Links:
[1] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/war-against-syria
[2] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/sarin-gas-syria
[3] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/pentagon-papers
[4] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/humanitarian-military-intervention
[5] http://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/msm-media-lies.jpg
[6] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/syria-and-sham-“humanitarian-intervention”
[7] http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/06/17/syria-and-sarin-skepticism-still-warranted/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=syria-and-sarin-skepticism-still-warranted
[8] http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/experts_dont_buy_claim_syria_used_chemical_weapons_20130618/
[9] http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/
[10] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Ffreedom-rider-obama%25E2%2580%2599s-syrian-press-pass&linkname=Freedom%20Rider%3A%20Obama%E2%80%99s%20Syrian%20Press%20Pass
_____________

From the archives: Articles you should have read the first time around but missed. 

The Pope Is Not Gay!
by Angelo Quattrocchi, Translated by Romy Clark Giuliani
Reviewed by George De Stefano | Released: October 4, 2010 Publisher: Verso (192 pages) 

On May 13, 2010, during the annual Mass at Fatima’s sanctuary in Portugal, Pope Benedict XVI delivered yet another of his orations on the evils of homosexuality, and the impermissibility of granting legal recognition to same-sex relationships. Gay marriage, he declared, is one of “the most insidious and dangerous challenges that today confront the common good.”

In September, on the occasion of a visit to Rome by the German ambassador to the Holy See, he returned to this theme, saying that society must not “approve legislative initiatives that imply a reassessment of alternative models of couple relationships and families” because such measures would “contribute to the weakening of the principles of natural law and . . . to confusion around societal values.” Heterosexual marriage, purportedly under siege by sodomites and their supporters, is the only permissible sexual arrangement because it alone can “transmit human life.”

Benedict, who is nothing if not consistent, has denounced homosexuality and gay relationships for decades, well before he ascended the throne of St. Peter. He’s most notorious for having declared homosexuality “a more or less strong tendency towards an intrinsic moral evil,” thereby condemning millions of humans who peaceably practice same-sex love as inherently defective individuals whose very existence threatens all that is good and holy.

There has been no lack of dissenting voices to refute Benedict’s hateful nonsense. Christopher Hitchens, for one, has been writing deliciously scathing commentary about the pope and the Vatican’s arrogance of power for the online magazine Slate. Now we have from Italy, the nation with the unfortunate duty of hosting Benedict’s doleful church on its charming terrain, The Pope is Not Gay!, a new indictment of the man its author, Angelo Quattrocchi, calls “the scourge of homosexuals and all non- reproductive sexual practices.”

Quattrocchi was a poet, author, and a journalist who worked for the BBC and Italian television. It is not clear whether Quattrocchi, who died last year, was himself gay. However, he was an anarchist with excellent anti- authoritarian and anti-clerical credentials, and a healthy sense of outrage over the Catholic Church’s demonization of gays and lesbians. His polemic is as irreverent as you would expect; hackles have and will be raised among the pope’s admirers, both in Italy and abroad.

For one thing, Quattrocchi repeatedly refers to the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as “Ratzi,” a campy nickname that suggests a Teutonic rent boy. That mischievous suggestion is not accidental. Paging Doctor Freud, Quattrocchi wonders whether the pope’s antipathy to homosexuality, and to all sexual expression other than the conjugal hetero variety, “isn’t the fruit of a deeply repressed desire for what he condemns. Of an unconscious desire which manifests itself as its opposite.”

Noting the pope’s sartorial flamboyance, the subject of much comment in the international media, Quattrocchi observes, “. . . our hero has discovered the dazzling clothes, the trappings of power and wealth, which centuries of pomp have draped on the shoulders of his predecessors. In this way, his true nature, his deepest unspoken inclinations are revealed. In short, he might simply be the most repressed, imploded gay in the world.”

The homophobic pope a closet queen? It’s not only his fashion choices (ermine-lined hats, cute red Prada shoes, designer sunglasses and fabulous cassocks) that inspire this speculation. Quattrocchi also points to Ratzinger’s intimate relationship with his private secretary, the German cardinal Georg Ganswein, who Quattrocchi describes as “remarkably handsome, a cross between George Clooney and Hugh Grant, but, in a way, more beautiful than either.” Ganswein and the pope spend most of the day in each other’s company and are inseparable in public appearances. The two are ideological soul mates: the younger man is as theologically reactionary as his boss.

When Ratzinger assumed the papacy in 2005, he was an old man, in his early 70s, a gloomy Bavarian who entirely lacked the charisma of his predecessor John Paul II. Ganswein, “his adoring batman,” advised him on how to make his mark. After the previous pope’s representative departed, Ganswein helped Ratzinger find his media strategy, which turned out to be “a combination of doctrinal rigidity and flamboyant dress.”

