Who does what to Whom in Syria? Some Revelations

This is really just to recommend a terrific article in the London Review of Books by Hugh Roberts , Professor of North African and Middle East Studies at Tufts University. It is so good that I read it in one exhilarating and mentally refreshing burst in a favourite caf�� on Sunday afternoon. It is a review of several books on the rise of the Islamic State and the events that preceded it.  Some of it will be reasonably well-known to readers here who have followed my comments on this, and my recommendations of Patrick Cockburn���s consistently clear-headed analysis and reporting on the ISIS problem (his recent book is one of those reviewed in the article) .  The article can currently be read here on the web as a free sample http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n14/hugh-roberts/the-hijackers . I strongly urge you to find the time to do so. It is analysis of a high order, and profoundly well-informed.

 

 

In any case, the thing about it is its undeceived understanding of the real origins of ISIS, and in particular the things it reveals, or suggests, about the origins of the Syrian crisis (in which our current Prime Minister once sought to intervene on one side, and now seeks to intervene on the opposite side, showing no sign that there is anything absurd about this).  There is a fascinating summary of the history of Syria, explaining how it came to be as it was on the eve of the events which led to the destruction of its order and stability, and the transformation of millions of reasonably contented people into destitute refugees, maimed casualties or decomposing corpses. 

 

I cannot myself think of any method of calculation which would make this worthwhile. I pray and hope that nobody ever decides to unleash upon my own homeland (however bad things get here) the sort of well-intentioned scheming that was directed towards Syria.

 

He  launches with a caustic review of an attempt by a French academic to blame Syria���s deep state for the disaster. Deep State indeed.

 

I was particularly struck by this passage : ���There is of course truth in all this. But states ��� at any rate, all states that endure ��� have their hidden depths and, for very cogent reasons, make a point of veiling what they get up to ��� let���s speak French here ��� by means of ���le secret d�����tat���. In the Ben Barka affair of 1965-66, the leader of the Moroccan left was abducted and murdered during a visit to France as the result of a conspiracy involving a large cast of characters including French police and intelligence agents, Moroccan agents, the Moroccan interior minister and French gangsters. A few of those involved ��� mainly the gangsters ��� eventually stood trial and went to jail. Paris���s prefect of police, Maurice Papon, was obliged to resign and others, including the head of the SDECE (France���s equivalent of MI6 at the time), took early retirement.

 

���The state and the deep state are not two things but all of a piece, in what we call democracies as well as in dictatorships. Talk of the deep state in Egypt suggested that its discovery was an unpleasant surprise, which indicates a good deal of naivety on the part of the Egyptian revolutionaries. Would-be revolutionaries who set out to transform a state ��� let alone overthrow it ��� need to know what they���re up against before they start.���

 

I have never been able to walk past the fascinating Brasserie Lipp (if you like Sauerkraut, it���s the place to be)  in the Boulevard St Germain in Paris without thinking of the disappearance of Ben Barka from just outside it one October day in 1965, a fascinating story now largely forgotten. I think we can all think of ways in which the British or American states have slithered beyond the bounds of strict legality and candour. It is na��ve to suggest that such dirty doings are restricted to the ���rest of the world���.

 

I was amazed throughout the ���Arab Spring��� at the naivety of supposedly experienced commentators and politicians, who seemed to think that establishing a law-governed free state was a matter of declaring your intention to do so. Real liberty is like a forest in many ways. It is beautiful. It cannot be built, but must grow over many years. It is irregular, tangled and must be navigated by winding paths. And it can be destroyed in a matter of hours by malicious enemies, or in a matter of centuries by stupid neglect or slow and unnoticed encroachment.

 

But to return to the Syrian question, Professor Roberts is one of those who thinks (I believe he is mistaken) that there ever was a real straightforwardly democratic movement in Syria, rather than a movement with some democrats in it that unwittingly served the purposes of others and which nobody would care about at all if it hadn���t served those purposes. I don���t know how we could ever settle this without actual evidence either way. But the circumstantial evidence for the second theory runs like this:

There are plenty of nasty despotisms in the region, notably our close ally Bahrain,  which contain genuine lovers of liberty, who have also been prepared to demonstrate against their rulers. They have been horribly repressed, and the Western nations have done absolutely nothing to support or rescue them. What���s more, those Arab states which have aided the Syrian ���democratic��� movement have, to put it mildly, not been helpful to the Bahraini opposition. Yet the Syrian opposition was openly endorsed by the US embassy in Damascus, when there still was one. And I think there is no doubt that the governments of the USA, France and Britain (which left the Bahraini opposition to its own devices), actively sought a full-scale military intervention in Syria, on the side of the opposition there. Compare and contrast. What���s the difference? The repression? Or something else?

 

Anyway, back to the Professor, who asks this very interesting question: ���who have been the real hijackers of the Arab uprisings from 2011 onwards, and how have they gone about it?���.

 

After providing a fascinating and valuable account of modern Syrian history, which I commend to anyone remotely interested in the subject, he points out that the Assad regime had by no means invented the idea of military rule in that country.

