War in Syria

“Another Type of Warfare” in Syria: Washington’s Support to Insurgents, Subversives and Assassins

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While the CIA has purportedly claimed to distribute arms only to “secular” and “moderate” rebel forces, Washington insiders from various academic and think-tank circles have openly endorsed bizarre positions in favor of integrating terrorists into Syria’s rebel forces.

“Al-Qaeda’s Specter in Syria [3],” penned by Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ed Husain, argues in favor of Al-Qaeda terrorists and their inclusion in the Free Syrian Army, stating, “The influx of jihadis brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results. In short, the FSA needs al-Qaeda now.”

Foreign Policy’s, “Two Cheers for Syrian Islamists [4],” penned by Gary Gambill of the heavily neo-conservative Middle East Forum, argues in favor of Al-Qaeda, “Islamists — many of them hardened by years of fighting U.S. forces in Iraq — are simply more effective fighters than their secular counterparts. Assad has had extraordinary difficulty countering tactics perfected by his former jihadist allies, particularly suicide bombings and roadside bombs.”_

The cold war never ended, and NATO's road Eastward is paved with support of neoliberal economic policies for destroying economies, and when that doesn't work fast enough the Gladio Gang Inc. fund and support right wing fundamentalists and terrorism. 

colder war = neoliberalism + terrorism

Drone Strikes in Syria?

http://rt.com/news/syria-usa-rebel-drone-356/

"CIA 'boosting' intelligence force to 'size up' Syrian extremists. The CIA may be preparing for lethal drone strikes in Syria..."

Russian Security Council Emergency Meeting as Russian Warships Arrive in Syria

http://nsnbc.me/2013/03/16/russian-security-council-emergency-meeting-as...

"The situation between Russia and the USA, EU, NATO, as well as the allied Gulf Arab states Qatar and Saudi Arabia has been rapidly deteriorating..."

Lebanon Army to Stop  Militants from Infiltrating Syria?

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/03/16/293925/lebanon-to-block-militan...

"Sulaiman said the stability of  Lebanon depends 'on all of us not sending militants to Syria, and not receiving them...we must commit ourselves to neutrality. The president said he had tasked the army with 'the arrest of any militants intending to fight (in Syria). Whether for the opposition or not.'

The comments came after Damascus warned on Thursday that its troops would fire into Lebanon if terrorist groups continued to infiltrate Syria. 'These past 36 hours, armed terrorist gangs have infiltrated Syrian territory in large numbers from Lebanon,' the Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a statement."

Syrian Warplanes Strike Lebanon Border

http://rt.com/news/syria-planes-bomb-lebanon-434/

"Syrian planes have bombed a Lebanese border town in eastern Bekka Valley..'

Israeli Jets Fire Flares Over Southern Lebanon

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/03/18/294289/israeli-jets-fire-flare-...

Israel to 'Immediately' Respond to All Syrian Cross Border Shooting

http://rt.com/news/israel-response-gunfire-syria-744/

"Israel will 'immediately' respond to Syria gunfire on the border of Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, stated new Defence Minister Moshe Yaalan. The statement come after Israel returned fire from over the border, wounding two Syrian soldiers..."

12 Killed in Damascus University Shelling - Syrian State TV

http://rt.com/news/syria-university-shell-students-987/

"Twelve people have been killed when mortar shells struck the campus of Damascus University, says Syrian state TV. The blast also injured at least 20 others..."

don't worry Canada, these bombers, head choppers and throat slitters are on 'our' side and this is the 'Arab Spring' right?

NDPP wrote:

12 Killed in Damascus University Shelling - Syrian State TV

http://rt.com/news/syria-university-shell-students-987/

"Twelve people have been killed when mortar shells struck the campus of Damascus University, says Syrian state TV. The blast also injured at least 20 others..."

don't worry Canada, these bombers, head choppers and throat slitters are on 'our' side and this is the 'Arab Spring' right?

