How can peace in Syria be achieved?

[Her Grey Eminence]

The simple fact is that the only way that both sides are going to be held accountable is to get an international peacekeeping force to ensure that adequate protections are provided for all Syrians.

Speak for yourself, I don't want one Australian killed in order to bolster Israel's greasy grip on the Golan.

Perhaps you are happy to see Americans killed in that cause, but presumably only because you don't propose to serve in such a force yourself.

 

[McHrozni]

I did not say Assad has legitimacy or the Assad government has legitimacy, I said the Syrian army and the Syrian police force have legitimacy to carry out security and terrorism prevention. The Syrian Free Army has no legitimacy to do anything.

Syrian army and police are a simple extension of Assad regime. Pretending otherwise is just dumb.

That aside, what feature gives them legitimacy? I doubt you want to piggyback on CL's particularly idiotic idea it was perpetrating the 2000 Hama massacre among other things.

In order to benefit Israel (...)

Evidence?

McHrozni

 

[Her Grey Eminence]

Syrian army and police are a simple extension of Assad regime. Pretending otherwise is just dumb.

That aside, what feature gives them legitimacy? I doubt you want to piggyback on CL's particularly idiotic idea it was perpetrating the 2000 Hama massacre among other things.



Evidence?

McHrozni

It is a LEGAL not a moral concept. How hard is that to understand.

Under Soeharto the Indonesian army was the legitimate army. Under Pinochet the Chilean army was the legitimate army. Under the Brezhnev the Red Army was the legitimate army. There have been dozens of dictatorships in the world, in almost all of them they departed or died and the institutions that supported them evolved.

Very few of them had civil wars and probably none of them would have benefited from them.

McHronzi, you couldn't care less who rules Syria, your only interests are Israeli interests.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Syrian army and police are a simple extension of Assad regime. Pretending otherwise is just dumb.

That aside, what feature gives them legitimacy? I doubt you want to piggyback on CL's particularly idiotic idea it was perpetrating the 2000 Hama massacre among other things.

Where did I say a massacre I've never heard of gave them legitimacy? In the 30 years since the Hama massacre I have heard of, nothing else remotely close has happened until the "Arab Spring" stuff started last year, then things suddenly did get quite crazy. And the government, all its problems intact (I'm hazy on what they actually are), had managed to keep things together in between. As HGE says, it's a legal matter, not a moral one, s citing the biggest crime (with Libya it was alternately the Lockerbie bombing and the Abu Salim prison massacre, both apparently made up) doesn't change things.

And I'll add even if it's not technically legal (??) it's pragmatic to give some legitimacy to the force that's in charge. Even opponents of the Libyan rebels recognized them as the legitimate government once they took the capitol. They're who you have to work with, y'know? They're in charge. What other option is there except to recognize a group not in charge and try to help bludgeon them into being in charge?

So yeah, normally, that's not how peace is achieved. Here we're going to have to make up some imaginative new way.

 

[McHrozni]

It is a LEGAL not a moral concept. How hard is that to understand.

It runs contrary to what legitimacy means, for one. In accordance with established principles is one such case.

Under Soeharto the Indonesian army was the legitimate army. Under Pinochet the Chilean army was the legitimate army. Under the Brezhnev the Red Army was the legitimate army. There have been dozens of dictatorships in the world, in almost all of them they departed or died and the institutions that supported them evolved.

Very few of them had civil wars and probably none of them would have benefited from them.

None of them had civil wars, which is what makes them incomparable even if we take your own definition of legitimacy.
Take a different example, more comparable. English civil war, 1642-51 - which side was legitimate, according to you?

McHronzi, you couldn't care less who rules Syria, your only interests are Israeli interests.

It's McHrozni and not McHronzi. Please provide evidence of my Israeli interests. Thus far all you have are empty claims.

McHrozni
(and not McHronzi)

 

[McHrozni]

Where did I say a massacre I've never heard of gave them legitimacy?

Well you said keeping the country together under their rule for X years gave them a measure of legitimacy. Hama massacre was an action that kept Syria together in the past, under the same regime as now. Ergo you're claiming Assad should stay in power in part because his fathers' regime was able to perpetrate the Hama massacre.

