How can peace in Syria be achieved?

[Mark6]

My apologies. I searched for posts which I was sure were from Childlike Empress. Turned out they were by Bikerdruid.

 

[Childlike Empress]

My apologies. I searched for posts which I was sure were from Childlike Empress. Turned out they were by Bikerdruid.

Thanks, accepted.

 

[HoverBoarder]

I have been interrogated by the Mukhabarat myself actually.

Long story, basically Israel had tossed a missile into a Palestinian refugee camp/training ground and 6 months later I went to have a look.

They seem to have all the good cop/bad cop techniques worked out and lots of psychological tactics, so I don't think they need to pull fingernails. Why not waterboard like the Americans do?

I did see someone being slapped around in one of the basements I was taken - but for all I know he was an ali baba. Anyway, the insurgents aren't exactly angels either.

Why should I care if some Mukhabarat slaps someone around in the well founded belief that if the tables were turned they would slit his throat? And ignore rebels that knife children in Houla?

I find that story to be seemingly unlikely unless it was 2007, and instead of standing next to a Palestinian refugee camp, you were standing next to a Syrian nuclear weapons facility...

Still, in either case, there would have been no reason for the Syrian secret police to interrogate you as they would just be debriefing you. You couldn't even get your "I was interrogated by Mukhabarat and all I got was this lousy tee shirt"


If you want to have a serious discussion about Mukhabarat, we could start here:

http://www.kalamullah.com/just-five-minutes.html

(At least spend thirty seconds skimming the site)

 

[HoverBoarder]

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

A fact.

Is there any point in which it would be not acceptable to justify and protect the higher living standards of some sections of the population that is maintained through the actions of a brutal dictator that tortures and kills large numbers of his own people?

Syria maintains a sectarian privileged class of people that has been violently maintained for 40 years through torture, execution, and occasional mass killings of Syrian citizens who are not deemed privileged due to their sectarian background.


It is somewhat ironic that many of the fringe pro-Assad sites rail against the elite 1%, and then support the massive inequality and abuses of the Syrian regime.

 

[Noztradamus]

Nuke the entire site from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure.

 

[MaGZ]

How can peace in Syria be achieved?

Assad should wipe out the terrorists.

 

[Toontown]

How can peace in Syria be achieved?

Assad should wipe out the terrorists.

You should not have come back, MaGZ-wan Kenobi.

 

[trustbutverify]

How can peace in Syria be achieved?

Assad should wipe out the terrorists.

Assad's gonna kill himself?

 

[Virus]

Ha. The neo-Nazi is on CE's side.

 

[trustbutverify]

That can always be assumed.

 

[Caustic Logic]

A fact.

I remember on the Colbert show an observation that the facts should be ignored, as they showed a strong anti-Bush bias. What to do when the facts show a pro-Gaddafi bias? Ignore those facts and insist that others do the same.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Originally Posted by Childlike Empress
I'm writing on this forum about this topic and adding gray to the black and white...

This is intended as a joke, right?

Seriously? Bias or whatever, she didn't even specify mid-tone gray, off-white, charcoal-black. Gray is broad, and is exactly what is between the extremes of G.I. Joe good-guy-bad-guy dichotomies fed to publics from time immemorial to "justify" wars usually decided on for other, material reasons.

And there's always a class of people ready to banish all shades of gray in support.

The actual truth is always somewhere in the gray, by the way. So giggle away if you like.

 

[Virus]

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.

I'm glad you liked it. This is pretty much the modus operandi of the local far left zealots;

There's a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing.

 

[Caustic Logic]

I'm glad you liked it. This is pretty much the modus operandi of the local far left zealots;

I actually read half the article. It's such a perfect fit for you. I dug the comments.

I can vouch for Lonely Planet, not Mr. Moynihan, on the Lockerbie bombing at least. Collectively by argument the forum discussion right here bears that out.

 

[HoverBoarder]

How can peace in Syria be achieved?

Assad should wipe out the terrorists.