What about your side NDPP? Is it it that easy to be on the side of the comprador bourgeoisie that has cheered on Assad's neoliberal reforms? The merchant class remains one of Assad's bastions of support - the polarization that has led to this situation isn't only a product of the Arab Spring or your paranoid CIA fantasies, it's a result of the decline of living standards for Syrian workers.

Is it easy to be on the side of a regime that has collaborated with American imperialism during the first Gulf War and during extraordinary rendition program during the War on Terror? 

Is it easy to be on the side of a regime that has undermined the Palestinian national movement when it has become too radical? You can't wish away Black September.

Have the anti-Assad forces committed atrocities? Absolutely. It's not particularly unusual in a war for both sides to do so even if one side supposedly has the moral high ground.

This is nothing more than a sign of how useless the left in the west can be. We are denying the agency of Syrians who oppose Assad. These Syrians are sure as hell not on the CIA payroll. There are FSA units of every religious and ethnic group. Remeber when the left used to cheer on democratic revolutions? 

Supporting democracy in Syria is not the same as cheering on NATO intervention and if you can't see the difference in that you really aren't in any place to be giving political analysis.

Bec.De.Corbin wrote:

 I for one do not see a favorable outcome for Syria should Assad fall in military defeat.  

I for two...

RT: Crosstalk - Syria As Proxy (and vid)

http://rt.com/shows/crosstalk/syria-israel-golan-heights-877/

"What is Israel's role in the Syrian civil war? What is their hidden agenda?"

Question to North Star:  What percentage of the "Syrian people" wanted this bloody civil war ?

  and Saddam, the Taliban and Gadhafi too right?

General Wesley Clark: Seven Countries in Five Years

http://www.youtube.com/v/9RC1Mepk_Sw

don't believe everything they tell you

Syria 'A Systematic Violation of the Convention Against the Use of Mercenaries - by Christof Lehman

http://nsnbc.me/2013/03/26/us-weapons-deliveries-to-terrorists-in-syria-...

"A New York Times (NYT) article reveals CIA involvement in weapons deliveries to the Syrian insurgents. Weapons which among others, end up in the hands of the Syrian Al-Qaeda branch Jabhat al-Nusra. As much as the NYT may want to portray arms shipments by plane as spectacular, it hardly touches the surface of the criminal attempt of the US and NATO allies, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, post-coup Libya and others, to systematically manufacture a low intensity conflict with the help of well-financed and armed proxies, for the purpose of preventing the completion of the PARS gas-pipeline, to balkanize Syria and Iraq, create a Kurdish Corridor, and to create the preconditions for a war on Iran and other conflicts along the soft, resource-rich under belly of Russia and China..."

A Syrian's Perspective: Democracy vs Foreign Invasion - Who is Bashar Al Assad?  -  by Arabi Souri

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34489.htm

"Bashar al Assad has recently been demonized by the mainstream and so-called alternative media who claim that he is a brutal dictator. Actually Bashar is a reformer who has done much to further the cause of democracy and freedom. It is the opposition and their foreign supporters who represent the most repressive elements of the former ruling party in Syria..."

NDPP, you cart out all the stuff you want from the globalresearch.ca tin foil hat brigade with its shameful apologism for Assad and and it's unending paranoia that the CIA is everywhere and responsible for everything.

Why is it particularly damning to the whole Syrian resistance for the US to be training parts of the resistance? It's an empire. It's going to try to influence events how it can but that doesn't mean it has total control over the opposition. It's also been trying to keep arms away from certain Islamist elements of the resistance as well.

There's is a secular democratic resistance that rejects foreign intervention that should be supported by every left wing internationalist out there. It's is absolutely mind boggling how people can come out and support a regime that is practically a hereditary monarchy that has been pushing through neoliberal reforms for the last decade.

That people in a dictatorship can't resist it because the CIA may get involve to try to advance their own interests denies the agency of people in the Thrid World (for lack of a better term) and is basically racist - every democratic upsurge by the Arabs is being controlled out of the Pentagon. 

