Understanding the World's Conflagrations ─ Syria

The melodramatic ending to 13 years of a horrific civil war in Syria had an additional drama. Muhammad al-Jawlani, who served five years in a U.S. prison in Iraq for terrorist activities, and was noted as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under U.S. Department of State Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, led the National Salvation Front that achieved the victory.

Muhammad al-Jawlani, as a reformed al-Nusra Front leader, may be an issue, but he is not the principal issue; his shadowy figure illuminates the principal issue — contradictions, dubious reports, manufactured facts, selective fancies, and fitting truths to agendas guide U.S. foreign policies influence public opinion, and make it impossible to know who Muhammad al-Jawlani is and what the **!!++// is going on. The real issues that confront Syria and the real reasons for a civil war that left an elevated estimate of 620 thousand deaths, more than six million internally displaced, and about five million refugees, have been obscured. Natural disasters accompanied the human disaster and are also responsible for the catastrophe. Statements and decisions have been inconsistent with reality.

The American Revolution has characteristics that guide an understanding of the Syrian insurrection. In both situations, ardent and semi-popular groups rebelled against injustices and hoped to create new regimes. In both situations, foreign powers, France and Spain in the American Revolution, Russia, Iran, United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other nations in the Syrian revolution, stoked the violence, commanded the direction, and shaped the rebellions. Portrayed as revolutions, the American and Syrian rebellions are more accurately described as battlegrounds for conflicting geo-politics.

By working together to defeat their British enemy and coordinating the supply of weapons and logistics to the colonists, France and Spain enabled the American Revolution to succeed. To obtain assistance, the foreign powers obliged the colonists to obtain sovereignty, declare themselves an independent nation, and provide a unified command so the two European nations could deal directly with an established government. Insistence by the two foreign powers that arms could only be supplied to a sovereign government provoked the issuance of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

In Syria, foreign supporters of the insurgents did not cooperate and were unable to supply weapons and logistic support to a unified command. For these reasons, the insurgency did not succeed. Each day of armed struggle increased the killings of Syrians; another, we had to kill them to save them.

Before the massive insurrection, Syria was a nation with free health care and almost universal education, with capability to supply adequate food, clothing, and housing to its population. Syrians did not breathe the air of freedom, but they inhaled the air of Syria, the oxygen of thousands of years of remembrances, peoples loosely bound together by history, culture, and civilization.

The post-World War I French mandate composed Syria of two states ─ Damascus and Aleppo. The western part became Lebanon and Latakia; the latter mostly aligned with Damascus. The northern part contained the Kurdish region, along the border with Turkey.

In 1936, Syrian nationalists gained Syrian independence in the Franco-Syrian Treaty. After 1970, the Baathist government forged a Syrian identity and guaranteed religious and ethnic freedom to all its citizens. All of that is slowly fading. Even if there is a new Syrian government, will there be a Syrian people, and a Syrian nation?

The map shows Syria's real problem ─ its divisions. Inability of intelligence agencies to gather the facts, and for competing nations to face the facts, brought the Syrian war to its punishing situation. Can the National Salvation Front gain unique authority? Can an established governing body gain universal approval?

A new government cannot easily resolve Syria's condition; the catastrophes have been more than man-made. In addition to the religious and social divisions, Syria suffers from an urban/rural divide, ethnic antagonisms, and natural calamities, which have exaggerated the conflict and need immediate attention. From the onset of the civil demonstrations, which began in March 2011 in the city of Dara'a, near the Jordanian border, agricultural unemployment, crowding of urban areas, dislocations, and possible food shortages occupied the time and energy of the Syrian government.

Natural Calamities
A body of social scientists and international political observers concluded that severe drought, during the early part of the 21st century forced 1.5 million Syrian farmers to migrate to urban areas and this added to social stresses that eventually resulted in the uprising during March 2011. An article, The Ominous Story of Syria's Climate Refugees, Scientific American, December 17, 2015, starts with the following:

Drought, which is being exacerbated by climate change and bad government policies, has forced more than a million Syrian farmers to move to overcrowded cities. Water shortages, ruined land and corruption, they say, fomented revolution.