How do you define terrorists?

Does it included people sleeping in their houses that are hit by artillery or airstrikes?

Or what about people waiting in a bread line?


Or what about the crime of being a man living in a house?

Today, however, our colleague Mona Mahmood has been speaking via Skype with a resident of al-Herak in Deraa who gave his name as Muhammed Abu Houran:


Yesterday morning the Syrian army began its campaign against al-Herak in Deraa. They launched a vicious raid against the people who were still in their houses, though most of the people had left the town earlier.

They Syrian army executed any men they found in these houses soon after arresting them. Most of the men who were executed were found in deserted houses. From yesterday until now, fires are still burning – there is not enough water to put them out.

After three days of fierce battles here, the FSA had to leave its positions as it had run out of ammunition. As soon as the FSA pulled out, field executions were carried out and houses were burned and destroyed.

 

[dudalb]

I see that Iran has effectively banned women from attending college. Be fun to the Usual Suspects defend this action since Iran is a "Anti Imperialist Allied Government".

 

[HoverBoarder]

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?

Suddenly became disgruntled?

The Assad regime came into power after they pulled a coup and retained the majority of positions and power in the hands of the Allawites.

They have been killing thousands of people to retain power ever since than. The previous Assad ruler killed 20,000 in one city.



This is just a situation of one group retaining majority power and control at the expense of another group. It is most similar to a much more violent version of apartheid South Africa.

In apartheid South Africa, you had a minority group being given preferential treatment and positions of power due to a government run by the preferred minority. Add in 40,000 to 50,000 or more deaths to terrorize the non-preferred population into submission, and you have Syria.

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.

For me, this is not about my side vs. your side.

My point is that we should have structures and measures in place to prevent these kinds of atrocities from happening in the first place.

One of the most tragic parts about this whole situation is that almost every single death that has happened in this conflict was easily 100% preventable. Soldiers, civilians, rebels, none of them needed to die. There should not have been 20,000 deaths in this conflict. There should not have been 5,000 deaths, or 4,000 deaths, or 100 deaths.

None of the deaths should have happened, and they ALL could have been easily prevented


Governments should not be allowed to kill their own people in mass, especially not in the thousands.


If Assad's allies had not given him a free pass to kill as many protesters as he did in the beginning, than there would have never been a Syrian conflict in the first place. If Assad's allies had not given him a free pass to ignore the ceasefire, than there would have been no conflict today. If Assad's allies would stop giving him a free pass to bomb and shell civilians neighborhoods with impunity, than there would be a peace agreement by next month.


All of the deaths that have happened, and all of the deaths that are happening are completely preventable. We just have to have an international community that wants to prevent them.

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?

There have been far too many deaths to be explained as propoganda. With 20,000 people dead, even 5,000, that is far too large to be explained away. The constant and well documented artillery fire into residential neghborhoods should not be ignored.

It is indeed one of the main reasons why this conflict has killed so many people.

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.


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?


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.




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.



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.


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.

There have been far too many deaths to be explained away as propoganda.

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.

The number of killings that have happened under the Assad regime should never have occurred. Neither should the kind of abuse that was carried out under the Assad regime.

So many families have been killed that never needed to die for either side to achieve their goals. Pointless, needless, tragic killings that never should have happened at all.



Nothing can bring back the families and people that have been killed already, but with nearly 100 people or more being killed everyday, it is the choice of the international community and the Syrian parties in the conflict how long they will allow this needless conflict to go on before serious peace negotiations occur.

 

[Polaris]

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.

Heh, I kind of like that. If we can enforce that with an explosive collar I'll be happy to get behind this initiative!

 

[HoverBoarder]

Remind me, how does the urban warfare in Syria look any different from the urban warfare in Fallujah?.

The main difference is primarily the rules of engagement.

The Americans did not seek out the families of insurgents and kill them just to send a message to the rebels.

A Syrian air strike on a rebel bastion in the north Wednesday flattened a string of houses and killed 31 people including children, activists said, leaving residents wailing in grief and anger.

