‘When will the Syria crisis end? God knows.
God knows because this crisis is increasingly not about freedom but about religion.’ Paul Danahar BBC
Mark Mardell has long supported Obama’s dithering, sorry, masterly inactivity..no….cautious, wise, diplomacy over Syria.
‘It is clear Mr Obama doesn’t want to go to war in Syria. He regards it as too complex, too difficult, too uncertain.
American action there would have a huge impact on the perception of America in the region – confirming every image he wants to change.
Yet the US is, perhaps, moving slowly and cautiously toward taking action. There is no sense of a time scale and no real certainty about what might be done. This is very Obama: the caution, the desire to bring allies along, the reluctance to rush to judgment.
Enemies call it dithering. Even allies are sometimes impatient. I doubt whether any of that worries a president who says sending young men and women into action is the hardest thing he has ever had to do.’
Unfortunately the real world has intruded into Mardell’s Obamian utopia, oddly, in the shape of the BBC’s Paul Danahar who has introduced a full dose of realism into the debate on Syria.
Mardell, no doubt through gritted teeth, has even linked to Danahar’s web article:
Why through gritted teeth? Because the article essentially damns Obama for his inaction over Syria…two years into the conflict and still no support for the anti-Assad rebels. Danahar is honest about the West’s failure, honest about the need for military action if we want to get rid of Assad, honest about a few other things not normally admitted on the BBC….such as the malign influence of Saudi Arabia and the divisive effects of religion.
I first heard Danahar on 5Live Drive (18:36) on which he poured scorn, diplomatically, upon the ‘West’…which really means Obama. The web article is pretty much as the live chat but the 5Live report is blunter and more to the point.
What is Danahar’s conclusion?
That as soon as it became apparent that the anti-Assad movement was serious, long term and capable of sustained action it should have been supported with funds and arms.
What are the consequences of not doing that? The original, secular freedom fighters, the original revolutionaries, have lost authority and influence because they have no funds or arms.
Into that vacuum have moved the Islamists funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and who are luring men away from the more secular forces and are now dominating the opposition ranks.
The opposition forces are fragmented with no overall command and control…this could have been put in place from the start if the rebels had been supported and helped to form such structures at the beginning. A ‘regular’ army could have been formed and the incursion of the Islamists limited.
Having no overall commander and therefore no overall plan of action means that there is no strategy to beat Assad who can survive lots of single attacks and beat them off individually.
That old phrase ‘divide and rule’ is as apt as ever here.
Iran and Russia are supplying Assad with weapons…and of course should he win will retain the influence over the region that they had before.
Assad has survived, he thinks he can, and will survive long term. He sees his enemies are divided and without funds or arms whilst he is resupplied by Russian and Iran.
He has no incentive to head for the negotiating table or to cut and run.
The war continues and thousands more lose their lives….all because Obama hasn’t supported the creation of an army capable of making unified decisions and one that is powerful enough to conduct decisive battlefield operations capable of knocking out Assad’s forces.
I disagree with Danahar about this statement which seems at odds with the rest of the report:
‘America is not acting because it does not know what to do or whom to do it with. Neither do the European countries.
Having spent the last few days in Beirut and Damascus, talking to the international community, Western diplomats, FSA activists and Syrian regime supporters, it is clear that nobody knows how to end this crisis.’
The answer is quite apparent, his whole article pointed to the answer….either let Assad win or pile in arms and money….targeted at the secular rebels, but the Islamists if necessary as well….they are a problem that any post Assad regime would have to tackle.
Here are some notable sentences from Danahar’s web article:
- The vacuum created by Western inaction has been filled by two of the Gulf states – Saudi Arabia and Qatar…..These are both sorely undemocratic states, they are not champions of democracy either at home or abroad.
- Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia hates Shia Iran, so it is using the war in Syria to try and weaken it. The Saudi interest in the conflict dates back 1,300 years to the split within Islam. That is where its ambitions over the outcome of the civil war begin and end.
- When will the Syria crisis end? God knows. God knows because this crisis is increasingly not about freedom but about religion. The Syrian war is turning into a sectarian conflict whose influence will spill beyond the country’s borders.There was the chance at the beginning to stop that being the case. That chance has been lost.
Whilst Danahar’s article and report are examples of how the BBC can provide us with intelligent, informed and unbiased news and analysis you know that this will soon be forgotten.
As soon as the US starts to arm the rebels and fighting breaks out on a larger scale the BBC will change that tune and the normal service of anti-war rhetoric will crank into action with demands for ceasefires and negotiations…thereby just prolonging the war…as we find with Israel which is constantly restrained from winning a decisive battle against Hamas or Hezbollah who survive to fight another day and keep pounding Israel with missiles and any other means of attack they can muster.
If nothing else though, it has shown Mardell how to gauge a situation with an honest appraisal rather than checking first to see how things reflect upon the best beloved Obama’s reputation.
