Nicholas Seeley writes in a guest column for Informed Comment
On a sunny fall afternoon, Abdullah joined me for lunch in the sitting room of my apartment in Amman, Jordan, and told me his story. He hails from a small town in southern Syria, a cousin to some of the families I’ve become friends with in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp.
Abdullah is used to traveling—he holds a PhD in a scientific field from a university in Asia, and has lived abroad for many years with his wife and his large family. (I’m keeping the details vague for his protection; Abdullah is not his real name.) When he spoke to me, he had been in transit for nearly 10 months. He fled Syria in December 2012, after being arrested and held for four days by Syrian security. After sneaking over the border into Jordan, he and his family were received by the Jordanian military and sent to Za’atari.
They arrived in the middle of a record cold winter. Snow and freezing rain pelted the camp, and tents were flooding almost daily. “The weather was so cold, we were covering ourselves with 10 blankets, and we were not feeling warm,” Abdullah said. Tent fires were common, and he feared for his children. In February, he bought a plane ticket for Egypt, where friends had offered him a place to stay. At that point, he and his family were allowed to leave the camp: a Jordanian police officer escorted them to the airport.
Egypt started out all right, but after the coup that unseated President Mohammad Morsi, the country became notably hostile to Syrians, and Abdullah began to be afraid again. He had stayed with his friends as long as he could, and he needed work. When he found a teaching job at a university in Yemen, he took it, despite the insecure conditions there. Once more, he moved his family. But the job didn’t work out: it was located in an oil boom-town where prices were shockingly high, and the university had misrepresented the cost of living. His salary wasn’t even enough to feed and house his family. After only two weeks, desperate, he spent the last of his savings on one-way tickets back to Jordan. Here, he said, if he cannot find a way to survive, at least he can go back to Syria.
This time he entered legally, so was able to avoid Za’atari. He took up residence in a small town outside Amman, but he is again growing desperate for work—he brought printed copies of his CV to lunch, in the hope I might be able to find him a job. It would be a risk, as he has no permit—he says he knows people who have been sent back to Syria after being caught working.
Abdullah’s story struck me, because it could as easily be a tale of the Great Recession as of a man fleeing a brutal civil war.
Media stories about refugees tend to follow a familiar mold. They begin with image of a family, dust-stained and barefoot, having fled their home “with nothing but the clothes on their back,” and living in terrible conditions of deprivation. Such portrayals are meant to arouse our compassion, which they do by turning people into passive figures, cutout victims with little agency in their own lives. Often, they create the opposite of sympathy. They make refugees seem like strange and exotic creatures, suffering unthinkable problems in a land far away. They allow us to see refugees as “other,” when in fact they are our friends, neighbors and relatives. They are us, if the cards had been stacked a bit differently.
On the opposite side of the coin from this kind of advocacy journalism are stories that paint refugees as dangerous carriers of social unrest. In the media, the Za’atari camp often appears as a kind of apocalyptic, Mad Max wasteland. News agencies have latched on to UN officials’ characterization of the camp’s ad-hoc bosses as “mafia dons,” and some have used it to describe the camp as a depraved criminal underworld. More sensationalist outlets have slavered over rumors of prostitution and child brides, generating stories based mainly on exaggerations and misinterpretations of fact.
These kinds of stories serve another agenda: to demonize refugees in order to justify denying them access to basic human rights. Rumors about criminality among refugees or asylum seekers are often encouraged by groups that feel the new arrivals threaten their status or entitlements. The stories need not even be false to be affected by such forces: every population contains criminals, but the degree and kind of attention we in the media pay to them says more about our preoccupations than about anything else.
The way we talk and think about refugees can have serious implications for how we try to assist them. In Foreign Policy this week, I write about how the international community is trying to adopt new strategies for dealing with large refugee crises. In part, these changes are data-driven, as years of accumulated research show that most refugees remain in exile for extended periods. But aid workers I spoke to also emphasized that major changes in practice came from overcoming their own stereotypes of refugees as passive victims or pushy criminals. New solutions appeared simply from talking to the refugees, and finding out what they really needed and wanted.
“Quite often, we are not looking into the real nature of: ‘who are the refugees,’” says Kilian Kleinschmidt, the manager of the Za’atari camp. “It’s a typical humanitarian mistake. We look for the vulnerable people … but what we are forgetting is that there are a lot of people with initiative, with skills.”
