Obama’s key line that the attack on Syria would be a short, surgical strike was designed to win over those who were appalled at Assad’s (virtually certain) use of chemical weapons and wanted him to be punished, but without risk of another long war. His latest deviation from this line – that the missile strike […]
Posts Tagged ‘Assad’
This rush to war over Syria: have we learnt no lessons from Iraq & Libya?
Aug 28th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Cameron has announced today that the government is indeed planning to take military action against Syria, the Commons is being recalled for Thursday, and no doubt bombing raids will then start straight away over the weekend. This precipitate haste over such a critical matter which may well have dangerous and long-lasting consequences reflects the same […]
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Review: The Silence and the Roar, by Nihad Sirees
Mar 7th, 2013 by Jack Dunleavy.During the Second World War, a spokesman of the Vichy Government criticised the films of poetic-realist director Marcel Carné for their pessimism, saying that ‘if we have lost the war it is because of Le Quai des Brumes’. Carné is supposed to have retorted that you ‘cannot blame a storm on the barometer’*. For better […]
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Western military intervention in Syria has already begun
Mar 3rd, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Now that Baba Amr has fallen with appalling brutality, the Western press is full of demands for intervention to forestall any further such genocidal episodes. More thoughtful minds insist that Western intervention would be counter-productive. Syria is no Libya: its 20 million population is three times that of Libya, concentrated in big towns and cities […]
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Syria: when confusion trumps solidarity
Feb 7th, 2012 by David Osler.On at least a few issues, political clarity should come easily to the left. To paraphrase George Orwell only slightly, when we see a government murdering thousands of its own citizens, we shouldn’t have to ask whose side we are on. Yet as Syria crosses the undefined threshold between mass unrest and de facto civil war, […]