And as for Syrian-Palestinian solidarity, that's laughable. The record of Syria standing up for the Palestinians is pathetic. They've bank rolled only Palestinian organizations that serve their purpose. This is the same regime that intervened in the Lebanese Civil War initially on the side of the Christians against the Palestinians and the Lebanese Nationalist Movement. It was Hafez al-Assad refusal to dispatch the Syrian air force that saved the reactionary Jordanian Monarchy from being overthrown, and Hafez used the Syrian failure during Black September to gain the presidency in Syria. The Baathist regime are opportunists same regime that collaborated with the US during the first Gulf War, and the regime was probably more than willing to throw the Palestinians under the bus in order to get the Golan Heights back.

If I were the Palestinians, I wouldn't trust Syria. The regime is collapsing under its contradictions and the Arab Spring. It's managed to last this long precisely because the Assad family has been able to do backroom deals with the US & Israel and to keep the Palestinians and other Arab nationalist movements in line.

Reply to North Star:

Given a choice between continuing to live under the Assad government or enduring this bloody civil war, polls have shown that the majority preferred the government with all its faults to the bloody civil war.  The opposition has been preparing this violent overthrow of the government for a while, often with Western (especially French) encouragement.  Now NATO has (so far) “let them down.” Some of you “Che Guevara’s (or Susan Rice’s) should go to Syria and join the Free Syrian Army and kill a few soldiers and government supporters for ‘democracy’ (Western style).  Then go and ‘liberate’  Iran.

Rikardo wrote:

Reply to North Star:

Given a choice between continuing to live under the Assad government or enduring this bloody civil war, polls have shown that the majority preferred the government with all its faults to the bloody civil war.  The opposition has been preparing this violent overthrow of the government for a while, often with Western (especially French) encouragement.  Now NATO has (so far) “let them down.” Some of you “Che Guevara’s (or Susan Rice’s) should go to Syria and join the Free Syrian Army and kill a few soldiers and government supporters for ‘democracy’ (Western style).  Then go and ‘liberate’  Iran.

Has it ever occured to you or have you ever ventured out of your globalresearch.ca bubble to know that there are many dedicated Iranian socialists who loathe both the Islamic Republic and reject any sort of Western intervention in Iran? I'm sorry if that's too complex a concept for some.

Bec.De.Corbin wrote:

I think it’s not so much too weak as it is too gullible so as to be duped into doing the West's dirty work (what they are suggesting).

This mostly comes from thinking there’s only two entities fighting here: Pro Western and Pro anti-Imperialist. There can’t possibly be a third or even fourth player or reason involved in all this so it has to be (of course) all the evil West’s doing via foolish young Arab men. Most here completely ignore, marginalize or dismiss the Shia/Sunni divide that is very evident in this civil war.

There is certainly a Sunni vs. Shia/Alawite dynamic yes. However it's not completely binary either. There are Christian and Alawite units of the FSA too despite the feeling that most of these groups are loyal to Assad.

There are different forces at work beyond Yankee imperialism. The Baathists have collaborated with imperialism before but people seem to want to overlook that. The Americans and Israelis are prepared to accept Assad remaining in power if it lessens the regime's influence in Lebanon for example. Hamas has already turned on the Assad regime. The Americans are happy to hedge their bets. They are giving some training to limited anti-Assad forces that they think they can trust to further open up the economy and play nice with Israel if Assad falls. If the Americans truly wanted Assad gone they could start arming the FSA with SAM and other sorts of sophisticated weaponry. It hasn't happened and I don't think it's going to.

deleted

Here in Quebec the only news on Syria the Devoir (Montreal's leftish intellectual newspaper) gives us is from Agence-France-Presse who gets their info from L'Observoire syrien de Droits de l'homme whose bias is never questioned.  They seem to be the voice of the non-religious opposition.

