The Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s announcement that he is prepared to give up his chemical weapons has been greeted as a victory for US hard-ball diplomacy. It is no such thing. Indeed it is a defeat, because the disaster that is unfolding in Syria is not about chemical weapons — it is about a well-armed ruling clique seeking to bludgeon its own people into submission.
Poison gas was only ever one of the savage tools that the Damascus government has deployed to stay in power. Yet, suddenly its deployment and its promised eradication from the battlefield have become perversely, the key issue in the struggle for the country.
What Assad has done, with highly effective assistance from Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is a classic conjuring trick. The best magicians force an audience’s attention onto the hand that is not actually doing anything, while the other hand is busy with the manipulation, unobserved, setting up the final flourish of the trick.
Thus international attention has been riveted on the chemical weapons issue, while the real focus should have been on the continuing enormity of a government that has plenty of other ways of slaughtering its own people. The reality on the ground has not changed. Refugees continue to pour away from the fighting, the toll of dead and injured continues to rise and town by town, building by building, Syria is slowly being blasted apart.
Yet Washington and a deeply cynical Moscow have greeted Assad’s agreement to get rid of his stockpiles of chemical weapons, almost as if it spelt the end of the conflict. For the Obama administration, the deal, which is likely to be meaningless anyway, is a shameful cop out. Already Assad is adding some small print … it could take a year to organize the destruction … and it is environmentally challenging to do in Syria .. the whole operation could cost over $1 billion. In a interview with a US TV network, Assad presented himself as the wronged leader, desperately anxious to do the right thing, not just in the eyes of the international community, but as he told the interviewer, for the sake of his own people also.
And while this drivel was being broadcast into American living rooms, in the White House there have been quiet celebrations that thanks to the deal Secretary of State John Kerry cut with his Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov, the administration has been spared the need to intervene decisively in the conflict.
As was demonstrated in Iraq and Libya, US military technology could destroy very easily Assad’s air assets, his communications, his armored formations, his rocketry and his artillery, to say nothing of his arsenals and command bunkers, all within a matter of hours. Such devastating blows would immediately remove the two advantages that Assad’s troops enjoy over the Free Syrian Army, superior weaponry and better communications.
The battle would assuredly swing in favor of the rebels and within days even, the Free Syrian Army would be sweeping into the heart of Aleppo and Damascus and mopping up the last remnants of the forces of the hated dictatorship.
Yet such an outcome is now feared by the Americans, because they know that among the victorious fighters will be members of the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis). There has already been bitter fighting between these terrorist groups and Syrian Kurds in the northeast of the country. There has also been a terrorist campaign to assassinate leading FSA commanders. Now there is vicious battle going on in the northern town of Azaz, between FSA units and terrorists from Isis.
The last thing that Obama wants to do is emulate his unlamented predecessor, George W. Bush, whose disastrous Iraqi invasion created a breeding ground for Al-Qaeda bits, where none had existed before. Yet it is this president, who is himself responsible for the presence of Al-Qaeda in Syria. Because he turned a deaf ear to the rest of the Arab world, and refused to intervene forcibly early in the conflict, he turned the civil war into a recruiting ground for terrorists.
Not only did he thus allow to become true, Assad’s original claim that the revolution was in fact caused by foreign terrorists, but he has also forced the FSA to fight, not only the regime, but the Al-Qaeda terrorists who have slithered into their forces.
Assad’s brutality must be stopped
