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Syria: Instead Of Courting Islamist White House Should Talk With Assad
U.S. officials are talking with commanders of new Islamic Front in Syria pretending that it is now the “moderate” alternative to Al-Qaeda:
The U.S. and its allies have held direct talks with key Islamist militias in Syria, Western officials say, aiming to undercut al Qaeda while acknowledging that religious fighters long shunned by Washington have gained on the battlefield.
At the same time, Saudi Arabia is taking its own outreach further, moving to directly arm and fund one of the Islamist groups, the Army of Islam, despite U.S. qualms.
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The Saudis and the West are pivoting toward a newly created coalition of religious militias called the Islamic Front, which excludes the main al Qaeda-linked groups fighting in Syria—the Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham, known as ISIS.
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Western diplomats said their engagement with the Islamists also aims to draw the powerful militias away from the Al Nusra Front and other groups affiliated with al Qaeda.
“We believe they are groups that, if we do nothing, may go toward more radicalization,” one Western diplomat said.
This is of cause pure nonsense. The main groups that formed the Islamic Front are Liwa al-Tawhid and Ahrar al-Sham both of which are regularly sharing resources and cooperating with the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al- Nusra and the Islamic State of of Iraq and the Sham. They have the same roots and were formed before the early protests in Syria started. Both have also been implicated in several pogroms against Syrians people who do not agree with their Sharia driven program.
The only alternative to an Al-Qaeda led anarchy in Syria is a state led by the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his party. Cooperating with Assad is the only way for the west to prevent a new fanatic Islamic state at NATO’s southern border. This was already obvious two years ago when I, in February 2012, pointed out :
A Syrian state crumbling under terror followed by large sectarian slaughter and refugee streams with certain spillover of fighting into all neighboring countries. That can not be in anyone’s interest.
It is time for the west to not only step back from this cliff but to turn around and to help Assad to fight the terrorists that want to bring down his country.
Some parts of the Obama administration are finally recognizing this obvious conclusion:
“We need to start talking to the Assad regime again” about counterterrorism and other issues of shared concern, said Ryan C. Crocker, a veteran diplomat who has served in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. “It will have to be done very, very quietly. But bad as Assad is, he is not as bad as the jihadis who would take over in his absence.”
Unfortunately the White House is not (yet) listening to Crocker:
It is not clear whether or when the White House would be willing to make such an abrupt shift in approach after years of supporting the Syrian opposition and calling for Mr. Assad’s ouster. It would certainly require delicate negotiations with Middle Eastern allies who were early and eager supporters of Syrian rebel groups, notably Saudi Arabia.
I do not understand what the problem with Saudi Arabia should be. That country has no alternative but to stay under the U.S. security umbrella. The White House should tell the Saudi King Abdullah to shut down Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s mercenary terror army in Syria “or else …”.
Would the Saudis really want a fundamental confrontation with the U.S. at the same time as Iran is presenting itself as a viable alternative for U.S. influence in the Persian Gulf?
“The KSA is executing an entire deniable strategy for the US, which knows it cannot sell direct support for totalitarian revolutionaries to its domestic constituencies (not ‘public opinion’, which doesn’t matter, but the ‘constituencies’ as we call them in Britain, the grassroots party members, and the donors).”
In order for this “deniability” to work there has to be widespread political indifference. Blindness might be a better word. America’s days of denying its involvement in Bandar’s adventures are in the past.
The cat is out of the bag.
Everybody understands that the US is backing the various forces invading Syria, it is supplying them with weapons, using its puppet in Jordan to give them bases, supplying Bandar’s Saudi dilettantes with trained special forces expertise, providing reconnaissance and intelligence services and so on.
Everybody knows. Deniability no longer works.
Why is this?
For the same reason that “public opinion” matters. Which is that the US is in the throes of a socio-economic crisis out of which political changes are going to come.
The Pew report I cited two days ago is no more than a straw in the wind but the wind is getting stronger and it is blowing towards Washington DC.
People, such as the pensioners in Illinois and Detroit, are waking up to the fact that the government which cannot afford to pay their back pay, produce their savings, account for their contributions, is the same bunch that is currently air-freighting million dollar plus armoured vehicles into Kabul, driving them across the road and scrapping them.
