Monday 20 May 2013

The news could be better, but it could also be worse

In the Islamic World War now gearing up at the syrian fault line the news is not all bad.

On the minus side, Israel has been forced to intervene multiple times recently in a war it very much wished to keep out of. Israel's bombing of Syria has had the effect of bringing Russia to show its hand by supplying the dreaded S300 anti-air missile system to Syria, and to station a fleet of ships off the coast of Syria. The war being waged in Syria is now recognized by most observers as having an extreme islamic nature on either side. The formerly much vaunted FSA is little more than a front for jihadists, little different, if at all to the fanatics of al Nusra financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Russia, as with Iran and Hezbollah was forced to take sides in a conflict it did not want. Russia would dearly like to remain as previously the weapons supplier and sleeping partner of the Syrian regime, but Iran has forced Russia's hand through the reaction by Israel to its attempted transfers of advanced missiles to its representatives in Lebanon, Hezbollah, via the good offices of Assad.

Iran and Hezbollah have been dragged into this conflict in support of their alawite ally, forced to support the regime that has killed many thousands of sunnis inside Syria for the last two years. No longer can Hezbollah make any pretense at being the 'resistance' to Israel (this in any case was just a fig leaf for Iranian aggression against Israel, certainly since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanese territory in 2000). The Iranians and Hezbollah also dearly wished to avoid this fight, their main love being to kill jews of Israel, but fight this war they must. And as I predicted a number of times in the past two years, this war is slowly intensifying, burning surely and at times with great intensity such as in the present battles for Qusayr.

And as I have previously stated, no side can win this war. The stakes are too high for both sunnis and shia. They have the treasure and the arms to keep a war going indefinitely.

The USA should not have become involved, but it did, and has done no good. The USA thought it would supply the syrian rebels through the offices of islamist Turkey and Qatar and only helped to deepen the radical islamic nature of this conflict rather than help depose Assad.

Even had the USA kept its nose out of this, the islamization of the conflict was probably inevitable. It might just have happened at a slower pace. The Newtonian Law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction should have been considered by Obama, but he has his own agenda, to counterbalance Iran whilst keeping the USA out of taking direct action. From a humanitarian viewpoint this was a mistake. The USA should not have backed any side, not have intervened at all, unless in a fit of principled humanity it was to try and train a secular alliance within Syria. This would most likely have been doomed to fail, as with the mujahideen who were slaughtered when Khomeini came to power in Iran. The Baathists were the true secularists, until they hitched their wagon to Iran.

The USA can rarely get things right when intervening in the middle east, and Obama has been the most spectacular failure ever, unless radicalizing the region was his plan from the beginning. Obama's policy  has been of building a sunni counterweight to Iran via the Muslim Brotherhood, salafists, assorted islamic extreme groups and countries along with neo Ottomanist islamist Turkey. The plan has succeeded, although it was in any case in formation in the last years.The stage is set for a prolonged and bitter fight that might very possibly last very many years. As I predicted last year, Lebanon is now being sucked in, slowly but surely. Over the weekend the Lebanese army came into play, and the fighting is right on the border of Lebanon. And firefights seem to be breaking out with greater frequency in Tripoli and elsewhere.

The rock of Iran (and its ally Assad and proxy Hezbollah) has hit the hard sunni world, a world unforgiving of those they see as apostates threatening their very regimes.  A world full of extremist madrassas with students just longing to become involved in the fight against the shia 'heretics', as they see them.

The USA and Russia should sit this one out as it has little to do with them, and much to do with islam.
But the USA and Russia will not sit on the sidelines, more pity for the region, and also for Israel, although it might continue to be spared direct involvement.

Israel has been the wisest actor in the region, keeping its cool, growling menacingly and acting firmly when its interests are threatened or missiles, mortars or even bullets come over the border on the Golan Heights. Hamas learned last November that the rules have changed, that Israel will no longer tolerate its border communities being terrorized with missiles on every sabbath morning, when children go to or leave their classrooms, on every national or jewish holiday when the rest of Israel is celebrating. That message has gone home and Hamas is keeping the border mostly quiet, after having denied for years that it could do this. Assad too can not fail to have noticed the firming up of Israel's defense posture.