All this is very amusing, and, more to the point, not implausible. Homosexuality, whether repressed or indulged, is hardly alien to the Roman Catholic clergy and hierarchy. If Benedict were in fact homosexual, he would not be the first pontiff with same-sex inclinations. The historian James Saslow, in his Homosexuality in the Renaissance, noted that the popes

• By Philip French / The Observer (UK), Saturday 8 June 2013

Michael Douglas as Liberace in Behind the Candelabra: ‘sheer brilliance’. Photograph: HBO/Everett Collection

http://youtu.be/4gxpYz4YBSI

Liberace was a fabulously rich, self-created midwesterner, the child of humble immigrant parents known for his extravagant lifestyle and vulgar tastes, as well as his worship of the American dream and the mystery in which he was wrapped. He was in effect a gay Jay Gatsby. His life was not, however, tragic, that is until his death of an Aids-related illness at 67, and he can be considered a success in that he achieved the acclaim and celebrity he had always dreamed of, and he died believing that he had taken the secret of his homosexuality to the grave.

1. Behind the Candelabra
2. Production year: 2013
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 118 mins
6. Directors: Steven Soderbergh
7. Cast: Dan Aykroyd, Debbie Reynolds, Matt Damon, Michael Douglas, Rob Lowe, Scott Bakula
8. More on this film

All the big Hollywood studios nixed the project, regarding it as too risky, “too gay,” until HBO embraced the production and made it into a modern, instant classic. The leads give stellar performances, and the rest of the cast is simply superb. The rave reviews are well deserved.

Steven Soderbergh‘s cinebiography of Liberace, Behind the Candelabra, is (so he claims) his final movie, and it had to be made for America’s HBO network because no Hollywood studio would finance a film for the big screen that presented its subject’s private life with this degree of candour. This has resulted in the odd situation of the movie having its premiere in competition at the Cannes film festival followed by a theatrical release in Europe and its US premiere on television. It’s thus being reviewed in the States by TV critics and on this side of the Atlantic by film critics. Henceforth, it will appear in reference books in Europe, but not in the States, as the last addition to Soderbergh’s filmography.

The trademark candelabra on Liberace’s grand pianos were inspired by those in A Song to Remember, a popular, much-mocked 1940s movie starring Cornel Wilde as Chopin (with whom Liberace evidently identified as a fellow Polish pianist) and Merle Oberon as George Sand. At its centre, Behind the Candelabra is less a biopic than an intimate love story of the five-year relationship between two men, the world-famous star Lee Liberace and the unknown Scott Thorson. The film is based on Thorson’s published memoir, and inevitably assumes a position similar to that of the critical hero-worshipping Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

Soderbergh and his screenwriter, Richard LaGravenese, take us behind the candelabra in three clever moves. The naive young Scott (Matt Damon, excellent in a difficult role), an animal wrangler for TV commercials with ambitions to be a vet, is picked up in an LA gay bar in 1977 by a handsome, worldly man, a little older than him. After they become lovers, Scott is taken to Las Vegas to see the 58-year-old Liberace (Michael Douglas) appear before an ecstatic audience of middle-class women. The vulnerable, orphanage-reared Thorson is as dazzled by the act as are the women. And so are we. For us, it’s the sheer brilliance of Douglas’s performance. As the outrageous star, he prances around the stage, flashing smiles, cracking familiar jokes, playing a boogie-woogie number at double speed. His white, rhinestone-covered coat-tails catching the light are like night-time Vegas seen from the sky. On the spectrum of gay deportment, shall we say, he’s closer to the camp director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers than to the grave doctor played by Peter Finch in John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

A backstage introduction leads to an invitation to Liberace’s house to view the man’s possessions. We’re now getting further behind the candelabra, but still they are there all around. “I call this ‘palatial kitsch’,” he tells Scott proudly, like Gatsby showing his mansion to Daisy. The smile takes on different forms – professional, warm, chilly, menacing – and his extravagant camp demeanour is modulated and moderated, but always there, blazing like a fake fire in a movie hearth.

He takes up the young man’s offer to treat his ailing dog, and very soon they’re in a bubbling hot tub, and then in bed, the entertainer’s sexual prowess explained in those pre-Viagra days by expensive implants. The ultimate intimacy, however, comes when Liberace reveals himself to Thorson without the enormous wig that conceals his baldness.