The government that gives Sisi and his mates $3 billion a year to buy gold braid and electrodes with, that gives Netanyahu anything he desires to keep the war pot bubbling, that employs a hundred thousand troops at more than $1 million per person in Afghanistan, and wants to stay to build more bases, spend more money, this is the same government which, in its extreme prudence, detects possible problems with the social security trust fund by 2040. Unless taxes are raised, which might prove a disincentive to investors soon to be born.
The conventional wisdom, based on about five minutes of observation and massive amounts of wishful thinking by “pundits” who can barely comb their own hair and probably think that the Federalist papers are for rolling joints with, is that the American people are incapable of anger towards their political class.
Just watch them. This is a country that began with the Whiskey Rebellion and featured one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.The times are changing. The long night of apathy, nourished, to be honest, by eight decades of widespread prosperity and the heady sense of national superiority, is ending.
The Military Industrial Complex, with its pathetically low employment rates and its unbelievable rates of profit, has a fight on its hands.
I expect Louis Proyect is rubbing his hands and brushing up on his What is To Be Done, even as we confer.
re pirouz_2 @20
The prospect of Iran allying with the US is frightening. This is, as you seem to say, very much what a thin, but influential layer of westernised, bourgeois Iranians and masses of expatriates want. Like the Russians who yearn for Moscow to become more like New York and ally themselves with imperialists, they ought to bear in mind what the US has done to them and their country over the past thirty years. This would include inspiring the war started by Saddam and financed by the Sauds which led to the deaths of a million Iranians.
If there is to be any prospect of international law and peace it will have to be based upon strong and independent states. The current international anarchy, in which Obama and his gangsters are free to kill and plunder at will, exists because most states are either intimidated by the fear of offending the Empire (look what happened in Libya, look at Syria) or actually run, as are most NATO countries, by US agents-albeit agents too dumb to get on the payroll.
The truth is that Iran, like China, needs offer the US nothing.
Soon Americans will wake up and notice that the city to which they have been used to sending their most recalcitrant citizens, their most incorrigible con-men and least bearable bores, bullshitters and blowhards- the asylum in the District of Columbia has been taken over by the inmates, warmongers and ultra zionists, stone age economists and fanatical hypocrites straight out of Elmer Gantry. When that is done and the troops start coming home and the NSA is drowned in a bathtub, we can all settle back into the important work of reconditioning a planet devastated by philistinism.
Posted by: bevin | Dec 5 2013 15:49 utc | 25
Muslims and the afterlife
The torture of the grave, Islam and the afterlife
By Leor Halevi
Published: Friday, May 4, 2007
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Hardly a week goes by without front-page news of Muslims dying somewhere in the world in a violent way. Despite all the media attention, there is little understanding among non-Muslims of Islamic views of death and the afterlife.
Everyone knows, of course, that after death martyrs go straight to the Garden of Eden, where they recline on couches, savor meats and fruits and enjoy the company of dark-eyed houris while listening to the sound of flowing rivers.
But what happens to the vast majority of Muslims, those who do not die as martyrs?
According to Islamic doctrine, between the moment of death and the burial ceremony, the spirit of a deceased Muslim takes a quick journey to Heaven and Hell, where it beholds visions of the bliss and torture awaiting humanity at the end of days.
By the time corpse handlers are ready to wash the body, the spirit returns to earth to observe the preparations for burial and to accompany the procession toward the cemetery. But then, before earth is piled upon the freshly dug grave, an unusual reunion takes place: The spirit returns to dwell within the body.
In the grave, the deceased Muslim – this composite of spirit and corpse – encounters two terrifying angels, Munkar and Nakir, recognized by their bluish faces, their huge teeth and their wild hair.
These angels carry out a trial to probe the soundness of a Muslim’s faith. If the dead Muslim answers their questions convincingly and if he has no sin on record, then the grave is transformed into a luxurious space that makes bearable the long wait until the final judgment.
But if a Muslim’s faith is imperfect or if he has sinned during life by, for example, failing repeatedly to undertake purity rituals before prayer, then the grave is transformed into an oppressive, constricting space.
The earth begins to weigh down heavily upon the sentient corpse, until the rib cage collapses; worms begin to nibble away at the flesh, causing horrible pain.
This torture does not continue indefinitely. It occurs intermittently and ends at the very latest with the resurrection – when God may well forgive Muslims who have endured the punishment.
Surely this violence sounds medieval. Belief in “the torture of the grave” indeed stretches way back in history. It appears in eighth-century epitaphs and in early Islamic traditions, which elevated this belief to the status of dogma.