Israel's new defense posture is the only realistic one in a tough neighbourhood, and one which impresses an arab world let down terribly by this effete American administration. Just to ram home the message, Netanyahu appointed Moshe Yaalon as defense minister, a no nonsense man prepared to fight fire with fire, as we see from the various bonfires Israel set over Damascus lately. Assad knows that if he is seen to be transferring game changing technology into Lebanon, he will invite attack from Israel. So far Assad's response has been close to nil, knowing that Israel unlike the USA is now after years of unsuccessful appeasement of its arab neighbours, now prepared to go all out to protect its vital interests. Israeli actions have brought Russia into the neighbourhood, but Russia knows there is little it can do in effect if Israel is determined to protect its interests, and Israel leaves little room for doubt about that nowadays.

Russia's Putin is a cold hearted, brutal yet calculating ex KGB General. He will not be interested in going head to head with Israel. Once upon a time the USA put its nuclear assets on alert when Russia threatened to intervene massively, to attack Israel directly. Putin knows this can't happen under an Obama administration, but then Israel is not the country of 1967 or 1973. Russian warships would most likely end up in Davy Jones' locker within minutes of beginning hostilities with Israel. Very possibly Israel already has the answer to the S300 missiles. Russia's best engineers did emigrate to Israel, and Israel is if maybe not the world's premier electronic superpower, it is second only to the USA.

So Russia has sailed its gunboats to make the point that it also has interests regarding Syria, will supply the S300 and let the sunni world know that it is firmly in the shia orbit. This is not necessarily a good policy for Russia to take, but it long ago chose Baathist Syria as its ally and it now has little choice but to support it. Russia is however mistaken in being so closely allied to Syria. Like Iran and Hezbollah, it has made its position all too clear.

And for Hezbollah the results are all too plain to see. Hezbollah is now in the fight of its life, a fight it can not win. As Hezbollah gets drained of blood, it will need to call for reinforcements from Iran. It is hard to see Lebanese shiites apart from Hezbollah radicals having a large stomache for fighting in Syria. Iran is going to have to send its cohorts in ever greater numbers into the killing fields of Syria. And as the shi'ites up the ante, so will sunnis, and this will be the end of Lebanon, just as Syria no longer exists in anything but name.

As I said before, Germany needed an awful bloodletting to pound its imperialist and racist nazi ideology out of it. Since Frederick the Great Prussia-Germany developed a militarized society that glorified death and destruction to others, a message we are wont to hear from radical muslims.

But there will come a point, a tipping point when muslims as with Germany will forget their glorification of jihad, of conquest, of murdering the infidel, and just wish to sit at home with the family, in a chair without fear of being shot. This point is not near, it is not even on the horizon. For such a radical ideology of jihad that is encompassed in the Qur'an  to be overcome in islamist societies, the bloodletting will need to be such that every family, just as in  Germany can claim a victim or more.

Almost every family in Germany had children without fathers, people mutilated in many and various ways. Almost every large town in Germany received one or more visits from USAF or RAF bombers. Terror,  Totalkrieg and Blitzkrieg might have been fun when being dished out by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, but when good german families never knew when they might receive a night time thousand bomber visit courtesy of 'bomber Harris' the lust for war slowly became a terror of war.

Germany is now the most pacifistic nation on earth.

I look forwards to a time when arab and other countries in the islamic world such as Iran are similarly peaceful, lusting after peace. But they have an ideology that needs to be beaten out of them, slowly and surely in such a manner that for generations muslims will know the evils of war. The lesson must be leaerned that nobody wins from war. This lesson is now in process of being realized, in a terrible but necessary manner.

The fascist Qur'anic ideology of Jihad will not burn itself out overnight. The Islamic World War has only just begun. Psychologists talk of 'overlearning' as being the best means to cement knowledge in memory. The arab world needs this cruel 'overlearning' to extirpate wahabism and shia extremism and all the other islamic forms of fascism.

Pity the innocent children who have to suffer because of the sins of their fathers, of a fascist creed they learned from genocidal preachers and which they are now trying to  put into effect. Sadly this war must be waged, experienced and above all remembered for the lessons of peace and coexistence to be learned.

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