{"id":11091,"date":"2013-11-04T10:20:24","date_gmt":"2013-11-04T14:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11091"},"modified":"2013-11-04T10:20:24","modified_gmt":"2013-11-04T14:20:24","slug":"muhammad-idrees-ahmad-on-monsterphilia-and-assad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/muhammad-idrees-ahmad-on-monsterphilia-and-assad\/","title":{"rendered":"Muhammad Idrees Ahmad: On Monsterphilia and Assad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fascinating article on Syria, even if I don’t agree with everything Ahmad writes; below the opening paras \u2014 you can read the full article in Guernica<\/strong> Magazine, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

October 24, 2013<\/i><\/center><\/p>\n
\n

The problems with the \u201canti-imperialist\u201d position on Syria.<\/em><\/h3>\n

\"\"Image from Flickr via david_axe<\/small><\/p>\n

By\u00a0Muhammad Idrees Ahmad<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Earlier this month, the British street artist Banksy produced a\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0on Syria that attracted over five million viewers in three days. At a time of intensifying state repression, the target of Bansky\u2019s satire was not the regime in Damascus but its opponents. By contrast, the most-watched video from the chemical attack in August,\u00a0showing a traumatized young survivor<\/a>, managed only half a million hits in over a month.<\/p>\n

Six weeks after the attacks on Ghouta, the belt of densely populated suburbs of Damascus, that killed hundreds of civilians, regime forces have choked off food supplies to the targeted neighborhoods. Survivors of the chemical attack are now facing the threat of starvation. Children have been reduced to eating leaves; clerics have issued fatwas allowing people to eat cats and dogs.<\/p>\n

The belated discovery of the Syrian conflict by \u201canti-imperialists\u201d after the US government threatened war has inspired impassioned commentary. The strangulation of its vulnerable population has occasioned silence. But dog whistles from issue-surfing provocateurs like Banksy are unexceptional; they merit closer scrutiny when they come from respected essayists like David Bromwich.<\/p>\n

The mix of nativist isolationism and Kissingerian realism that Bromwich espouses was perhaps better articulated by Sarah Palin: \u201cLet Allah sort it out.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a recent\u00a0front-page article for the\u00a0London Review of Books<\/em><\/a>, Bromwich identifies many rogues in the Syrian drama: Barack Obama, John Kerry, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, \u201cthe jihadists.\u201d Conspicuously absent is Assad\u2019s Baathist regime. Vladimir Putin is the closest Bromwich admits to a hero. The Syrian people are denied even a cameo.<\/p>\n

When the Yale literature professor uses a tautology like \u201canti-government insurgency\u201d to refer to Assad\u2019s opponents, it is reasonable to assume intention. The word \u201cgovernment\u201d conveys a certain benign authority; and when it is also said to be opposed by the universally reviled \u201cjihadists,\u201d then there is only one place a\u00a0bien pensant<\/em>\u00a0reader can invest sympathy\u2014and it\u2019s not with the opposition.<\/p>\n

Bromwich\u2019s elegant prose barely conceals his clunky polemical apparatus. The validity of his claim\u2014that the Obama administration was engaged in illegal aggression against Syria until Putin intervened\u2014hinges entirely on his treatment of the events of August 21.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody doubts that an attack took place,\u201d writes Bromwich. But \u201cnobody yet knows with reasonable certainty who ordered it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The words are carefully chosen. It is true, nobody knew with reasonable certainty\u00a0who ordered it<\/em>\u2014but it had been established beyond reasonable doubt\u00a0who carried it out<\/em>. One can perhaps dismiss the conclusions of British, French and German intelligence agencies given their earlier record of failure. But by early September even independent munitions experts and Human Rights Watch had ruled out the possibility that anyone other than the regime could have carried out the attacks.<\/p>\n

To understand the absurdity of Bromwich\u2019s dodge, consider the napalming of a school in Aleppo a week after the sarin attack. The bomb was dropped from a jet; and since only the regime possesses airpower, the responsibility for the attack was easy to establish. But as in Ghouta, no one could know \u201cwith reasonable certainty who ordered it.\u201d Nor was it relevant.<\/p>\n

[ctd… here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fascinating article on Syria, even if I don’t agree with everything Ahmad writes; below the opening paras \u2014 you can read the full article in Guernica Magazine, here. October 24, 2013 The problems with...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71,997],"tags":[1444,1754],"class_list":["post-11091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east","category-syria","tag-muhammad-idrees-ahmad","tag-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11091"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11093,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11091\/revisions\/11093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}