Page 1 of
3 COMMENT Covering Syria: The information
war By Aisling Byrne
The
narrative that has been constructed by the Western
mainstream media on Syria may seem to be
self-evident from the scenes presented on
television, but it is a narrative duplicitously
promoted and coordinated so as to conceal and
facilitate the regime-change project that is part
of the war on Iran.
What we are seeing is a new
stage of information war intentionally constructed
and cast as a simplistic narrative of a struggle
for human rights and democracy so as deliberately
to exclude other interpretations and any
geo-strategic motivation.
The
narrative, as CNN puts it, is in essence this:
"The vast majority of reports from the ground
indicate that government forces are killing
citizens in an attempt to wipe out civilians
seeking [President Bashar] al-Assad's ouster" -
the aim being
precisely to elicit a
heart-wrenching emotional response in Western
audiences that trumps all other considerations and
makes the call for Western/Gulf intervention to
effect regime change.
But it is a narrative based
on distortion, manipulation, lies and videotape.
In the first months, the
narrative was of unarmed protesters being shot by
Syrian forces. This then evolved into one of armed
insurgents reluctantly "being provoked into taking
up arms", as US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton explained, to defend peaceful protesters.
It was also a narrative that
from the outset, according to a recent report in
Time magazine, that the US has facilitated by
providing training, support and equipment to
Syrian opposition "cyber-warriors".
Reports confirmed by leading
Syrian opposition leaders in April 2011 reveal
that in addition to cyber-training, weapons and
money from Syrian exiles, as well as from a "major
Arab Gulf country" and a Lebanese political party,
were being distributed to "young demonstrators".
The former head of Russian intelligence, Yevgeny
Primakov, similarly noted that the Syrian conflict
"started with armed revolts against the
authorities, not peaceful demonstrations".
Ironically, one of the most
accurate descriptions of the sectarian conflict we
are witnessing in Syria comes from an assessment
by the neoconservative Brookings Institute in its
March 2012 report "Assessing Options for Regime
Change in Syria", one option being for "the United
States [to] fight a "clean" war ... and leave the
dirty work on the ground to the FSA [Free Syrian
Army], perhaps even obviating a massive commitment
to Iraq-style nation-building".
"Let
the Arabs do it," echoed Israeli President Shimon
Peres. "Do it yourself and the UN will support
you." This point was not lost on one leading
Turkish commentator, who noted that US Senator
John McCain "said that there would be no American
boots on the ground in Syria. That means we Turks
will have to spill our precious blood to get what
McCain and others want in the States."
In
the wake of the failures at state-building in
Afghanistan and Iraq, direct intervention, with
all the responsibilities this would entail, would
not go down well in cash-strapped Western nations.
Better to get others to do the "dirty work" -
pursue "regime change by civil war".
"The
United States, Europe and the Gulf states ... are
starving the regime in Damascus and feeding the
opposition. They have sanctioned Syria ... and are
busy shoveling money and helping arms supplied by
the Gulf get to the rebels," Joshua Landis,
director of the Center of Middle Eastern Studies,
wrote in Foreign Policy in June.
With
regional allies prepared to do the "dirty work" of
providing increasingly sophisticated weapons
clearly geared for purposes other than
"self-defense", and the FSA and its jihadist
allies doing the "dirty work" within Syria (their
salaries paid by Saudi Arabia), the US and
European nations can proffer their clean hands by
limiting support to communications equipment,
intelligence and humanitarian aid, and of course
to providing the moral posturing required to
topple the Syrian system and implant a regime
hostile to Iran and friendly to Israel. Having
"clean hands" enables the US, France and Britain
to pose as abiding by UN standards, while at the
same time flouting the UN Charter by promoting an
attack on a member state.
Time
magazine reported last month that the
administration of US President Barack Obama "has
tiptoed across an invisible line. [It] said it
will not actively support the Syrian opposition in
its bid to oust Assad ... [but] as US officials
have revealed, the administration has been
providing media-technology training and support to
Syrian dissidents by way of small non-profits like
the Institute for War & Peace Reporting and
Freedom House.
"Viral videos of alleged
atrocities," noted Time, "have made Assad one of
the most reviled men on the planet, helping turn
the Arab League against him and embarrassing his
few remaining allies almost daily."
It
is a position that reeks of hypocrisy: as US
columnist Barbara Slavin notes, "Without a UN
Security Council mandate, the prospects for US
military intervention in Syria are minimal ... the
provision of communications gear frees up others
to provide weapons."
A US official quoted by
Associated Press was more frank: Washington's
equipment and medical supplies to the opposition
"can now be easily augmented with weapons from
other donors. Smuggling lines are smuggling lines.
We use the same donkeys," he said, pointing out
that routes are in essence the same for bandages
as they are for bullets.
And
while various Western governments are helping
"document crimes" committed by Syrian forces,
these same governments have refused to investigate
their own killings of civilians in attacks by the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Libya. NATO
"created its own definition for 'confirmed'
deaths: only a death that NATO itself investigated
and corroborated could be called confirmed",
enabling the alliance to conclude: "We have no
confirmed reports of civilian casualties."
Britain was the only country
involved in the bombings to conduct its own
inquiry. Its report accepted "that coalition
forces did their best to prevent and minimize
civilian casualties ... We commend them for this
approach."
For every tragic story like
journalist Marie Colvin's final dispatch before
she was killed while embedded for British media
with the FSA ("In Babr Amr. Sickening. Cannot
understand how the world can stand by. Watched a
baby die today. Shrapnel: doctors could do
nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved
until he stopped. Feeling Helpless"), there are
other similar tragedies, committed by the
insurgents, that are rarely reported in the
mainstream Western press.
You
won't read in the mainstream press of foreign
jihadists increasingly pouring into Syria to fight
their holy war; you won't read that some
ultraconservative Salafi sheikhs in Saudi Arabia
are running their own military network inside
Syria; you won't read how Assad's support during
the 14-month crisis has if anything increased in
light of the insecurity gripping the country; you
won't read comments like those of the Lebanese
Christian Maronite patriarch who said that while
"Syria, like other countries, needs reforms which
the people are demanding ... the closest thing to
democracy [in the Arab world] is Syria".
You
won't read how the head of the opposition in
Turkey, a former ambassador to Washington, Faruk
Logoglu, has said that what Turkey is doing
hosting armed FSA fighters and allowing them to
carry out attacks in Syria is "is against all
international norms; against all neighborly
relations ... It is a basic rule that countries
must respect the sovereignty of others."
You
won't read how armed insurgents used the Arab
League observer mission's ceasefire to "reinforce
themselves and bring supplies from Lebanon,
knowing the regime would be limited in its ability
to obstruct them at that time", or how they have
used the Kofi Annan plan to prepare for larger
attacks.
While we have seen extensive
demonization of Assad, his wife and family, with
the president depicted recently in the British
press bathing in blood, you won't read articles
demonizing the Saudi or Qatari regimes, or
highlighting the hundreds of millions of dollars
they have poured into political parties and
groups, particularly Salafists, across the region
in their "counter-revolution" against change; or
the recent declaration by the official Saudi Mufti
for all churches in the Arabian Peninsula to be
demolished (which was not covered by a single
Western mainstream news outlet); or as a senior
Sunni political figure told me recently, the more
than 23,000 detainees in Saudi prisons, a majority
of whom (a recent report notes 90%) have degrees
(to be fair, Chatham House did comment on this in
a recent report that this "is indicative of the
prevalence of a university education").
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
