For God's sake keep out of Syria
The media are driving us into yet another Middle Eastern mistake, one from which we are apt to reap no positive result and plenty of dead and wasted money. Sure, the pictures from Syria are terrible; tnough no more terrible than those from the Christian ghettos of Egypt and Sudan, which our media heroes don't favour us with. But any attempt to impose peace on Syria would be concentrated insanity, deliberately putting our feet into a wolf trap, and for less reason even than in Iraq or Afghanistan - where we have been so very successful in exporting democracy and human rights.
Let's talk sense. We Europeans are infatuated with popular insurrections, because, in our collective history, popular insurrections have often brought freedom and better governance. Often, not always: Franco's tyranny and Communist rule in Russia have both been the result of uprisings against constitutional, though flawed, governments. But there is no reason to suppose that the same dynamic would apply in a different culture, and in fact it does not. In Egypt, in particular, there is an ancient tradition of street revolts that tended to increase the power of mosques and religious leaders. The journalists and "experts" who covered the so-called Arab Spring were blithely unaware of this little fact, and just automatically reacted as though the presence of a large rebellious crowd in Tahrir Square had to mean just the same as the presence of a large rebellious crowd in Wenceslas Square. A few of the saner ones are now beginning to see the difference.
This infatuation has already had worse results than just wildly inappropriate cheerleading, such as we indulged in Egypt. Libya, we have been told was liberated from a tyrant and is now building up to be a proper democracy. For a start, the "liberation" would never have taken place unless Britain and France, led by overeager amateurs, had not insisted on stacking the deck till it groaned, not only bombing the Hell out of Gheddafi's forces, but, it is rumoured, sending special forces on the ground in defiance of even the furthest limits of UN resolutions. They behaved like a card cheat who, being unable to win just by cheating, should draw a gun and take all the money anyway.
Well, whatever is happening in Libya, it ain't democracy, it sure as Hell isn't better governance, and it isn't by a million miles the rule of law. Italy is Libya's former colonial power, and there are close links; and Italian journalists know where to go. And Italy's leading newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, published an account of a region where dozens of villages have been emptied of their inhabitants and where at least 50,000 people are unaccounted for (http://www.corriere.it/inchieste/nei-villaggi-pro-gheddafi-dove-passata-pulizia-etnica/7c93a99e-616d-11e1-8325-a685c67602ce.shtml ). Of course, vengeance after revolution is not uncommon. When America won its independence, a large number of Tories were turned unceremoniously out of their native country, and each revolution, however genuinely liberal, has had its own victims. In continental Europe, the defeat of Nazism was attended by excesses such as the lynching - ahem!. "trial" - of Pierre Laval, and the murder - ahem!, "mysterious death" - of industrialist Louis Renault in France, and, in Italy, the slaughter of Mussolini's companions and the widespread Communist violence in the Spring of 1945. But all these episodes lasted briefly, and where they were not suppressed outright (in Italy, by the Communist Party itself), left a legacy of shame that insured that people would stick, if anything, closer to the rules. John Tusa, the historian of the Nuremberg Trial, argues that the French participation in the war crimes tribunal - with personnel of exceptional calibre, including future ministers, and a very unemotional by-the-book approach - was deliberately intended to counteract the stain of the Laval trial on French justice. In Libya, on the other hand, vindictiveness and savagery seem to have triumphed with the approval of the authorities, and with the western world looking the other way and pretending to see nothing. Gang rule has replaced police rule. Western intervention replaced a brutal, efficient and secular regime with a brutal, inefficient and religiously dominated one. And without Western intervention, Gheddafi would have crushed the rebellion; by the time Sarkozy and Cameron started scrambling their fighter planes, his forces were at the outskirts of Benghazi. In fact, I would say that I am certain that Cameron and Sarkozy's main motivation was simply the desire not to be made to look stupid after they had already described Gheddafi as being as good as doomed.
The unwillingness to admit that we have been fooled is indeed a driving force. It will not let the media say that the Egyptian revolution had been managed in the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood from the beginning. The Brotherhood has behaved exactly according to the pattern of Bob Dylan's Man Of Peace: "First he's in the background, then he's in the front/ Both eyes are looking like they're on a rabbit hunt./ Nobody sees through him, no, not even the chief of police/ You know, sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace." At first the Brotherhood hung well back from the mess in Tahrir Square. They might even have been heard harrumphing a bit at the threat to peace and quiet. Then suddenly they were everywhere, talking to the Army about anything under the sun; and now, in the new Parliament, the Brotherhood will probably have an absolute majority, with the Salaphite extremists - who manage to make the Brotherhood look moderate - in second place, and any kind of real democrats nowhere.
