Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are already intervening in Syria. Why aren't we?
By Michael Weiss World Last updated: February 6th, 2012
Michael, I swear we are getting slaughtered.
I had asked Alaa al-Sheikh, the spokesman for the Khaled Bin Waleed brigade of Syrian rebels, to give me an overview of whats happened in the last 72 hours in Homs. He said that 42 people had been killed in the city of Rastan alone, although he admits that mention of statistics at this stage is irrelevant: There are bodies that could not be documented because they were completely mutilated and disfigured.
For those who havent had lunch today, I encourage you to see up-close what Russian weapons and Iranian and Hezbollah military consultants have helped accomplish in Syria. This video is of a young boy in Homs. His entire lower jaw has been removed from his head and Im told that this is more watchable version of the footage; an earlier reel went round where he hadnt been anaesthetised yet.
Vladimir Putins copper-bottomed support for Bashar al-Assad at the UN Security Council can be taken in one of two ways. There will be those who claim that here was one organised crime lord pledging solidarity with his human ferret counterpart. The two men really do understand each other and are even beginning to replicate each others c.v.s. Assad is doing to Syria what Putin did to Chechnya a decade ago and under the same pretext of combating terrorists. Moscow had its dodgy apartment bombings in 1999, blamed with credible evidence on the FSB, to justify the razing of Grozny. Damascus has had its spate of suicide bombings lately, blamed by the regime on the following actors: al-Qaida, the United States, Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Syrian opposition and loyalists of former Syrian Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam. Footage showing the mukhabarats theatrics before and after these incidents matters not at all because the Assad regime, with a little help from Russia Today and other Kremlin mouthpieces, has also blamed foreign media for presenting a mere domestic misunderstanding as a full-blown humanitarian crisis.
Taken another way, Putins support for Assad is a foreign policy victory that comes at just the right time for Russia, weeks ahead of a presidential election. The real challengers to the incumbent are not liberal bourgeois figures who cannot get their candidacies registered, but an indulged nationalist far Right which believes that Russia for is for ethnic Russians, and warm-water ports in the Mediterranean are as well. Like Assad, Putin sees foreign conspiracies at every turn. And so the tens of thousands gathered at the weekend at Bolotnaya Square demanding genuine democracy are no match for a narod convinced that runaway corruption and stuffed ballots arent as important as giving Washington and Brussels the finger.
Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Alain Juppe can grumble all they like about travesties at Turtle Bay and the inevitability of Assads fall. Even if they got their toothless Security Council resolution calling for Assads departure, then what? Would he pack up and go quietly? If so, where to? Hows the tabouleh in the Black Sea?
Here is the real travesty of this revolution. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have all been intervening in Syrias internal affairs for ten months now. Meanwhile, the Arab League, the United States and the European Union have all determined that any claim to sovereignty Assad might have had in 2011 is null and void in 2012. What is needed, therefore, is not condemnations, demarches and shuttered embassies but a Western equivalent of intervention in Syria, namely in the form of:
Humanitarian safe areas to provide food, aid and medical supplies to the civilian population and give the various opposition groups a headquarters inside their own country
Advanced weapons and communication devices for the Syrian rebels
A no-fly zone to stop the regime from using its aircraft to conduct reconnaissance, offload security personnel and yes strafe rebel strongholds from the sky.
Elements of the dead Left view a US military presence in the Middle East as more of a menace than a Soviet-style totalitarianism which rapes young boys in front of their fathers and murders newborn infants just for the hell of it. I don't expect them to concede that their anti-imperialist theses are less important than Arab lives. But they have no right to misrepresent the will of the people doing the bleeding and dying. If certain comment editors have difficulty finding Syrians on the ground who want Nato fighter jets overhead, Ill be glad to introduce them to several.
Here is al-Sheikh: As an activist and a coordinator for the Khaled Bin Waleed brigade, I state that we in Homs, Idlib and Damascus suburbs call for unilateral American and British intervention. We also want to improve our relations with the US administration and people after the revolution, but we need you to save us. We are getting slaughtered, save us.
Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are already intervening in Syria. Why aren't we? – Telegraph Blogs