This is why the stories of Abdullah, and people like him, are so important. The average stories, not the extreme ones. If we want to help Syrian refugees, first we have to listen to them.
——
Nicholas Seeley is a freelance reporter in Amman, Jordan, and the author of the Kindle Single “A Syrian Wedding,” which tells the story of a young couple trying to get married in the Za’atari refugee camp. His reporting on refugees in the Middle East has appeared in numerous publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy and Middle East Report.
Some 750,000 Syrians have been forced to seek refuge in Jordan. About 2/3s live in apartments or with families, with about a third forced to live in unsanitary tent cities.
” • The generosity of Jordan and Lebanon, their cultures of hospitality, and provision of aid to those fleeing violence and political instability must be recognized and commended. This is not to say that there is not room for improvement; rather, it is to emphasize that neighboring countries have prevented a wider scale humanitarian disaster by keeping their borders open, which has come at considerable cost to their own populations and budgets. Both Jordan and Lebanon have long histories of hosting refugees and responding to crises. In Lebanon, Syrians are living in almost every town, village, and city neighborhood. In Jordan they are largely concentrated in the northern towns and cities, in addition to Za’atari refugee camp, and two other smaller camps that continue to expand in order to shelter new arrivals.
• In both Jordan and Lebanon, local/national NGOs, along with municipalities in the case of Lebanon, are providing significant levels of assistance, often in concert with and through funding from international NGOs and donors. Both refugees and host communities would benefit from more aid moneys being directed at the local level, thereby helping build infrastructures and capacities which would continue to serve the host populations after the refugee crisis is over, as well as alleviating local resentment of refugees being given resources over locals.
• Both Jordan and Syria have opened their education and health care systems to refugees, supported by generous aid from the international community. However, absorbing hundreds of thousands of students and patients puts an incredible strain on the system, medical supplies, classroom space, infrastructures, and the professionals who work in these fields. As the crisis extends, these issues must continue to be prioritized by governments, valued by refugees themselves, and the financial burden offset by donors.
• The Syrian refugee population has grown from 200,000 in September 2012 to over two million in September 2013, overwhelming those tasked with crafting responses. Unfortunately, the leadership of the humanitarian aid regime has reacted to this crisis with insufficient creativity and innovation. While there is more information than ever before about the locations and demographics of refugees and details of specific projects, the approach to assistance has shown little change from previous crises. Agencies continue to utilize many of the innovative tools developed in response to the Iraqi refugee crisis in 2005. Yet, the majority of humanitarian assistance remains anchored in the capital cities while many Syrian refugees are elsewhere, experiencing limited access to services and unnecessary hardship. Various agencies continue to use outdated and inappropriate ways of dealing with refugees from a lower middle income country, such as food vouchers with restrictions on products, systems causing refugees to wait for hours or days in residential neighborhoods to register, months of delays in receiving cash assistance, and facilities located far outside of the city centers requiring refugees to
take taxis.
• Given that there are proportionally high levels of young men and men of
fighting age as refugees, in part due to fear of military conscription and recruitment into armed groups, they should be considered an at-risk and vulnerable population. Currently there are no aid or programs aimed at this demographic and they face extremely limited opportunities for employment, leaving them with little alternative but to return to Syria or resort to negative coping capacities in order to survive.
• Recognition of the need for refugees to return requires systematic preparation and will be an important task for aid givers and service providers. In addition, acknowledging the history, culture, social structures, and emotions of refugees can help proud people swallow the sometimes bitter pill of dependency. Projects that recognize and engage all aspects of refugees’ lives have much higher chances of success. They are more than mouths to feed and bodies to care for, and recognition of their humanity, creativity, and resilience is required even in the midst of difficult times.”
What if the sole superpower on the planet makes its will known — repeatedly — and finds that no one is listening? Barely a decade ago, that would have seemed like a conundrum from some fantasy Earth in an alternate dimension. Now, it is increasingly a plain description of political life on our globe, especially in the Greater Middle East.
