Syria: Do you support NATO/Trump or Putin/Assad?

“1)  Do you support the Trump/NATO crusade or the Putin crusade?

A: Yes I support the U.S. action.

2) Is Trump’s latest intervention policy justified or unjustified?

A: Justified. You cannot sit ideally by and watch continued systematic violence against civilians and not respond as a Democracy. The previous administration was indecisive and allowed the death of tens of thousands of innocents. That’s isn’t a political statement that’s a factual one.

3) Will the Middle East be split by China, Russia and Iran, if the US ceases to intervene?

A: Yes. They all have a stake in the conflict. China, Russia and Iran benefit financial and strategically from siding with these regimes.

4)  Why should the US protect and serve the interest of Middle Eastern countries who secretly defame and hate US intervention policy? Shouldn’t Europe take the pie considering they’re more dependent on foreign oil exports from the Middle East and have a larger Muslim integration-population?

A: As Winston Churchill correctly stated “ Countries do not have friends they have interests.” With a few exceptions, Europe (i.e. the EU) is an indecisive, impotent group of countries. They are trying to retain their high ideals of socialistic unity with mankind while ignoring the reality of the dangers in their own backyards.”

Walter Donway.

(He is a writer on political economy and was a founding trustee of The Atlas Society. He graduated cum laude from Brown University with a degree combining history, political science, philosophy, and literature. He was business/finance reporter for The Worcester Telegram and program officer, program director, and publications director for The Commonwealth Fund and The Dana Foundation. His articles on political economy appeared in the Wall Street Journal among other media networks)

Carter was a restrainer.  The Bushes was a lungers.  Obama was a restrainer.  Trump seems to be a lunger. Who has done better, the restrainers or the lungers?

Syed Qamar Afzal Rizvi.

(His research interests focus on the international relations, particularly with reference to the EU’s affairs, the United Nations affairs, the US foreign policy and prevention of conflict-studies. He contributed to the publications to the Daily Dawn (a leading English newspaper) and the Pakistan Observer (an Islamabad-based English daily)

“A-1: As far as the issue of Trump/Nato or the Putin military adventurism is concerned, one can reasonably argue that the incorporation of the hard power doctrine via Trump’s Nato or via Putin’s forces shall not pave the way for a lasting peace in Syria or Middle east. Instead of supporting the policy of military solution, I would like to advocate a policy of liberal synergy based on a Middle eastern metanoia. There is ample evidence gathered and collected from the US intervention in Iraq in 2003 that an American policy of intervention on the Middle Eastern soiled has upped the ante. “Putin intends to start the post-Obama chapter in Syria on his terms, confronting the new American administration with the fait accompli of [Assad] regime victory in Aleppo,” writes Fabrice Balanche of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “  

On the diplomatic front, the new Turkey-Russia-Iran alliance threatens to marginalise other outside actors.” Whereas the Trump administration’s current action in Syria shows a hawkish US’s paradigm in the region. The latest incident, which comes at a very odd time – just days after the White House it will no longer pursue the ouster of Assad, cementing the Syrian leader’s resolve not to do anything to infuriate the US administration – means Trump is faced with the same dilemma that faced his predecessor: whether to openly challenge Moscow and risk deep involvement in a Middle East war by seeking to punish Assad for using banned weapons, or compromise and accept the Syrian leader remaining in power at the risk of looking weak.

A-2: As for Trump’s intervention doctrine, I would like to solicit the point of view that this trump-fostered intervention may not be justifiable since this kind of Monro doctrine sow seeds of hatred and antagonism in the heart and minds of the local inhabitants, the ARABS. To counter- examine this hypothesis, we can go back to the annals of war history and richly get the information that these kinds of western interventions, particularly in the post Cold War era have produced no positive results.

But it is unfortunate that Hawkish Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are pressing the Trump administration to escalate military efforts to protect the Syrian people against President Bashar Assad. “As part of a broader strategy, we urge the President to take greater military action to achieve our objectives, including grounding the Syrian air force and establishing safe havens inside Syria to protect Syrians,” the senators said in a joint statement on last Tuesday.

Apparently for the last few decades in the Middle East, the policy of western powers — led by the United States — has been to ensure the flow of oil; maintain stable and secure allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf States, Egypt, and Israel; and maintain military and economic influence when needed. But in reality to meet these ends the US administrations have committed some blunders, thereby making the region towards dismemberment. And if the Trump’s administration would not learn from the past mistakes, it would be an irony for both America and the people in the Middle east.

