Syria: The Descent Into Holy War

Patrick Cockburn writes:

It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows two men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He hacks with a machete at the neck of a middle-aged man who has been forced to lie in the street with his head on a concrete block. At the end of the film, a soldier, apparently from the Free Syrian Army, holds up the severed heads by their hair in triumph.

The film is being widely watched on YouTube by Syrians, reinforcing their fears that Syria is imitating Iraq's descent into murderous warfare in the years after the US invasion in 2003. It fosters a belief among Syria's non-Sunni Muslim minorities, and Sunnis associated with the government as soldiers or civil servants, that there will be no safe future for them in Syria if the rebels win. In one version of the video, several of which are circulating, the men who are beheaded are identified as officers belonging to the 2.5 million-strong Alawite community. This is the Shia sect to which President Bashar al-Assad and core members of his regime belong. The beheadings, so proudly filmed by the perpetrators, may well convince them that they have no alternative but to fight to the end.

The video underlines a startling contradiction in the policy of the US and its allies. In the past week, 130 countries have recognised the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people. But, at the same time, the US has denounced the al-Nusra Front, the most effective fighting force of the rebels, as being terrorists and an al-Qa'ida affiliate. 

Paradoxically, the US makes almost exactly same allegations of terrorism against al-Nusra as does the Syrian government. Even more bizarrely, though so many states now recognise the National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, it is unclear if the rebels inside Syria do so. Angry crowds in rebel-held areas of northern Syria on Friday chanted "we are all al-Nusra" as they demonstrated against the US decision.

Videos posted on YouTube play such a central role in the propaganda war in Syria that questions always have to be asked about their authenticity and origin. In the case of the beheading video, the details look all too convincing. Nadim Houry, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch in the Middle East and North Africa, has watched the video many times to identify the circumstances, perpetrators and location where the killings took place. He has no doubts about its overall authenticity, but says that mention of one district suggests it might be in Deir el-Zhor (in eastern Syria). But people in the area immediately north of Homs are adamant the beheadings took place there. The victims have not been identified. The first time a version of the film was shown was on pro-government Sama TV on 26 November, but it has been widely viewed on YouTube in Syria only over the past week.

The film begins by showing two middle-aged men handcuffed together sitting on a settee in a house, surrounded by their captors who sometimes slap and beat them. They are taken outside into the street. A man in a black shirt is manhandled and kicked into lying down with his head on a concrete block. A boy, who looks to be about 11 or 12 years old, cuts at his neck with a machete, but does not quite sever it. Later a man finishes the job and cuts the head off. The second man in a blue shirt is also forced to lie with his head on a block and is beheaded. The heads are brandished in front of the camera and later laid on top of the bodies. The boy smiles as he poses with a rifle beside a headless corpse.

The execution video is very similar to those once made by al-Qa'ida in Iraq to demonstrate their mercilessness towards their enemies. This is scarcely surprising since many of the most experienced al-Nusra fighters boast that they have until recently been fighting the predominantly Shia government of Iraq as part of the local franchise of al-Qa'ida franchise. Their agenda is wholly sectarian, and they have shown greater enthusiasm for slaughtering Shias, often with bombs detonated in the middle of crowds in markets or outside mosques, than for fighting Americans.

The Syrian uprising, which began in March 2011, was not always so bloodthirsty or so dominated by the Sunnis who make up 70 per cent of the 23 million-strong Syrian population. At first, demonstrations were peaceful and the central demands of the protesters were for democratic rule and human rights as opposed to a violent, arbitrary and autocratic government. There are Syrians who claim that the people against the regime remains to this day the central feature of the uprising, but there is compelling evidence that the movement has slid towards sectarian Islamic fundamentalism intent on waging holy war.

The execution video is the most graphic illustration of deepening religious bigotry on the part of the rebels, but it is not the only one. Another recent video shows Free Syrian Army fighters burning and desecrating a Shia husseiniyah (a religious meeting house similar to a mosque) in Idlib in northern Syria. They chant prayers of victory as they set fire to the building, set fire to flags used in Shia religious processions and stamp on religious pictures. If the FSA were to repeat this assault on a revered Shia shrine such as the Sayyida Zeinab mosque in Damascus, to which Iranian and Iraqi pilgrims have flooded in the past and which is now almost encircled by rebels, then there could be an explosion of religious hatred and strife between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East. Iraqi observers warn that it was the destruction of the Shia shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, by an al-Qa'ida bomb in 2006 that detonated a sectarian war in which tens of thousands died.

