200,000 people in Syria are dead as of last year when observers of the war seem to have stopped keeping count, 3.5 million are refugees in other countries, and half of Syria's people have been forced to leave their homes. That is the human cost of civil war in Syria. The entire country lies in ruins, everyone has lost friend or relatives, and there is no hope of a moderate, democratic opposition overthrowing the government - because no moderate, democratic opposition exists as an armed force on the ground in Syria.
To this day, however, the United States and its allies are determined to keep the war going on. Why is that? Because Assad must not be allowed to win, they say. To this day they have continued funneling arms, funding, and recruits to the jihadist rebel forces to keep propping up the rebellion, which they recognized years ago was never actually going to defeat the Syrian government. But the rebels must be propped up, says the Obama administration and supporters of the war in the press (such as the writers of The Guardian). Why? To have a seat at the negotiating table, they say.
Let's stop and ask ourselves what would happen if Assad were allowed to win, if he had been allowed to win. Lee refers back to a second article he wrote in 2011 entitled The Syrian Revolution Hijacked. Excerpted:
The Syrian revolution—a broad-based, non-sectarian, democratic anti-despot national movement—has failed.
Mass demonstrations never materialized in Damascus and Aleppo. The military and security forces didn’t crack. The Alawite on Sunni crackdown (Alawites form the backbone of the army/security forces/irregular goon squads) fomented sectarian divisions, with most non-Sunnis minorities cleaving desperately to the Assad regime. Prosperous Sunnis have presumably been hedging their bets by donating to the anti-government cause in recent days but have not explicitly abandoned the regime.
The Gulf powers and the West would have welcomed a Ba’athist regime collapse at the hand of domestic anti-government demonstrations.
That didn’t happen.
As the peaceful democratic movement has faltered, there has been no move from the Western/Gulf powers to encourage reconciliation and reforms.
Quite the contrary, in fact.
Whenever Assad makes an offer of reform, the Western powers dismiss it as too late and/or insincere.
Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokesperson, counseled Syrian dissidents to defy the Assad regime’s offer of an amnesty in return for handing in illegal weapons
The Syrian uprising against Assad was defeated within months by the end of 2011. The rebels were beaten. The death toll?7,000.
The war in Syria could have been over then. But the US, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia would not accept it. The US cleared its allies to supply massive shipments of weaponry and open the doors for jihadists to go Syria and wage war against the government. Ever since 2011, the popular uprising the US continues to refer to has been hijacked by jihad and artificially sustained through the supply of weapons and money from foreign countries.
The Syrian opposition, or the coalition of foreign jihadists and Islamist militias that calls itself the moderate opposition, would collapse within a couple months if it was cut off from foreign funding and arms, if countries like Turkey and Jordan closed their borders to Syria.
And the war would be over.
It could have been over as early as three years ago. 200,000 people who are dead today could still be alive. Millions who've lost their homes could still be living in them. ISIS would not even be half as strong as it is today.
For any real humanitarians out there (as the writers of The Guardian imagine themselves to be), the solution to the war in Syria has been clear and obvious for three years now.
Let the Assad regime win already, for the love of God!
- Tim Mulhair
http://www.unz.com/plee/the-wests-historical-amnesia-moral-collapse-and-criminal-culpability-in-syria/
No comments:
Post a Comment