Note, I did get the year wrong in the first post. Sue me.

McHrozni

 

[Caustic Logic]

A modern Russian lady, ha. Ok ok, I didn't have a lot of time to type my post and made a mistake on not including "talks about" after the comma.

It's better form to just acknowledge the goof-up, even a pretty silly one. Adding evasion is less good form.

This is borderline tl;dr, my fault, too much else going on. I'll skim at least, and offer a thought or two.

It's not always the case that people who think that Assad has lost his legitimacy to rule, deny or get mad that there are some people who think otherwise. There will always be supporters of a dictators rule, especially if they provide and maintain a privileged group of society to support them.

Side-question: HYPOTHETICAL! What if a "dictator" somewhere ever managed to make everyone in the country part of a fairly evenly-priveleged group, and kept everyone happy, but still didn't let people vote? Plato's good tyrant, best form of government, he thought. If ten thousand people in some minority (of, say, 12,000,000 total) somehow got suddenly disgruntled and demanded his overthrow - would it be right to help them out?

Forgot what you were responding to there-maybe it answered my point, maybe not.

...the large number of people who think Assad should go.

How large, do you think? Overal pop, pre-uprising, a hair under 21,000,000.

Interestingly though, it is the pro Assad side that gets worked up about opposing viewpoints, or more commonly ignores them altogether. SANA doesn't exactly spend a lot of time talking about the people who do not approve of Assad, and especially not why.

Nor does CNN or the Guardian give much voice to those SANA talks to. There are some numbers attached to these sides, neither of us knows what they are.

Syrians should have a right to choose and peacefully demonstrate without fear of being killed by their government.

Absolutely. And I understand still shootings at protests and funeral processions occur. I'm hazy on the details, but for this, failing as you note top curb it, to protect their people from their own armed forces, is seriously delegitimizing. All that you write is clear, and generally quite fair considering what’s generally accepted. You win, in normal land.

All I’d like to add is that’s not necessarily physically true. If physical reality were democratic, the people of the world would have voted this to truth easily. But it's not, so I remain agnostic until I get more detail to have a better guess. This is worth a major study by experts, and should have been done months ago, but I will attempt to start an analysis. I'm putting off the Homs torture hospital allegations to make time, and even then, nothing promised for a bit. Then people will have something new to ignore.

From the bits I've seen and things I know from around, I get the impression that in the heat of full-on war, the regime is still picking off actual protesters at like every protest in Aleppo at least. It seems like very few people - one or two, never enough to scatter them-they remain defiant. These happen in towns with a strong rebel presence, areas they tend to control.

These could, crazy as it sounds, be false flag provocateur sniper acts, as I’ve documented in Libya, seriously pretty well illustrated, right from the famous rooftop videos of the “government repression.” In this kind of attack, some hardcore cats would run it, shoot one or two protesters/mourners down, ones who look weak or young. They get the most sympathy dead, and make the worst fighters alive, so it’s a maximum win and minimal lose.

Someone needs to take a closer look at how these Syrian snipers work compared to more successful crowd dispersal or crushing actions as compared to the kind of action we see in the videos from Al Baida. It seems like a military presence, marching, pushing, tear gas, etc. usually play in, and the crowd gets moved. In extreme cases, live fire is used - not just shooting a couple and letting the rest rage in place, but enough downed to scare everyone else away.

Can anyone tell me before I start looking soon - which of those models do the Syrian protests that get sniped look more like?

The first and foremost duty of a Nation is to protect the people. If a Nation is failing to do that, and especially if they are intentionally doing a lot of killings themselves on unarmed civilians, than something need to be addressed.

They say they have been trying to, by attacking the terrorists doing things like sniping the citizens just to blame the government (remember Sari, and that we don't know that's the only case). But they operate inside cities, and it's a little tricky, not as precise and bloodless as the eye surgery Assad studied for.

"unreliable" because of "inconsistencies."

Attached to those who disagree with little Ali? Of course - they're inconsistent with the activist-supplied witnesses. I've been "proven" wrong and "unlikely" again. So what?