But pious Muslims today continue to adhere to this belief. In invocations, funeral prayers, sermons, and popular literature, Muslims are frequently reminded to heed this punishment.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them take it seriously. The psychologist Ahmed M. Abdel-Khalek, who has studied anxieties about death among Arab youth, has found that preoccupation with the torture of the grave remains acute.
The Egyptians and Kuwaitis he polled worried about this torture more than they feared losing a dear relative or succumbing to a serious, fatal disease.
Recently, an Islamist Web site posted a picture of an 18-year-old man exhumed by the order of his father. Only three hours had passed since his burial, but already his corpse appeared aged and bruised. Scientists, according to the story, affirmed that this was caused by the torture of the grave; and the father explained that his son had been a sinner.
Many Muslims commenting on the picture took it as a sign from God to stop sinning and as a reminder to pray assiduously for relief from the punishment of the tomb. Several doubted the reality of the picture, prompting the author of the Web site to remove the posting and to apologize for it. But even a skeptic who challenged the “scientific” evidence professed in this public forum his belief in the reality of the torture of the grave.
Muslims can escape the torture of the grave by dying as martyrs. In Islam the category of martyr does not belong exclusively to those who die fighting in God’s path. According to Islamic tradition, Muslims who die in a fire, by drowning, in the collapse of a building or in some other way involving great physical suffering merit the rank of martyrs in the afterlife.
This means that immediately after death, their spirits do not return to dwell within mutilated or burned corpses. Instead they enter the Garden of Eden, where they receive new bodies, perfectly reformed, so as to enjoy the rewards of martyrdom until the resurrection. Those who have lost a relative in a violent and shocking death – in the bombings in Baghdad, for instance – may find some consolation in this belief.
Leor Halevi, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, is the author of “Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society.”
Posted by: okie farmer | Dec 5 2013 20:38 utc | 29
Having made Spinoza sound so nice, I ought to add the major qualification, which separates his ideas from those of orthodox mysticism: Spinoza does not believe in Providence. His ‘God’, while in other respects satisfying the simplest and most ample mystical hopes, is completely mindless. He she or it, this ‘God’, simply creates, endlessly and ad infinitum, without being equipped with any means either to evaluate the creation or to change it. The whole creation is one seamlessly integrated logical whole. It is, according to Spinoza, beginningless and endless, but if we might postulate something I would call ‘logical time’, which is not real time but an imaginary time in which God can make decisions and do things, ‘prior to the Creation’ ( not temporally but logically), then what we get from Spinoza is this: ‘God’ creates the entire eternal universe, past, present and future, all of it integrated by its own inherent and unchangeable mode of operation (what we perceive as temporal cause and effect), in one fell swoop, and having done so, is unable to alter it in any way. It is therefore pointless to pray to this God or expect the universe to ‘evolve’, ‘progress’, or ameliorate itself in any way. Beings like ourselves can and must think of ways to make life better, but ‘God’ will not guide us in this endeavour.
However, the plus side of Spinoza is unbeatable: precisely because at death, the consciousness of the individual simply reverts into the universal consciousness, bringing nothing with it (personality, memory, character, etc), there is no karma, no reward or punishment, it makes no difference whether you are a ‘saint’ or a mass torturer and murderer. ‘God’ learns nothing either positive or negative from your life, judges nothing, and is in no way afflicted by your sufferings on the one hand or your evil-doing on the other. ‘You’ do not persist as an identity, a ‘soul’, after your death, so you cannot be rewarded or punished, nor can you bring with you any ‘karma’, such as the dreadful burden of having tortured and killed thousands of other human beings, all this just evaporates. Of course, Spinoza did not go so far as to say this, since his work was in any case greeted by a great chorus of religious outrage (and even outrage from semi-secular cartesians). They all said: how dare you preach that there is no reward and punishment after death? If people believe that, they will lose all morality, since only the fear of god’s judgment keeps them on the moral path. And in fact Spinoza’s treatment of survival of the soul after death is extremely cautious. But it is not hard to draw the conclusions I have drawn. Only academics write about Spinoza, and they always miss the point I am making, that Spinoza’s aim is to completely abolish the fear of death, because they are so preoccupied by the question: but will ‘my soul’, ‘my personality’, etc survive, and having grasped that the answer is ‘no’, they drop the subject as if it was no longer of any interest.
Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Dec 6 2013 7:47 utc | 38
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