The conflict in Syria has been rumbling on for 15 months now and I have always had the feeling that the usual suspects, US, Britain and Israel have been itching to get involved to force that old favourite, regime change.
The Syrian President, Bashar Assad, is undoubtedly a nasty piece of work but the Free Syrian Army are little better, shelling pro-Government towns and cities and using suicide bombers and car bombs to kill Assad supporters as they did in Homs, bombing a demonstration that killed 7 including a French journalist.
Now the television news is reporting the massacre of 92 civilians in Houla for which the Free Syrian Army are blaming on the Syrian Government who in turn accused the killings on 'armed terrorist groups'.
President Assad has always maintained that he is fighting terrorists, a view shared by many especially after the Al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, gave his explicit support for the Syrian uprising just before the twin car bombings near a military building in Damascene which killed 55 and wounded hundreds.
The Free Syrian Army are calling for the West to intervene, calling for a Libyan style no-fly zone to attack Assad's troops, and stating: 'The inaction of the international community helps the Syrian authorities to perpetrate these massacres on a large scale'.
British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has called for a 'strong international response' and said Britain was consulting the UN on what that response should be.
While it is horrific to hear what is happening there, the British and American response should be to stay out of it.
The regime has been touting such attacks as evidence of Al-Qaida at work, while the Free Syria Army has insisted that the regime itself has been concocting the attacks to reinforce its terrorist narrative.
We have been here before, in Kosovo especially, where the first commander of U.N. troops in Bosnia, Canadian Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, confessed after the war that "We bombed the wrong side. The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius'.
Now i don't know if the Free Syrian Army are playing us. They could well be the the victims of a massacre or they could well be perpetrating the massacres and blaming it on the regime forces to drag in the West but the US, Britain and Israel have no business there and will only escalate things.
Before we go stomping into yet another Middle East country with all guns blazing as it seems we are just waiting for an opportunity to do, think about who we are helping into power and whether the Free Syrian Army are just today's KLA making mugs of us and playing us like a Stradivarius.
3 comments:
bad stuff happening there.
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True, watching it as it pans out on the news is horrific.
This always seems to happen... It's the Donald Rumsfeld-Saddam Hussein handshake over and over again. I'm not at all coming out in support of Bashar al-Assad/Iran/Hezbollah--they all obviously have innocent blood on their hands. I just mean to say that this sort of meddling approach to international politics inevitably leads to us opposing one evil leader, without any assurances that the other leaders won't be even worse.
But what do you do when you see some people who don't like you killing some other people who don't like you? Do you stop it at once, and have the one side love you in the near term, but set a worldpolice precedent for the long term? Do you wait until it just gets too bad, and have those suffering rejoice while cursing you for taking so long? Do you do nothing? It's a dilemma.
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