The analogy with Iraq is troubling for the US and British governments. They and their allies are eager for Syria to avoid repeating the disastrous mistakes they made during the Iraqi occupation. Ideally, they would like to remove the regime, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad and the present leadership, but not dissolving the government machinery or introducing revolutionary change as they did in Baghdad by transferring power from the Sunnis to the Shia and the Kurds. This provoked a furious counter-reaction from Baathists and Sunnis who found themselves marginalised and economically impoverished.

Washington wants Assad out, but is having difficulty riding the Sunni revolutionary tiger. The Western powers have long hoped for a split in the Syrian elite, but so far there is little sign of this happening. "If you take defections as a measure of political cohesion, then there haven't been any serious ones," said a diplomat in Damascus.

Syria today resembles Iraq nine years ago in another disturbing respect. I have now been in Damascus for 10 days, and every day I am struck by the fact that the situation in areas of Syria I have visited is wholly different from the picture given to the world both by foreign leaders and by the foreign media. The last time I felt like this was in Baghdad in late 2003, when every Iraqi knew the US-led occupation was proving a disaster just as George W Bush, Tony Blair and much of the foreign media were painting a picture of progress towards stability and democracy under the wise tutelage of Washington and its carefully chosen Iraqi acolytes.

The picture of Syria most common believed abroad is of the rebels closing in on the capital as the Assad government faces defeat in weeks or, at most, a few months. The Secretary General of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said last week that the regime is "approaching collapse". The foreign media consensus is that the rebels are making sweeping gains on all fronts and the end may be nigh. But when one reaches Damascus, it is to discover that the best informed Syrians and foreign diplomats say, on the contrary, that the most recent rebel attacks in the capital had been thrown back by a government counteroffensive. They say that the rebel territorial advances, which fuelled speculation abroad that the Syrian government might implode, are partly explained by a new Syrian army strategy to pull back from indefensible outposts and bases and concentrate troops in cities and towns.

At times, Damascus resounds with the boom of artillery fire and the occasional car bomb, but it is not besieged. I drove 160 kilometres north to Homs, Syria's third largest city with a population of 2.3 million, without difficulty. Homs, once the heart of the uprising, is in the hands of the government, aside from the Old City, which is held by the FSA. Strongholds of the FSA in Damascus have been battered by shellfire and most of their inhabitants have fled to other parts of the capital. The director of the 1,000-bed Tishreen military hospital covering much of southern Syria told me that he received 15 to 20 soldiers wounded every day, of whom about 20 per cent died. This casualty rate indicates sniping, assassinations and small-scale ambushes, but not a fight to the finish.

This does not mean that the government is in a happy position. It has been unable to recapture southern Aleppo or the Old City in Homs. It does not have the troops to garrison permanently parts of Damascus it has retaken. Its overall diplomatic and military position is slowly eroding and the odds against it are lengthening, but it is a long way from total defeat, unless there is direct military intervention by foreign powers, as in Libya or Iraq, and this does not seem likely.

This misperception of the reality on the ground in Syria is fuelled in part by propaganda, but more especially by inaccurate and misleading reporting by the media where bias towards the rebels and against the government is unsurpassed since the height of the Cold War. Exaggerated notions are given of rebel strength and popularity. The Syrian government is partially responsible for this. By excluding all but a few foreign journalists, the regime has created a vacuum of information that is naturally filled by its enemies. In the event, a basically false and propagandistic account of events in Syria has been created by a foreign media credulous in using pro-opposition sources as if they were objective reporting.

The execution video is a case in point. I have not met a Syrian in Damascus who has not seen it. It is having great influence on how Syrians judge their future, but the mainstream media outside Syria has scarcely mentioned it. Some may be repulsed by its casual savagery, but more probably it is not shown because it contradicts so much of what foreign leaders and reporters claim is happening here.

Exposure

Ian Noble has the best news in a very long time:

Police have arrested seven people after an early morning drug raid at a North East lap dancing club. Durham Constabulary raided the Red Velvet club, in Consett, in the early hours of today (Saturday, December 15) following a tip-off.

The police were acting on information supplied by local residents about the Front Street club. Seven people were arrested on suspicion of drug related offences. They are being held at Durham City Police Station. Inspector Colin Dobson said: “Dealing drugs is a serious offence and drug use is an enormous problem for the community. When this is combined with alcohol the problem magnifies. We have listened to the community concerns about Red Velvet and we want to send a clear message that any criminal activity on licensed premises will be dealt with robustly.”

Red Velvet is the only licensed County Durham lap dancing club and it gained its license in April of this year. Durham Constabulary is to begin proceedings to have the licence revoked on Monday (December 17). The police also closed another premises during the operation. The police would not release any further details about these premises.