However, you cannot deny that the report details some extremely serious war crimes. There are some extremely grave findings in these sections:

I haven't had time to look yet. I'm guessing - tell me if I'm wrong -documenting means taking down what activist supplied witnesses said happened. Not impressed. About 100 documented witnesses supported this total crap cover story for a Libyan rebel war crime. No one here even disagrees, they just find it boring. The UN's report toed the same line as the media there. So what? They were all on the wrong (untrue) side of the line.

If you search for "Shabbiha," you can find some of the worst abuses that have been carried out are associated with that group. That is why it is so troubling when CE jokes about Assad being a "thug, LOL" for sending his shabbiha out to kill defecting soldiers.

Yep. Same with "African mercenaries" in Libya. We can be fairly sure the thousands of them reported in the first days of "protests" were mythical, the later ones, maybe less so. Doing terrible things, allegedly, explaining many of the rebels' own crimes, like killing piles of "defected"soldiers, requiring lots of dead Black guys for months on months, all of the Shabiha, er mecernaries.

There are some pretty grave accounts of what the Shabbiha did to villages who were suspected of knowing about defected soldiers, and especially the families of defected soldiers.

Sad thing is, I suspect much of the violence they describe is happening, just as extremely as they say. I've seen some video proof that would curdle your blood. I've been a bit messed up by them. I just wonder who really stands to benefit, and if the circumstances are being accurately portrayed by the activist-supplied alleged witnesses. We'd all better hope so.

Here is just one small part form the report (pg. 74):

Yeah, a regime crime for sure, that SANA probably tried to cover up by saying the local Imam was pro-regime, and so were the other people killed, by "what they call terrorists." As if that story ever works, but they keep doing this and saying that. It's insane, requiring removal. Idiots.

Is it possible for someone else to shoot yourself in the foot for you?

Could also be a more straightforward case-it's not suspiciously, cartoonishly evil, that one. Some preachers and fighting men in wartime might get the summary execution, even if it's wrong. Sure. I'd need to know more to get a better guess. But you know enough to call it an incident that happened as described. I envy you a bit.

That kind of action shouldn't be happening, and Russia, Iran, and the other Syrian allies who refuse to pressure Assad to halt that kind of actions are allowing it to occur.

I'm just not so sure they're the ones trying to halt the attempts at halting. If I were, I'd probably agree with you almost toally. These things shouldn't be happening, and I suspect once Assad is overthrown and can't be blamed, they will stop, approximately then, and we can pat ourselves on the back, most of us. (I'll gladly sit in my dictator-supporter corner of shame).

Apologies if I've missed anything important cutting it off there. Peace.

 

[Toontown]

I take back what I said before. I now believe it is mandatory that the dictator who was in power when the civil war broke out must remain in power, so that it is his responsibility, rather than the responsibility of the civilized world, to fix what the dictator broke.

 

[HoverBoarder]

It's better form to just acknowledge the goof-up, even a pretty silly one. Adding evasion is less good form.

This is borderline tl;dr, my fault, too much else going on. I'll skim at least, and offer a thought or two.

Here's the part that really annoys me about it. I read through both articles from the Guardian, and the translated version of the Saudi newspaper multiple times, and I know that Assad's last name is Assad.

I made the mistake twice, but I was really in a hurry, and was only checking for spelling. If I did have more time, I am fairly confident that I would have caught my mistake and corrected it.




The much more major aspect is all of the data that just flat out shows major war crimes by the Assad regime that CE is just ignoring, nor addressing any of the major problems with the SANA articles and other more questionable sources that have been posted.

It is a pattern of ignoring any of the major contradicting data in favor of focusing solely on small, one sided selective biased analyses that backs a simplistic B&W good/guy pattern of viewing everything that is true for CE irregardless of the facts.

 

[Childlike Empress]

Here's the part that really annoys me about it. I read through both articles from the Guardian, and the translated version of the Saudi newspaper multiple times, and I know that Assad's last name is Assad.

I made the mistake twice, but I was really in a hurry, and was only checking for spelling. If I did have more time, I am fairly confident that I would have caught my mistake and corrected it.




