A Streetcar named Damascus - Simon Monrad Gough

I was at a talk hosting an official from the US Embassy recently, who entreated us in first excited, then hushed tones at the real origin of the present conflict of Syria. Like a synod meeting of clergy, we leaned in to be regaled with the now common line among learnèd students of foreign policy that Syrian conflict is really about climate change. It was water scarcity in the outlying regions forced farmers into the cities, he stated, causing conflict among urban and rural Syrians of opposing Islamic strains. Of course, the US official omitted that Israel illegally took the water-rich Golan heights from Syria in 1967, but that’s no matter. It is no matter, because the hushed, reverent secret that the Syrian war is a “climate conflict” is more than obfuscation: it is a reductive mythology. The conflict in Syria is better described as a proxy war, involving fossil fuels, between Sunni-US and Russo-Iranian coalitions.

A Different Kind of Gas in Aleppo

Origins of the desire for Syrian conflict lie, as almost all Middle Eastern conflicts from the past seventy years do, in CIA interventions and American exceptionalism at the behest of fossil fuel interests. In 1946, Syria began a people-led democratic government based on the American model. Unfortunately, leftist parties won most of the seats, which in Cold War mythologies indicated in the West a threat to world peace, or more accurately US dominance. Mere months after the CIA was formed, the Syrian government’s refusal to let Western interests build a Trans-Arabian Pipeline for oil through their country meant the CIA, in March 1949, funded, armed, and trained right wing extremist groups in Syria who overthrew the government to install Assad Senior’s predecessor.

Robert F. Kennedy, in a piece for Politico, writes that after 9/11 Bashar al Assad handed over to the US the files on Jihadists that he had. Assad further offered to weave Syria into the fabric of the Bush administration’s rendition programme. Most terrorist groups in the region were Sunni or Shia, funded by Saudi Arabia and Iran; Assad is Alawite. The US drew little attention to Assad’s human rights abuses; there was no reason to draw attention when Assad formed nothing more than a minor annoyance in the region, any more than to the atrocities of the dictators the US has installed in Latin America. But Assad was, and is, closer to Russia. Russia exports much of its natural gas to Europe. Washington’s accepted position began to change as Saudi Arabia and Qatar desired to have a gas pipeline go through Syria, and Russia’s ally Iran had a competing pipeline run through Syria. Regime overthrow became a considered option. History was soon to repeat.

Despite Obama’s telegraphed concern about Assad’s 2011-12 human rights abuses, with America the benevolent hero state, plans for intervention and regime overthrow began far earlier. In fact, the Bush regime began to consider fracturing Syria back in 2007, as veteran journalist Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that year. From 2007, Bush administration pushed a “redirection” toward interests in Syria, and arms were being funnelled there. “The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney… and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser” Hersh reported.

Hersh’s account of the Bush Administration’s aims sounds eerily familiar: “The Saudis, the Israelis, and the Bush Administration have developed a series of [understandings] about their new strategic direction. At least four main elements were involved … [the] Fourth [was], the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria.” Arms were being funnelled into Syria. We might ask to whom, and why. To answer this, the long-held confluence of interests between the Washington deep state and establishment, Saudi figures and insurgent groups must be understood.

Hersh provides some help here with the historical record: “In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan... Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and [associates], who founded Al Qaeda.” This is true. As Robert Kennedy states, Arabs don’t hate “our freedoms”, because their only experience with US pushes for “freedom” has been destabilisation and violent regime overthrow to further oil interests in the region, for the better part of the 20th Century.

Our answer, then, is one consistent across the Bush and Obama Administrations, whatever “liberal vs. conservative” gloss may be coated on it. For the purposes and ends of the deep state in the US, financial and arms support for the Syrian redirection was always toward Saudi-élite supported and funded groups. These include who they have included since the Reagan era: Wahhabi and Salafi groups from the Mujahedeen, to Al Qaeda fronts, to ISIS.

