Be Careful What You Wish For

I had meant, in my previous post, to deal with Syria, but became too engaged in dealing with correspondents. I will say one thing. A scoffing contributor splutters that it is surely absurd that anyone in Syria would contact *me* of all people, about problems with the coverage of the present crisis.

Well, I can say that some of my correspondents did in fact contact more ‘mainstream’ media outlets about what they saw as severe bias, and were either ignored or rebuffed. They came to me because they had read online what I had written, and thought (rightly) that I would be more sympathetic.

The bias of the media towards a crude good versus bad interpretation of Syria is not the result of a particular political view or direct interest. Far from it. Most of those involved would have trouble finding Syria on a map, and know nothing of its history.

But, as I explained in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, media outlets are terribly conformist, and tend to follow a line, and all stories which do not fit that line are ignored are discarded, or buried in obscure corners.

The ‘Arab Spring’ is a terribly simple and easy formula for newsdesks and presenters, though the problem is increasingly to define the rebels. Where the rebels were of a type we disapproved of (in Iraq, after the Anglo-American invasion), they were ‘insurgents’. Had they been approved of, they would have been the ‘resistance’. Likewise, in Syria, ‘our side’ must not be called ‘rebels’ or ‘revolutionaries’. They are called ‘activists’, a word so meaningless that if demands analysis. What is it supposed to suggest? Some sort of protestor in a good cause, perhaps in the poorer part of Chicago or Glasgow, raising important issues with the authorities?

It certainly does not bring to mind the idea of a rather well-organised and (I believe) quite well-armed faction, equipped by foreign powers and dominated by Islamist fanatics of the type we have for the past ten years been taught to fear and loathe.

This mindset is also capable of believing almost anything about the wickedness of the regime . Now, it is a nasty regime, and I make no doubt about that. But we have a difficulty with all such post-colonial regimes, because they draw their legitimacy from us. Even more than in Libya, where the King we left behind was overthrown by Gadaffi and his fellow-officers, and we later recognised that regime, Syria is a direct inheritor of the defunct French Empire. The only previous legitimate authority there was the Ottoman Empire( complainers about the legitimacy of Israel have a similar problem) . If we are going to classify this hitherto recognised state as a ‘regime’ worthy of overthrow, what is the consistent basis on which we decide which states are acceptable and which are not?

For years western diplomacy and media ignored the wrongs of the Assads ( I used to have a virtual monopoly, among British journalists of even knowing about the 1982 massacre in that city, because in those days the media only cared about Arab deaths if they had been caused by Israel. Arabs killed by other Arabs were of no interest, apparently). It is much the same as the current blank ignorance about the Caucasus and Central Asia, where Hillary Clinton consorts with all kinds of dubious figures and nobody cares, or thinks it odd in the light of her burning conscience about Syria. The day will come when we learn a lot more about this crucial, oil-and-gas-filled region (I have already taken the trouble to go there and find out).

Now, as in the Houla massacre, the Assad government is guilty even if the evidence against it is confused on any terms. Take the initial reporting of the Houla massacre ( I have no doubt, by the way, that there was such a massacre, though as far as I know it remains to be properly established who was massacred by whom). We were , at the beginning, shown horrible pictures of murdered children, plainly killed at close quarters. At the same time, we were told that the Syrian army had caused the massacre with shellfire. So anxious were those involved to blame Damascus directly that nobody seemed to see the rather obvious difficulty, that shell fire would not have, could not have, caused the sorts of injuries in the photographs. Whatever had taken place, the reports of it lacked basic professional scepticism.

A UN spokesman’s unwillingness to attribute responsibility to anyone at that stage was mentioned, but over-ridden, or bypassed in reports Only later was a new culprit, an Alawite militia, named (more credibly) as being responsible. It may well have been the fault of Assad, but that *had not been established* . A rush to judgement is always unwise. For some reason the British government is anxious to take the Saudi and Turkish side (the militant Salafi and Sunni side) in this complex conflict. Its enthusiasm should surely be open to question. William Hague, the foreign Secretary, did at least mention the possibility that the ‘activists’ may have been responsible for bad things in the Commons yesterday, but he is still an enthusiast for a process which is headed rapidly towards intervention, and which accords Damascus absolutely no right to defend itself from attack.

That is, in effect, a cancellation of Syria’s national sovereignty. What forces do we have, able to replace Syrian national sovereignty with a stable and peaceful government of that territory, a complicated and dangerously unstable balance of forces? Our supposedly benevolent interventions have already displaced untold numbers of Christians in Iraq, and caused who-knows-what terrors and miseries in ‘liberated’ Libya. Why are we so sure we will do any better this time?