I don't often look ar globalresearch.ca prefering antiwar.com or counterpunch and I know that there are dedicated Syrian socialists who reject outside intervention. I doubt they started this terrible war which most Syrians didn't want but which may continue until we "get rid of" Assad (as we did with Saddam and Ghadafi) and what the Devoir edtorials called for.

North Star wrote:

Supporting democracy in Syria is not the same as cheering on NATO intervention and if you can't see the difference in that you really aren't in any place to be giving political analysis.

Some of us don't think it's our place to support "democracy" (whatever the hell that means) in Syria. Some of us believe it's very wrong for imperialist countries like Canada or the U.S. or France or the U.K. to cheer on one faction or another in a civil war, especially when we have seen these powers directly or via NATO committing aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and supporting Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people and its neighbouring states... and preparing the terrain for war against Iran.

I don't support democracy in Syria. I support the right of the Syrian people to determine their affairs without any foreign intervention whatsoever. I certainly don't believe you, any more than the rest of us, have a single thing to teach the Syrian people about democracy. And if you can't see the difference in that you really aren't in any place to be giving political analysis.

Unionist, that’s your opinion and I know it well. I just don’t see how the non interventionism/isolationism you preach here is possible in the shrinking geo-political world of today given the world economy. I’m afraid you’re fighting human nature and not just imperialism.

Still, good luck with that fight, at least your persistent and constant, I can respect that.

North Star & Bec, it appears you are vastly outnumbered by Unionist and NDPP. Give up now while you can and save us the bother of cleaning your bodies from side of the road.

President Bashar Al-Assad Interview with Turkish Ulusal TV Station (and vid)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Hui-Vj4yI

Part 1

",,,the coming of a president or the departure of one is an internal Syrian decision."

Great. Babble is now host to a frat party pissing contest. Do any of you have any sense of how reactionary - not to mention ridiculous - this 'discussion' is? Do any of you have any idea how absurd it is for you to be discussing what is best for Syrians while throwing around the term 'imperialist' from your safe, comfy and bomb-free armchairs?

Just once I'd like to drop one of you into a real combat zone and see how long it takes for you to drop the macho posturing idiocy that dominates this board.

Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media Jan 2012

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Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that most Syrians are in favour of Bashar al-Assad remaining as president, would that not be major news?

 Apparently they don't want Syria transformed into a base for U.S.-backed militant Islam now, like Bosnia through Libya,  but perhaps later after months and months of their country being laid siege to by Al Qaeda and other western-backed terrorists.

Syrian Armenian Refugees Back President Assad

Western Christian fundamentalists supporting the murder of other Christians in Syria. Nice stuff.

"And I laid traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reached Bombay
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah" - Sympathy for the Devil

Let's have some sympathy, please!

Rebecca West wrote:

Great. Babble is now host to a frat party pissing contest. Do any of you have any sense of how reactionary - not to mention ridiculous - this 'discussion' is? Do any of you have any idea how absurd it is for you to be discussing what is best for Syrians while throwing around the term 'imperialist' from your safe, comfy and bomb-free armchairs?

Not sure what you're talking about. My viewpoint is precisely that we Canadians should [b]not[/b] be discussing what is best for Syrians. As for the term "imperialist", if you have a problem with it, why not just spell it out instead of adopting a tone of degradation and ridicule?

Quote:

Just once I'd like to drop one of you into a real combat zone and see how long it takes for you to drop the macho posturing idiocy that dominates this board.

I grew up in poverty, the child of parents all of whose direct relatives - all - were murdered, as civilians, in a "real combat zone". Would you like to drop me into another one - or would we draw short straws to see who goes?

There is an important conversation going on here (even though there have been one or two stupid disruptive comments), namely, what should be the stand and attitude of progressive people in the imperialist (sorry) heartland toward civil conflicts like the one under way in Syria. This is not an idle debate, as your "macho posturing idiocy" comment would appear to imply. It is a debate which directly impacts how we try to influence the policies of our own government.