John Wendle, the article's author, talked with Mustafa Abdul Hamid, a 30-year-old farmer from Azaz, near Aleppo.

"The war and the drought, they are the same thing," says Mustafa Abdul Hamid, a 30-year-old farmer from Azaz, near Aleppo. "The start of the revolution was water and land," Hamid says.
Life was good before the drought, Hamid recalls. Back home in Syria, he and his family farmed three hectares of topsoil so rich it was the color of henna. They grew wheat, fava beans, tomatoes, and potatoes. Hamid says he used to harvest three quarters of a metric ton of wheat per hectare in the years before the drought. Then the rains failed, and his yields plunged to barely half that amount. "All I needed was water," he says. "And I didn't have water. So things got very bad. The government wouldn't allow us to drill for water. You'd go to prison."

The Scientific American article concluded:

Syria's water crisis is largely of its own making. Back in the 1970s, the military regime led by President Hafez al-Assad launched an ill-conceived drive for agricultural self-sufficiency. No one seemed to consider whether Syria had sufficient groundwater and rainfall to raise those crops. Farmers made up for water shortages by drilling wells to tap the country's underground water reserves. When water tables retreated, people dug deeper. In 2005 the regime of Assad's son and successor, President Bashar al-Assad, made it illegal to dig new wells without a license issued personally, for a fee, by an official, but it was mostly ignored, out of necessity.

The Rural and Urban Conflict
Economic, social, health, and intellectual disparities between urban and rural life have plagued most nations and played a leading role in civil disturbances. China's 1960s Cultural Revolution and Cambodia's Pol Pot emptying of the cities during the late 1970s were futile and disastrous attempts by totalitarian governments to resolve the urban/rural divide. China still struggles with the problem and is slowly moving rural dwellers to huge apartment complexes in mega-cities. Syria’s displaced remain displaced because they have no viable place to go. The disparities have continually surfaced and will disturb the new regime

Ethnic and Tribal Differences
Forged from European secret agreements, which created artificial nations without regard to ethnic differences, the Middle East nations struggle to give a unique identity to disparate faces. By populating Kurdish urban areas with Arab Iraqis, Saddam Hussein tried to reduce Kurdish nationalism and turn Kurds into pure Iraqis. Moammar Gaddafi pacified the Libyan tribes but could not reduce antagonisms between the eastern and western provinces ─Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Syria is a bundle of tribal conflicts, and the Baathist government waltzed through them by applying a strong and authoritarian rule.

Fitting facts to agendas
A one-sided look at the Syrian government was compounded by one-sided reporting.
Back in 2011, at the start of the civil war, police arrested and pommeled several high school students for painting anti-government graffiti on a wall. Considered the spark that lit the flame, the arrests of the children in the southern city of Dara’a triggered a march for political rights and an end to corruption. Syrian police reportedly countered with water cannons and gunfire, and killed three protesters. According to the Syrian government news agency, "infiltrators among the marchers smashed cars, destroyed other property, and attacked police, causing chaos and riots." And so, it goes - rebel forces accuse and the government excuses. Who should be trusted in the era of 'false news?' One problem is that conventional media reports were always slanted against Assad. Other reports often tell a different story.

Jonathan Marshall, ConsortiumNews.com, July 20, 2015 provides an alternative interpretation.

... in an uncharacteristic gesture intended to ease tensions the government offered to release the detained students, but seven police officers were killed, and the Baath Party Headquarters and courthouse were torched, in renewed violence. Around the beginning of April, according to another account, gunmen set a sophisticated ambush, killing perhaps two dozen government troops headed for Dara'a.

President Assad tried to calm the situation by sending senior government officials with family roots in the city to emphasize his personal commitment to prosecute those responsible for shooting protesters. He fired the provincial governor and a general in the political security force for their role. The government also released the children whose arrest had triggered the protests in the first place.