In the future, the indecent haste with which Barack Obama sought cover under the umbrella unfurled by his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis will be viewed as a watershed moment when it comes to America’s waning power in that region. In the aptly named “arc of instability,” the lands from the Chinese border to northern Africa that President George W. Bush and his neocon acolytes dreamed of thoroughly pacifying, turmoil is on the rise. Ever fewer countries, allies, or enemies, are paying attention, much less kowtowing, to the once-formidable power of the world’s last superpower. The list of defiant figures — from Egyptian generals to Saudi princes, Iraqi Shiite leaders to Israeli politicians — is lengthening.
The signs of this loss of clout have been legion in recent years. In August 2011, for instance, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ignored Obama’s unambiguous call for him “to step aside.” Nothing happened even after an unnamed senior administration official insisted, “We are certain Assad is on the way out.” As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Similarly, in March 2010, Obama personally delivered a half-hour-long chewing out of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a politician Washington installed in office, on the corruption and administrative ineptitude of his government. It was coupled with a warning that, if he failed to act, a cut in U.S. aid would follow. Instead, the next month the Obama administration gave him the red carpet treatment on a visit to Washington with scarcely a whisper about the graft and ill-governance that continues to this day.
In May 2009, during his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Obama demanded a halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem. In the tussle that followed, the sole superpower lost out and settlement expansion continued.
These are among the many examples of America’s slumping authority in the Greater Middle East, a process well underway even before Obama entered the Oval Office in January 2009. It had, for years, been increasingly apparent that Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with several lesser campaigns in the Global War on Terror, were doomed. In his inaugural address, Obama swore that the United States was now “ready to lead the world.” It was a prediction that would be proven disastrously wrong in the Greater Middle East.
Afghanistan and Pakistan
Invaded and occupied Afghanistan was to be the starting point for phase two in the triumphant singular supremacy of Uncle Sam. The first phase had ended in December 1991 with the titanic collapse of its partner in a MAD — that is, mutually assured destruction — world, the Soviet Union. A decade later, Washington was poised to banish assorted “terror” constellations from nearly 80 countries and to bring about regime change for the “Axis of Evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea). Having defeated the “Evil Empire” of the Soviets, Washington couldn’t have felt more confident when it came to achieving this comparatively modest aim.
Priority was initially given to sometime ally and client state Pakistan, the main player in creating the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s. Much to the chagrin of policymakers in Washington, however, the rulers of Pakistan, military and civilian, turned out to be masters at squeezing the most out of the United States (which found itself inescapably dependent on their country to prosecute its Afghan war), while delivering the least in return.
Today, the crumbling economy of Pakistan is in such a dire state that its government can keep going only by receiving handouts from the U.S. and regular rollover loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since the IMF arrangement is subject to Washington’s say-so, it seemed logical that the Obama administration could bend Islamabad to its diktats. Yet Pakistani leaders seldom let a chance pass to highlight American diplomatic impotence, if only to garner some respect from their own citizens, most of whom harbor an unfavorable view of the U.S.
A case in point has been the daredevil actions of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder-leader of the Lashkar-e Taiba (Army of the Pure, or LeT), listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department and the United Nations following its involvement in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, which killed 166 people, including six Americans. In April 2012, the State Department announced a $10 million reward for information leading to Saeed’s arrest and conviction. The bearded 62-year-old militant leader promptly called a press conference and declared, “I am here. America should give that reward money to me.”
He continues to operate from a fortified compound in Lahore, the capital of Punjab. “I move about like an ordinary person — that’s my style,” he told the New York Times’s Declan Walsh in February. He addresses large rallies throughout the country and is a much sought-after guest on Pakistani TV. According to intelligence officials based in the country, the militants of his organization participate in attacks on NATO forces and Indian diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan.
In August, when Saeed led a widely publicized parade on the nation’s Independence Day, protected by local police, all that a spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad could helplessly say was: “We remain concerned about the movements and activities of this person. We encourage the government of Pakistan to enforce sanctions against this person.”
Far more worrisome for Washington was the critical role that the al Qaeda-affiliated Pakistani Taliban, also listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department, played in determining the outcome of the country’s general election in May. It threatened to attack the public rallies and candidates of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) because its membership was open to non-Muslims. This tied the party’s hands in a predominantly rural society where, in the absence of reliable opinion polls, the size and frequency of public rallies is considered a crucial indicator of party strength. The outcome: a landslide victory by the opposition Pakistan Muslim League led by Nawaz Sharif, which drastically reduced the strength of the PPP in the National Assembly.
