one option available which strikes a balance between outreach and isolation. It involves combining sovereignty and cooperation, working together to achieve mutually agreed outcomes based on individual strength not weakness. All of this is anathema to Western policymakers at present, but we are rapidly approaching the point where they will have no choice.
The sides of a billiard ball
Many politicians say it is one or the other; you are either with Assad or against him. The key issue here is sovereignty: do foreign powers have the right to exact regime change on other countries? Do they have a right to incite or provoke terrorism to create the goal of regime change? International law says they don’t, and the UN says they don’t. People excuse these actions with atrocities, as if these trump law, but do they look at the background to the Syrian conflict?
According to the US Peace Council Representatives, Syria is not at all what we are led to believe by the mainstream media or in mainstream politics.
Henry Lowendorf of the US Peace Council says, “We are fighting a mass of propaganda that has demonised the Syrian government, demonised its leaders, an effort that precedes every other intervention that the United States has made over the course of many decades in order to convince people that it’s acceptable, for humanitarian reasons, to overthrow a government and to replace it with whatever the United States prefers that government to be, even if it is not democratic or even worse than what existed before. The US agenda and the so called policy at the time is the deciding factor, and the country subject to change is more often than not the less-than-willing participant in whatever is at the top of the US policy of the day.
“So what we saw in Damascus and what we saw in the two villages we visited outside Damascus belies the propaganda that has overwhelmed us. It’s hard for even those that have been in the peace movement for a long time. It’s hard for us to ignore this propaganda. It is so well orchestrated. We spoke to members of industry, the Chamber of Industry. We spoke to leaders in the Student Union, the National Student Union; we spoke with NGOs that are involved in taking care of the orphans, of those who have died in this war, on both sides. They don’t discriminate. Orphans are orphans. Whatever side they were fighting on, these young people have to be taken care of. We spoke with an NGO that trains women who don’t have a skill in sewing because they lost the breadwinner in their family. We spoke to an NGO where they are trying to deal with reconciliation and trying to make sure that supplies get to the areas of the country that are under the control of the terrorists, of the mercenaries. And we make a distinction between opposition, the political opposition with whom we also met, and the terrorists and the mercenaries with whom we did not meet.
“Those in the delegation met people in Syria who work non-violently to bring about change. They learned of their efforts to bring about change, working in opposition to the government, working with the government, but nonviolently, and this include interfacing with government officials. They proposed a plan to bring back those Syrians who have for one reason or another joined the mercenaries and the ranks of the terrorists.
“It is clear that Syria is the killing field for those who are not Muslims, just for the sake of making sure the destruction is final. Predominately Christian villages have been besieged by the terrorists, and many have been destroyed or cleansed and will never recover. For instance, in the village of Malula its religious shrines have been destroyed, and this is one of the few villages left anywhere in the world where they still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. And there are attacks on the Christian population.
“One of the things I bring back (there are two things I want to mention finally that we feel are really important): One is that while the United States would like to divide the Syrians up by religion, or within a religion, by the different beliefs within that religion, there wasn’t a Syrian around who would accept that. We spoke to the Grand Mufti, and he said people ask me how many Muslims there are in Syria and his response was always 23 million – that’s the population of Syria – and when we talk to the bishop of one of the Orthodox churches, he answered the same thing, the number of Christians is 23 million – “We will not allow ourselves to be divided up the way the United States has divided up the people of Iraq or Libya or Afghanistan or so many other countries, we won’t allow that.” That unity, I believe, has led to the ability of the Syrians to withstand an invasion by the most powerful country in the world and its most powerful allies in Europe, its most powerful allies in the Middle East with what is a vicious attack on the Syrian people.”
So it is clear that within Syria it is not primarily a question of being for or against Assad. The division imagined in the West does not exist, and if it does, it is similar in nature to the democratic disagreements which always in exist in all Western countries, which would never be used to justify an invasion. The US went into Iraq on the basis of false claims. Is it any wonder that the intervention in Syria is turning out the same way?
The horse has bolted but there is still a stable
It is only too clear that the Obama Administration’s “efforts” to tackling ISIL and other terrorism problems have been dismal failures. So much so, that we can legitimately question what the intention of these “efforts” actually was. Did the US really set out to save Syria from Assad? Or was the intervention simply an excuse to arm more terrorists, hoping they could be controlled, only to find they bite the hand that feeds them?
The US efforts to topple the Syrian government have given future planners so many examples of what not to do. All the various stunts used, such as staging false flag gas attacks and arming the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition illegally, have not only ended up recruiting for the enemy but have failed to achieve their initial aims. An outgoing president always wants to leave office with some semblance of a foreign policy success. But Assad seems secure for now, and this is overshadowing the significant economic achievements of the Obama Administration, which he would rather have as a legacy.
