From the very beginning my interest in Syria has been focused on what was taking place inside the country rather than on the Great Game that absorbed Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and Pepe Escobar. If your point of departure is that there is some kind of global chess game in which a pawn might have to be sacrificed for the sake of a checkmate, then naturally you will be willing to see Bashar al-Assad’s enemies vanquished no matter the justice of their cause. One supposes that in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance associated with an approach more Metternich than Marx, the global chess game left tended to avoid reading or mentioning any literature that put the rebels in a favorable light. Instead, every single misstep was seized upon to make it seem that they were a Taliban-like threat to a secular and progressive regime even though with somewhat naughty authoritarian tendencies.
I am sure that those who continue in this vein will have little use for the material outlined below, all of which is available online, but for those sitting on the fence or simply curious this might prove useful: full: http://louisproyect.org/2013/09/16/a-guide-for-the-perplexed-on-syria/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
