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 is part of a wider scenario leading to regime change in Damascus – was designed to win over key Republican leaders in order to help win the Congressional vote next week, but it will inevitably alarm and turn off those in the first category. Continue reading
Tagged with Assad
This rush to war over Syria: have we learnt no lessons from Iraq & Libya?
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 drumbeat of war that seemed to make inevitable the West’s attacks on Iraq and Libya. Yet there are strong and solid grounds why this abrupt rush to war should be resisted.
First, the 20 UN inspectors now allowed into Syria have not had enough time to find conclusive proof of chemical weapon use, as the US State Department has admitted. Nor has it been proven beyond doubt that, even if chemical agents such as sarin were indeed used, the 18 or so shells were fired by the Syrian military rather than the rebels. The position is further complicated by the fact that the inspectors have been warned that their safety cannot be assured, so they have now withdrawn. Continue reading
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Review: The Silence and the Roar, by Nihad Sirees
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 or for worse, the overhaul of any political system influences the reception of the cultural product of the overhauled regime, due to the influence this regime must have had on its cultural product.
Nihad Sirees’ The Silence and the Roar sits on both sides of this divide. Written under an oppressive regime, re-published after its fall, the book tells the story of Fathi Sheen, a writer living in a thinly disguised pre-civil war Syria. Here, no cultural output is permitted that does not in some way endorse the never-named ‘Leader’ of the country. Fathi was recently a popular author, critic and broadcaster, until one day he received ‘a fax from one of the security services…which criticized my programme because I had not mentioned the Leader recently’, and was subsequently forbidden from public work.
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Western military intervention in Syria has already begun
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 which combine a variety of ethnic and religious groupings. Continue reading
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Syria: when confusion trumps solidarity
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, automatic solidarity has somehow failed to kick in, a tendency that I suspect is down more to confusion than actual malevolence.