This seems the clearest explanation of what is happening in the world today. It is one that the everyone should take seriously.
US SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
1. The Arab Spring was a democratic uprising. It took the US by surprise. (Sarkozy had to drag Obama into Libya kicking and screaming.)
2. The Jan 25th movement was crushed in Egypt by the US-bought Supreme Command of the Armed Forces.
3. The Feb 17th movement in Libya was being crushed with battlefield weapons, and Obama didn’t want to intervene because of the debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq, because he didn’t want to upset the flow of oil, and because Gaddafi had been welcomed into the US sphere of influence in 2004. U-turns are very difficult for politicians to make.
4. The March 15th revolution kicked off in Syria, and was immediately attacked with battlefield weapons and aerial bombing of peaceful protesters. The US and the UK did nothing to prevent the steeply escalating murders of peaceful protesters.
5. Bahrain’s democratic revolution threatened to upset the Bahraini regime, so it was crushed by US proxy Saudi Arabia, who invaded over the land bridge to ‘restore stability’. Revolutionaries were hinted down, tortured and jailed for long jail terms. Doctors who helped wounded revolutionaries were put in prison for twenty years.
6. Saudi Arabia’s revolution was also crushed.
7. Iraq’s revolution was crushed by the sectarian US client regime of Nouri Al Malaki.
8. Revolutions across the Arab world were smashed by US clients.
9. Therefore:
Conclusion 1. The United States cannot accept the risk of democracy breaking out in the middle east.
RUSSIAN SPHERE OF INFLUENCE:
10. Syria and Iran also had their own uprisings. But they are not within the US sphere of influence. Iran and Syria are Russian clients. Syria has been a Russian asset for 40 years.
11. Iran erupted in 2009 and 2011. Both uprisings were crushed by the regime and its militias.
12. Russia’s client state Syria erupted in March 2011, and Assad’s Syrian Arab Army immediately used battlefield weapons on protesters.
13. The US was unable to do much about Syria because it is a Russian client. Involvement would bring the US directly into friction with Russia, and possibly conflict.
14. The USA’s role in Syria, therefore, has been ‘good cop’ to Putin’s ‘bad cop’.
15. This is because: if Assad falls, there is a risk that popular democracy will break out in Syria. Neither the USA nor Russia wants that. Israel doesn’t want it, Turkey doesn’t, Iran doesn’t, and Cameron certainly doesn’t.
16. If real democracy breaks out it will inspire Gazans, Saudis, Qataris, Iranians, Chechens, Jordanians, Bahrainis, Iraqis, and everyone else who wants democratic reforms.
17. In other words: none of the major regimes want Assad to go, because of the risk of democracy.
18. The Syrian revolution is democratic. Therefore it has to be destroyed by Russia and Assad.
19. In its own interests, the US doesn’t oppose the devastation, but does oppose the breakout of democracy.
20. This also explains why the Turkish state is bombing the Kurds, with no complaint from the US.
Conclusion 2: The Syrian Revolution is the 21st Century version of the Paris Commune. No regime wants it to survive.
Conclusion 3: The antiwar left has unwittingly become the West’s main counter-revolutionary force against the potential for democracy, by uncritically supporting Putin and Assad in the Chechenification of Syria.
Edwin Stratton-Mackay
Derived from and inspired by: “Syria Is The 21st Century Paris Commune”
by Gabriel Ash
Sep 25, 2015
(“The immediate problem is indeed Assad.
But that is the tip of the iceberg.
Assad has been a stellar prince. He has fully grasped the potential of the current historical moment, the Fortuna that opens possibilities for virtù, and acted on that understanding single-mindedly.
Bombing one’s own country to the stone age and expelling the majority of the people is a very high risk strategy, and few tyrants have survived it.
But Assad has grasped where the world is today.
He has correctly understood that defeating the threat of expanding democracy, everywhere, but especially in the Middle East, is not only the point of unity of all the world’s powers, but even the dominant intellectual and cultural mood, and if he positions himself at that very point, he will be untouchable.
He understood that none of his adversaries, not Turkey, nor the US, nor Israel, would risk his downfall if it meant an opening for popular empowerment.
And the more he murders, the more he destroys, the more impossible it is it remove him without conceding the revolt.
Syria is the 21st century Paris Commune.
It is a flash of lightning that illuminates a furious global counter-revolution.
Even hundreds of thousands of refugees are unlikely to change that.
The EU would much rather build new concentration camps for them than risk inadvertently helping a popular victory against tyranny.”)
