sultan knish
Forget the Grand Prix or the Daytona 500, the real race right now is the
race to Damascus. The racers include Syrian rebels in pickup trucks
with mounted machine guns and homemade tanks, toting weapons and
equipment supplied and paid for by Qatar and Turkey, and more covertly
by the British and French intelligence services. Racing along with them
are carloads of international diplomats urging their governments to give
the militias more money and more weapons.
Everyone is on the road to Damascus in this amazing race. Christian
refugees from Aleppo and Alawites packing in behind the tanks of the
Syrian army, Iraqi militias that used to plant IEDs in front of American
Humvees who have found new work blowing up churches and taking over
Syrian bases.
There are international activists from around the world, reporters or
citizen-journalists embedded with the rebels, Russian advisers embedded
with Syrian units, Qatari trainers turning children into child soldiers
with the rebels and Turkish officers trying to get the entire rabble
moving in the right direction toward Damascus.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah's militias out of Lebanon
are shooting at Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood militias from across the
Middle East and even Europe in one of those unique displays of family
entertainment that you wish would go on forever, but that won't, because
despite the Hasish-fed bravado, supplemented with meth from Iran's top
laboratories, the whole shooting match only as long as it takes the side
with the weakest bladders to run away, and then both sides brag about
their great victory on YouTube and Facebook.
Imagine the Crips and the Bloods, armed to the teeth by every country
from Mexico to China, fighting over the ruins of California cities, and
you get some idea of the glorious Syrian civil war being fought by the
Brave Syrian People, most of whom at this point are about as Syrian as
the Palestinians are from Palestine, in a conflict that will determine
once and for all who will be ethnically cleansing who this year.
The Syrian rebels are Sunni. The Syrian regime is Alawite, which is
close enough to Shiite in a region where most Sunnis hate Shiites. This
isn't some heroic battle between the people and the dictator; it's a
religious war. And in a newly Islamist region, religion is the best
possible reason that anyone can think of for a war, that will just
incidentally happen to realign a strategic piece of territory from the
Shiite axis to the Sunni axis. And we, as befits the nation that Obama
described as one of the largest Muslim countries in the world, happen to
be in the Sunni axis, ensconced somewhere between the fattest
child-molesting members of the Saudi and Qatari royals, the most vicious
Turkish and Egyptian Islamists, and the Eurocrats looking to score oil
deals with the former and arms deals with the latter, and political
points with their domestic population of Sunni Islamists who have the
unfortunate habit of blowing things up.
On the road to Damascus, the politicians and pundits tell us that we
cannot simply sit things out. Someone is bound to remove Assad and we
had better be in good with whoever does.
The UK, which dragged Obama into Libya the way an elderly lady drags a
poodle into a pub, is frantically urging us to stop just looking the
other way while Qatar and Turkey arm the Syrian rebels, and to get into
the rebel-arming business ourselves.
Considering how well that worked out in Libya, not to mention a certain
obscure part of the world, known as Afghanistan, that we never heard
from again, we should probably hurry and start arming the Syrian rebels
right now. The sooner we give them weapons, the less likely they are to
use them against us. Or so the reasoning of the people who brought you
Iran, September 11 and September 11 II: The Mohammed Video Diaries goes.
And with a track record like that, how could they be wrong?
If we give the right Syrian rebels the weapons, then they will win,
instead of the wrong Syrian rebels. But if we don't, then the wrong
Syrian rebels will win, and even the right Syrian rebels will hate us
and turn wrong, and before you know it they'll be shooting at us with
the weapons we didn't give them.
Telling apart the right Syrian rebels from the wrong Syrian rebels is
tricky. The Free Syrian Army, once hailed as a moderate secular
organization, has more Al Qaeda in it than the dirt in Tora Bora. The
new opposition set up by Obama and Qatar consists of the Muslim
Brotherhood and people with fake mustaches pretending not to be the
Muslim Brotherhood. As an additional handicap, the head of this moderate
secular opposition, Sheikh Mouaz Al-Khatib, who had previously praised
Saddam for "terrifying the Jews", objected to the American declaration
that the Al-Qaeda militias are terrorists.
"The logic under which we consider one of the parts that fights against
the Assad regime as a terrorist organization is a logic one must
reconsider," Al-Khatib said, and it's hard to argue with his logic. The
difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda is that the
Muslim Brotherhood wins an election before shooting people in the
streets while Al Qaeda shoots people in the street without waiting for
an election. To the Democracy Uber Alles crowd, this makes a big
difference, but the people being shot are still dead either way.
No serious thinkers seriously think that not siding with either side is
an option. When confronted with Muslim terrorists, they begin searching
for moderates in the rubbish bin, and with a working definition of a
moderate that includes anyone less extreme than the most extreme of the
extreme, they never have a problem finding moderates. And they keep
finding moderate Syrian rebels who will be our friends tomorrow for a
few RPGs today.
