Over the past four years I have noticed that just after Bashar al-Assad is pilloried in the bourgeois press for some atrocity or another, his amen corner in the USA and England rises to the occasion publishing one article after another warning that this was preparation for a George W. Bush type “regime change” operation, often likening accusations such as Assad using sarin gas in East Ghouta to the charge that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling WMD’s including nuclear weapons. I often had the feeling that if the war in Iraq had not occurred, the amen corner would be at a loss for words.
In the latest go-round, the misery of Syrian refugees has been turned by some as the fruit of a “war on Syria” conducted by Barack Obama rather than the result of four years of scorched earth tactics of the sort that have leveled Gaza and Chechnya. We are told that if the USA had not funded “takfiri” (terrorists), Syria would have remained a peaceful beacon of Enlightenment values in the Middle East even if its democratically elected president (after all, he did get 88.7 percent of the vote in the last election) was forced to use discretionary powers against fanatics of the sort who cry out “Alluah Akbar” in the most off-putting manner, especially when they have the audacity to aim machine guns at helicopters bombing street markets. The image that has generated the most “the West has to do something” type commentary is that of the drowned son of Abdullah Kurdi. Poor Kurdi blames ISIS and Bashar al-Assad for forcing his family to take the risky exodus to Europe over the open sea, and especially the latter for having him tortured in a Baathist prison for five months. Surely Mr. Kurdi should have understood that President al-Assad was forced to take draconian measures because of all those Nicholas Kristof op-ed pieces in the NY Times. full: http://louisproyect.org/2015/09/07/syrian-refugees-and-the-amen-corner/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
