Through their reactive kneejerk policies over the last few years, policies that conform both to their inherent nature and parochial interests, Russia, Iran, the Assad regime, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and all other Middle Eastern regimes managed to create a situation in Syria where the United States had no choice but to intervene to midwife a process that will eventually secure the interests of most of these regimes, most of which will survive the current mayhem with little or no change.
Personally, I think that mass atrocities and beheadings is ISIS’ way of negotiating with the Americans over the issue of recognition of their de facto state. Because without recognition, even if unofficial, the state that ISIS is creating means little. With unofficial recognition, ISIS can make billions rather than millions of dollars from the sales of oil under their control, even if they have to sell it on the down-and-low. Recognition also allows ISIS the time it needs to consolidate its hold on the territories currently under its control, and to govern.
A scene from Deir Ezzor City, Syria, now under ISIS control. AFP PHOTO / AHMAD ABOUD
Some people have enough moral sense to criticize Israel, but not to criticize anything that Assad and his supporters have done and are still doing. They see ISIS stoning women and chasing away Christians, but they ignore all evidence and testimony of torture, mass rape and mass murder in Assad’s concentration camps. They ignore evidence of collaboration between ISIS and Assad. They ignore Iran’s role in the current mayhem in Syria, Iraq and Gaza, and advocate engagement with her. They defend Russia and ignore her duplicity in war crimes in Syria and Ukraine. Clearly these people cannot truly be concerned with human rights. Their stand by the Palestinians at this stage seems motivated more by ideology than any sense of moral solidarity – an ideology that put Israel and America, and sometimes the West as a whole, at the center of all evil designs in the world; an ideology that, in essence, covets the power that these countries have and longs to appropriate it, rather than be truly dedicated to holding all equally accountable for their misdeeds.
The debris of a jet engine from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is seen near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk. (IMAGE: REUTERS/MAXIM ZMEYEV)
It was not only an airliner that was shut down in Ukraine, but the last vestige of the post-Cold War global order, and the popular myth regarding the containability of “local” conflicts. In today’s hyper-connected world, conflict anywhere is a conflict everywhere, for spillovers are unavoidable and containability a myth.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 