Let’s veto the West’s moral posturing on Syria [View all]

[stockholmer]

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/12054/

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You don’t have to be a supporter of Russia’s and China’s veto (spiked isn’t) to understand why they did what they did. The UN resolution condemned the Assad regime’s use of extreme force against protesters and called for a ‘Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system’. Both Russia and China have fairly deep political and business relations with Assad-ruled Syria and they clearly decided, through a process of interest-driven foreign policy-making, that it would be potentially destabilising for Syria’s rulers, and by extension for them, if international pressure were put on Syria to undergo regime change. Chinese officials have said that they don’t support Assad himself, and are critical of his recent actions, but they felt the UN resolution was rushed, with a vote being forced ‘despite serious differences’, and so they vetoed.

Yet listening to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and British foreign secretary William Hague, and perusing the media coverage of Russia’s and China’s behaviour, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had invaded Syria and actually joined in the Assad regime’s bombing of Homs and other cities. Sounding like a sixth-former who has just signed up to Amnesty International, Hague accused http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9063214/New-wave-of-bloody-attacks-kills-50-in-Homs-as-Hague-warns-Russia-and-China-have-blood-on-their-hands.html Russia and China of having ‘blood on their hands’. ‘How many more Syrians need to die before Russia and China allow the UN Security Council to act?’ he cried. Clinton described Russia’s and China’s veto as a ‘travesty’ and said they now ‘bear responsibility for the horrors that are occurring on the ground in Syria’. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16896783 Likewise, French foreign minister Alain Juppe said they bear ‘grave historical responsibility’ for the bloodshed in Syria.

Don’t be sucked in by these grand-sounding condemnations of Russia’s and China’s alleged complicity in Assad’s war of attrition against his opponents – and not only because the condemnations are coming from the three permanent members of the Security Council who have actually used extreme force in the Middle East and north Africa in recent years and who therefore have, to use Hague’s adolescent phrase, ‘blood on their hands’. No, the real reason Russia’s and China’s actions appear so alien, so ‘incomprehensible’, to Western observers is because they are quite explicitly motored by geopolitical interests rather than by the fashion amongst Western foreign-policy departments for teenage moral bluster and highly changeable international positioning. The creeping consensus that Russia and China have inflamed instability in Syria glosses over the fact that today’s unhinged Western foreign policy-making, with its elevation of the short-term PR needs of Western leaders over any consideration of ‘the long game’, is far more destabilising than the occasional veto.

The truth is that there is more logic to Russia’s and China’s actions over Syria than there is to Hague’s and Clinton’s. The behaviour of Western foreign-policy departments in relation to Syria confirms that there is now a massive disconnect, a gaping chasm if you like, between the West’s geopolitical interests and its geopolitical behaviour. So a couple of years ago, America, Britain and France were courting the Assad regime, believing, in the words of Hillary Clinton, that Assad was ‘a reformer’. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/hillary-clintons-uncredible-statement-on-syria/2011/04/01/AFWPEYaC_blog.html Under George W Bush, Syria was described as ‘evil’, of course, but following the election of Barack Obama in 2008 America’s attitude towards Assad became more conciliatory. Former presidential candidate John Kerry was sent to meet Assad, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/06/090406fa_fact_hersh#ixzz1lbm0QAK5 enthusiastically describing him as someone who ‘wants to engage with the West’, and in 2009 America appointed its first ambassador to Syria in five years. Meanwhile, in 2008 French president Nicolas Sarkozy invited Assad to become a member of the European Union’s Mediterranean Union and entertained his wife in Paris. As a news report in 2010 put it, ‘Assad is now courted by the West’. http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/17/syria-assad-pariah-power-broker?cat=commentisfree&type=article

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Flashback from Democracy Now With Amy Goodman:

General Wesley Clark On Pre-Planned Invasion (post 9-11) Taking Out 7 Countries (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran)