It matters who started it

There is a lot of anguished hand-wringing in the West over the suffering of the people who live in Aleppo. We are encouraged to blame Russia for that suffering, and there are calls for some unspecified action because we can’t stand by and watch while a tragedy unfolds. However, the siege has been looked at in Western mainstream media (and I am going to adopt the usual MSM abbreviation for them) through the wrong lenses. Without wanting to seem unsympathetic to the innocent victims, and without taking sides in a conflict in which there is no desirable winner, I’d like to look for the lessons which we could, even now, learn and apply.

Firstly, while the worst of the human tragedy is happening now, it represents the climax of a situation which has taken many years to develop, and in which we (in the sense of the Western powers) were not innocent spectators, but active and malicious participants. I realise that this statement calls for some justification, as it runs counter to the MSM narrative and the line pushed by Western authority-figures. I start from the premise that most of the events which happen in the political sphere are not the natural results of an objective reality, or of some tide in the affairs of men which we are powerless to direct; but are deliberate constructs, accompanied by a narrative which is intended to have an emotional impact on us, and to generate particular emotional responses (such as, “something must be done”). Thus, the war in Syria is not a natural occurrence like an earthquake, but was the intended result of a series of deliberate actions by many people. This may sound childish, but it matters who started it, and it’s worth establishing that.

Syria has been governed for many years by members of the Alawite minority, led by the Assads (father and son). As a country of many ethnic and religious factions, whose borders, like those of others in the region, were drawn a century ago by European colonial authorities without regard for natural geographic and cultural units or the interests of the native peoples, it has proved a difficult country to govern other than with force and repressive measures, although Bashar al Assad was elected President with a higher proportion of the vote than our own government. The approach the Assads have taken resembles that of Tito and Saddam in their respective countries, when faced with similar problems. All of them, and many others, have had their supporters and patrons according to which superpowers they were broadly aligned with. According to the rules of the “sphere of influence” game, they had a free hand to govern with whatever level of brutality they saw fit, as long as they played their allotted role on the geopolitical chessboard. So it was with Pinochet, Suharto, Somosa, Marcos, the House of Saud, and a whole string of central American dictators too numerous to mention, on the one side; and Castro, Hoxha, Hohnecker, Ceauscescu, and all the dictators of Eastern Europe, several in Africa and Asia, and others supported by the USSR (a policy continued but on a smaller scale by post-communist Russia). It was always immoral and usually against international law, but as with any racket, if everybody does it, it’s not really against the rules, it’s just how things work. Contempt for international law (and the innocent victims) has been our policy all along. The common attitude was summed up by Franklin Roosevelt, who, when Secretary of State Sumner Welles said “Somoza Garcia’s a bastard”, replied, “Yes, but he’s our bastard”. National sovereignty, human rights, and self-determination have always been treated as things we go along with only if it suits our interests.

Consistently, and dating back to the days of overt Anglo-Saxon imperialism, the stratagem of having proxies, surrogates, and client governments, bastards all, to rule other countries and to start and fight wars against the other side’s clients, has been used across the globe to expand a sphere of influence (empire); to exert control over it; and to promote political and commercial interests.

The same applies to the support, whether covert or overt, given to violent factions seeking the overthrow of the other side’s client governments. It is such universal practice that one of the first tasks of the founders of any guerrilla movement is to seek such patronage. Those who get it, have some leverage; those who don’t are likely to fail. The point, right now, is that the US and her allies spent years supporting, organising and funding opposition factions in Syria in the run-up to 2011. This is not a contentious statement; as far as I know, there is no real pretence otherwise, it is just played down in the MSM. This support was largely covert before 2011, and has been more or less overt since then. How much of the support took the form of arms and other direct military aid is not clear at the present, although there is little room for doubt that US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar gave such support from an early stage, using as channels a number of shady Islamist organisations which have emerged from the chaos of Iraq.

The resulting warfare was the foreseen and desired result, called for by (yes, I’m sorry, her again) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on whose watch NATO aircraft ferried men and weapons from Libya to the Syrian theatre via Turkey, where they were trained and assisted by British and French special forces. Once more, all of this is well documented and is not, as far as I know, seriously denied; details and witness testimony are easily looked up. In the early days, the US was relatively careless with its assistance, supporting the “Free Syrian Army” opposition umbrella group at a time when its membership was very loosely defined and overlapped, or exchanged, to some extent, with what are now seen as extremist Islamist groups, including those which became today’s Daesh/ISIS and groups like Al Qaeda/Al Nusra. Later, as the atrocities committed by the more extreme groups became an embarrassment, blanket Western support for any and all anti-Assad factions wavered, and attempts were made to target the assistance more accurately. It was claimed that a distinction could be drawn between “moderate rebels” who were presented as legitimate freedom fighters, and the extremists such as Daesh, who are clearly terrorists by any definition; and that the material aid could be targeted only at the former. David Cameron made such a claim in his unsuccessful attempt to persuade the British Parliament to take part in a military intervention. This claim was never convincing; and throughout, the over-arching aim was always to oust the Assad government through starting and fighting a war. It is this aim, and the actions to promote it, which was the crime in which the US, Britain and others are complicit, and of which the siege of Aleppo is a consequence. When I say “crime”, I am referring to the principle established at Nuremberg and elsewhere that it is a crime to wage an aggressive war.

By 2014, the massive train-and-equip program went public as President Obama asked Congress for official, rather than black, funding to train opposition forces. Obama, though, was always lukewarm about the neoconservative “arm-all-the-rebels” argument, and was also unsure whether the primary enemy was Assad, or Daesh (which was, by that time, making great show of beheading American captives), and which of the other factions were worthy of support, hence the emergence of the mythical “moderate rebels”. At the same time the political line that “Assad must go” was used as a precondition for talks, to prevent any peace agreement being reached.

The lack of clear war aims and political confusion, has frustrated Western strategy. The obvious fact that none of the opposition factions could be trusted meant that even the hawks were reluctant to supply heavy and sophisticated weapons such as ground-to-air missiles, which would be needed by anyone who was serious about defeating the Syrian army. As Western nations were unwilling to get directly involved with their own forces (apart from flying bombing missions at a safe altitude and carrying out drone attacks), this meant the war against Assad could cause immense death and suffering, but could not be won.

My point is very simple; having provoked, fomented and supported a war, poured in weapons, and then lost track of who the enemy is, you lose the right to cry for “humanitarian intervention” and to wring your hands over the suffering of innocents as that war progresses. For decades, the major powers have used petty dictators and surrogate forces to fight their geopolitical campaigns; pretending to care about the victims is unconvincing and profoundly hypocritical. Sure, it’s the Syrians and their Russian backers who are bombing and shelling Aleppo now, and therefore they are the most direct cause of the suffering; but those whose actions are the indirect causes are equally guilty. War crimes have been committed on all sides, yet only those of Assad’s forces get prime time coverage. Meanwhile, the MSM struggle to find words to describe the defenders of Aleppo. Terms like “fighters”, “rebels”, “militants” and “radicals” are used; anything to avoid calling them “terrorists”, the term which would be used for such people under any other circumstances.

If we really mean that we are sympathetic to the plight of civilians, we should show this by giving up our warlike policies. Right now, Saudi Arabia is waging war in Yemen. Cities are bombarded, civilians die, children are buried under rubble etc. Our response is to sell more ammunition to the Saudis. No good will come of it.

Will we ever learn, we might ask. Is the wave of anti-establishment election results (Brexit, Trump, and possibly today, Italy) a sign that this kind of cognitive dissonance has finally driven us to reject the established politics, of which warmongering is part? I would hope so, otherwise it’s just lashing out.