A-3: it goes without saying that today Middle east is a hot bed of tug between multilateral stake holders. This is not a middle east representing an era of bipolarity once experienced during the years of the Cold War period. Today, Middle east seems to depict a clash between the centripetal and centrifugal forces. The nature of clash is multi-complex. Though presently, Syria is the nucleus of the conflict yet not resolved with prudence and political or diplomatic sagacity, the crisis may entrap the whole middle east. Although Russian-Iranian bilateral are complicated, one thing is clear: Iran has proven to be an asset for Russia in Syria and acts as a hedge against Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and the Middle East region remain key suppliers of natural oil and gas to the People’s Republic.

But after 2011, when China lost millions in the likes of war-torn Libya and Syria, it began to pen a slew of deals with alternative providers, particularly in North America. China conducted its first joint counterterrorism drills with Saudi Arabia in the southern Chinese city of Chongqing. It’s been doing the same with other Muslim-majority Asian nations — mostly members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — over the past few years. Arab politicos and intellectuals have long decried a precarious U.S.-Arab partnership, premised disproportionately on just two things: Ever-fluctuating oil prices and the ebb-and-flow of counterterrorism.

China promised more than that. Since 2013, Beijing had championed its “One Belt, One Road” (一带一路）policy of promoting trade with historical Silk Road trade partners in faraway West Asia. But the rousing slogan hasn’t been met with much innovation in China’s trade agenda.

A-4: Yes it is correct to say that US must not indulge into the Middle east via a military war. And of course, the European Union diplomacy must be active to resolve the ongoing crisis. France has got deep influence in the ARAB lands. Despite the fact that Britain has left the EU, the British diplomacy may also be of paramount consideration to use its leverage in the said crisis. Germany may also play an instrumental role in engaging itself with the Arab counterparts. Although Europe and the United States have regularly competed for influence in the Middle East, the EU’s growing weight in the region, instead of fueling a new transatlantic face-off, has in fact contributed to improving relations. The EU needs to adjust to the new geopolitical landscape created by the Syrian conflict by recalibrating its position vis-à-vis other major players, contributing to regional security issues, and standing firm on its values. It needs to use its large foreign policy toolbox in a much better-coordinated manner under the leadership of its foreign policy high representative.

A-5: Here, I would like to add that US’s unwarranted invasion on Iraq in 2003 has been the root cause of promoting political, economic and democratic instability in the Middle eastern region. The Bush doctrine of exporting democracies via regime change caused great turmoil in the region. These kinds of western policies created insecurities, resentment and provocation. Actually, these policies have fired back. Assad’s adamant hold over Damascus reflects this notion. Let the people be the right judges to exterminate or admit these governments, not otherwise America holds this responsibility of examining whose government is good or worse.”

Andre Vltchek

 (He is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novels, he also produces documentaries. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world)

“While reading Jaime Ortega’s contextualization of the question, I was struck by the very framing of the question, which expresses the essence of the West’s approach to the rest of the world. This approach is the source of innumerable conflicts and millions of deaths throughout time and space. It consists of many components, coalescing into a complex nod of motives behind the West interventionist policies. One of the components is rationalism, the supreme principle that guides Western reasoning and acting since the Enlightenment. At the basis of rationalism is the conviction that the human being with its ratio, mind, is the Supreme Being and a Master of Universe. The Human Being, through the mind, strives to know the surrounding world, in the process minimizing the danger of unknown. Unknown generates fear, so the mind fights it with the light of knowledge. Not to fear the unknown requires faith, trust into God, which the rationalism rejects. The Western world, or at least, its ruling elite and bureaucratic machinery, have become largely secularized. The science dethroned faith. We do not live in peace with the world; we manage it. And the question that we pose when it comes to countries, which do not fall into the Western model of society, is not ‘what it is” and ‘let it be.’ The question that we pose is “how to manage it.”

The technological superiority of Western civilization endowed Westerners with a dangerous, indeed criminal conviction that the Western rationalism and the Western model of society are the best and should be emulated by others. To me, such approach is arrogant and doomed to fail because it ignores the complexity of concrete historical and geographical circumstances and the richness of civilizational diversity that they produced.

The same technological superiority allowed Westerners to colonize the world, to impose the colonial administration, and to plunder the land and people of colonies. The richness of the Western world comes to a large extent from the colonialist looting of technologically less developed nations.