 

He asks : ���In what sense, then, can Assad and his wing of the Baath [Party] be accused of hijacking Syrian independence? They weren���t responsible for the militarisation of Syrian political life, a process which began years before they took power. More coherently and more effectually than any of their predecessors, they sought to make independence a reality. The tragedy for Syria is that Assad lived so long.���

 

He then argues : ���The brutal repression with which the regime responded to demonstrations in Deraa in the far south of the country backfired; it ensured that the revolt would spread across Syria, initially in the form of increasingly angry demonstrations but soon as an armed insurrection.���

 

I wonder. My own guess is that, had the protestors not had substantial material and political backing from outside the country, the Deraa repression would not have ���backfired��� any more than the same regime���s highly successful repression in Hama in 1982 'backfired' (the centre of the city was flattened with artillery fire, and between 10,000 and 40,000 people, depending on which estimate you prefer, were killed. Nobody in the rest of the world did a thing). It was just that, by 2011, Assad���s opponents had attracted the interest of outside backers who had been uninterested in his father���s opponents in 1982, and had left them to die.  One cannot help thinking that it was not democratic sentiment which caused them to feel differently in 2011 to the way they had felt in 1982.

 

Well, believe what you like. I carry no torch for the Assad state, rather the reverse, but I���m unconvinced that the people of this strategically important state developed a sudden taste for ���democracy��� just when Saudi Arabia was getting particularly hostile to Iran (one of Syria���s principal allies) , and just when the USA wanted to teach Russia (another of Syria���s principal allies) a bit of a lesson about how this really is a Unipolar world, like it or lump it.

There���s some very interesting stuff about the structure and nature of the Syrian National Council and other bodies, such as the Free Syrian Army,  claiming to speak for the Syrian democratic movement. And there���s some very interesting detail of the foredoomed nature of the various negotiations, mainly because the ���opposition��� were completely unwilling to abandon their demand for Bashar Assad���s personal removal from power.  Can they really not have grasped that this demand would ensure that the talks failed?

 

Professor Roberts explains (but does not excuse) the sectarian way in which Assad defended himself, which of course played some part in the even more sectarian nature of the rebellion. Then, in one of the crucial passages of the review, he says this :

������those most responsible for the jihadis��� advance were the external actors who backed and bankrolled them and supplied them with arms. The behaviour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait can at least be understood: the Gulf states are Sunni sectarian monarchies governing disadvantaged Shia minorities, with Iran, the Shia power that gained most from the overthrow in 2003 of Iraq���s Baathist regime, just across the water. They were bound to want to topple the Assad regime ��� the central link in the Iran-Damascus-Hizbullah alliance ��� if the opportunity presented itself. It is the policy of the Western powers that needs to be questioned.���

 

Indeed, it does.

 

Then  there is this amazing segment.  It was like one of those novels where the entire plot casually turns over in a second, so that everything you have hitherto read now means something else (I am thinking especially of Josephine Tey���s marvellous book ���Brat Farrar���, and Philip Roth���s ���The Human Stain���) and you repeatedly go back over the crucial passage,  amazed that so few words can have worked such a transformation. Here, try it for yourself:

 

���Cockburn argues that ���for America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of Isis and the caliphate is the ultimate disaster.��� There are certainly grounds for thinking he is right. But there are also grounds for wondering. His book went to press before he could take account of the extraordinary revelation that US intelligence had anticipated the rise of Islamic State nearly two years before it happened. On 18 May, a document from the US Defense Intelligence Agency dated 12 August 2012 was published by a conservative watchdog organisation called Judicial Watch, which had managed to obtain this and other formerly classified documents http://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/

through a federal lawsuit. The document not only anticipates the rise of IS but seems to suggest it would be a desirable development from the point of view of the international ���coalition��� seeking regime change in Damascus. Here are the key passages:

 

���7b. Development of the current events into proxy war ��� Opposition forces are trying to control the eastern areas (Hasaka and Der Zor), adjacent to the western Iraqi provinces (Mosul and Anbar), in addition to neighbouring Turkish borders. Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey are supporting these efforts. This hypothesis is most likely in accordance with the data from recent events, which will help prepare safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre of the temporary government ���

8c. If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.���

���So American intelligence saw IS coming and was not only relaxed about the prospect but, it appears, positively interested in it. The precise formula used in paragraph 8c is intriguing. It doesn���t talk of ���the possibility that Isis might establish a Salafist principality��� but of ���the possibility of establishing��� a Salafist principality. So who was to be the prime mover in this process? Did IS have a state backing it after all?���

 

Well, think on, as I believe they still say in Yorkshire.  Professor Roberts explains this not through cogently understood, clear-eyed intent but through the ���eternally recurring colossal cock-up��� and by C.Wright Mills���s belief that much US policymaking is run by crackpot realists���, all of whose very astute realism is devoted to their own careers, and who cannot therefore see that the policies they are pursuing are ludicrous. It would explain a lot.