Taking Control
News media speak of the eventuality of a long, drawn-out civil war in Syria. As though that is not yet what is occurring. The Middle East is not unused to such wars, Lebanon's transformed it from a civilly-moderate society where Muslim sects and Christians and Druze managed to live together in harmony in the Riviera of the geography, until fifteen years of hell occurred and Lebanon has never returned to what it had been.Lebanon is now effectively a place hostile to accommodation of diversity, in a stranglehold of adversity with the political and military presence of an Iranian-Syrian proxy militia, Hezbollah. A deeply politicized Islamism has overtaken a country that was once proud of its open-minded and Westernized approach to civic life. So it's a little ironic that Syria, which once effectively controlled Lebanon, is now facing a similar situation.
Islam is a religion divided within itself, which cannot and will not accept varying views of Mohammedan inheritance and Islamic principles. The two major divisions hold one another in contempt and each believes that even smaller divisions of antiquity like the Ahmadiya and Baha'i, are characterized as equal to kuffar, infidels. Sectarian and tribal rivalries and antipathies are vicious and violently expressed.
But the affairs of the Middle East are truly Byzantine in nature. Bashar al-Assad, like Moammar Gadhafi before the fall of Libya, insists that terrorists and Islamists and al-Qaeda (and malign Western influences) are behind the uprising he is facing. He is attempting, with his military, to put down an insurrection, something most dictatorial rulers engage in, to restore normalcy and restrain demonstrations intent on defeating a country's ruling clique.
The world, observing select videos demonstrating the brutality of the regime's onslaught in attempting to preserve its authority, sees events that modern technology has made available. When the U.S. entered Iraq to remove the Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, there was a similar breakdown in society, owing completely to tribal and sectarian animosities. The restraining brutality of Saddam Hussein kept the population in fear and in order.
With the Coalition of the Willing, the U.S. and its allies, removing Saddam from power, a new freedom was unleashed, and it wasn't the freedom associated with democracy, though this was what the Western invaders kept alluding to. Instead, it was the freedom to revel in a bloodbath of revenge slaughters, the Shia and the Sunnis, expressing their hatred for one another. And into that chaos came al-Qaeda, and other mujahadeen to engage in jihad.
In Libya, central authority is impotent, it is the tribes that reign in their little geographies, and who continue to violently oppress those whom they claim oppressed them. In turn they are torturing, raping, looting, killing and cleansing towns and villages, oblivious to Western dismay, now that the use they had of NATO intervention in protecting them from the regime's desperate attempts to stem their protests is history.
As with Libya's National Transitional Council that the West so depended upon to spread tolerance and liberty and democracy, so too the Syrian National Council, staged outside Syria, having little relevance to Syrians, but claiming to represent them, along with the rebel-led Free Syrian Army. There is a palpable, grim and shadowy presence of al-Qaeda-affiliated groups and Muslim Brotherhood-allied groups awaiting opportunity.
IHS Jane's identifies Syria as having an active chemical weapons program containing "substantial stocks of mustard blister agent, sarin nerve agent and possibly VX nerve agent", stored not far from Aleppo. A prolonged civil war or the fall of the Assad regime could see those chemical agents raided, falling into terrorist hands, or conveyed to Hezbollah. We have not yet seen the end of the looted armaments from their weapons caches in Libya.
It is telling that even the Syrian National Council has admitted that over half of its members are Islamist and that there is anticipation that Syria's outlawed Muslim Brotherhood is on the verge of taking control.
Labels: Conflict, Iraq, Islamism, Libya, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 19, 2012
<< Home