Obama's imminent Syria strike: Sanity for Britain and lessons for Iran

Commentary

In a rare display of democratic sanity, the British House of Commons has jammed brakes on the whimsical plans of the PM Cameron to bombard Syria, at least for now.

This is in contrast to the US where president Obama apparently plans to move ahead with the strike even without congressional approval.

As the war scale buildup for the strike Syria was going on, Britain appeared to be ahead of even US till yesterday as the British air base in Cyprus was clearly smelling war. But the sheer baselessness of the British Government's claim that pinpointed Assad for the chemical weapons use acted to catapult the members of commons. It was a strange sense of deja vu as similarly provocative but essentially baseless evidence of WMD in Iraq had led to the cataclysmic Iraq invasion a decade back.

Has the possibility of a strike on Syria subsided significantly? I think, no. US still has the capability and will power to launch the attacks and they are unlikely to miss such a golden opportunity to strike a foe who, having consistently gained upper hand in protracted warfare, has suddenly become more vulnerable than ever.

There is no doubt the chemical attack in Syria was horrendous, to say the least. But while John Kerry has chosen to label it a 'moral obscenity' of the Syrian regime, as many analysts have pointed, it is perfectly possible for the reality to be just the opposite given the lack of motive for use of such weapons on part of Assad's forces and the desperation of the rebels.

The history repeats as farce at Gaza strip

Lessons From Gaza Strip

Implications of the Israeli assault on Gaza

Humiliation hatches desperation. Desperation hatches hatred. Hatred in its extreme form transforms itself into violence and terrorism. Though not always direct, there is a definite correlation between the acts of coercion, exploitation and oppression, whether real or imaginary, with the acts of terrorism. As the terrorists implement the supposedly retaliatory programs to provide ‘justice’ to the victims, it is the civilians that form the soft and low risk target. This leads to indiscriminate violence leading to panic and dread in the people which the perpetrators occasionally bother to justify as the collateral damage in the course of a struggle to achieve justice. No population in the world is currently immune from this menace of terrorism and the new phobia is growing to the extent of making the people paranoid about the ‘other’ people.

One of the many graffiti pictures on a wall that separates Palestine and Israel

 By No Lands Too Foreign 

taken on February 22, 2010 

Parallel to this ordinary terrorism, there has run an extraordinary reign of terror in the human history. This seems often less offensive and preferred and pleasant act for privileged people. It has proven its might by taking hostage the human rights, civil liberties and democratic principles for decades altogether. By now, a vigilant reader must be pretty sure what I mean by all this. It is the state terror or the state sponsored terrorism that has surfaced every now and then in the human history, often because a clique of ruling elites has felt threatened.

If there is anything that is worse than the worst state terror, then it is the current Israeli assault on Gaza strip. Israel has got clear plan of action based on comprehensive assessment of the situation. First, the Palestinians failed to be eliminated themselves forming a nuisance to the ever prospering state of Israel. Second, they failed to comply the second alternative given to them: they refused to evacuate the Palestinian territory fully by fleeing to other countries to ensure a smooth expansion of the Jewish settlements. Third, they dared to elect an inherently anti-Israel force Hamas instead of the thoroughly corrupt and discredited Fatah in the elections. Fourth and the only expressed accusation, they failed to stop firing rockets into the Israeli territory from their side of the border. Being a state established and prospered through disproportionate military superiority to the Arab world, Israel can thus barely avoid the wars like this one and the previous assault supposed to be on Hezbollah.

In the sacred memory of Rachel Corrie

Ruminating how and why the world remains as apathetic to plight of Palestinians as ever nearly a decade after Corrie's death

"All of the situation that I tried to enumerate above - and a lot of other things - constitutes a somewhat gradual - often hidden, but nevertheless massive - removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive. This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities - but in focusing on them I'm terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here - even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon's possible goals), can't leave. Because they can't even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won't let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can't get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don't remember it right now. I'm going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don't like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions."