There’s real love and affection here, but it’s jealously possessive in the manner of that between the elderly movie star and the two-bit writer in Sunset Boulevard. Thorson becomes part of the great charade of Liberace’s life by becoming his chauffeur. It’s a piece of extravagant theatre in which the whole of America, from its president to its suburban housewives, have agreed to take part. It’s Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name translated into a conspiratorial cross between the mafia’s omerta and the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell”.

The story takes on a bizarre turn when Liberace suddenly decides, after seeing himself on The Johnny Carson Show, that he needs a facelift, and that Thorson should be transformed into a version of his younger self. A cruel parody ensues in which Rob Lowe plays unscrupulous plastic surgeon Dr Startz, an authentically evil showbusiness Frankenstein. This monstrous figure alters the appearance of both for the worse. At one particularly painful and painfully funny moment, Liberace’s skin has been stretched so much that he can’t close his eyes and only his snoring proves that he’s asleep. From this moment, though, the relationship is on its way to inevitable destruction.

All the people around Liberace become grotesques, from the bewildered Thorson, who attempts to understand him, to his mother (an unrecognisable Debbie Reynolds with a prosthetic nose and a thick Polish accent) who doesn’t want to question her son too closely. But they make the obsequious lawyers and businessmen, who arrive in Savile Row suits to serve and exploit him, seem detestable.

Certainly, Soderbergh, LaGravenese and Douglas view Liberace with affection and admiration in their genital-warts-and-all portrait. In a tender and extremely touching movie he comes across as a colourful figure of some courage, as defiant in his way as Quentin Crisp, a gay contemporary of Liberace’s who confronted his homosexuality in a rather different manner and was also brilliantly impersonated by a straight actor, John Hurt, in The Naked Civil Servant.

Sungur Savran

On May Day 2013, the police poured tonnes of tear gas on tens of thousands of workers and youth in different quarters of Istanbul, Turkey in order to stop them from approaching Taksim Square. The government had decided that this square, the traditional venue for May Day celebrations and home to daily political actions big and small, was to be shut to demonstrations this year because development work was being done on a massive scale involving huge excavated pits making it dangerous for crowds. In a ludicrous act, the governor of Istanbul stood atop a mound at the edge of one of those pits to hold a press conference in a desperate attempt to drive home the threat that these pits represented for people.

[Source: occupygezipics.tumblr.com]

Exactly one month later, on Saturday June 1, the masses protesting against the urban plans behind this development work and against the government itself had captured the square and made it the freest part of Istanbul, or rather of Turkey! The police withdrew that afternoon from Taksim Square to abandon the place to the thronging crowds of protestors unfathomably numbering in the hundreds of thousands! It has now been three days and not one single soul has fallen into the scarecrow pit! The symbolism is striking: This is the biggest defeat for the AKP government and for Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan ever since the party came to power a decade ago.

This is a fact of momentous importance. Despite the deep contradictions within the Turkish bourgeoisie over the last decade, pitting the Westernist-secularist dominant wing against the newly ascendant Islamist wing, involving coup plots and imprisonment of top brass, it is not any force from within the ruling class, but the popular masses that teach Erdogan his first serious lesson! For the hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets and squares of at least 48 of the 91 provincial capital cities of the country and for the many millions behind them supporting the struggle morally from within their homes, nothing is taken for granted any more. This is a mass of people shining forth with self-confidence and a feeling that it is they who represent what is just and right. They defy all the conventions and limitations of the existing legal system regulating political activity.

Spontaneity and Heterogeneity

Yes, this is a rebellion, the revolt of a whole people against an oppressive government that has overseen processes of brutal capitalist exploitation over a full decade. But it is not yet a revolution. For the people do want to bring the government down (the major unifying slogan is “Erdogan resign!” or “Government resign!”), but are not organized, nor can they yet become organized so as to set up an alternative government that represents their aspirations and interests. This is not a struggle for power, but a gigantic movement that has taken the whole (or almost the whole, see below) country in its grip that cries out its grievances and wants to remove from the scene what it sees as the cause of all ills, the Erdogan government.

As in almost all the cases of revolutionary or pre-revolutionary outburst around the Mediterranean basin within the last five years (Greece December 2008, Tunisia and Egypt 2010-11, Spain 2011), the revolt in Turkey is also a totally spontaneous one uncontrolled by any single or several political or social organization. This is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength in the early stages because it brings in the most incredible sections and layers of society without fear of manipulation by a political organization not to their liking. It is definitely a weakness in the long term since if the revolt were to turn into a revolution, this could only triumph under the leadership of one or more political parties with a strong following in the mass movement.