In the wake of a recent Russian-U.S. deal averting American airstrikes, Syria has begun to answer questions about its chemical weapons stockpile. One thing inspectors don’t have the mandate to ask is where those weapons came from in the first place. But evidence already out there suggests Syria got crucial help from Moscow and Western European companies.
When Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was asked recently about the origins of Syria’s chemical weapons, he said, “Well, the Russians supply them.” Hagel’s spokesman George Little quickly walked back that statement, saying Hagel was simply referring to Syria’s conventional weapons. Syria’s chemical weapons program, Little explained, is “largely indigenous.”
But declassified intelligence documents suggest Hagel, while mistakenly suggesting the support was ongoing, was at least pointing his finger in the right direction.
A Special National Intelligence Estimate dated Sept. 15, 1983, lists Syria as a “major recipient of Soviet CW [Chemical Weapons] assistance.” Both “Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union provided the chemical agents, delivery systems, and training that flowed to Syria.” “As long as this support is forthcoming,” the 1983 document continues,” there is no need for Syria to develop an indigenous capability to produce CW agents or materiel, and none has been identified.”
Soviet support was also mentioned, though with less details, in another intelligence estimate dated Feb. 2, 1982. That report muses about the U.S.S.R.’s motivation for exporting chemical weapons to Syria and other countries. The Kremlin saw gas as useful for allies fighting against insurgencies: For the countries that had actually used it in combat – Kampuchea, Laos, Afghanistan and Yemen – the authors conclude that the Soviet Union saw it as a way of “breaking the will and resistance of stubborn guerrilla forces operating from relatively inaccessible protected sanctuaries.”
The 1982 report goes on to say: “The Soviets probably reasoned that attainment of these objectives – as quickly and cheap as possible – justified use of chemical weapons and outweighed a small risk of exposure and international condemnation.” Last week, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that intelligence sources in the country are convinced blueprints for four of the five Syrian poison gas plants came from Moscow.
Evidence gathered from what we now know was a sarin attack last month is also suggestive. According to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, one of the weapons used in the attack was “a Soviet-produced 140mm rocket.” Meanwhile, the UN’s own report shows a picture of Cyrillic letters on the remnants of the rocket.
It’s impossible to know the exact extent of Soviet and Russian help. U.S. intelligence was not particularly focused on the Syrian program, says Gary Crocker, a proliferation specialist at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the 1970s and 1980s. Most analysts did not know much about its program: “Detailed information on the Syrian program was only accessible to very high level intelligence officials,” Crocker said.
There are also indications that the Soviets grew increasingly uneasy with Syria’s ability to deliver the deadly gas by long-range missile. Concerned about Syria’s buildup, the head of the Soviet chemical warfare corps, General Vladimir Pikalov,flew to Syria in 1988. According to reports from the time, he decided against supplying the country with SS-23 missiles, which would have been able to deliver poison gas deep into Israel.
But the Soviets don’t appear to be the only ones who provided some help.
“Soviets provided the initial setup, then the Syrians became quite proficient at it. Later, German companies came in,” Crocker said.
As then- CIA director William Webster said in Senate testimony back in 1989: “West European firms were instrumental in supplying the required precursor chemicals and equipment.” Asked why the companies did it, Webster answered: “Some, of course, are unwitting of the ultimate destination of the products they supply, others are not. In the latter case, I can only surmise that greed is the explanation.”
Indeed, Syria received precursor chemicals from the West until well into the last decade. Last week, the German government acknowledged that between 2002 and 2006, it had approved the export to Syria of more than 100 tons of so-called dual-use chemicals. Among the substances were hydrogen fluoride, which can be used to make Teflon, and also sarin. The exports were allowed under the condition that Syria would only use them for civilian purposes. The British government also recently acknowledged exports of dual-use chemicals to Syria.
Both the British and German governments said there’s no evidence the chemicals were used to make weapons.