“Bashar did this. God help us, these animals will kill us all,” said one man, hoisting a bloodied arm from a pile of body parts on the pavement outside the hospital in the town of Aazaz after the bombardment.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 31 people were killed in the attack by a MiG fighter jet...

Residents insisted there was no rebel base where the bomb struck but some said the families of FSA fighters lived there.

If you look at where they attacked, they attacked a poor residential neighborhood knowing that it would be mostly all civilians including women and children.

Knowing that it would be mostly all civilians including women and children.

This follows a consistant pattern of attacking towns or families of anyone opposing the Assad regime (pg. 12 of the UNHRC report that CE linked to):

52. Most unlawful killings occurred in the context of attacks against the strongholds of anti-Government armed groups. According to the most prominent pattern, attacks began with a blockade of the area and shelling, followed by an assault by ground forces, including special forces and Shabbiha. Snipers were used extensively. On securing the area, Government forces undertook house-to-house searches. Defectors, activists and fighting-age men were systematically sought out during these operations. Wounded or captured anti-Government fighters were executed. In some cases, family members of fighters, defectors and activists, as well as others who appeared to have been randomly selected, were also executed.

When the Syrian military goes out a specifically kills families of people who are suspected of opposing the government, they are purposefuly targeting innocent women, children, and men, and brutally killing them because either they, someone in they town, some family member of theirs, or just someone somewhere else is accused of opposing the regime.

Most of the time, entire neighborhoods are targeted because it is easier that going in and being selective. They just turn their artillery guns and bomb the whole neighborhood.

Innocent men, innocent women, innocent children, innocent infants. All needlessly killed just to terrorize the Syrians into submission.

Even if the Syrian army were to win this conflict, at what cost would they be doing so?

What is happening in Syria is simply what any urban insurgency is like, Assad is not "killing his own people" as the crawlers like to pretend, but an urban insurgency targets government workers and installations which either has to be surrendered to or resisted.

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.

There is no moral judgement, simply a legal judgement.

In order to benefit Israel we are encouraging the murder of innocent soldiers and policemen whose only crime was to sign up to serve their country and their community. If you want change in a country you need to look to the example of Eastern Europe of how to achieve that. The fact is most Syrians probably don't care much one way or the other, so we need the revolutionary vanguard approach of terrorism in order to force people to choose a side.

Here's the important part, sometime reletively soon from now there will be some kind of resolution to this conflict (hopefully a few months vs. a few years), and at that point, there will have been many people in the conflict who died who will have no impact on the resolution.

That's thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands who will have died totally pointless, meaningless deaths.

It is basically up to the international community and the Syrian people how many needless deaths there are. We get to choose how many people are going to die in Syria, but if we want to be serious about reducing that number, we have to be serious about what is happening in Syria.


I get that it is easiest to just blame this all on Israel without taking any kind of genuine and serious look at what is happening in Syria, but that doesn't help anyone in the conflict, and only makes the problems in Syria worse off.

Israel in fact loses no matter which side wins. Both sides subscribe to the view that it is a good idea to kill all Jews, and the US doesn't really win in either case as well.

The only players that really have a major power interest at stake are Iran/Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Russia.


Largely, it has been these four main palyers (plus China), that have prevented any kind of meaningful solution in Syria, and it has been the Syrian people that have paid for it.

 

[HoverBoarder]

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.

That is not technically true.


The whole reason that we have the International Criminal Court in the first place is because there are some moral laws at the basis of a governing body that are set up to specifically protect against War Crimes and other internationally illegal acts from occuring.


You are not allowed to commit war crimes. Plain and simple.


No matter who you blame it on for why you had to commit war crimes, you cannot commit them.

Legally, when an army starts to commit war crimes, especially on a massive scale, it is up to the army to refuse those orders.


So, technically, the international laws that forbid mass killings and war crimes that are based on moral legal rulings outrule any governmental structures that allow mass civilian killings and other similar war crimes.