generalspeaking

The Mad and the Criminally Psychotic

Natural allies, Syria and Iran. Most Arab and Muslim countries are majority-Sunni. Iran, not an Arab country but an "Aryan" one, beloved of Nazi Germany, is majority Shi'ite. And while Bahrain, which is facing its own revolt, ruled by a minority Sunni dynasty is a majority Shia country, Syria, ruled by the Alawite sect of Shi'ites, shared a political Baathist party view with the late unlamented Saddam Hussein, in Iraq, another country neighbouring Iran with a majority Shia population ruled by a minority Sunni dictatorship.

Politics and religious sectarianism in the Middle East can well be characterized as nastily many-faceted and always wrought with sinister tribal antipathies. Syria, like other countries of the geography, is facing its own brand of resistance to the current reigning dynasty of the Assads. Just imagine, it all began in Syria when fifteen children spray-painted the words "The People Want the Fall of the Regime", on the walls of their school.

They were children who obviously had eyes and ears and a taste for repeating what they had observed and heard from their elders. It was their misfortune to be critical of a regime that brooks no dissent, and which does not hesitate to arrest children. Which initiated the protests in Daraa, which eventually spread to Damascus, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, al-Riqqa and Latakia. And where government forces have not hesitated to do the bidding of Bashar al-Assad.

Syria is the hub in the wheel of the Mideast geography, with Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon bordering it. The downfall of the Assad government would be a fascinating experiment. It might, but might not register as the removal of a terrorist-sponsoring, nuclear aspiring head of state whose closest ally is yet another terrorist-sponsoring, nuclear aspiring theocracy intent on destabilizing the current balance, fragile and fraught as it is, in the area.

This is a government in Syria which has found a common mission with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which alone poses a singular threat to the stability of the geography and to the wider world. Both regimes are brutal enforcers of their very particular type of nation-building and nation-smashing; both aspire to destroy Israel and that mission accompanies the sponsoring of two state terror groups, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Within Syria the heads of fanatical Islamist terrorist groups find welcome and comfortable accommodation. The leaders of Hamas have found a haven in Syria safe from the fate that has dispatched other key members of their jihadist clan. And from Syria they broadcast their messages of hate and divisiveness and encouragement for the destruction of their arch enemy, the State of Israel.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad holds out a tenuous promise of 'reforms', the lifting of a half-century-old repressive emergency state, one that enjoys the reputation of being the region's most dedicated violator of human rights - next to Iran. While at the same time dispatching tens of thousands of government forces to augment the hundreds of thousands of pro-government supporters staging counter-protests.

The United Nations special tribunal is on the cusp of releasing its final report, blaming Syria and Hezbollah for the 2005 car bombing slaughter that targeted Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri. And then, the Syrian-sponsored Hezbollah which has cleverly inveigled itself into Lebanon's parliament through its 'political wing', will, along with Syria, blame a Zionist conspiracy for the UN finding.

Syria has long been known as the major entry point into Iraq for Islamist jihadists determined to join al-Qaeda in Iraq in suicide bombings, in attacking the nascent Iraqi democracy, in returning Iraq to the calamity of tribal warfare and the potential, however dim it may now seem, of splitting the country into its religious sectors of Shia, Sunni and Kurd tripartate divisions.

Syria's security forces are busy gunning down anti-government demonstrators. State-owned news media inform the public that "armed gangs" are responsible for the killing. Those armed gangs are being controlled by their international handlers, and more specifically from close-by enemies "mostly from Israel" from whence over one million text messages go back and forth instructing the progress of the rebellion.

Amazingly, the Obama administration in the United States verges on considering Syria's Bashar al-Assad an ally, prepared to launch reforms, not to be considered in the same dastardly league as Libya's mad dog Moammar Gadhafi.

Labels: Conflict, Human Rights, Middle East, Political Realities

posted by Pieface @ Friday, April 01, 2011