The political and economic configurations of the world we live in today are the product of European colonialism. And although the former colonies are now de jure free and independent, they remain an economic appendage of the former colonial powers, providing natural resources and cheap labor to transnational capital. And the Western complex of superiority still defines the foreign policy of Americans and their loyal Western allies.

Politics are an expression of economic interests. This essential truth is often masked by sanctimonious moralizing of Western politicians on the violation of human rights in non-Western countries and the outrage over the ‘dictatorship’ of forms of government that do not follow the liberal model of democracy. Economic interests drive political actions. All the wars in the Middle East, which the United States and their allies conducted or sponsored in the past and are conducting at present, is about securing a stable access to oil and gas, the main source of our comfortable living in the West.

The West’s policy in the Middle East is a complex nod of political, economic, and moral reasons. To understand West’s actions in this region, one has to look into the interplay of these reasons, not just isolating economic interests, for example. Looking at American foreign politics solely through the perspective of energy resources will fail to take into account one of the most powerful motivations – the genuine belief of American politicians in the superiority of the American democracy and the desire to export it to the non-Western world. However, because of the incapacity, inability, or unwillingness to understand the Other, this desire has led to disastrous results in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine.

Democracy cannot be imposed. It is an oxymoron. Democracy presupposes the free will of people. If democracy is forced upon people through predatory internationals loans which require the destructive economic reforms or through bombings of cities and villages, this is not a democracy. This is a neoliberal imperial interventionism. Democracy can only be developed through education and empowerment of ordinary citizens. But this requires years and years of painstaking work, patience, humility, and love, which hold no market value, whereas loans and weapons bring huge profits.

It is exactly the interventionist policies of Western powers that stirred the storm in the Middle East. Driven by their arrogant ignorance of the complexity of the region and the economic interests in oil and gas, the US attacked Iraq using a blatant lie as a pretext. I will never forget General Colin Powell with a test tube which allegedly was a proof of Saddam Hussein’s arsenals of chemical weapons. After the invasion, hundreds of thousands of deaths, destroyed infrastructure, the emergence of ISIS, Americans were never able to produce one convincing proof of their claims in the UN Security Council. It turned out to be one big criminal lie.

I do not think that Russians want a piece of the slice in the Middle East. For one simple reason – they have enough oil and gas. I think Russians had enough of Western arrogance and catastrophic interventionism. They want to prevent the destruction of Syria and an enormous cataclysm which would lead, over again, to millions of refugees, to the emergence of terrorist groups, and to the utterly impotent Western reaction to it. Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov have repeatedly stated that the regime change in Syria should be decided by the Syrian people, through a democratic election, not through the external powers’ handpicking of their favorite as the new president. Russians are interested in maintaining peace in Syria. And they did not invade Syria like Americans did in Iraq. They did not send massive troops on the ground. They came on the invitation of the Syrian President.

I find Trump’s decision to bomb Syrian army under the false pretext that it launched a chemical attack against civilians impulsive and irresponsible. First of all, the chemical weapons that Assad regime possessed was destroyed in 2013 under the supervision of UN experts. Russians played a key role in convincing Assad to do it. So the version that Syrian army launched that attack in Idlib province of Syria is highly improbable. Americans jumped at that conclusion hours after the attack happened, and without any serious investigation declared that it was the terrible crime committed by the bloody regime. The news about that attack made the headlines of all Western MSM, while a more deadly and terrible crime by Syrian ‘opposition’ suicide bombers, who attacked buses with civilians, women, and children in western Syria villages, did not receive such a full coverage. It is yet another example of the ideologically eschewed bias of Western MSM who readily talk for hours about alleged crimes of the regime and do not mention the gross violations of human rights by the so-called Syrian opposition.

It is difficult to accept facts that do not inscribe into the well-established framing of the world, in which the all-powerful West dictates the rules of the game, appoints and takes down heads of the states that cannot oppose the West, designates villains and destroys them.

It is difficult to accept for the American elites that the world is becoming multipolar and that they are losing their grip on it. Americans are going through a deep and fundamental identity crisis, triggered by the realization that they are not anymore the only superpower that decides the destinies of the world. American imperialism as the foundation of American identity has been challenged by emerging alternative centers of power, such as BRICS. It is a very painful process, but Americans have to go through it if we are to live in a safer, more democratic world. After all, democracy is about pluralism, equality, and the respect of differences. It is about a peaceful resolution of conflicts where one genuinely tries to understand the Other, without bullying or aggressing the opponent. We would all benefit from a diversity of various forms of governments and cultures, not just the dictatorship of false neoliberal democracy, imposed on technologically weaker countries through predatory loans or criminal bombings.