It’s not the first time Germany may have turned a blind eye to potentially dangerous trade. In the 1980s, for instance, German and French companies were crucial in building poison gas plants in Iraq and Libya . Stricter export controls in Europe were only installed after a web of companies that supplied the chemical weapons programs in the Middle East was exposed in the late 1980s. The New York Times embarrassed the German government by revealing the connection between German company Imhausen-Chemie and a Libyan poison gas plant in Rabta. (Times columnist William Safire German later called the plant “ Auschwitz-in-the-sand.”)
In the following years, German authorities indicted more than 150 managers of companies involved in Saddam Hussein’s program, which he had used to kill thousands of Kurds. According to one report, from the late ‘90s, more than half of the proceedings were stopped. Most of those that went to trial were acquitted or paid fines, a handful received jail time.
Just how deeply were German companies involved in Syria’s program? We may never know. A long-ago proposal by the German Green party to install a fact-finding commission to comprehensively investigate the web of German companies supplying Middle Eastern states – and government knowledge of these exports – was voted down by all other parties in parliament.
The pan-Arab daily al-Hayat [Life] reports that 14 bands of fighters in Syria have broken with the moderate Syrian National Council led by Ahmad al-Jarba and have repudiated its Free Syrian Army.
The importance of this development should not be underestimated. It will throw a scare into Baghdad and Amman, and will provoke serious thought in Tel Aviv and Europe about the wisdom of supporting the opposition in Syria.
Embarrassingly enough this development broke while al-Jerba was at the UN General Assembly, where he met with Secretary of State John Kerry and UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. Al-Hayat said the Americans insisted on three points: Pursuing the plan to sequester Syria’s chemical weapons; an increase in aid to the opposition, including humanitarian aid; and proceeding with a negotiated settlement at Geneva. Al-Jerba, who wants outright victory, cannot have been happy to hear all this. And then his fighters abruptly joined al-Qaeda, cutting him off at the knees. The Americans postponed their further meeting in Washington with AlJerba and with Gen. Salim Idris, commander of the (now diminished) Free Syrian Army.
The American plan, of strengthening the FSA and overcoming the extremists in the opposition so as to force the ruling Baath regime to the negotiating table has now almost completely fallen apart. The turn toward al-Qaeda of so many Syrian fighters just after the Nairobi attacks will make it even harder for the Congress to support aid to the rebels.
Three of the armed groups that signed the fundamentalist declaration had been considered members of the Free Syrian Army. Also signing the declaration seeking an Islamic state instead of a Syrian National Council were Jabhat al-Nusra, an open al-Qaeda affiliate.
The London-based daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] suggests one explanation for the defections: money. The Syrian National Council is just not funding the moderate Free Syrian Army very well, while fundamentalist fighters are well paid.
“Syria: FSA Officials Complain of Weak Financing, Defections to Well-Financed Islamist Brigades”…
Al-Sharq al-Awsat Online
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Document Type: OSC Translated Text
Despite insistence by the Syrian opposition on organizing the activities of the Free Syrian Army and controlling decisions by its brigades as a prelude to transforming it to a military establishment that protects security in the period after the ouster of the regime, realities on the field indicate there are many obstacles to bringing this about. Military commanders complain of the modest finances that reach the Joint Chiefs of Staff, something that forces the commanders of the brigades fighting on the ground to shift their alliances to the quarters that supply them with money and weapons.
Breakaway Brigadier-General Khalid al-Hammud told Al-Sharq al-Awsat that about 50 percent of the FSA brigades receive support from external sides. These brigades are the more effective in fighting the regular forces because they lead the most prominent battles and score great gains, he said. This has produced a state of multiple loyalties within the FSA because the decision in some brigades is up to those who supply them with weapons and pays them, not the Chiefs of Staff.
Al-Hammud said that the Chiefs of Staff control only 20 percent of the brigades that fight on the ground. Its members live on the borders and do not enter Syria, something that makes them distant from the course of action on the field, he said.