Decline And Fall; Rebirth On The Left

Patrick J. Buchanan writes:

In 1958, Senate Minority Leader William Knowland, his eye on the 1960 GOP nomination coveted by fellow Californian Richard Nixon, went home and declared for governor. Knowland’s plan: Ride to victory on the back of Proposition 18, the initiative to make right-to-work the law in the Golden Land. Prop. 18 was rejected 2 to 1. Knowland’s career was over, and the Republicans were decimated nationally for backing right-to-work. Badly burned, the party for years ran away from the issue.

This history makes what happened in Michigan, cradle of the United Auto Workers, astonishing. A GOP legislature passed and Gov. Rick Snyder signed a right-to-work law as libertarian as any in Red State America. The closed shop, where a worker must belong to the union before being hired, is dead. The union shop, where an individual must join the union once hired, is dead. The agency shop, where a worker cannot be made to join a union but can be required to pay dues if the union is the agent negotiating the contract for all workers, is dead. Michigan just legislated the open shop.

And behind the blue-collar bellicosity in Lansing is this new reality. Non-union workers can now “free ride” on union contracts. This is close to a non-survivable wound for labor. Workers who do not belong to unions will cease paying dues, and union members will begin quietly to quit and pocket their dues money. Why pay dues if you don’t have to? Why contribute a dime to a union PAC if you don’t have to, or don’t like labor’s candidates?

Michigan workers are not going to suffer. They have simply been given the freedom to join or not join a union, to pay or not pay dues. And while wages in right-to-work states such as Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida are slightly below those of other states, employment in right-to-work states is higher. For these are the states where domestic and foreign investors look to site new plants. The BMW assembly plant is in Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C., the Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa, Ala., the Volkswagen and Nissan plants in Tennessee. As Gov. Rick Perry boasts, Texas has been the biggest job creator in the Obama recession.

But union power is going to be circumscribed as non-union workers elect to free-ride and union members start resigning. And just as Michigan saw Indiana creating jobs after passing right-to-work, other states may observe Michigan and go forth and do likewise. There are now 24 right-to-work states. But while these laws arrested the rise of the house of labor, there was an inevitability to its fall. Who are the collective killers? Like the murder on the Orient Express, just about everyone on the train.

First came automation. A third of U.S. workers were unionized in the 1950s. But with new technologies, we discovered we did not need so many men to dig coal, make steel or print newspapers. We did not need firemen riding in the cabs of diesel locomotives. A second blow came with the postwar rise of Germany and Japan. Their plants and equipment were all newer than ours. Their wages were far lower, as they did not carry the burden of defending the Free World. Under our defense umbrella, they began to invade and capture our markets. And Uncle Sam let them do it.

A third blow to Big Labor, concentrated in the Frost Belt, came from the Sun Belt. With air conditioning making summers tolerable, the South offered less expensive and more reliable labor than a North where union demands were constant and strikes common. But the mortal blow to American unions came from globalization. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China propelling hundreds of millions of new workers into the global hiring hall, U.S. multinationals saw historic opportunity.

If they could move factories out of the U.S.A., they would be free of union demands, wage-and-hour laws, occupational health and safety laws, environmental laws and civil rights law. By outsourcing, they could produce for a fraction of the cost of doing so in the U.S.A. And if they could get the U.S. political class, in return for corporate generosity at election time, to let them bring their foreign-made goods back to the U.S.A., tax and tariff free, profits would explode, and salaries and bonuses with them.

The corporate establishment and political establishment shook hands, the deed was done, and the fate of U.S. industrial unions sealed. So came NAFTA, GATT, the World Trade Organization, MFN for China, free trade with all. And with globalization came trade deficits unlike any the world had ever seen, a loss of one-third of U.S. manufacturing jobs in the last decade, a U.S. dependence on foreign-made goods almost as great as in colonial days, the enrichment of our corporate and financial elites beyond the dreams of avarice, and the decline and fall of the house of labor.

Unions are dying because, in America, economic patriotism is dead. 

Leading John to comment:

I don't always agree with him, but Pat Buchanan’s latest article on the decline of the American labor movement is worth reading, and so are the comments below. I was surprised to see so many pro-union comments on the American Conservative website, given that the Old Right often tends toward economic libertarianism, lionizing Ron Paul and the Austrian School. Pat Buchanan, however, has always had a strong populist side to him, and he is one of the few prominent American conservatives to raise concerns about social justice and the plight of the American worker. Indeed, on economic issues I think Mr. Buchanan is arguably to the left of most modern Democrats.