Incredibly, the reaction to this is not to accept that we have been wrong, but to suddenly discover democratic virtues in the Brotherhood that nobody had so far ever perceived. After all, the argument says, they are a barrier agains the Salaphites. How pathetic can we get?
Now, for those who are still willing to see things as they are, the same pattern has become manifest in Syria. At first the Brotherhood and its Palestinian proxy, Hamas declared themselves neutral, harrumphing about the sad sight of brother killing brother, pleading for restraint. Nobody would imagine that they might want to have a stake in the Syrian mess. Only in the last month or two have they been seen to pick a side; surprise surprise, it is the side of the rebels, those champions of humanitarian and liberal virtue, those innocent victims of Assad's villainy, that the media are urging us to go rescue. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203960804577243412423452598.html .
Had people been willing to throw the romantic glasses away and stop thinking that any popular revolt is the kin of 1775 America and 1848 Europe, the peculiarity of the Syrian revolt might have been more widely understood, and suspicions about its nature might have been less rare. In fact, the pattern of events is so peculiar that, without the distorting influence of political cliche' and wishful thinking, intelligent observers might have noticed it long ago. The normal kind of popular revolt is like a fire: either it catches on quickly, building up a power with which the government has to deal or fight a civil war, or else it collapses as swiftly as it has arisen, like a great wave breaking against an unbroken cliff. A few years ago, a genuine popular and political revolt in Iran was ruthlessly suppressed by its monstrous rulers, and today we hear nothing more of it. Conversely, all successful revolutions and civil wars - whether we approve of their cause or not - have their origin in sudden, swift ground-level mass movements. Think of the rise of the Confederate States of America in a matter of weeks, or of the speed with which almost half of Spain fell or went over to the revolted army at the start of what became the Spanish Civil War.
The Syrian protest movement did not correspond to this pattern at all. Hammered time and again by vicious government thugs, the protest demonstrations did not, as they had in Iran, die away among grief and murder, nor did anyone go underground. To the contrary, the movement kept stubbornly filling the streets over weeks, over months, growing all the time ever more violent and ever more like a budding civil war. And one detail ought to have told anyone who knew anything about Islam exactly what was going on: the protests always reached their pitch on Friday - the day in which the mosque-going public pours on the streets after having heard and inwardly digested the mosque preaching.
In other words, the revolt was being pushed and manipulated from the mosques. And not just one or two mosques: hundreds of imams, in dozen upon dozen of mosques, must have been preaching similarly inflammatory sermons week after week, sending their hearers back in the streets over and over again regardless of government violence, deliberately ratcheting up the number of victims. They must have seen the violence increasing, government brutality worsening, week after week; and the evidence of facts shows that this neither troubled nor slowed them. Friday after Friday, the mobs took to the streets. At the back of this popular movement there is a conspiracy of preachers; and the one thing I don't understand is why the Syrian government, which has otherwise proved totally devoid of any kind of scruple whatsoever, did not round up a number of them and make examples of them in its own inimitable way, while it was busy butchering women and children.
This is not a political movement, at least not in the Western sense. It is a religious movement. While some claims may have been Baathist (Syrian government) scare stories, reliable sources such as the Barnabas Fund inform us that Christians are being persecuted and abused in the "liberated" areas, and the Maronite Patriarch has enraged Sarkozy and the rest of the Western know-nothings by telling them plainly that the fall of Baath is something the local Christians dread, and that they will be reduced to the same condition as their Iraqi brothers. Indeed, that is why the Syrian government is fighting such a savage and underhanded war, deliberately risking the wrath of world powers, rather than looking for any agreement. The ruling class in Syria belongs to the Alevi or Alawi religion, which has a very thin and phantom claim (not recognized in Turkey, for instance) to be a Muslim sect, but is in fact a descendant of the ancient Gnostics. This group, which amounts to maybe 11% of the total Syrian population, knows that if it ever loses power it will be the target of terrible persecutions, and that it has no choice except remain in power at all costs. Other minorities, such as Christians and Shias, look on things in the same light.