Al-Hammud explained the procedure adopted by the fighting brigades to obtain support from merchants and businessmen sympathetic with the Syrian revolution. He said the soldiers prepared a video on an operation they carried out against regular forces to send it to the financing quarters in order to get money and weapons. Thus the phrase has been coined among brigade commanders in Syria: Shoot videos and get money and weapons, he said…
According to Al-Hammud, the hard-line Islamic brigades that constitute 30 percent of the opposition fighters do not suffer a problem in getting finances. On the contrary they pay salaries to their fighters and ensure a good life to their families.a(euro) He said that a(euro)oea number of moderate fighters leave their brigades and join the Islamic brigades to obtain the privileges they provide. He blamed this on the FSA Chiefs of Staff which he said operates a(euro)oeaccording to a Western agenda.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff comprises 30 civilian and military members operating under the command of General Salim Idris who was elected in mid December 2012 after lengthy meetings held in the Turkish town of Antalya attended by representatives from various fighting Syrian opposition factions operating inside Syria. This took place about a year after the establishment of the FSA by the breakaway Colonel Riyad al-Asad who was excluded along with his aides from the composition of the new Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Under the field complexities facing the FSA, its brigades have lately been facing a new confrontation with the hard-line Islamic brigades, especially the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant which is close to Al-Qaeda. Several clashes have broken out between the two sides the last of which was in the village of Hazanu in [Idlib's] countryside.
When reports of a chemical weapons attack in Rif Dimashq near Damascus on August 21 first surfaced, some observers questioned whether these were really chemical weapons. Others questioned whether the force that deployed them, if that was what they were, was the Syrian army. T
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said that the evidence for Sarin gas use was indisputable and clearly a “war crime.” The UN inspectors were not tasked with determining who exactly used the toxic rockets. But the type of munitions and the trajectory they established pointed to the army of the ruling Baath regime in Damascus, since the rockets were in the government arsenal, came from regime-held positions and landed in rebel-controlled territory. The Syrian army chem unit that likely deployed these weapons appears to have engaged in a diabolical set of calculations, firing the warheads at a time when the winds were propitious for spreading the gas around and allowing it to seep into basements where the population of Ghouta was hiding from a regime bombing campaign.
“The rocket systems identified by the UN as used in the attack – truck-launched 330mm rockets with around 50 to 60 liters of Sarin, as well as 140mm Soviet-produced rockets carrying a smaller Sarin-filled warhead – are both known to be in the arsenal of the Syrian armed forces. They have never been seen in rebel hands. The amount of Sarin used in the attack – hundreds of kilograms, according to Human Rights Watch’s calculations – also indicates government responsibility for the attack, as opposition forces have never been known to be in possession of such significant amounts of Sarin.
The various theories claiming to have “evidence” that opposition forces were responsible for the attack lack credibility. This was not an accidental explosion caused by opposition fighters who mishandled chemical weapons, as claimed by some commentators online. The attacks took place at two sites 16 kilometres apart, and involved incoming rockets, not on-the-ground explosions. This was not a chemical attack cooked up by opposition forces in some underground kitchen. It was a sophisticated attack involving military-grade Sarin.”
As I have argued on several occasions, the Syrian regime must be punished for these severe war crime, and it is time for the US Treasury Department to close off the loopholes that allow Syrian banks to continue to interface with Western ones, if necessary by threatening Russian banks with third-party sanctions. This kind of pressure will be more effective than merely lobbing a couple of cruise missiles at Damascus, in any case.
Here are some key excerpts from the Sellstrom report:
“23. Information gathered about the delivery systems was essential for the investigation. Indeed, several surface to surface rockets capable of delivering significant chemical paloads were identified and recorded in the investigated sites . . . Samples later confirmed to contain Sarin were recovered from a majority of the rokets or rocket fragments.
24. In total, 30 environmental samples were recovered . . . According to the reports received from the OPCW-designated laboratories, the presence of Sarin, its degradation and/or production by-products were observed in a majority of the samples . . .
26. Blood, urine and hair samples were withdrawn from 34 of the 36 patients selected by the Mission who had signs of intoxication. The positive blood and urine specimens provide definitive evidence of exposure to Sarin by almost all of hte survivors assessed by the mission. These results are corroborated by the clinical assessments, which documented symptoms and signs that are consistent with nerve agent exporsure, including shortness of breath, eye irritation, excessive salivation, convulsions, confusion/disorientation, and miosis…
27. On the basis of the evidence obtained during our investigation of the Ghouta incident, the conclusion is that on 21 August 2013, chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syrian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale.
28. In particular, the environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent Sarin were used in Ein Tarma, Moadamiyah and Samalka in the Ghouta area of Damascus.