The much more major aspect is all of the data that just flat out shows major war crimes by the Assad regime that CE is just ignoring, nor addressing any of the major problems with the SANA articles and other more questionable sources that have been posted.

It is a pattern of ignoring any of the major contradicting data in favor of focusing solely on small, one sided selective biased analyses that backs a simplistic B&W good/guy pattern of viewing everything that is true for CE irregardless of the facts.

I'm writing on this forum about this topic and adding gray to the black and white for half a year and followed it closely from the beginning. I know all your "arguments" because they are the epitome of the narrative that got screamed from the rooftops on all channels until very recently. As i've told you before, I have not the slightest intention of interacting with you and your constant strawmen, not necessary because of what you've written in this thread including your bizarre "error", but what you've written about our wiki and the impertinent and repeated misrepresentations of my posts in the other threads. Find someone else, whining won't help.

 

[HoverBoarder]

I'm writing on this forum about this topic and adding gray to the black and white for half a year and followed it closely from the beginning. I know all your "arguments" because they are the epitome of the narrative that got screamed from the rooftops on all channels until very recently. As i've told you before, I have not the slightest intention of interacting with you and your constant strawmen, not necessary because of what you've written in this thread including your bizarre "error", but what you've written about our wiki and the impertinent and repeated misrepresentations of my posts in the other threads. Find someone else, whining won't help.

I have never seen one post of yours that has seriously acknowledged the blatant war crimes of the Assad regime besides saying that 'other people have extensively covered that, and there is no reason for you to,' and then totally ignore that data in every other post.

 

[Mark6]

Assad would LOVE this solution.

And the Iranian Government statement on terrorism is Drop Dead Funny considering how much of it they have supported........

My immediate thought when I saw it: "They know what they are talking about!"

 

[Toontown]

The dictator will, of course, fail miserably to fix what he broke. The failed country will complete it's descent into chaos and anarchy.

And that's the way it should stay. Indefinitely. At some point, perhaps, Lebanon and/or Iraq may decide to go in and pick up the shattered pieces of the failed dictatorship.

Whatever. It will be interesting to see what happens when a country like Syria completely disintegrates.

 

[Virus]

I'm writing on this forum about this topic and adding gray to the black and white for half a year and followed it closely from the beginning.

Actually you are just an Assad supporter with Lonely Planet leftist guidebook ideology.

 

[Toontown]

Actually you are just an Assad supporter with Lonely Planet leftist guidebook ideology.

The cartoon at the top of the article is hilarious. The two lefties look like the Beaverly and Butthead of leftism.

Those two went looking for Mr. Goodbar and found three of them.

 

[trustbutverify]

I'm writing on this forum about this topic and adding gray to the black and white...

This is intended as a joke, right?

 

[Mark6]

No, she means it. Read her previous posts on other threads.

And Virus' observation is spot-on. That article about "Lonely Planet" pretty much describes Childlike Empress. Especially her icreasingly desperate defense of Ghaddafi back when he was still alive. Much like how she defends Assad now, only more so.

 

[Childlike Empress]

Especially her icreasingly desperate defense of Ghaddafi back when he was still alive.

You're either confusing me with somebody else or making stuff up. I did not at all discuss Libya when it was happening on this forum, with very few exceptions like this thread which is about propaganda and saw pseudo-skeptics willingly swallow it like they do now. Reason why I started to discuss Syria is that I thought some may have learned - and indeed some have, despite the desperate attempts of the usual suspects to discredit the messenger and keep the sheeps in line.

 

[Mark6]

I'm saying that the bruhaha about this sham "election" is a fig leaf to ensure people like you keep believing that Libya is now better off than with the system they had. Which couldn't be further from the truth.

Really, do they? Frankly, i'm not interested in discussing this at the moment, it sickens me to the stomach. Read the article i've posted for a start. The social fabric of this country, until last year the one with the highest living standards in all of Africa, and with a direct democracy designed to fit the tribal roots of the land, is utterly destroyed. It's a tragedy.

"Highest living standard in all of Africa?" If that's not defense of Ghaddafi, what is?

 

[Childlike Empress]

"Highest living standard in all of Africa?" If that's not defense of Ghaddafi, what is?

A fact.