Assad also announced several national reforms. As summarized by the UN's independent commission of inquiry on Syria, "These steps included the formation of a new Government, the lifting of the state of emergency, the abolition of the Supreme State Security Court, the granting of general amnesties and new regulations on the right of citizens to participate in peaceful demonstrations." His response failed to satisfy protesters who took to the streets and declared the city a "liberated zone." As political scientist Charles Tripp has observed, "This was too great a challenge to the authorities, and at the end of April, a military operation was put in motion with the aim of reasserting government control, whatever the cost in human life."

Described by the United States as an insurrection against the Assad regime in an attempt to achieve freedom and democracy, the conflict in Syria emerged with a different context. Groups of Syrians who want democratic action and freedom existed, but they did not demonstrate great strength and were usurped by better-organized groups — ISIS and Al-Nusra — who eschewed democracy and freedom. The result of the initial battle for Raqqa, where different rebel forces — Free Syrian Army and Islamic brigades — engaged and defeated the Syrian army, validate this statement. Who emerged as victor and in complete control of the city? It was ISIS. Raqqa's population, swollen in size by hundreds of thousands of Syrians displaced by the battles, did not support any side. Mostly Sunnis, they remained neutral or gravitated toward ISIS, uncaring about expressions of liberty, democracy, and freedom.

Attacking the Assad regime and reinforcing the rebellion encouraged the inevitable ─ the destruction of Syria. A great part of its population is in exile; other than Damascus, its major cities are in shambles; its ancient heritage sites are ruins; its infrastructure is wrecked. The shared history, pride in continuity from the start of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, and ability to enable diverse ethnicities and religions to work together, which characterized Syrians, have been smothered. By addressing the causes of the problems of Middle East nations as slogans — lack of democracy and freedom — the United States assured there would be no democracy and freedom. By destroying Syrian sovereignty, the United States elevated ISIS' claims to sovereignty.

Atrocities
In all wars, combatants vie for public opinion by accusing the other side of atrocities, which are usually true, but exaggerated and hypocritical. No side owns atrocities.

Revelations of alleged gas attacks against populations, shelling and bombing of civilians in rebel-controlled areas, mass incarcerations, and atrocities against prisoners are the principal grievances of international opinion against the Assad regime. These charges may be valid, and cannot be excused, but they have a stimulus; they arise partially out of revenge for mass kidnappings by rebel forces of Assad supporters who are ordinary civilians, executions of captured Syrian soldiers in rebel held territories, and alleged gas and shelling attacks against civilians in government held areas. They are part of many "out of control" internecine wars. Examine the U.S. Civil War, the 1920 Russian Civil War, the 1937 Spanish Civil War, and 15 years of the Vietnam Civil War. Since Cain slew Abel, fraternal animosity is woven into humanity's fabric.

This is not an attempt to minimize the atrocities and human rights violations committed by the Baathist regime; just the opposite, all atrocities and human rights violations must be exposed, but we should not permit those committed in Syria to divert attention from those committed in Saudi Arabia and its prisons, Israel and its prisons, and by U.S. authorities in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the Iraq War, at Guantanamo Bay, and at the CIA’s network of “black sites” around the world, where the agency kept rendered terror suspects for “enhanced interrogations.”

The hypocrisy of preaching law and order and paving a road to peaceful reconciliation appeared immediately after the National Salvation Front consolidated its authority. Israel, once again, thumbed its nose at the world community and received approval from the U.S. government for its hostile actions. After Israel violated international law by seizing additional Syrian territory adjacent to the occupied Golan Heights, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller retrieved the macro that stated, “Israel has right to defend itself and take actions against terrorist organizations.”

As a response to Israel’s 480 air force strikes on Syrian military bases and destruction of the Syrian fleet overnight, The Washington Post reported, “Washington had given its blessing years ago to Israeli freedom of action in Syria, including airstrikes, as a self-defense measure, and that it extended to the present.” Israel has the unique privilege of destroying the military potential of a sovereign nation and render that nation defenseless.

Lack of understanding of Syria's many problems contributed to the lack of understanding of the nature of the rebellion. Did people rebel because Syria was too authoritarian, or was Syria too authoritarian because that was needed to resolve problems and squash rebellion? Will the new government be less authoritarian and more effective? Will the National Salvation Front allow itself to follow the U.S. and become a satrap for Israel?