SPEAKING
FREELY Duplicity drives West's Syria
policy By Bob
Rigg
Speaking Freely is an Asia
Times Online feature that allows guest writers to
have their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
Western media have
generally painted a flawed and incomplete picture
of the current situation in Syria, where an
authoritarian power elite led by a politically
blind ophthalmologist is crushing popular
insurrection. We are told that Western
humanitarian concerns about this have been
unfairly thwarted by Russia and China, which are
blocking supposedly reasonable attempts to
persuade the UN Security Council to intervene and
set things right.
It is ironic that
France, now at the forefront of Western
lamentations about
human-rights abuses, in the late 1920s defended
its Syrian mandate with counter-insurgency tactics
foreshadowing the cruelty of later French wars in
Algeria and Indo-China. In fairness to France it
should also be noted that, in 1982, Syria's Hafez
al-Assad regime liquidated at least 10,000 members
of the Muslim Brotherhood in a bloodbath.
When France, immediately after World War
I, was granted a mandate over the new state of
Syria, it had to contend with bitter and
continuing resistance from the Middle East
country's normally factionalized population. As
has been the case with other parts of the region,
including Israel, Western creators of this new
state lumped together diverse and sometimes
warring religious and political groups after
little or no on-the-spot consultation. The key
Syrian groups have been Syrian Druze, Sunnis,
Shiites, Alawites, and Christians. But these
categories barely skim the surface of the teeming
diversity that is contemporary Syria.
US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently said
that the US has been working to unify the
heterogeneous groups making up the opposition:
"We're also working very hard to try to prop up
and better organize the opposition. We've spent a
lot of time on that."
In the meantime, US
officials have admitted that they have been
providing covert military training and assistance
for some time now. Large quantities of US
automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades,
ammunition and some antitank weapons are being
smuggled across the Turkish border by
intermediaries including Syria's Muslim
Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia
and Qatar.
In this context it is likely
that US satellite and drone surveillance has been
providing intelligence on Syrian troop movements.
The US has also provided between 10-20 classified
technologies that may include a mobile phone
"panic button" and an "Internet suitcase" to
override government communications control.
Training in the use of these technologies has also
likely been provided.
Almost from the
beginning of the conflict, Saudi Arabia has, with
the knowledge of the US government, been making
full use of its wealth and local knowledge to pour
material and military assistance into Syria. The
Saudis are alarmed at the recent re-emergence,
thanks to US ineptitude, of Shi'ite predominance
in Iraq, which has created a regional "Shi'ite
crescent" including Iran and Syria (Saddam Hussein
had cunningly removed Shi'ites from their
traditional positions of influence and had
replaced them with Sunni. The US reinstated the
Shi'ites, altogether overlooking the fact that
many had spent years in Iranian exile).
There is no doubt that Iran has been
providing its Shi'ite ally with political and
military support, although it is not clear just
how much and what support. The Russians do have a
toehold on Syrian soil in the form of their small
Tartus naval base, which is being upgraded and has
been declared a permanent regional base for
Russia's nuclear-capable warships. This renders
problematic any military intervention not
sanctioned by Russia. Apparently, the Turkish
fighter plane recently shot down for violating
Syrian airspace was collecting information on
Russia's Tartus base.
The US has recently
generated great international controversy over
Russian shipments to Syria of air defense systems,
reconditioned helicopters and fighter jets. What
the US omitted to say was that these shipments,
worth US$500 million in 2012, date back to a
series of contracts signed between 2005 and 2007,
long before the current crisis. The Russians were
hopping mad when the US unilaterally imposed an
illegal embargo on one of Moscow's vessels
delivering Mi-25 helicopters. Tensions between
Russia and the US, already considerable, grew
exponentially.
The West falsely claims
that its interest in Syria is purely humanitarian,
while it is covertly pouring political and
logistical fuel onto the flames of civil war in
Syria, escalating the conflict and ensuring ever
greater losses of human life. It now seems likely
that the civil war will spill over from Syria's
cities into the countryside, making a war zone of
the entire country.
Russia and China have
made it clear that their unwillingness to support
any United Nations Security Council military
intervention in Syria is attributable to their
disillusionment with the unscrupulous way in which
the West exceeded its purely humanitarian mandate
in Libya by forcing regime change and having
Muammar Gaddafi eliminated.
In other
words, as Russia and China see things, although
they were fiercely opposed to a North Atlantic
Treaty Organization intervention in Libya they did
not invoke their veto to block it, giving the West
an opportunity to demonstrate the purely
humanitarian nature of its concerns.
Unfortunately, what they have learned from this
experience is that when the West speaks of human
rights, this may well be a front for
self-interested geopolitical power plays.
The US and its regional allies are
ensuring that the Syrian conflict will escalate
into a hellish long-term civil war with the
potential to ignite sectarian and other conflicts
in its neighborhood, as we can see with Turkey at
present.
Bob Rigg has written
extensively on nuclear and chemical weapons, the
United Nations and the Middle East, with special
reference to Iran. He was formerly senior editor
for the Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons and chairman of New Zealand's
Consultative Committee on Disarmament from
2003-2006.
Speaking Freely is an
Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
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