From Zionist grandfather to chemical cannibal: Bashar Assad, Syria and more

[simsim elmasry]

Archive photo showing freed Syrian detainees in front of posters showing Syrian President Bashar Assad and his father Hafez Assad in Damascus. Photo by AP



1. “Do not press an enemy at bay. Prince Fu Ch’ai said: ‘Wild beasts, when at bay, fight desperately. How much more is this true of men. If they know there is no alternative, they will fight to the death.’” (Sun Tzu, The Art of War, VII-32).
Which is why the US is repeatedly asserting that whatever the battle plan in Syria, “regime change” is not in the cards. Washington does not want Syrian President Bashar Assad to feel cornered or to fight to the death, like a desperate and dangerous beast at bay.
2. If the US effort to calm Assad – ironic in and of itself – ends in failure, the danger of an attack against Israel, as Syria, Iran and Hezbollah have threatened, increases commensurately. For Israelis, this is the real “Iraqi precedent”, harking back to Saddam Hussein’s traumatic lobbing of 43 mostly harmless Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in January, 1990 during the first Gulf War.
For Americans, of course, the “Iraqi precedent” is the false pretenses of a vast Iraqi arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction under which America went to war in 2003, in the second Gulf War.
3. The history-induced Israeli jitters are bound to increase even further with the approach of the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which will be marked, according to the Jewish calendar, in less than three weeks.
The closer we get to that date, the greater the resonance of the historic parallels and the deeper the public skepticism about the current conventional wisdom that holds that “Assad wouldn’t dare attack Israel”.
The Agranat Commission of Inquiry that investigated the 1973 war famously coined the term “konseptzia” to describe such a rigid preconceived notion.
4. Those who comfort themselves with the belief that Assad isn’t crazy enough to attack Israel and risk Israeli retaliation that might endanger his regime still haven’t come up with a rational explanation why he was crazy enough to launch the deadliest chemical weapon attack on his own civilian population in 25 years on the very day that a UN inspection team arrived in Damascus.
5. In a February 2003 meeting with then Under Secretary of State John Bolton, before the start of the second Gulf War, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that Iran, Libya and Syria should be stripped of their weapons of mass destruction. "These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve," Sharon said.
It didn’t really work out that way, but one out of three ain’t bad.
6. Israel is now hoping that a strong American assault on Assad will send a clear message to Tehran that Washington will not tolerate proliferation of any WMD, whether nuclear or chemical.
That’s one possibility. The other is that with a military operation in Syria, the Obama Administration will be using up whatever meager motivation it had to intervene militarily in the Middle East or anywhere else – and that the military option against Tehran will be swept “off the table” as a result.
7. Syria, in any case, has traditionally been viewed as Israel’s most implacable and ruthless enemy; what it lacked in military performance it more than made up for with its bloodcurdling cruelty. More than any other Arab country, it was Syria that kept the flame of the eternal “armed struggle” directly, or, in recent decades, by terrorist proxy.
Syrian callousness was etched into the collective Israeli consciousness in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. The admittedly harsh Egyptian treatment of Israeli prisoners of war nonetheless appeared completely benign when juxtaposed against the inhumane humiliation, torture and sometimes murder that were the fate of Israeli soldiers held by the Damascus regime. The infamous 1984 Syrian army training film that showed female soldiers eating live snakes, widely screened in Israel at the time, erased any lingering doubts.
8. In September 1967, the Arab League convened in Khartoum for the famous “Three No’s” summit that has become synonymous with Arab intransigence: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it”.
Syria, however, boycotted Khartoum. Not because it was too extreme, of course: for the regime in Damascus the “Three No’s” summit was tantamount to surrender and capitulation to the Zionist regime.
9. France has reportedly moved its nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the Eastern Mediterranean, and rightfully so. As the colonial power in Syria from 1920-1946, it is France that is responsible – rarely for better, often for worse – for weaving much of the basket case that is Syria today.
Employing the age-old “divide and rule” tactic of occupying powers, France fostered the Alawite, Druze and Kurd minorities to counteract the post World War I anti-colonial Arab nationalism that swept much of the Syrian Sunni majority. They created a semi-independent Alawite state on Syria’s Mediterranean coast and recruited hitherto downtrodden if not enslaved Alawites to man their occupying army.
Following Syrian independence, the Alawites persevered in their military calling. They created the cadre of officers that eventually took over the country and brought Hafez Assad to power in 1970. Sunni attempts to wrest back control of Syria from the “heretic” Alawites culminated in 1982 in the massacre of 20,000 Muslim Brotherhood members at Hama, in what Thomas Friedman famously described as “Hama rules.”
Bashar has now added his own “Ghouta Rules” to mark the chemical attack against his own people in the suburbs in Damascus. It runs in the family, like father like son, or maybe not:
10. In 1936, in a concession to Sunni nationalists, France decided to reincorporate the Alawite State, then called the Government of Latakiya, into Syria proper. In a last ditch effort to reverse that decision, separatist Alawite leaders – who wanted nothing to do with Islam – petitioned France’s Jewish prime minister, Leon Blum. In a letter influenced by the Great Arab Revolt that had just erupted in Palestine – and has since been lamented as the “lost cause of Alawite Zionism” – the Alawites wrote:
“The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria.”
“Therefore we ask you to consider the dreadful and terrible fate that awaits the Alawites if they are forced to be annexed to Syria, when it will be free from the oversight of the Mandate, and it will be in their power to implement the laws that stem from its religion.”
The most famous signatory of that the letter to Blum was Sulayman Assad, Hafez’s father and Bashar’s grandfather, two apples that obviously fell far away from the tree, at least as far as Jews are concerned.
11. The Obama Administration has yet to spell out a definitive endgame for what everyone assumes is their imminent decision to attack Syria. The tactics are apparently known – missile and air strikes – as are the targets, but the overall strategy remains blurry.
Possibly the US might heed this 2500 year-old warning: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of...emium-1.544046