Matters are now being further complicated by how the Russians are demonstrating that the terrorists could actually be defeated if the US wanted to do it: Putin is getting the job done, quickly and cost effectively. So what options does the US have left? It is too late to just declare victory and walk away, as a juggernaut has been set in motion which will have far reaching ramifications. But neither can the US, which declared the Syrian conflict a “war on terrorism”, be seen to be losing a conflict with either terrorists or Russia, particularly as it is still haunted by Vietnam, which made domestic “traitors” into greater heroes than the troops who had answered Uncle Sam’s call.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) problem stems from the illegal Western invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was also an unanticipated byproduct of what Western policymakers and news reporters welcomed as the so-called “Arab Spring.” So it can be said to be a Western creation. As a result, the big foreign policy question is no longer “where should America strike next?”, as it was during the Bush years, but “where will the next terrorist threat come from?” On the surface, this is a clear sign of failure. But this situation does give the US a perverse comparative advantage.
The US knows more about terrorism than any other nation, as it has an unparalleled track record of creating, arming and funding terrorist groups which threaten the whole planet. No other nation controls as many supply lines, has as many dirty tricks centres and as many compliant governments in its thrall as the USA, as we discover every time a new terrorist group is identified and we are suddenly told all about its leadership, structure and ideology. If the US wants to achieve foreign policy successes this is the first place it needs to look, as it would only mean building on existing work, not entering a new country or developing new pretexts for action.
At one time the Windscale nuclear plant in the UK regarded itself as the leader of the global nuclear power industry. Obviously therefore it supported the growth and retention of nuclear power, even when the nuclear industry developed such a bad reputation that the plant had to change its name to Sellafield to prevent the public associating it with its own work. Now developed countries have moved away from nuclear power the plant is still there, but has successfully repositioned itself as the leader of the nuclear decommissioning industry, without the least irony. If the US wants to get out of Syria with dignity, and fewer lives lost, it would do well to follow this example.
Sanctions against peace
The other dimension of the US-led operations in Syria is sanctions. It is a common trick to either try to avoid war by imposing economic sanctions instead or to use them to fail and make war “inevitable.” However in Syria they are being used as another form of warfare, with the same consequences.
As Lowendorf says in another part of his report, “I have to admit that I did not know before I went that the United States has imposed sanctions on Syria in a way that is similar to the sanctions that it imposed on Iraq in the 1990’s in order to weaken that country and that government. That the United States admits killed 500,000 children in Iraq during the 1990’s sanctions. That set of sanctions means that the Syrian people cannot get medicines that they desperately need, they cannot get the factory parts that they need to maintain their economy, they can’t get infant formula and many other things.”
If people get the things they need they routinely blame their government. One of the root causes of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 was that wages had fallen dramatically, not that a democracy-loving population had rejected communism, as it was portrayed externally. Consequently the aim of these sanctions was to encourage a revolt against Assad so the US wouldn’t have to do the job, regardless of the human consequences. Now the US supported terrorists have cut off the water supply to civilians already living in the most dismal of conditions.
As Veterans Today writes, “the so-called “moderate” rebels turned off the water to a city of once a million civilians living in West Aleppo, apparently in retaliation for a Syrian Army airstrike on East Aleppo. Now it is estimated that 250,000 residents are without water, thus setting the stage for an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
But the US has a different option. If it wants to portray Assad as a repressive dictator it can demonstrate this by doing better itself. More aid, given to all victims and regardless of whatever the side they are on, more technical assistance, and no killing. This could be accompanied by a narrative that all this was available to Assad if he had wanted it but he chose not to take it. This will make the point the US wants to make more forcibly than starving people will: one reason Assad is gaining some international support, when the Syrian regime has been almost a pariah ever since the 1960s, is that he can readily say that his enemies are killing his people with sanctions and actions; he has a responsibility to protect them from this, and the Right to Protect Doctrine is established under international law.
There has been much recent speculation over the aid convoy that was destroyed on its way to Aleppo. What we know is that it was carrying banned materials, medicines, infant formula, etc. It was thus violating sanctions imposed by the US. So was it US aid or was it sent by those who do not agree with the US actions?
If so, who is most likely to have bombed it?
David was too camp for the public
Perhaps all this is Jimmy Carter’s fault. He had the temerity to try and stop war in the Middle East, and wet a long way towards achieving that with his Camp David Accords, signed by Egypt and Israel in 1978. The Egyptian and Israeli presidents who signed this ended up sharing the Nobel Prize. Carter thought this would be a crowning achievement of his presidency, regardless of what it did for him, but as we know he lost the 1980 election to the hawkish Ronald Reagan.
No one wants to end up like Carter, who was so unpopular after his defeat that people didn’t just complain about him, they avoided him. Nor do they want to end up like Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, assassinated by elements who couldn’t accept his making peace with Israel, whoever these elements may have been sponsored by.
But the US always has to lead, which is the main driver of its actions, whether they achieve anything or not. The more it pursues a strategy of fomenting war and arming terrorists to do it, the more it is losing out to countries like Russia, which simply wait for the US to compromise itself and then turn the situation to their advantage.
If the US can’t win it can’t lead either. It could win hands down at disarming terrorists and providing aid if it wanted to. Soon it will have little choice, if it wants to prevent its own otherwise inevitable decline.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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