But even in the medium term (and, in this kind of concrete situation, when we talk about the medium term, we are talking weeks, if not days) it is also a weakness since it paradoxically leaves the movement vulnerable to the machinations of wings of the bourgeois political establishment that wish to recuperate the movement through more subtle methods (refused by Erdogan, who has persisted and signed) and this way put an early end to the rebellion before it starts to get out of hand and starts to threaten the bases of capitalist rule in the country. This kind of alternative has already started taking shape in the form of an alliance between Abdullah Gul, the president of the republic (of AKP origin himself), a political figure who is in political rivalry with Erdogan for the next presidential elections, and Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the CHP, the Turkish member of the misnamed Socialist International. Since Erdogan has departed on a tour of North African countries and since Bulent Arinc, deputy prime minister acting as prime minister temporarily, takes a line that is critical of Erdogan’s stance also, they will probably try to absorb the movement through some minor concessions to the mass movement in coming days, with Erdogan conveniently absent while soft methods alien to him are being implemented. Behind this kind of solution would stand at least TUSIAD, the organization of the pro-Western wing of finance capital, if not other organizations of the Turkish ruling classes. This kind of face saving resolution of the problem is made all the more urgent since even at this stage the capitalist economy is threatened by the situation Turkey finds itself in. On Monday, day four of the revolt but the first day when the Istanbul Stock Exchange was open, the markets took a nose dive, closing more than 10 per cent on a catastrophic day.

On the other hand, the movement itself is extremely heterogeneous both in class terms and in ideological-political orientation. In class composition, one can easily assert that this is a multi-class movement, with the modern sections of the petty-bourgeoisie totally immersed in a Western life style, the intelligentsia, the upper echelons of the proletariat and the youth in the forefront. The working-class proper is not oblivious to the movement, but has not yet either thrown its organized weight behind the movement or put forth its specific class demands.

Ideologically and politically three broad tendencies may be discerned, with infinite variations in each category. There is the ecological sensibility, unfortunately marred by the left liberalism (in the European sense of the term “liberal”) of great parts of the left in Turkey, which makes them easy prey to the machinations of what they would consider as the “democratic” and “civilized” wing of the bourgeoisie. There is, secondly, a very strong, one would even say dominant, Turkish nationalist tendency, ranging from the CHP through myriad Kemalist associations to the ex-Maoist, Kemalist, quasi-fascistic Labour Party. And, of course, there is the motley collection of Turkish socialist and revolutionary forces, skilled and seasoned in street fighting, but lacking in political acumen or programmatic horizon.

The aspirations of the three tendencies are very different from each other. For the ecological cum left liberal tendency, the great dream is Turkey’s accession to the European Union. So any deal that makes TUSIAD happy would possibly leave them satisfied as well. The nationalist tendency is divided between Atlanticism and a pro-EU stance, on the one hand, and a Eurasian orientation, on the other. However, both of these sub-currents are united against the creeping Islamization that the AKP has been carrying out successfully over a decade. They are all “republicans,” i.e. they defend Kemal Ataturk‘s principles and wish well to the pro-Western wing of the bourgeoisie, that is, the wing represented again by TUSIAD. (The contradiction that the reader may sense in two very different tendencies represented by the left liberals and the nationalists in their common support for TUSIAD is a contradiction that exists in real life!)

The socialist left in its majority unfortunately tail-ends either one or the other of the above tendencies. There is, of course, a third major tendency that supports the Kurdish cause, of which more in a moment. It is only if the major actors missing for the moment come into the fray that the left can even begin to pose an alternative solution to the crisis.

The Missing Actors

The fate of the great popular rebellion in Turkey will be decided by the following questions: Will the Kurdish movement join the rebellion or will it implicitly side with the AKP government? And will the core battalions of the working-class come forth with their class-based demands and forms of struggle?

On the first question, despite our whole-hearted support for the rights of the Kurdish people, including self-determination, we feel duty-bound to underline, without unfortunately being able to go into detail, that the Kurdish movement is on the wrong track in having accepted the terms of Erdogan for the so-called “peace” process. This will oblige them to support the expansionist and adventurist hegemonic role that the AKP government seeks to establish for Turkey in the whole region of the Middle East and North Africa and beyond. Even at this early stage, when the “peace” process has hardly covered any distance at all, it has also so far stopped them from supporting the popular rebellion because this would, they fear, throw cold water over their relations with the AKP government and spoil the whole “peace” process. This, one is forced to underline, is a most backward position for what was once a national revolutionary movement with Marxist leanings. In their defence, one should remember that for three decades, while the Kurdish masses were being persecuted and assassinated, most of the people out on the streets now were looking the other way, if not lending straightforward support to the criminal actions of the Turkish state.