Public Relations, Mythologies, and Media Complicity

The Guardian ran, in its 2016 subscription drive, the tagline “never has the world needed fearless independent media more.” I am inclined to agree. A shame The Guardian does not offer it. It has proven neither fearless nor independent. A more fitting descriptor for the self-proclaimed liberal paper and its trans-atlantic equivalents the New York Times and Washington Post would be war cheerleaders. Narratives on Syria have been confused and contradictory, as on the one hand, Assad must be painted as a new Saddam, and on the other, the rebels fighting Syrian government forces are largely offshoots of Al Qaeda and ISIS in the region, who the same newspapers have spent several years also marking as a locus on the axis of evil. Reconciling this double-think has been an admirably herculean task for the media. Walter Lippmann’s famous antebellum call for the “manufacture of consent” of the masses in service of élites has been, in the case of Syria, been refined such that it leaves few gaps for dissent. Even the normally dissident Democracy Now! has toed the political line in some way to the primary narrative of the US government.

The Times reconciled this media double-think by lionising terrorist rebel groups fighting Assad while neglecting to mention that the core fighters are jihadi terror fronts. The Times quoted, for primary source support, the Syria Human Rights Observatory, an organisation cited by numerous other papers who often have few other sources. It is run by one man, Rami Abdulrahman, from his two-bedroom home in the Midlands of England. How Abdulrahman observes anything in Syria from Coventry is unexplained, as are his unnamed activists. He does not disclose his intelligence sources or from where he receives the funding to run such an observatory. Crucially, Abdulrahman’s claimed intelligence accuracy is contradicted by independent Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett’s testimony at a UN press conference, after spending time in the streets of Eastern Aleppo, that there were no observing international organisations on the ground. Few establishment Western outlets do not cite Mr Rahman or rely on his aethereal intelligence. It is far too convenient to question, happening to match the talking-points of US/UK government spokespeople. Other such neutral sources for The Times included Jens Stoltenberg, head of NATO. This is the NATO which made a vociferous push for regime change, arming mercenaries and terror groups, almost from the beginning. This is the realpolitik alliance which continues to defy post-Cold War redundancy by inventing new nemeses and generating steady income for Military-Industrial companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin in unapologetic expansionism (or sometimes, in self-recognising gallows humour).

In a similar PR push for regime change, the White Helmets (funded to the tune of $23 million by the United States Agency for International Development) and the Syria Campaign ensured the proliferation of photographs of a blood- and ash-caked little boy, Omran Daqneesh, in Eastern Aleppo. Establishment outlets were quick to decry this apparent atrocity as an outrage. The image of Omran, the signifier for bad-things-in-Syria, and the signified – that this is evil inflicted by Assad/Russia on civilians – matter more than the referent object of a real war. That is where the strength of the mythology of Syria lies. How many little Omrans are caked in blood and ash, and by which fighters, matters less than the construction of reality, the Facebook-shareable hyperreality, that the image unfolds for us. It affirms both newspaper reporter and reader’s deepest suspicions that their state government is benevolent and telling the truth. That dropping bombs and killing half a million civilians can, for example, bring democracy to Iraq. That napalm can cure Communism. That the rebels of Aleppo are the Rebel Alliance of Star Wars.

That PR group calling itself the Syria Campaign, as Alternet reports, is almost unknown to the public who read newspapers which use its talking points, even though it “has played a crucial role in disseminating images and stories of the horrors” in Eastern Aleppo. The Syria Campaign “presents itself as an “impartial, non-political voice” for ordinary Syrian citizens. Strange, then, that it is also coordinating the lobbying of Syrian regime change in Washington. This includes promotion of a no-fly-zone. As former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton admitted in a Wall Street speech leaked by Wikileaks, an enforced no-fly-zone would “kill a lot of Syrians”. Clinton should know: it happened at her behest in Libya, now a destabilised state with a strong ISIS presence. One of the founders of the PR group (Avaaz) also pushing for that Libyan no-fly-zone, Jeremy Heimans, is a founder of the Syria Campaign.