29. The facts supporting this conclusion are:
Impacted and exploded surface-to-surface rockets, capable to carry chemical payload, were found to contain Sarin.
Close to the rocket impact sites, in the area where patients were affected, the environment was found to be contaminated by Sarin.
Over fifty interviews given by survivors and health care workers provided ample corroboration of the medical and scientific results.
A number of patients/survivors were clearly diagnosed as intoxicated [poisoned] by an organophosphorous compound.
Blood and urine samples from the same patients wer found positive for Sarin and Sarin signatures. . .
Appendix 5…
Impact site number 1 (Moadamiyah) and Impact site number 4 (Ein Tarma) provide sufficient evidence to determine, with a sufficient degree of accuracy, the likely trajectory of the projectiles.”
The hawks who are deeply disappointed that diplomacy has likely forestalled a US military intervention in Syria in the foreseeable future often attempt to tug at our heart strings by pointing to the over 100,000 dead and the millions of displaced, implying that the US has a responsibility to intervene to stop the carnage on humanitarian grounds.
If the world were such that the US could in fact do so, perhaps they might have a point. The problem is that social engineering on that scale is currently beyond even a superpower. We need a humanitarian realism to forestall the utopians from taking us into quagmires. There is nothing wrong with doing good where you realistically can. Trying to do good by military means where you cannot can be deadly to both you and the victims.
Syria resembles Iraq in many respects. It is a multicultural country with 60% Sunni Arabs, 10% Kurds, 10-14% Alawite Shiites, 10-14% Christians, and smaller Twelver Shiite, Druze and Ismaili communities. Iraq is a mirror image, with a Shiite majority and a Sunni Arab minority.
Both countries were ruled for decades by the Baath or Resurrection Party, which claimed to be socialist and Arab nationalist. The Baath Party insists on a one-party state. In both countries, an ethnic minority captured the upper echelons of the Baath Party, using its control of the state to reward coreligionists. In Iraq, the Sunni Arabs disproportionately dominated the higher ranks of the Baath Party and officer corps. In particular, the Tikriti clan of Saddam Hussein took the highest posts. In Syria, the Alawite Shiite Arabs were disproportionately represented at the heights of power. In particular, the al-Assad clan took the highest posts.
The Neoconservatives accused Saddam Hussein of having killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and maintained that the US had a duty, which trumped international law and the UN Security Council, to invade and overthrow him. While it is true that Saddam Hussein was responsible for a lot of deaths, it wasn’t clear that he was killing any significant number of people 1992-2003. The killings had come as a result of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the internal war against separatist Kurds (1985-1989), and the repression of a massive Shiite uprising in March-May of 1991. The US was complicit in much of this, having encouraged Iraq and having allied with it during the Iran-Iraq War, which might have ended sooner otherwise. The Reagan administration also used its clout at the UN to protect Iraq from sanctions for using chemical weapons on Iran, which encouraged the regime later to use them on the Kurds. George H. W. Bush called on Iraqis to rise up against Saddam in 1991, and when they did he left them twisting in the wind and allowed the regime to use helicopter gunships against them.
The pretext for the US war on Iraq was its alleged chemical and other weapons programs and stores, which did not exist and which UN inspectors such as Scott Ritter, a former Marine, explicitly said did not exist.
Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, who has never been right about anything (and is now cropping up on corporate television again) wrote on January 15, 2003 in USA Today:
“As war with Iraq nears, the chorus of those claiming Saddam Hussein is contained, the United Nations process is working or the U.S. must address other, more pressing problems, grows louder. Some hate war or mistrust any expression of American power, but by far the largest group of naysayers is well intentioned. Their mantra, if they had one, would be: “Why now?” . . . Why now?”
She says critic bring up al-Qaeda and North Korea as threats. She answers,
“But these are not reasons to defer action. They are reasons for the U.S. to act now and remove Saddam from power. Only then will al-Qaeda’s followers grasp that the U.S. is a power to be reckoned with, committed to destroying its enemies. Only then will North Korea step back and assess the fate of dictators committed to amassing weapons of mass destruction.”
How’s that North Korea deterrence working out for you? And, didn’t the invasion of Iraq reinvigorate al-Qaeda to the point where it came into that country and is still blowing it up and is now ruling some of northern Syria?
