Syria in the crosshairs

It's getting Syrious...

There were reports today that some force attacked some installations in Syria, although what exactly happened isn't clear. The BBC has a number of comments published from people who witnessed what happened, but whether this signals greater instability in the last Baathist republic or merely another incident is very unknown. Al Jazeera claims that "foreign special forces" implied to be the Americans did this operation and fled into the city. I really don't know what to make of that:

It is widely known coalition special forces based out of Iraq are in operation inside the Syrian side of the Iraqi boarder to stem the flow of foreign fighters. This incident is the first which has targeted the capital Damascus.

Maybe...

(my following speculation was posted to the Kos this afternoon, now slightly updated and better linked)

Just to run down the menu, since the invasion of Iraq, Israel has bombed an abandoned/dormant Palestinian training camp about 30 miles outside Damascus, towards Lebanon. This location was roughly at the center of the Syrian 'regional presence' if you include the places they occupy in Lebanon. Also at one point in the past year the US army chased a set of retrofitted gas trucks into Syria from Iraq, killing about 20 people and seizing four Syrian border guards, who were later released. (I'm going from memory here, so I might be mistaken) That whole incident turned out to be based on bad intel, but it got the US military raising havoc in the territory, which was, I think we all have to admit, a prime objective of neoconservative strategy.

The thing about Syria that everyone forgets is that their government is fundamentally opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda type political forces, and they've been in conflict for decades. Syria also provided a great deal of al Qaeda intelligence to the CIA after 9/11 as Seymour Hersh reported. But that didn't save them from losing the oil that Saddam was surrepiticiously pumping to them after the war.

Syria is probably one of the most badly calcified and repressive states in the world, but at the same time it is against Al Qaeda. And after all, until four years ago Israel was occupying south Lebanon, as well as the annexed Golan Heights. All this military activity forced Syria to remain a state mobilized for war, vesting more power in the dictatorship and less in civil society.

I don't really think this is the popular revolution at the gates like everyone's speculating... However how the hell can we even decode what's happening in a secretive place like Damascus when Hezbollah and Hamas are chillin there?

Yes, the Israelis would like to see it destabilized. I don't really think that Mossad did it, but maybe they helped some crazy Arabs get bombs and such. They are that impulsive these days, but there are plenty of other parties.

On the other hand, the only other big news from Syria lately is that some Kurds fought with the government in the wild eastern section of the country after a soccer game. It would not be surprising at all if the Kurdish militants are taking advantage of their greater freedom and Iraqi basing to go after the Syrian Baathists. After all, the remote sections of Syria are as much part of their heritage as Damascus'. (and for that matter, the free-for-all in Iraq provides a great deal of terrorist-haven space to attack the Saudis and Jordanians from, as well, which is a prime reason that Iran is generally interested in peacefully stabilizing Iraq)

There's the whole issue of Syria letting foreign (read Arab) fighters come across the border to fight the United States since before the war. I would be interested in someone explaining to me why it was morally wrong for them to leave the border open. There are a lot of cross-border Sunni tribal connections, and I would suspect that much of the resistance in al-Anbar province is supported by Arabs with Syrian family ties, perhaps especially Sunnis who got completely screwed when Bremer dissolved the Iraqi military.

Also it is worth noting that Pentagon Office of Special Plans schemer David Wurmser wrote a funny and wildly inaccurate report alongside the famous Clean Break document called "Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli balance of power strategy for the Levant" which makes all these weird claims about Syria evaporating in the desert. ('Western and Israeli balance of power' couldn't possibly mean Israeli-American hegemony, could it??! How silly!)

In the Clean Break, Perle, Feith, Wurmser declared that 'rolling back' Syria was a principal objective of Israeli policy that could be accomplished by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Is this chaos part of that scheme, or merely the waves of wreckage stemming from their incredibly poor and Sunni-hostile postwar management?

This is not a situation with a great deal of 'moral clarity,' let me put it that way.