Reading Pat Buchanan’s writings on globalization, with his powerful descriptions of collapsed industrial towns in the Midwest and elsewhere, caused me to completely reevaluate my political philosophy. I used to be a typical GOP conservative. I believed in the power of the market to self-regulate and produce a kind of Leibnizian “best of all possible worlds.”  I was also a social conservative, as I still am today.  Eventually, this combination could not hold. The reality of global capitalism, with its rootlessness, its utilitarianism, its disregard for families and communities torn asunder by capital’s endless search for great and greater profits, started to become clear.

My own experience as a member of the College Republicans reinforced my misgivings. The leadership of my school’s GOP group was comprised mainly of the sons and daughters of upper-middle class professionals from the Chicago suburbs. They cared little about the social or cultural issues that were important to me, but they were very keen on anti-unionism. Having grown up around police officers, firefighters, municipal employees, tradesmen, and other unionized workers I knew that many of the stereotypes of greedy, lazy, and incompetent union workers were untrue.

Soon, the scales fell from my eyes, and I was able to comprehend the true nature of capitalism as an essentially anti-conservative force.  Reading the works of the great French counter-enlightenment authors, such as Joseph de Maistre and the Vicomte de Bonald, revealed a different kind of conservatism, one that did not submit to capitalism but instead critiqued it on the very grounds of preserving Christian civilization. Eventually, I discovered figures such as Giorgio La Pira and Jakob Kaiser who were able to formulate a more modern form of Social Christian thought. But it all started with Pat Buchanan.

More Joy In Heaven?

This is really very good and important.

But Harriet Harman needs to say, once and for all, that she recants her support for what was then the Spirit of the Age on children and pornography.

Thereby admitting that it was the Spirit of the Age, against which the Catholic Church made however imperfect a stand. Even moving people around did at least conceded that there was a problem, rather than something to celebrate.

In marked contrast to those on the then New Left who disagreed most violently with Her Teaching on bioethical and sexual questions, and thus also with Her Teaching on social justice and on peace.

And in no less marked contrast to those on the then New Right who disagreed most violently on Her Teaching on economic and geopolitical questions, and thus also with Her Teaching on the sanctity of life and on the virtue, which is in fact the civic virtue, of chastity.

False Start

I have never seen anything so shameless.

Boris Johnson to the first safe Conservative seat to have its MP die, and thence to an immediate Leadership challenge. Seb Coe to Mayor of London, his campaign having started tonight.

The problem is that their party probably could not win any parliamentary by-election at the moment, and that it certainly could not hold onto the London job.

But what would then become of Boris, having lost one and resigned the other?

The Rogue States of America

Suffering the state-level legalisation of cannabis places the American federal institutions in material breach of their country's international obligations.

In Proportion

George Eaton raises the question of whether the rise of UKIP might reopen the debate on electoral reform, although he does that rare thing among press journalists and mentions the fact that UKIP has never won a seat, not even, one might add, against none of the Big Three and with massive newspaper backing at Buckingham in 2010.

It has nothing like the localised activist base ever to win one, and, not unrelatedly, it has no municipal base, either. I am no fan of the Greens, but it is perfectly scandalous that they receive less coverage than UKIP. A very great deal less, in fact. That looks like a contempt of Parliament, and it is undeniably a contempt of the electorate.

As to electoral reform itself, only its application to the House of Commons can make any real difference, since the parties shaped by the elections to that House are the parties that then contest all elections. If the parties contesting elections to the British seats in the European Parliament, or to the devolved bodies in Scotland and Wales, or to the Greater London Assembly, had been designed with those elections and those bodies in mind, then they would entirely different.

As it is, they are designed for the House of Commons and for the elections thereto, merely also happening to contest any other election that might happen to be ordained from time to time by that House. That is just the way that it is. In Northern Ireland, the situation is that the structure has been constructed so as to preserve the shape of the parties, something that Westminster also now does, but for which it was not necessarily intended as the end in itself.

If there were to a be a more proportional system for elections to the House of Commons, then what might the new party system entail? The Liberal Democrats would disappear entirely. Their Neither Of The Above position can exist only under First Past The Post, and they are demonstrably hopeless at anything else; when their Holy Grail, multimember STV, was introduced for local elections in Scotland, then their number of councillors went down.