Western colonialism and post-colonial interventionism produced disastrous results, much worse than if the non-Western countries were left to develop themselves without intervention from abroad. It is time for the West to withdraw. I think not a single external power should have a slice of Middle East. Countries of the region should settle their disputes among themselves, with the West acting as a non-partisan, honest broker. Unfortunately, I am fully aware that such scenario is unrealistic.”

Jaime Ortega-Simo.

(The Daily Journalist president and founder)

“I don’t support Donald Trump on this particular issue and I think it’s a very unwise move to attack Assad – a starch defender of religious minorities in the region, as he himself is an Alawite. When Trump ran for office a few months ago, one of his noticeable campaign promises was to stay away from bullying Assad’s regime – a promise not shared by his archrival Hillary Clinton who promoted a neo-conservative scheme to straighten the mess she help create.

There is only one reason why western countries intervene in Middle Eastern affairs, and has nothing to do with friendships or democracy; unlike the past where the Middle East was a schoolyard for religious control, as we approach a post-religious era, it is all about petro-money. Thus the reason why Trump’s first interventionist move sparked in Syria and not Ukraine, which continues under the direct siege of Russian military forces masked on civilian uniforms protected under Putin’s umbrella. I strongly suspect, countries like Taiwan and Israel will not be secured from China, Russia and Iran in the near future, if the United States loses military grip globally as it did during Obama’s administration.

Dealing with the Middle East is like dealing with an immovable object – if you cannot move something, then you must blow it up (I don’t mean blowing the Middle East, but sectarian violence). No country has ever seeded democracy on the Middle East and succeeded in reforming the region. Only one empire was 100 percent successful in quenching all the havoc on the region; the Mongol Empire on their quest to harvest the region without tare dealt brutally with sectarian violence to try to prove a point to all surrounding nations after suffering Islamic extremism of its own.

If the west wants to police the Middle East and deal with ISIS once and for all, it must adopt a ‘neo-mongolist’ attitude in the region to weed-out sectarian tare, otherwise it is completely ridiculous and irrational to believe Western Democracy will solve the conflict with its current international model. The reason why Russia is in Syria is because it knows it can control the problem with force and gain territory and political alliance with autocratic leaderships proven to work in the region. The generals fighting the counterinsurgency in Libya and Egypt have his support, and don’t trust neither NATO nor the US.

I don’t like Putin as he is the epitome of fake news and anti-journalism; however, the ousting of dictators in the Middle East was one of the most stupid and destructive events to engulf the Middle East in many decades, perhaps centuries – and it wasn’t created by Putin’s neo-soviet mentally to expand militarily worldwide, but by US interventionism. The US has completely torn the Middle East from the inside out. The US attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, but not main Islamist donor states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait to name a few? Geopolitical democracy is as joke, and I learned all I needed to learn of democracy after watching how the western world dealt with Rwanda.

The US is simply ‘jealous’ Russia decided to intervene in the Middle East. The US threw the toy away with its conflictive policy in Syria and now wants it back as soon as the ‘new kid’ in town arrived. The Russian’s despite their imperialistic agenda, did not launch airstrikes against Iraq when US forces were illegally present in the area. The US reaction against Russia and especially against Assad is completely unjustified. The truth is Syria is a complete fiasco and either the Kurdish, the Turks, Assad’s Regime, ISIS or Russia will control the region – the truth might be the same in Libya and possibly in Afghanistan in the near future as China ventures closer to Baluchistan. The US now feels protective of human rights, not because it cares for the Syrians, but to tell Russia not stretch its arm to expand in the area — the chemical weapons in only an excuse to spank Russia.

Trump is only going to aggravate the problem in Ukraine, as Sergey Shoygu — the Russian minister of defense — will push Putin to not give up the notion of ‘Russian empire’ and its inspirations to counter US interventionism. China watches the situation and would love for the US and Russia to annihilate each-other in the region while it expands. A lot of experts claim the relationship of Russia and China is great based on their latest energy agreement – I beg to differ, just wait till China and Russia’s interest clashes on Euro-Asia or the Middle East, as they both expand outwards to challenge US supremacy.

Lastly, chemical weapons cause death like any other weapon. Death is death regardless of the situation, how the UN resolution classifies justified interventionism based on death is quite arbitrary. I don’t see how chemical weapons violate international law, but an 1970 AKA 47 with oxidize bullets or a tele-guided drone play by the rules of engagement. I don’t understand, death is death.”