Regarding the working-class, one should face the truth squarely and admit that at the polling booth, the core of the working-class has been voting for Erdogan and that major battalions of the class (from the metal workers to road and transport) are regimented by extremely bureaucratic unions that bow before the onslaught of the capitalist class and have recently sought to secure the conditions of their own existence through servitude to Erdogan. One most recent instance of such shameless capitulation was seen in the heat of the popular rebellion itself. The right-wing leadership of the largest metal workers union had refused the terms of the bosses’ organization and had proclaimed a strike applicable some time in June. It then signed that same collective bargaining agreement the very night when popular anger grabbed the streets of Istanbul. A coincidence? Not at all. The leader of this union has posed his candidacy for the position of leader of the largest labour confederation and is declaring his loyalty to Erdogan so that he can take the job!

However, the working-class does display tendencies toward joining the big revolt movement. There have been repeated marches, night after night, in different working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of cities such as Istanbul, Ankara and Antalya. If only this potential could be mustered to form an organized movement, the whole situation would promise to change from one of rebellion with uncertain horizons to a revolution with clear ends.

These are the hidden resources of the rebellion in Turkey. Should the working-class come into the fight with its specific demands and form of struggle, the whole balance of forces would change. The class struggle federation that represents public employees (KESK) had already declared a sector-wide strike for 5 June. Should this be taken up by the rest of the union movement and made into a general strike, the rebellion in Turkey would make a giant step forward.

The other reserve force is, of course, the Kurdish national movement. The cities of Turkish Kurdistan are as yet quiescent. Should they decide to join their brothers and sisters of the rest of Turkey, an explosion of unfathomable proportions would shake Turkey, the Middle East and beyond. •

Sungur Savran is based in Istanbul and is one of the editors of the newspaper Gercek (Truth) and the theoretical journalDevrimci Marksizm (Revolutionary Marxism), both published in Turkish. This article was written on 4 June, 2013.

Endnotes:

1. “This is a revolt, not (yet) a revolution!” A reference to the famous conversation during the outbreak of the French Revolution between King Louis XVI and one of his advisors.

Kizilay in Pictures

Karin Bashir and Karina Francisco

By MsExpat, a journalist and essayist who lives in New York and Hong Kong and Fellow of The Mighty Corrente Building. Originally published at Corrente.

Two of the greatest criminals in recent history. Big phonies, too, a necessary talent in all politicians, especially of the American variety.

06/17/2013

People around the world were shocked to learn of the extent of US snooping. This anti-Obama poster comes from Hong Kong.

Europe Must Protect Itself from America

A Commentary by Jakob Augstein

Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that assumption into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama is coming to Germany. But who, really, will be visiting? He is the 44th president of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. He is an intelligent lawyer. And he is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

But is he a friend? The revelations brought to us by IT expert Edward Snowden have made certain what paranoid computer geeks and left-wing conspiracy theorists have long claimed: that we are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching.

On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend, then we really don’t need to be terribly worried about our enemies.

URL:

• http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/europe-must-stand-up-to-american-cyber-snooping-a-906250.html

Related SPIEGEL ONLINE links:

• The German Prism Berlin Wants to Spy Too (06/17/2013)
  http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,906129,00.html
• Prism Revelation EU Weakened Data Protection at US Request (06/13/2013)
  http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,905520,00.html
• World from Berlin Prism Spying ‘Attacks Basic Civil Rights’ (06/11/2013)
  http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,905089,00.html
• Prism Exposed Data Surveillance with Global Implications (06/10/2013)
  http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,904761,00.html
• US Prism Scandal ‘Security Is Not an End in Itself’ (06/11/2013)
  http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,905001,00.html

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

Emblems of the criminals who hold the world hostage. Their influence on contemporary history and constant turmoil in the Mideast  remains disastrous.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle. Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war. So much for America’s ‘friends’.

Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power. Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure – that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East. Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad. The Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power. Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained. Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.

In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army. The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy. They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.

From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus – every war crime committed by the rebels – will be regarded in the region as Washington’s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2001 – who are America’s greatest enemies as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism. His experience in Chechnya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechnya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.

For the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all, but to the south of Moscow; and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier. Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim. Six of the Soviet Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni. And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims. For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.

Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon – with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither. They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan. The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance. One of the sources claimed – not without some mirth — that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran’s help.

It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria. Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.

Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities supposedly committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule. One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as “Israel’s man in Damascus”. Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator. In vain.

If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians. The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’. ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s attempts to create such a state have been laughable. A future ‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation. But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.

Another of the region’s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush Assad. Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.

In Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive. Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.

_{ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Briton Robert Fisk is one of the most experienced reporters in matters concerning the Middle East.}