But anyone who knows anything about Britain will be able to presuppose that the right flank of the left-wing coalition will always be provided by a Tory-rooted party, and the left flank of any right-wing coalition will always be provided by a Labour-rooted party, both of which would be economically populist and thus effectively social democratic, both of which would be sanely conservative socially and culturally, and both of which would be strongly patriotic in relation to all threats to our sovereignty, liberty and democracy (both parliamentary and municipal), whether from the Executive or the Judiciary, from the EU or the US, from Israel or the Gulf monarchs, from China or the Russian oligarchs, from the money markets or the media moguls, from separatists or communalists, from over-mighty central government employees or over-mighty local government employees.

Between them, those two parties would have considerable appeal in much of the South and even in parts of London, by no means necessarily the white parts, if that is what you are thinking. They would clean up in the North and the Midlands, where under any form of PR they could reasonably expect to hold two thirds of the seats on a permanent basis, and could reasonably aspire to win three quarters of them from time to time. At least one, and probably both, would always be in government, or else there would be no government.

They would dominate Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as surely as the North and the Midlands if it were not for the constitutional questions. But the constitutional question in Wales, insofar as there ever was one, and the constitutional question in Northern Ireland are both now resolved, while that in Scotland will be resolved before the next General Election.

There is also talk that Nigel Farage might have to be included in the next Leaders' Debates. The answer to that is very simple: all three main parties long ago decided that there were not going to be any more Leaders' Debates. So there aren't. Nor, in this country, ought there ever to have been. But the pretext will be that, no matter how many the participants, two would have to come from the Coalition. What do you think that this is? Question Time?

I have had to take a very deep breath before writing this next sentence, but even if Andrew Rawnsley says something, that does not automatically make it a lie. Of course, if he alone says it, as in every word of his vicious and totally false book How Dare That Common Little Man Be Prime Minister Instead Of One Of My Mates!, then it certainly is a lie, and a malicious lie at that. But this is not such a situation. Rawnsley was very lucky only to have had to have dealt with the Prime Minister who had taken this country out of recession. Had he tried that, not that he ever would have done, against the puppet of Alastair Darling and Peter Mandelson, then the BBC would have announced his suicide well under an hour after the discovery of his body, and that would have been the end of the matter.

But speaking of Question Time, a well-placed regular correspondent has emailed me to ask what the large and thriving Morning Star Parliamentary Readers' and Supporters' Group, set up during the present Parliament and until recent days convened by the PPS to the Deputy Leader (a man still very much on course for Ministerial office, and still undeclared on same-sex "marriage"), would say or do if that newspaper once again not only endorsed, but more or less organised, a slate for the European Elections, as it did with No2EU - Yes to Democracy, support for which from the audience was infamously edited out of the relevant edition of Question Time as part of a comprehensive media blackout.

My answer is that that is extremely unlikely to happen. At this year's Durham Miners' Gala, John Hendy QC, who had been a No2EU candidate in London, spoke from the same platform as Ed Miliband, a platform on which Bob Crow was also seated. The annual ritual of returning the RMT's affiliation cheque uncashed ought to be discontinued soon enough.

The internal Labour shift on Europe, illustrated as much as anything else by the number of MPs from the 2010 intake who have signed up to the Morning Star Readers' and Supporters' Group (a 34-year-old Assistant Whip, only elected last year, is leading the campaign against Government Departments' boycott of that organ of Euroscepticism from the very start; at university we used to rib him about how right-wing he was, but getting on in Labour is clearly now a very different matter) and by Ian Lavery's own continuing progress since his election in that year, means that longstanding dissidents from the party line who have instead advocated absurd ultra-federalism are extremely unlikely to be permitted to contest the next European Election, or at least not in positions that gave them any realistic hope of re-election. Why, even I might then be able to vote Labour at a European Election, for the first time in my life.

But the broader and deeper solution would be as set out above. The Labour-rooted of those two parties would fill a very British gap, the lack of a party anchoring the Left while engaging fully in the battle of ideas at every level of cultural life and of the education system, while refusing to consign or to confine demotic culture to "the enormous condescension of posterity", and while co-ordinating broad-based and inclusive campaigns for human rights and civil liberties, for peace (including nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological disarmament, and including against the arms trade), for environmental responsibility, and for the defence and extension of jobs, services and amenities.

It is absolutely farcical, and demonstrably disastrous, that the nearest approximation, here in what was once the land of the ILP, the Socialist League and, for all its many and grievous faults, the CPGB, should be the undergraduate Trots of the SWP, "Workers" who have never so much as ironed a shirt or changed a light bulb in their lives. Moreover, the remedy would also secure the most enduring, because the most valuable, legacies of what were once the prongs of the trident: Independent Labour Publications, Tribune, and the Morning Star.