From the beginning of Syria’s war, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, enabled by Iran and Russia, has run a very elaborate media war to portray itself as the victim of an international conspiracy, wherein its only opponents are terrorists from al-Qaeda and its offshoots who are being used by foreigners—namely the Gulf States, Turkey, Israel, and the United States—to overthrow a defiant “resistance” State.
The other part of this strategic messaging is aimed at the West, which Assad otherwise accuses of supporting jihadi-Salafist terrorism against him: Assad is the only alternative to the terrorists, it says, so the West should support him. War criminal he might be, he will protect the minorities—his role in endangering them by starting a sectarian war against the Sunni majority and bolstering the takfiris within the insurgency to cannibalize all legitimate or engageable armed opposition, notwithstanding—and has no immediate plans to fly planes into Western skyscrapers. (That the leading edge of Assad’s ground forces are made up of radically sectarian, foreign Shi’a jihadists under Iran’s control, some of them Iraqis responsible for killing a quarter of the 4,000 U.S. soldiers who fell in Mesopotamia, and are integrated into a State-run terrorist network that has struck Western and Jewish targets the world over, gets left out.)
For Assad and his allies, it helps if this propaganda is not only delivered by regime spokesman but independent analysts, journalists, academics, and politicians. In the last ten days two salient examples have emerged: Stephen Kinzer, a veteran journalist, including for The New York Times, who wrote in The Boston Globe, and Jeffrey Sachs, an academic economist working at Columbia University, who wrote in The Huffington Post. Mixing together conspiracy theories, half-truths, and outright lies—disinformation, to give it an old name—both Kinzer and Sachs told a version of the regime’s narrative. Why they did this is best-known to them.
A Matter of Framing
A central point of misinformation in both Sachs’ and Kinzer’s articles is that the U.S. is hell-bent on overthrowing Assad. When Syria’s uprising broke out, “the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory,” Sachs writes. Note the list of States that Sachs cites as being ranged against Assad. In many ways, it has to be said, Sachs can be forgiven for thinking this. In 2011 and since, those interested in containing Iran were advocating for the Assad regime’s overthrow: Iran’s gateway into the Arab world, its lifeline to the terrorist Hizballah in Lebanon, and increasingly an Iranian vassal regime on NATO’s doorstep. But in reality, U.S. policy has been essentially the exact opposite.
While President Obama said Assad must “step aside” in August 2011 and drew a “red line” around chemical weapons of mass destruction in August and December 2012, he never had any intention of enforcing either; the overarching goal was to stay out of Syria. In December 2011, Obama told Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s then-Prime Minister whose relationship with Iranian intelligence goes back decades, “We have no intention to intervene militarily” in Syria. The regime’s propaganda campaign basically worked. The U.S. was expressing misgivings about the Syrian rebellion in terms reminiscent of regime talking points by early 2012 and shortly thereafter Assad’s survival became part of a broader U.S. policy realignment.
Barack Obama came into office determined to reduce the U.S. footprint in the Middle East, where the U.S. was “over-invested,” as Obama’s former National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon put it, and the President alighted on détente with Iran as the means of achieving this. By respecting Iranian “equities” in the region and finding areas of common interest—such as fighting the Islamic State (even if such common interests are illusory)—Obama hoped to create an “equilibrium” that could police itself with minimal U.S. involvement. The nuclear deal would facilitate rapprochement, removing a thorny issue from U.S.-Iranian relations and giving Tehran access to resources to pursue these overlapping interests.
This was a fantasy, of course. But it did have practical implications. Iran has the Quds Force and other asymmetric instruments that mean any attempt to “balance” between Iran and its neighbours favours Iran. Iran saw U.S. reduced investment in the region as a chance to establish its own hegemony, and with Russia’s help it is well on the way. Since the paper agreement was the thing the U.S. wanted—rather than to verifiably disarm Iran—it meant that the leverage in the nuclear negotiations themselves was tilted toward Iran; it also meant Iran could extract concessions in the region with the implicit threat that it would walk away from the table if it didn’t get them.
To preserve the nuclear deal and Obama’s concept of a new regional order, Syria was given to Iran as a sphere of influence. Iran was informed ahead of time when the U.S. began airstrikes against IS, for example, and told Assad would not be a target—granting Assad a de facto U.S. security guarantee. Iran made sure of that by turning U.S. troops in Iraq into hostages—giving the administration a rationalization for not upsetting Tehran in Syria.
So the whole framing of the articles is wrong.
Continued........
Assad as Saviour
Within a month of Russia’s intervention, 35,000 people had been displaced from just two villages in Aleppo and 120,000 or more in total had been displaced either directly by Russia’s airstrikes or by Russian air power enabling offensives by pro-regime forces—usually led by Iranian-controlled foreign troops. Within days of Russia enabling the pro-regime ground forces to cut the last supply line from Turkey to the rebellion in eastern Aleppo City on February 3, anything up to 70,000 civilians fled fearing the imposition of starvation-sieges the regime has in place in forty-nine other locations. Many of the remaining civilians in Aleppo City are trapped for one reason or another such as they are already displaced and don’t have the resources to move again or are elderly. This was a fairly decisive case of people voting with their feet.
Russia has directly committed “egregious” war crimes, according to Amnesty International, deliberately targeting civilians and then following up with attacks on first-responders in an unmerciful campaign intended to terrorize the population into submission. These “double-tap” atrocities, against groups like the Syrian Civil Defence (“The White Helmets”) that have saved tens of thousands of lives, have been repeatedly documented. Russia has also systematically targeted civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools. Subtlety not being Moscow’s leading skill, it wasn’t just a hospital but a hospital for children injured and disabled by its own bombing raids that Russia flattened last Monday.
Meanwhile, the Assad regime, enabled at every stage by Iran and Russia, not only bears moral responsibility for every death in this war since it met peaceful protests with live fire and turned a struggle for its spoils system into a grand religious war, but has gone some way to distinguish itself—above and beyond even the Islamic State—for the scale of its cruelty and murder. Six-hundred witnesses and a mountain of documentation taken out of Syria led the United Nations to conclude that the regime was guilty of extermination, rape, and five other crimes against humanity, as well as a raft of war crimes.
The liquidation of at least 11,000 prisoners held by the regime using torture and starvation has been revealed by the defector CAESAR. Something like 200,000 more are held in regime detention in subhuman conditions. In November 2011, barely a month after organized armed resistance had broken out, the U.N. reported that among the tactics the regime was using to suppress the uprising was raping male children in front of their families. Later the regime would cause female captives to bleed to death by inserting rats into their vaginas. IS burned a pilot alive in a cage; the Iranian-run sectarian militia, the National Defence Force, which has eclipsed the national army, burns whole families alive in their homes. And that is before the regime’s methods of warfare—indiscriminate artillery fire, barrel bombs, and airstrikes to destroy ancient cities, and chemical weapons of mass destruction and chlorine-laced incendiaries to intimidate—aimed at mass-killing and the displacement of survivors is factored in.
Continued.....
Shifting the Blame
Since both Sachs and Kinzer present a universe in which Assad is victim rather than perpetrator of the Syrian catastrophe, however, the corollary is to assign blame elsewhere. In line with regime propaganda, this burden falls overwhelmingly on the United States.
To press this argument of Assad as the wronged party, Sachs blames the U.S. for the breakdown of the April 2012 ceasefire. “[Kofi] Annan’s peace efforts were sunk by the United States’ unbending insistence that U.S.-led regime change must precede or at least accompany a ceasefire,” Sachs writes. Kinzer says the same thing: “In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan’s UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily.” But it isn’t true.
Continued.....
Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09
Bookmarks