British diplomats bust Blair

A whole bunch of British government diplomats have released a letter criticizing Tony Blair's strategies on Iraq and Israel/Palestine, saying that he has been heedless of civilian casualties in Iraq while undermining and unbalancing the British approach to the Arab world by abandoning the Road Map plan. Reuters summarizes the 'unprecedented letter' while Juan Cole reprints it in full. I would characterize this as pretty much the whole British Arabist establishment flaming Blair. Reuters:

The diplomats criticised the toll of the war and apparent lack of a plan for life in the country post-Saddam. "The Iraqis killed by coalition forces probably total between 10,000 and 15,000," they said, estimating the number killed in the last month in Falluja alone at several hundred.

"There was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement...To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful."

On the Middle East, the diplomats said big powers had waited for U.S. leadership to advance a "road map" for peace that had raised expectations of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian settlement. "The hopes were ill-founded. Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence. Britain and the other sponsors of the road map merely waited on American leadership, but waited in vain," it said.

"Worse was to come," they continued, attacking Bush's decision this month to endorse an Israeli plan to retain some settlements in the West Bank as an illegal and one-sided step. "Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land."

Or rather, as Iraqi-Palestinian Raed in the Middle put it about a week ago:

I am ANGRY!!! VERY ANGRY!!! I am a secular leftist! But I am angry!!!!
Can you imagine what do other millions of right winged religious people feel????
I can’t even concentrate and don't know if my words will make any sense!!

The hate and anger of the Arab people today is unbelievable!!!, Palestinians Iraqis Jordanians Egyptians Syrians … the hate against Bush and his administration is huge now… enormous … ENORMOUS!!!!!!
Everyone believes that Bush is giving the green light for Sharon to kill their leaders, and everyone thinks that Iraq, Falluja, Najaf and every other city would face the same Palestinian destiny if they didn’t fight Against the American army now …. They would be put under siege and assassinated one by one by the American helicopters!!!
Everyone thinks that it is better to start fighting from now!!! Everyone is full of HATE!!! EVEN ME!!!

When the Iraqi fighter kills more American soldiers now… he has the images of Ahmad Yasin and Ranteesi in his mind
Can you imagine a community that is boiling?! Like a volcano?!
....
I am losing faith that words can solve anything when Bush and Sharon are ruling the world, and I can feel that explosion that will destroy everything is coming; it will destroy us and destroy you.

The explosion is coming.
The volcano of the Middle East is not going to sleep forever.

And earlier:

So, after the huge defeat and failure, Bush decided to make a move today… he announced the neo-Balfour Declaration, and gave the house of my grandfather as a gift to Sharon. Please! UN resolutions? Road map? anyone? hello?

I mean… where is the point? How can someone donate something that he doesn’t own? It’s like me announcing that I give the house of Bush as a gift to my father!

Site traffic still strong

I just ran my web server logs and yet again the numbers show that the site is still fairly popular and still catching hits from military (.mil) computers, as well. (specifically Navy computers!)

The current list of different countries includes the Netherlands, Canada, Japan, UK, France, Australia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, Turkey, Macedonia, Portugal, Hungary, Belgium, Argentina, Italy, Austria, South Africa, Singapore, Mexico, Spain, Ukraine, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Israel, Czech Republic, Denmark, Russia, Thailand, Lithuania, Seychelles and Hong Kong.

Right here you can see the full access report, now including referrers.

Not all of these different countries appeared since the last log analysis. However traffic is still high, and April 23rd was my busiest day so far, with 547 page requests. The Googlebot really likes to visit, as well.

Now that the referrers are being listed, billmon.org, where I leave comments sometimes, as well as Technorati provide a lot of incoming hits. Technorati is a somewhat arrogant kind of rate-yourself sort of enterprise that I decided to get a listing on. Through the Technorati service, I can see that my site is listed on at least 19 other sites on the Internet, a much higher number than I thought. Primarily the sites list me on the 'blogroll' as a DailyKos blogger, and they tend to call me 'Hong Pong.' Oh well... network effects on the increase!

Thank you to everyone who continues visiting! I'll keep trying to improve the functions and features of the site, and I hope everyone likes that the front page now loads much more quickly!