An examination of the atrocities establishment news-media have omitted reveals a different story entirely. While the Syria Campaign were disseminating photos of Omran, the BBC’s Channel 4 embedded journalists with the Nour al-Din al-Zenki front (likely given funding by the US State Department), who months prior had cut the throat of twelve-year old Abdullah Issa. Al-Zenki justified the beheading by accusing the boy of being a government fighter. The BBC agreed, despite the medical infusion drip in Abdullah’s arm. Given the BBC had reported on that beheading, Channel 4’s later piece was mendacious at best, with producer Riam Dalati describing the child-beheading Al-Zenki group as “moderate rebels”, and vile pardoning at worst. Channel 4 hastily removed the video of its reporters embedding with terrorists from YouTube after being called out. (That’s not how the internet works, Channel 4.)

Nowhere in any of this coverage, given all the resources of media conglomerates across the Murdoch empire, across Time-Warner and Comcast, given the thousands of hours devoted to show-reels of ash-caked children, is mention of the competing Shia-Sunni pipelines. No mention of US interest in seeing jihadi groups flourish, to say nothing of its allies directly funding them. That is not to dismiss the reality that Putin’s Russia has an equal interest in propaganda. After all, the gas pipelines are competing, and Russia’s Shia allies have as much an interest in winning the proxy conflict as they do to see the Saudi-American coalition fail. It is that Russia’s transparent RT network is comparatively sophomoric in a media war against such old, practised hands as the US intelligence community and the fake news of the WaPo and New York Times, who sold everything from Gulf War incubator babies to Iraq WMDs above the fold.

The New Zealand Response

Unsurprisingly, our media coverage of Syria has been somehow worse: a sound-bite distillation of CNN-style talking points, and consequently more blatant in the drumbeat towards endless war in the Middle East. No press release from the former Key cabinet was ever given more than a cursory glance as to motives. Forget lack of discussion on the war being a Sunni-Shia proxy conflict over gas pipelines. Neither TVNZ nor Mediaworks, Fairfax nor NZME, had the capacity to provide more than statements that Prime Minister Key or Minister McCully were at the UN discussing Syria, with twenty seconds of the relevant speech sans critique or fact-checking. US-NZ relations, intermittently thawing under Clark, reached a zenith under the Key government. Such a warming comes at the price of cheerleading the Washington Consensus in international relations, as evidenced by Minister Brownlee committing $65 million to aggravating the Syrian conflict. Any lack of consultation of the New Zealand public on such expenses has been, and is, muted by this country’s tepid excuse for journalism. Having it known we were giving tacit support for Jihadi groups, while our child poverty and housing crises reach to new levels, is after all unlikely to prove a vote-winner for English.

The Washington Consensus, meanwhile, has never looked so imperialistic in ambition since the pre-Church Committee/Bruce-Lovett CIA era. It is a heady mixture of American exceptionalism and manufactured endless strife in the Middle-East enriching military-industrial conglomerates, politicians, and oil lobbyists alike. Or perhaps it is desperation that forty years of successful self-interest might be slipping away. The Democratic Party’s desperate sleight of hand with an attempt to incite a new Cold War is ample evidence for that. Washington and its intelligence agencies originally wished to party in Syria like it were 1949. New Zealand, presiding over the UN Security during all this, has seen fit to fall silent, and shuffle its feet.

Perhaps we should face up to the truth. We can no more claim truthfully to be a small-nation moral compass in the UN than a US embassy speaker can claim Syria to be a climate conflict. Whether English’s cabinet develops the requisite backbone to hold Washington’s actions in Yemen, Somalia or the six other countries Obama is manufacturing perpetual war with, to the same standard it does Russia in Syria, remains to be seen. Do not expect it from McCully in his final months.

CORE REFERENCES

http://www.alternet.org/world/inside-shadowy-pr-firm-thats-driving-western-opinion-towards-regime-change-syria

http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/how-white-helmets-became-international-heroes-while-pushing-us-military

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection (‘The Redirection’, Seymour M. Hersh)

http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/10/deconstructing-the-nato-narrative-on-syria/

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

http://www.politico.eu/article/why-the-arabs-dont-want-us-in-syria-mideast-conflict-oil-intervention/

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