Page 3 of
3 COMMENT Covering Syria: The information
war By Aisling
Byrne
What we are witnessing is a new
generation of warfare - an information war where,
by using what is in effect propaganda, the aim is
to construct a consensual consciousness to provide
overwhelming public support for regime change.
Not to be outdone by Senator McCain
(described by a leading US foreign-policy magazine
as one of the "three amigos ... who have rarely
found a country they didn't want to bomb or
invade"), The Guardian itself noted in March: "If
you think Guardian readers are a peace-loving
bunch, think again. In an online poll, more than
83% [13,200 votes] have so far backed John
McCain's call to launch air strikes against
Syria."
While The Guardian describes the
so-called shabihain what
appears to be a piece of
pure propaganda - "according to demonstrators" it
interviewed - as "large lines of plain-clothed or
khaki-clad men and boys armed with
submachine-guns" who appear "awaiting an excuse to
intervene" and who fire on protesters, a senior
European diplomat based in the region told me that
it is not in fact clear who the shabiha
are, or whether they actually exist.
The
diplomat told me of an instance when the UN
monitors were filmed by activists as they were
inspecting an insurgent-blocked subsidiary road;
they later saw footage of themselves at the same
ditch on the international news spliced in such a
way as to make it appear that there had been
bodies in an excavated area and that the UN
monitors were watching bodies being removed,
whereas in fact it was no more than a ditch across
a road that they had been filming.
Human
rights are a fundamental component of this
information war that is a cover for regime change.
By in effect taking a one-sided approach to events
in Syria, leading human-rights groups like Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch are,
willingly or unwillingly, being used as an
integral part of this information war on Syria.
Despite publishing the odd report on
abuses, torture and killings perpetrated by the
insurgents, they cast the conflict in Syria as a
simple one-sided case of aggressors and victims,
lamenting, along the lines of John Bolton and
McCain, "Why is the world doing nothing?" Amnesty
International's Eyes on Syria site, for example,
exclusively documents "the scale of torture and
ill-treatment by security forces, army and
pro-government armed gangs", harassment of
"pro-reform" Syrians, and deaths in government
custody.
A notable exception has been the
International Committee of the Red Cross, which
has continually criticized the militarization of
humanitarian assistance. When former French
president Nicolas Sarkozy and Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for the
creation of "humanitarian corridors", the ICRC
publicly criticized a move that would inevitably
involve the deployment of armed forces to enforce
the zones.
The use of propaganda as a tool
in war is an old one. During World War I, in the
wake of British propaganda of "babies [with] their
hands cut off ... impaled on bayonets ... loudly
spoken of in buses and public places ... paraded,
not as an isolated instance of an atrocity, but as
... a common practice", a member of Parliament
wrote: "In Parliament there was the usual evasion
... the only evidence given was 'seen by
witnesses'."
What we see now in coverage
of Syria has echoes of 2003 - Western governments
and the Western media accept at face value the
claims of exiles living in the West. Paul Pillar,
a former official of the US Central Intelligence
Agency now at Georgetown University in Washington,
notes that the neocon case for arming the Syrian
opposition "is a continuation of the same patterns
of neoconservative thinking that led to [president
George W] Bush's war [on Iraq]. There is the same
wishful thinking substituting for careful analysis
about consequences."
Charged with defining
the future of warfare, the US deputy chief of
staff for intelligence in 1997 defined this
"conflict between information masters and
information victims ... We are already masters of
information warfare ... we write the script," he
wrote. "Societies that ... cannot manage the flow
of information simply will not be competitive ...
Emotions, rather than strategy, will set the terms
of struggles." Against such an onslaught, there is
little the Syrian government can do to defend
itself - Assad has already said that Syria cannot
win the media war with the West.