This is how Rachel Corrie describes her predicament after a short but eventful stay at Gaza strip in an email to her mother sent on Feb 27, 2003. That was 17 days before her death in a blatant act of aggression by Israeli forces on a rampage of demolition. The world has seen many things since. Babies have been born and elderly people have died. More significantly, large number of children, teenagers and youth have also died the unnatural death. Most of them have lost their lives in violence of one kind or the other. Even more people have been languishing their lives in extremely miserable conditions, sometimes even worse than death itself. 

While violence in mass scale is not the monopoly of West Asia, it definitely epitomizes the phenomenon of sustained and systemic violence dictated by indulgent powers rendering the rest of the world the hapless witness of the butchery. This is indeed one thing that helps explain why so many violent periods were thrust upon the human history despite the fact that the ordinary men and women always detested the suffering that accompanied them. While innumerable conflicts, many of them major, rage throughout the world, the mass killing and displacement of the Palestinians is perhaps one of very few instances where a narrative of rectifying a historical injustice to one population with criminal injustice to another in the present is successfully sold to a large number of people. 

When I first read about the death of Corrie, an American student, fighting for the Palestinian cause I was a teenager and I was suddenly filled with an enormous sense of guilt. What Corrie did was perfectly understandable and reasonable under the circumstances. The realization that I was among the billions of mute spectators of one of the worst injustices in history made me restless. Then, I had not even been to Kathmandu, the capital, and knew very little about the machinations of the international power game. With time, that sense of guilt evolved into a sense of frustration and helplessness and as I entered the youth, I came to adjust to that reality in a way that is 'normal' to most of us. Regardless of what I wrote, said, shouted or objected in any other way, the world would proceed as usual; I would be the sole audience of what I had to say or express. Mentioning name of Corrie to friends would draw blank expressions and writing about her was also unlikely to get any reader other than myself. This was how the news of Corrie's life and death impacted my teenage and early youth days. 

Syria and Middle East: The Fallacy of Missing the Forest for the Trees

Keeping the tragic transformation of ‘Arab Spring’ in historical perspective

(First published by Foreign Policy Journal on 15 Aug 2012)

As the fighting between the government forces and the rebels intensifies amid visionary planning for post-Assad Syria, it is easy to point to either the brutality of the Assad regime or the sectarian tendency of the rebellion, but disproportionate focus on the daily events on ground has served to obfuscate some crucial historical realities that are certain to shape not only the outcome of the present conflict, but also the future of the entire region. Historically, the manipulation of the rulers of the region by the West has served to make the division between the states dominated by two Islamic branches unbridgeable. Threatened by the popular upsurge against the ‘our bastards’ in the region, the rulers in the west were prompt in transforming the struggle against injustice into the ugly sectarian bloodletting by condoning the unceremonious suppression of the Bahraini uprising by Saudi forces. The same process of transformation has gone too far in Syria and it is no longer a fight between good and bad or between pro- and anti-democracy forces.

“Do you think that Mossad will now liberate Palestinians with due help of CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar?” This was how I retorted to one of the supporters of Syrian rebellion who had ‘Palestine’ in his Twitter username. In a short but charged conversation with two of the enthusiastic supporters of the rebellion in Syria, I alluded the instance of CIA and Saudi support for Afghan Mujahidin in the 1980s and about the likelihood of same cycle of the West nurturing the extremists and waging the war against them being repeated in Syria where it is increasingly clear that Al Qaeda is one of the important beneficiaries of the dollars and weapons delivered by the gulf monarchies with due help from U.S. and Turkey.

They tried to argue for some time deriding the crimes committed by Assad, but eventually ended up alleging me of “having sniffed some hallucinating stuff” and a moment later I was blocked so that I cannot even retrieve the whole conversation now. The debate surrounding the raging war in Syria has polarized people so much that they are ready to allege those who disagree with them to be just ‘hallucinating’, and so it was during the NATO bombardment of Gaddhafi’s Libya. This was not, however, the rule from the beginning of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Tunisia and Egypt, when even Aljazeera’s coverage was objective enough to interest a keen watcher. This change in perception about the apparently similar uprisings has been the result of the fact that the wave of rebellion having traveled from Tunisia to Syria has morphed from a true revolt for democracy and human rights to an armed conflict dictated by vicious tussle among the vested interests of the regional and world powers.