Published in Canberra Times, 1 December 2011
When the Arab Spring becomes a dense canopy, many shady truths hide among its bushy foliage.
The Obama administration was recently caught out, tangled in the Syrian quagmire.
In August, US President Barrack Obama condemned the violence against the ‘peaceful protestors in Syria’ and this was echoed by Secretary of State Hilary when she referred to ‘slaughtering thousands of unarmed Syrian citizens, including children’.
If this principled stand was applied across all states in the Middle East, including US allies, it would have attracted integrity rather than cynicism.
However, it was contradicted earlier this month after the Syrian Interior Ministry announced an eight day amnesty for surrendering weapons as a concession to mark the Muslim feast Eid al Adha between 5 and 12 November. It invited the people ‘who carry weapons, sell, distribute, purchase or finance the purchase and who do not commit murder to hand over their weapons to the nearest police station’.
Rather than supporting the amnesty to end the bloodshed, and supporting dialogue with the anti-government protestors, the US State Department’s spokeswoman Victoria Nuland declared “I wouldn’t advise anybody to turn themselves in to regime authorities”.
Given her president’s insistence on unarmed peaceful civilians, surely her more logical response should have been ‘what weapons’? This couched admission of armed forces is as ‘knee-deep’ as the US fertilising the armed uprising.
It would have been interesting to ask Nuland and her bosses to explain the weapon sources for last weekend’s bombing of the Baath Party’s main building in Damascus.
Dr Bashar Al Assad did not initially chose to be in politics. He and his Sunni British wife were recalled from his apthamology career in London to be groomed for the Syrian presidency after his brother died Basil in an accident in 1994. But this is no excuse for several strategic blunders. His vague hour long speech to the Syrian parliament on 30 March, two weeks after the protests began, blamed international conspiracies for the uprising and blamed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for failing to implement his overdue domestic reforms. The legitimate aspirations of his own citizens were drowned out by applause, chants and standing ovations. He squandered his opportunity to prevent the cross pollination of the Arab Spring, and prevent future accusations of ‘too little to late’.
In his recent interview with London’s The Sunday Times, the president would have been wiser to detach himself from the rhetoric of the condemned and slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
It was Gaddafi who declared that ‘we will fight to the last drop of blood’, and now Assad has declared that ‘each spilt drop of blood concerns me personally’. Gaddafi vowed that ‘Tripoli would burn’, while Assad warned that Syria is a fault line in the region and ‘if you play with the ground you will cause an earthquake’.
However Assad’s openness to genuine reform and an evolution rather than a revolution was evident in his declaration that the February 2012 elections would vote for a parliament to create a new constitution and this would include not only how to elect a president but indeed “if they need a president” at all. And this is where his faith in his people and putting his nation first differs dramatically from Gaddafi.
Assad cannot be blamed for treating the Arab League’s ultimatums with cynicism. If the member states, dubbed the ‘dictators club’, were genuinely concerned about ‘killing and violence against civilians’, then surely it would extend such suspensions and sanctions to US allies and oil rich states such as Yemen and Bahrain for their brutality against their own civilians.
In August, US President Obama called on his Syrian counterpart to ‘step aside’ because ‘his calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow’. But the Obama administration’s anti-Syria sanctions also ring hollow. Banning petroleum products of Syrian origin and freezing the Syrian government assets would have more impact in Russia, but very little in the USA. Unlike the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan and Yemeni leaders who were renown for their greed and personal assets, such clench-fisted threats amount to less than a slap to Assad.
While the number of deaths since the Syrian uprising has exceeded 3000, what is hidden by the ‘book cover’ of the Arab Spring foliage is the number of soldiers and security police who have been murdered by the armed gangs.
What is also hidden is the admission by foreign funded terror groups of their violent exploits and provocations in Syria. In televised confessions on Syrian TV, terrorist Khaled Ibrahim al-Taleb confessed to committing several crimes in Homs including killing protestors in order to accuse the army soldiers of doing so. He confessed to attacking military checkpoints and abducting citizens to terrify them, and their collaboration with terrorists groups.
What is hidden in combat gear within the foliage are foreign suppliers of arms and finance, including Saudi Salafists seeking a theocracy not a democracy. What is hidden are images of the rising resolve of the silent majority Syrians to defend their country from foreign intervention.
It may be time to prune the foliage of the Arab Spring and expose those lurking parasites. They should be caught red-handed before a dark winter descends on Syria.