Today we have to support the Muslim Brotherhood for fear that Al Qaeda
will take over. Tomorrow we will have to support Al Qaeda for fear that
Al-Takfir Wa Al-Hijra will take over. And then we'll have to support the
Takfiris for fear that Itbach Al-Kul Ulum will take over. And the day
after our leaders will have no choice but to nuke the entire planet for
fear that an asteroid will hit it instead. The radiation will be bad,
they tell us, but at least nuclear weapons are moderate. Asteroids are
extreme. And no one, except skateboarders, wants to be extreme.
It's Black Friday in Syria and just sitting at home, watching the game,
sipping a beer and wondering who's going to score in the third quarter,
the black flag Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood militias, Hezbollah or a
race of demons erupting unexpectedly from the earth to devour all
participants, never occurs to the bright boys and girls down in D.C. No,
they're dragging us into line at five in the AM in the hopes of scoring
a friendly Syria for only 4 billion dollars and maybe only
twenty-thousand dead Christians.
The rebels are making their gains, or so the New York Times claims,
while Pravda claims that the Syrian government is beating back the
rebels. It's hard to know whose pravda to believe when all we have to
choose from are propaganda outlets that parrot the talking points of
their respective governments. In a Pravda world, you don't read the news
to find out what's going, you read the news to find out what the
government thinks about what is going and then you try to derive from
that what is truly taking place.
In this Plato's Cave version of the news, all that we know is that
everyone is racing to Damascus, and that everyone is winning and
everyone is losing and everyone is dying at the same time. And we're
rushing right along with them, hoping that our guys, who are slightly
less murderous than their guys, will defeat them, despite the
murderousness gap, with the help of our weapons, our planes and maybe a
few of our guys, wearing sneakers and long beards, coordinating
operations on the ground.
The Muslim Brotherhood is running torture chambers in Egypt and shooting
protesters in the street, but we're still shipping them free F16s and
helping them take over Syria. Because if we don't help them, how will we
have any influence over them? If the Muslim Brotherhood can't
non-violently seize power in Syria through a violent civil war, there is
a risk that they will turn to violence again. And that means they'll
start trying to violently take over countries without going through the
formality of fighting a civil war to take them over first.
Every leader of Al Qaeda was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but
since the Muslim Brotherhood, like the New Left, is willing to
non-violently take us over through front groups and immigration, rather
than flying planes into buildings, they're our idea of the good guys,
even if they have the same objectives as Al Qaeda, just a different way
of getting there. But then again you could probably say the same thing
about the people who were running the USSR in 1932 and the people who
are running the United States and the European Union in 2012.
The Muslim Brotherhood isn't satisfied with Egypt. Al Qaeda isn't
satisfied with Mali. Iran isn't satisfied with the hypocrisy of
agitating for the rights of the Shiite majority in Iraq and Bahrain and
the rights of the Shiite majority in Syria.
Obama isn't satisfied with wrecking just Libya, Tunisia and Egypt.
Russia isn't satisfied with financing 50 years of war in the region even
though it's on the verge of bankruptcy. Prime Minister Cameron of the
UK and President Hollande of France aren't satisfied with being on the
verge of bankruptcy and only wrecking Libya. And like Bob Hope, Bing
Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, they're all on the road to Damascus. Or the
road to hell.
And so on we go, all together, rebels and diplomats, throat-slashers and
powdered-hair personalities, embedded into a conflict, racing to
Damascus, eager to raise the flag, report on the historic moment,
negotiate deals and deliver speeches. Obama probably already has his
written and it will probably be the same exact speech he delivered when
Mubarak fell and Gaddafi got sodomized to death after his convoy came
under fire from an American drone. There will be lots of moving
sentiments about hope and change, peace and freedom, the choice of the
people and the transition to democracy.
This road picture has the usual participants. The Western diplomats who
fell in love with the region, its culture and its people. The Western
politicians still dreaming that the region is just one more revolution
away from peace and stability. There's the fourth son of some upper
middle class family who grew his scraggly beard long and now dreams of
dying as a martyr for the Caliphate surrounded by white doves and even
whiter virgins.
There's the Qatari weapons trainer teaching 13-year-olds how to plant
IEDs and the Russian colonel, underpaid and hating the locals more than
ever, trying to get the ragtag locals to fight. There's the embedded
citizen journalist with fourteen differently colored keffiyahs in his
luggage blogging his experiences on Tumblr and the gang of local thugs
who alternate between taking potshots at Syrian army positions on behalf
of the Free Syrian Army and its Qatari and Turkish paymasters and
kidnapping some of the wealthier residents for ransom, which pays even
better.
There are Sunni and Shiite militia members from neighboring Lebanon and
Syria. There are Pakistanis fresh from Waziristan and Libyans looking
for a good brawl. There are Scud missiles and chemical weapons and
broken buildings, torn corpses and roads full of refugees fleeing for
their lives. There are tanks and jets and fleets. There are armies and
militias, truckloads of weapons and bodies, fire behind them and death
ahead of them. And they're all hurrying, running and racing to Damascus.
And then the real killing will begin.
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