Pletka was doubtful that Iraq had really destroyed its chemical and biological weapons and mothballed its nuclear program:
“Since 1991, there have been repeated “full, final and complete” disclosures of Iraqi weapons programs, each of them incomplete.”
The idea that the US could by invading and occupying the country forestall another 300,000 deaths, which is what the Neoconservatives were arguing, was simply incorrect. The US created a power vacuum in Iraq and by playing favorites helped provoke a years-long (perhaps decades-long) guerrilla war. The Sunni Arabs were fired from their jobs, their state-owned factories were abruptly shut down, and they were removed from positions of power and authority in favor of Shiites and Kurds.
Yesterday, on Sunday, car bombs in Hilla, Basra and elsewhere killed 58 people. Hilla is a Shiite city, and some of its notables had had their land to the north taken away from them by Saddam and given to Sunni families. Since 2003 they have been reclaiming it, expelling Sunni farmers who had come to see the land as theirs. Some of what the US used to call the ‘triangle of death’ was produced by this dynamic. Most likely, the al-Qaeda that Danielle Pletka was certain she could frighten out of existence by invading Iraq was behind the bombing in Hilla, in September of 2013. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq in early 2003.
Since April 1, 4,000 people have died in political violence in Iraq. That is over a decade since the great Neocon Jihad against Saddam. It is not clear that the Syrian death toll at this moment is greater on a monthly basis than the Iraq shaped by the tender ministrations of Washington.
Guerrilla wars are fought in back alleys and inhospitable terrain. The fighters hide, strike, then fade away. The US never was able to defeat them, either the Shiite ones or the Sunni ones, and mostly had no control over what they did. There US was occupying Iraq with 150,000 troops or so in 2006 when a civil war broke out that was killing as many as 2500 noncombatants a month and displacing tens of thousands each month abroad. It was in charge of the security of the country. It had the troops, the tanks, the planes, the electronic surveillance. But it was powerless to stop a civil war from unfolding under its nose. The deaths tapered off by September of 2007 not because of Bush’s troop excalation (‘surge’) but because by that time Shiite militiamen had ethnically cleansed so many Sunnis from their neighborhoods that they would have had to drive for a while to find more Sunnis to kill. Baghdad under the US went from being half Sunni to being 20% Sunni. There were huge American bases in Baghdad during these events, with on-base McDonalds and Burger Kings. They may as well not have existed for all of their ability to stop the carnage.
So the hawks, whether of the manipulative and vicious sort or of the humanitarian sort, who keep squawking that the US needs to do something are beginning with the premise that the US can do something effective. It can’t.
That the Syria situation is so like that in Iraq makes the analogy compelling. I am not saying that all interventions are doomed. Kosovo and Bosnia aren’t paradise, but they turned out just all right. But Syria is not like Kosovo, where you had a compact territory being invaded by another ethnic group. Syria is all mixed up. The tanks are inside the cities. The cities are multi-ethnic for the most part. There is nothing you could bomb without killing the civilians you were hoping to protect (Syria differs in this way also from Libya).
It is human nature to think, when we see an ongoing great slaughter, that something must be done. But because of the ease of availability of high explosives and other weapons and the breakdown of social consensus, there is little the outside world could hope to do. Arming the rebels, as Obama has pledged to do, will not, let us say, reduce the death rate.
It may be a positive that the question is even being broached. Millions were polished off in Congo in the 1990s and it didn’t get mentioned on the evening news in the US. Likewise, the Algerian civil War of the 1990s and early zeroes passed without comment in America.
But if the US couldn’t stop a civil war and a growing guerrilla war in Iraq while actually running the place, it can’t likely do anything about Syria. It is a sad fact of 21st century life.
What the US and its allies can do is improve the conditions of the 2 million Syrians displaced abroad, and try to figure ways of getting food and necessities to internally displaced noncombatants. The US hasn’t been bad on refugee aid, but it can do substantially more, as can Europe and the Arab League. Ignoring the plight of a third of the country (the DPs) while strategizing how to scramble fighter-jets is the opposite of humanitarianism.
which tells the story of a young couple trying to get married in the Za’atari refugee camp. His reporting on refugees in the Middle East has appeared in numerous publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy and Middle East Report.
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