Syria: A game of chicken
Editorial-September 8, 2013
In what may be described as a dramatic turn of events, Russia has pledged to back Syria in the event of a foreign military strike. This undertaking has been given by no less a person than President Vladimir Putin himself, who, addressing the media on the sidelines of the G-8 Summit, dismissed the claim that the Syrian forces were using chemical weapons as a ruse by the anti-Assad rebels to pave the way for a foreign-led attack.
President Barack Obama has not budged an inch. Instead of accepting the UN position on Syria, he is reported to have questioned the effectiveness of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in handling the alleged chemical weapons issue. Has he confused the UNSC’s effectiveness with its willingness to plunge feet first into military action against the countries the US wants to tame? In asking for congressional approval for attacking Syria he has apparently placed the US legislature above the UNSC which has not endorsed his planned move.
The US has already created very bad precedents by using falsified intelligence dossiers to invade Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed and by causing death and destruction through its intervention to oust Gaddafi in Libya. The Obama administration has lost its credibility even in the eyes of British lawmakers who shot down Prime Minister David Cameron’s resolution to back the proposed US military action against Syria.
President Assad is no angel and he will baulk at nothing to remain in power. He does not want to be beaten to death in a wayside drain like Muammar Gaddafi or hanged like Saddam Hussein following a ‘trial’ by a pro-western kangaroo court. It is being claimed that he used chemical weapons but this allegation has not been convincingly substantiated. The US is looking for a casus belli and what it says of ‘chemical attacks’ cannot be considered the truth because of its WMD lie as regards Iraq.
Ironically, the US is trying to wreak havoc on an already devastated Syria regardless of the huge human cost its military action is sure to entail purportedly to uphold a ban on chemical weapons, while refusing to pay compensation to tens of thousands of victims of its chemical attacks in Vietnam.
It may be recalled that the US was the only country that voted against a UN Security Council statement in 1986 condemning the mustard gas attacks by Iraq on the Iranian forces. America also allowed its companies to export chemicals to Iraq, which used them on humans. All chemical attacks by Hussein on the Kurds as part of his genocidal Anfal campaign, which left more than 150,000 Kurds dead, over 1,000 Kurdish villages destroyed and about 300,000 Kurds displaced had the blessings of the West. The crop spraying helicopters used in those attacks had come from the US! Those massacres, unfortunately, had no impact on the trade that Iraq had with the West. Instead, it increased! He was executed years later but his western confederates went scot free. He, too, would have been safe if he had not ruffled the feathers’ of his former western masters.
With Obama and Putin refusing to soften their positions on the Syrian issue, the US and Russia are engaged in a game of chicken. A US strike on Syria and Russian help for Assad will only take the conflict to a higher level with extremely dangerous consequences. This has to be avoided at any cost as it is fraught with the danger of not only destroying many more lives in Syria but also threatening global peace with the conflict spilling over into other parts of the world and the attendant runaway oil prices plunging many an economy already in trouble into deeper crisis. One way of stopping the on-going carnage in Syria may be for the US and Russia to use their influence to make the rebels and Assad’s army freeze their positions, declare a truce and negotiate a solution.