As Syria
tips into the next more violent stage of sectarian
war, with the SNC/FSA and their foreign backers
increasing the ante with possible supplies if
heavy weapons by the US, leading to more violent
attacks, and the Syrian government (with its
Republican Guard and the Syrian Army's powerful
4th Division still held in reserve) cracking down
on "all armed groups", we should expect to see the
"crusaders" in the mainstream media follow suit
with their onslaught on Syrian government
"atrocities" - massacres, use of children as human
shields, claims of the imminent collapse of the
Syrian government, etc.
But we would do
well to acknowledge that there are two competing
narratives out there. The BBC acknowledged
recently that while "video filed by the opposition
... may provide some insight into the story on the
ground ... stories are never black and white -
[they are] often shades of grey", and Channel 4's
Alex Thomson's near escape after being set up by
the Free Syria Army prompted him to say: "Do not
for one moment believe that my experience with the
rebels in al-Qusair was a one-off." It makes you
wonder, he wrote, "who else has had this
experience when attempting to find out what is
going on in rebel-held Syria". The narrative,
however, complete with myths, has established a
virtual reality that is now set in stone.
Sixteen months into the conflict, it is
too little, too late to acknowledge that there are
"shades of grey" at play in the Syrian context:
for 16 months, The Guardian, Channel 4, the BBC
and others have presented the conflict, using
largely spurious "evidence", in exactly the
black-and-white terms that increasingly people are
now questioning. Peter Oborne, writing some months
ago in The Daily Telegraph, warned that by
presenting the conflict as a struggle between the
regime and "the people", British Prime Minister
David Cameron is either "poorly briefed or he is
coming dangerously close to a calculated deception
of the British public". The Takfiri jihadists
and their backers have been allowed to define and
dominate the crisis. The crisis is now symbolized
by car bombings, assassinations, mutilations and
atrocities. This empowering of the extreme end of
the opposition spectrum - albeit a minority - has
in effect silenced and pushed to the sidelines the
middle ground - that is, most of the internal
opposition. One key internal opposition leader
recently told Conflicts Forum that, like other
leaders, he has had close relatives assassinated
by the Salafists. The internal opposition has
acknowledged the stark choice between two
undesirables - either a dialogue that currently is
not realizable, or the downfall of Syria, as
Al-Akhbar, one of the leading independent
newspapers in the region, recently reported.
With weapons of war, words and ideology,
the self-appointed "Friends of Syria" have done
everything they can to tiptoe around the UNSC and
to undercut all attempts at an intra-Syrian
political dialogue and a negotiated end to the
conflict, of which the Annan mission is the latest
attempt. The West/Saudi/Qatari "dirty war" on
Syria applies as much to its (dis)information
campaign as it does to getting others to fight and
kill for them.
As was no doubt the
intention, Clinton's "spin" that Russia was
supplying attack helicopters to Syria went a long
way - the US Congress, the British government and
the mainstream media all fell into line calling
for action. A member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee wrote to the US defense secretary
calling the Russian state arms firm "an enabler of
mass murder in Syria", and Cobra, the British
government's emergency security committee, met
several times.
It turned out, however,
that what the New York Times described as "the
Obama administration's sharpest criticism yet of
Russia's support for the Syrian government" was,
according to a senior Defense Department official,
"a little spin" put on the story by Clinton so as
"to put the Russians in a difficult position". It
was three helicopters of "marginal use
militarily", explained the Times, returning from
routine servicing in Russia.
For their
part, the mainstream media bear some
responsibility for the slide toward sectarian war
in Syria, the victims of which, as always, are
civilians. The media's conceptualization of
victims and oppressors has in effect eliminated
the space for negotiation. Lavrov has warned:
"Either we gather everyone with influence at the
negotiating table or once again we depart into
ideology, where it is declared shamelessly that
everything is the fault of the regime, while
everyone else are angels and therefore the regime
should be changed.
"The way the Syrian
crisis is resolved", he advised, "will play an
important role in the world tomorrow; whether the
world will be based on the UN Charter, or a place
where might makes right."
Aisling
Byrne is projects coordinator with Conflicts
Forum and is based in Beirut.
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