It is therefore entirely wrong to claim that Assad "is shelling his own people". Assad is trying to defend his own people from the assault of a majority that is alien to him and to them. Every concept the West can take to the notion of peace-making is entirely irrelevant. We cannot talk to the Syrians as though they could be got to see themselves as fellow-countryman, with more things uniting them than dividing them. To the contrary, Syria is falling apart into religiously-divided cantons, reflecting the funamental alienness of the religious groups to each other. Peace-making is impossible, and peace troops would only get in the way of the crossfire.
And there is another reason why Syria does not deserve to be saved. This business of a country collapsing into religious cantons through a savage and unprincipled civil war stoked by shadowy foreign interests has something highly familiar about it. It is what the Syrians, under the command of the current tyrant's father, did to Lebanon during that horrendous chaos called the Lebanese Civil War.
Lebanon had been separated from Syria as being the only area in the Middle East with a Christian majority. For a few decades, it rejoiced in a modest prosperity and Beirut took pleasure in calling itself "The Paris of the Levant". However, Lebanon was surrounded by Syria, which never ceased to regard it as a strayed province and maintained a long-term goal to annexate or subdue it.
Their opportunity came when the Lebanese Christian leadership realized that they had been imprudent in allowing the Palestinians to become a virtual state with its own army inside Lebanese territory. A few years earlier (1970), the king of Jordan had dealt with the same problem in brutal but effective style, crushing the Palestinian army on his own territory (as well as untold numbers of Palestinian civilians) by force of arms. The Lebanese tried to do the same. But the King of Jordan had two assets that the Lebanese lacked: a religiously and culturally united population with no minorities of any importance (a few Christians survived here and there, but nobody paid them any attention), and a disciplined and well-trained army which, in spite of having been defeated by the Israelis, remained a formidable instrument of power. Syria intervened in Lebanon with the clear purpose of breaking down the country and making it a Syrian puppet; and incidentally of looting the smaller but richer country.
For four decades the Syrians have been criminally meddling in Lebanon, dividing, oppressing, murdering, stealing. At the back of their policy was a convinction that Lebanon really was a part of Syria and had to be got back by whatever means. This is not merely an Alewi crime: no doubt the Alewi ruling class got most of the loot, but all the Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon for "peacekeeping" took part in the chaos and in the protection-racket politics. It was a popular cause. Now events have tragically proved their belief true: Syria is indeed no different from Lebanon, and the meddling that destroyed the small country can, by the same means and in the same way, destroy the larger one.
We can do nothing about this. We can only keep out of it.
Let's talk sense. We Europeans are infatuated with popular insurrections, because, in our collective history, popular insurrections have often brought freedom and better governance. Often, not always: Franco's tyranny and Communist rule in Russia have both been the result of uprisings against constitutional, though flawed, governments. But there is no reason to suppose that the same dynamic would apply in a different culture, and in fact it does not. In Egypt, in particular, there is an ancient tradition of street revolts that tended to increase the power of mosques and religious leaders. The journalists and "experts" who covered the so-called Arab Spring were blithely unaware of this little fact, and just automatically reacted as though the presence of a large rebellious crowd in Tahrir Square had to mean just the same as the presence of a large rebellious crowd in Wenceslas Square. A few of the saner ones are now beginning to see the difference.
This infatuation has already had worse results than just wildly inappropriate cheerleading, such as we indulged in Egypt. Libya, we have been told was liberated from a tyrant and is now building up to be a proper democracy. For a start, the "liberation" would never have taken place unless Britain and France, led by overeager amateurs, had not insisted on stacking the deck till it groaned, not only bombing the Hell out of Gheddafi's forces, but, it is rumoured, sending special forces on the ground in defiance of even the furthest limits of UN resolutions. They behaved like a card cheat who, being unable to win just by cheating, should draw a gun and take all the money anyway.
