Once again, might is right. The following text was written one day before the US attacks on Syria. What happened 24 hours later was already looming ahead. Now also the new US President has decided to continue the disastrous tradition of the US war policy violating international law. At this point the question of what made him break his campaign pledge has to remain unanswered. He has to bear the responsibility for this decision and its consequences. It looks downright perverse, however, that the anti-Trump campaign which has been on for months is now silent and now that he has blood on his hands US hawks like John McCain and “leaders” of other NATO states like the French President and the German Chancellor are declaring their “solidarity”. – This speaks a lot for our “community of values” and for the state of todays world. – Yet: Still everything has to be done to prevent an extension of the war.
Again the Syrian government is accused for being responsible for a poison gas attack on the civilian population in an area occupied by “rebels”. In the Syrian proxy war, the public has become used to charges being issued without proof. This is true also here.
The central question is why not only all of our media but also all responsible Western politicians are joining in these accusations. What are we talking about if not about the assessment of proven facts? Why do we still see so much propaganda? Why is it always about escalation and never about de-escalation?
It would have been de-escalating if all sides had called for an honest and thorough investigation of the incident. But this did not happen – at least not from responsible Western politicians. It is alarming that the US government is forming the vanguard of this movement. The US government has the means to intervene massively in Syria and against the Syrian government. Nobody knows which consequences this might have. It has to worry us extremely that we now hear that the US President had “changed his attitude towards head of state Assad”, that the Syrian government has stepped over “red lines” and that the US would also act without approval of the UN Security Council, that is, violating international law. Obviously in Washington the agitators and war hawks are winning out.
We all know that in the current situation where a proxy war is going on in Syria (as well as in other places), the war drums are sounded. Of course the saying “The first casualty when war comes is truth” is true also here. This is not an abstract statement but has been proven several times for Syria – only recently in Michael Lüders’ book “Die den Sturm ernten. Wie der Westen Syrien ins Chaos stürzte” [Those who reap the whirlwind. How the West threw Syria into chaos”]. The author explains what is at stake in the war in Syria and that the “sponsors” of the war were ready to pay any price for victory – even if it seemed remote. These “sponsors” were and are still sitting in leading political positions in the US and their allies.
On 5 April a German daily newspaper, the “Landeszeitung” issued in Lüneburg – it was the exception in the press review – was writing: “A sarin attack against individual rebel positions will not bring Assad closer to a military victory – especially after a partial withdrawal of the Russian forces. However, it might be the rebels’ political calculation that a war crime for which the regime can be held responsible could revive the determination of Assad’s enemies in the West.” This can be food for thought for all citizens.
But: The Western governments will already be better informed and let their politics neither be controlled by the media nor by the Syrian “rebels”. If they still join the movement, we can only draw one conclusion: They still want victory … and thus escalate the war. •
“It does not take much to create political enemy stereotypes or to keep them alive. So what can we do? One possible answer could be to ask the right questions in the first place. To distrust official announcements and to follow media accounts critically. At best they show the peak of the iceberg. Syria is only one of the timeless stories dealing with injustice, suffering and human abysses. Why not renounce the logic of power and dominance, to think us differently, including all people of good will? Maybe it really takes a fundamental change in awareness, the insight that we have no other choice but taking the future in our own hands.”
Michael Lüders: Die den Sturm ernten. Wie der Westen Syrien ins Chaos stürzte, 2017, p. 169
(Translation Current Concerns)
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