Well, whatever is happening in Libya, it ain't democracy, it sure as Hell isn't better governance, and it isn't by a million miles the rule of law. Italy is Libya's former colonial power, and there are close links; and Italian journalists know where to go. And Italy's leading newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, published an account of a region where dozens of villages have been emptied of their inhabitants and where at least 50,000 people are unaccounted for (http://www.corriere.it/inchieste/nei-villaggi-pro-gheddafi-dove-passata-pulizia-etnica/7c93a99e-616d-11e1-8325-a685c67602ce.shtml ). Of course, vengeance after revolution is not uncommon. When America won its independence, a large number of Tories were turned unceremoniously out of their native country, and each revolution, however genuinely liberal, has had its own victims. In continental Europe, the defeat of Nazism was attended by excesses such as the lynching - ahem!. "trial" - of Pierre Laval, and the murder - ahem!, "mysterious death" - of industrialist Louis Renault in France, and, in Italy, the slaughter of Mussolini's companions and the widespread Communist violence in the Spring of 1945. But all these episodes lasted briefly, and where they were not suppressed outright (in Italy, by the Communist Party itself), left a legacy of shame that insured that people would stick, if anything, closer to the rules. John Tusa, the historian of the Nuremberg Trial, argues that the French participation in the war crimes tribunal - with personnel of exceptional calibre, including future ministers, and a very unemotional by-the-book approach - was deliberately intended to counteract the stain of the Laval trial on French justice. In Libya, on the other hand, vindictiveness and savagery seem to have triumphed with the approval of the authorities, and with the western world looking the other way and pretending to see nothing. Gang rule has replaced police rule. Western intervention replaced a brutal, efficient and secular regime with a brutal, inefficient and religiously dominated one. And without Western intervention, Gheddafi would have crushed the rebellion; by the time Sarkozy and Cameron started scrambling their fighter planes, his forces were at the outskirts of Benghazi. In fact, I would say that I am certain that Cameron and Sarkozy's main motivation was simply the desire not to be made to look stupid after they had already described Gheddafi as being as good as doomed.
The unwillingness to admit that we have been fooled is indeed a driving force. It will not let the media say that the Egyptian revolution had been managed in the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood from the beginning. The Brotherhood has behaved exactly according to the pattern of Bob Dylan's Man Of Peace: "First he's in the background, then he's in the front/ Both eyes are looking like they're on a rabbit hunt./ Nobody sees through him, no, not even the chief of police/ You know, sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace." At first the Brotherhood hung well back from the mess in Tahrir Square. They might even have been heard harrumphing a bit at the threat to peace and quiet. Then suddenly they were everywhere, talking to the Army about anything under the sun; and now, in the new Parliament, the Brotherhood will probably have an absolute majority, with the Salaphite extremists - who manage to make the Brotherhood look moderate - in second place, and any kind of real democrats nowhere.
Incredibly, the reaction to this is not to accept that we have been wrong, but to suddenly discover democratic virtues in the Brotherhood that nobody had so far ever perceived. After all, the argument says, they are a barrier agains the Salaphites. How pathetic can we get?
Now, for those who are still willing to see things as they are, the same pattern has become manifest in Syria. At first the Brotherhood and its Palestinian proxy, Hamas declared themselves neutral, harrumphing about the sad sight of brother killing brother, pleading for restraint. Nobody would imagine that they might want to have a stake in the Syrian mess. Only in the last month or two have they been seen to pick a side; surprise surprise, it is the side of the rebels, those champions of humanitarian and liberal virtue, those innocent victims of Assad's villainy, that the media are urging us to go rescue. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203960804577243412423452598.html .
Had people been willing to throw the romantic glasses away and stop thinking that any popular revolt is the kin of 1775 America and 1848 Europe, the peculiarity of the Syrian revolt might have been more widely understood, and suspicions about its nature might have been less rare. In fact, the pattern of events is so peculiar that, without the distorting influence of political cliche' and wishful thinking, intelligent observers might have noticed it long ago. The normal kind of popular revolt is like a fire: either it catches on quickly, building up a power with which the government has to deal or fight a civil war, or else it collapses as swiftly as it has arisen, like a great wave breaking against an unbroken cliff. A few years ago, a genuine popular and political revolt in Iran was ruthlessly suppressed by its monstrous rulers, and today we hear nothing more of it. Conversely, all successful revolutions and civil wars - whether we approve of their cause or not - have their origin in sudden, swift ground-level mass movements. Think of the rise of the Confederate States of America in a matter of weeks, or of the speed with which almost half of Spain fell or went over to the revolted army at the start of what became the Spanish Civil War.
The Syrian protest movement did not correspond to this pattern at all. Hammered time and again by vicious government thugs, the protest demonstrations did not, as they had in Iran, die away among grief and murder, nor did anyone go underground. To the contrary, the movement kept stubbornly filling the streets over weeks, over months, growing all the time ever more violent and ever more like a budding civil war. And one detail ought to have told anyone who knew anything about Islam exactly what was going on: the protests always reached their pitch on Friday - the day in which the mosque-going public pours on the streets after having heard and inwardly digested the mosque preaching.
In other words, the revolt was being pushed and manipulated from the mosques. And not just one or two mosques: hundreds of imams, in dozen upon dozen of mosques, must have been preaching similarly inflammatory sermons week after week, sending their hearers back in the streets over and over again regardless of government violence, deliberately ratcheting up the number of victims. They must have seen the violence increasing, government brutality worsening, week after week; and the evidence of facts shows that this neither troubled nor slowed them. Friday after Friday, the mobs took to the streets. At the back of this popular movement there is a conspiracy of preachers; and the one thing I don't understand is why the Syrian government, which has otherwise proved totally devoid of any kind of scruple whatsoever, did not round up a number of them and make examples of them in its own inimitable way, while it was busy butchering women and children.
This is not a political movement, at least not in the Western sense. It is a religious movement. While some claims may have been Baathist (Syrian government) scare stories, reliable sources such as the Barnabas Fund inform us that Christians are being persecuted and abused in the "liberated" areas, and the Maronite Patriarch has enraged Sarkozy and the rest of the Western know-nothings by telling them plainly that the fall of Baath is something the local Christians dread, and that they will be reduced to the same condition as their Iraqi brothers. Indeed, that is why the Syrian government is fighting such a savage and underhanded war, deliberately risking the wrath of world powers, rather than looking for any agreement. The ruling class in Syria belongs to the Alevi or Alawi religion, which has a very thin and phantom claim (not recognized in Turkey, for instance) to be a Muslim sect, but is in fact a descendant of the ancient Gnostics. This group, which amounts to maybe 11% of the total Syrian population, knows that if it ever loses power it will be the target of terrible persecutions, and that it has no choice except remain in power at all costs. Other minorities, such as Christians and Shias, look on things in the same light.
It is therefore entirely wrong to claim that Assad "is shelling his own people". Assad is trying to defend his own people from the assault of a majority that is alien to him and to them. Every concept the West can take to the notion of peace-making is entirely irrelevant. We cannot talk to the Syrians as though they could be got to see themselves as fellow-countryman, with more things uniting them than dividing them. To the contrary, Syria is falling apart into religiously-divided cantons, reflecting the funamental alienness of the religious groups to each other. Peace-making is impossible, and peace troops would only get in the way of the crossfire.
And there is another reason why Syria does not deserve to be saved. This business of a country collapsing into religious cantons through a savage and unprincipled civil war stoked by shadowy foreign interests has something highly familiar about it. It is what the Syrians, under the command of the current tyrant's father, did to Lebanon during that horrendous chaos called the Lebanese Civil War.
Lebanon had been separated from Syria as being the only area in the Middle East with a Christian majority. For a few decades, it rejoiced in a modest prosperity and Beirut took pleasure in calling itself "The Paris of the Levant". However, Lebanon was surrounded by Syria, which never ceased to regard it as a strayed province and maintained a long-term goal to annexate or subdue it.
Their opportunity came when the Lebanese Christian leadership realized that they had been imprudent in allowing the Palestinians to become a virtual state with its own army inside Lebanese territory. A few years earlier (1970), the king of Jordan had dealt with the same problem in brutal but effective style, crushing the Palestinian army on his own territory (as well as untold numbers of Palestinian civilians) by force of arms. The Lebanese tried to do the same. But the King of Jordan had two assets that the Lebanese lacked: a religiously and culturally united population with no minorities of any importance (a few Christians survived here and there, but nobody paid them any attention), and a disciplined and well-trained army which, in spite of having been defeated by the Israelis, remained a formidable instrument of power. Syria intervened in Lebanon with the clear purpose of breaking down the country and making it a Syrian puppet; and incidentally of looting the smaller but richer country.
For four decades the Syrians have been criminally meddling in Lebanon, dividing, oppressing, murdering, stealing. At the back of their policy was a convinction that Lebanon really was a part of Syria and had to be got back by whatever means. This is not merely an Alewi crime: no doubt the Alewi ruling class got most of the loot, but all the Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon for "peacekeeping" took part in the chaos and in the protection-racket politics. It was a popular cause. Now events have tragically proved their belief true: Syria is indeed no different from Lebanon, and the meddling that destroyed the small country can, by the same means and in the same way, destroy the larger one.
We can do nothing about this. We can only keep out of it.