Syria: will the West attack?

[Young Master Smeet]

https://imagopyrenaei.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/syria-iraq-kurdistan-30n.pngA useful map, not how much of the IS territory is basically uninhabitted desert, but they clearly have a presence in Ninnevah, and do seem to hld the oil fields.

[alanjjohnstone]

YMS, i think the religious schisms which are far more regional, further than Iraq and Syria. For instance, Bahrain and in Yemen, both trouble-spots for the Sunni ruling class and both nations where the Saudis intervened militarily. Of course, the family links are important but so were the middle age "great families" connections in the Catholic/Protestant power struggles. Reflections and not the essence. 

[ALB]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

 (also Assad is Shia,

People keep pointing this out but I don't think it means much. He and his regime are basically Baathists, i.e secular pan-Arab nationalists. And as I think you once posted, many people of Sunni origin support the government and occupy top posts in it.Anyway, I'm not sure that the Alawites (the sect Assad is formally a member of) are really Muslims. According to this (which also provides other useful information) they weren't recognised as such even by orthodox Shiites till 1974.

Quote:

Sunnis believe that succession to prophet Mohammed (d. 632) rightly followed through the line of his most able and pious companions. Alawites follow the Shiite interpretation, claiming that succession should have been based on bloodlines. According to Shiite Islam, Mohammed’s only true heir, imam, was his son-in-law Ali bin Abu Talib.But Alawites take a step further in the veneration of Imam Ali, allegedly investing him with divine attributes. Other specific elements such as the belief in divine incarnation, permissibility of alcohol, celebration of Christmas and Zoroastrian new year makes Alawite Islam highly suspect in the eyes of many orthodox Sunnis and Shiites.

Alcohol, no praying five times a day, no going to Mecca. They don't sound so bad compared with the others ! Still religious mumbo-jumbo of course.

[Young Master Smeet]

Just for compare and contrast:Sunni & Shia:https://thesinosaudiblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/mid-east-religion.jpgIraq tribes:http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/images/tribes.jpgAnd for Syria:https://www.quora.com/Escalation-of-the-Syrian-Conflict-Aug%E2%80%93Sep-2013/How-many-tribes-make-up-Syria Actually, closer inspection of this one:http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/Syria_Ethnic_1935_lg.pngClosely resembles the current battle lines in Syria.  The bottom line is IS is the desert Sunni's of Iraq and Syria.

[Young Master Smeet]

ALB wrote:

People keep pointing this out but I don't think it means much. He and his regime are basically Baathists, i.e secular pan-Arab nationalists. And as I think you once posted, many people of Sunni origin support the government and occupy top posts in it.

Well, in the sense that we'd understand ethnic Catholics in this country, which is basically my point, it's not just confessional, it's cultural, familial and historical.Hence the focus on Islam or Islamism is as eroneous as during the troubles in the six counties/North of Ireland/Northern Ireland…

[Young Master Smeet]

Bit of a lng paper: http://www.securityintransition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ISIL-JAN-and-the-war-economy-in-Syria1.pdfSeems to be on the right lines, and with a sensible list of action points (on a quick skim).

[Young Master Smeet]

I found that paper here:http://socialistunity.com/how-can-isil-be-defeated/That is a slightly more tendentious 'leave it to Assad and Russia' peice.  I don't think that's entirely true, but it is true that britain's financial clout counts for more than military here.

[Dave B]

The praying five times a day isn’t in the Quran I think and it probably comes from the Zoroastrians. http://heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/worship/ like a lot of religious practice it appears in the supplemental hadiths; I think

[Anonymous]

Just a thought but "will the west  attack?" Shouldn't we be asking "will the ruling class of the west attack?" Because I will not be attacking anyone, I have no beef with workers of other countriesLet's not forget we workers are also 'the west' 

[Young Master Smeet]

Dave B wrote:

The praying five times a day isn’t in the Quran I think and it probably comes from the Zoroastrians. http://heritageinstitute.com/zoroastrianism/worship/ like a lot of religious practice it appears in the supplemental hadiths; I think

I think it's actually from original practice, although for a while, in Mohammed's time, it was thrice a day, and towards Jeusalem, and then it changed after the Muslims took Mecca.  Obviously, it probabkly comes from practicces common among religious groups prior to Mohammed, but I think it is a 'core' thing.

[Young Master Smeet]

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-12/01/c_134870766.htmThis is interesting,

Xingua wrote:

DAMASCUS, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) — A total of 120 rebels evacuated a western Damascus neighborhood on Monday to rebel-held areas in the northwest of Syria under new deal concluded with the Syrian authorities, a well-informed source told Xinhua.120 rebels evacuated the district of Qudsayah along with their families to rebel-held areas in Idlib province under the UN supervision, Maher Murhej, an opposition activist and head of the Syrian Youth Party, told Xinhua.

  And a similar deal could end the fighting in Homs.  The suggestion is this is an outcome of the Vienna talks.  Admittedly, Hawks will say that force, and the hreat of force spurs such deals, but maybe this shows that talks work?

[jondwhite]

Quote:

The UN Security Council resolution (of which Mr Cameron makes so much) actually offers no legal basis for military action. Nor does it cite Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which authorises the use of force.  David Cameron is already suffering from galloping Churchill syndrome (the patient growls, denounces his critics as appeasers, and starts wars). Now he seems to have contracted Blair’s disorder, an irresistible desire to pose alongside military hardware. On Monday he managed to have his portrait taken next to a very macho-looking Typhoon fighter jet at Northolt RAF base on his way back from Paris. Odd, that. Typhoons are not normally stationed at Northolt, and I haven’t been able to get a coherent explanation of what military reason it had to be there, so convenient for a photo-opportunity.  The Prime Minister might have been better employed looking up Syria on a map, reading the relevant documents, or consulting with our former ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford – who energetically opposes what he denounces as ‘recreational bombing’.

P Hitchens weighs inhttp://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/11/this-isnt-just-a-war-its-recreational-bombing-by-our-churchill-wannabe.html

[ALB]

This article by David Wearing is very good. I don't know if it's appeared elsewhere. He writes occasionally for the Guardian and seems to be connected to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade:http://www.syriahr.com/en/2015/12/syria-airstrikes-has-the-west-learned-nothing-after-its-911-response/He makes the point that bombing Syria will increase "the probability of ISIS killing civilians on the streets of Britain", i.e us and other members of the working class here. We'll know this evening the names of those MPs prepared to put our lives as well as those of innocent civilians in Syria at risk.Also, that

Quote:

Cameron’s government has been looking for a way into the Syrian conflict for some time, likely motivated above all by the need to restore Britain’s military credibility after the failures of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

As he also points out, Cameron's 70,000 Syrian fighters on the ground prepared to take on ISIS is a fabrication equal to Blair's one about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

[Anonymous]

Cameron gets his way and further carnage has already started:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34992032How MPs voted:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34987921

[ALB]

I see 66 Labour MPs voted for war and that some of them are complaining about receiving tweets and emails calling them "warmongers" and saying they'll have "blood on their hands" .But, unlike Cameron's statement that opponents of the war  are "terrorist sympathisers" (echoing George Orwell's outrageous characterisation of opponents of the Second World Slaughter as "fascifists") this is true: they are and they will have.Having said this Hilary Benn, one of them, did express the Labour Party's traditional attitude accurately when he described Labour as always having been an "internationalist" party if you understand this as that it has always supported British capitalism's overseas imperialist ventures. Even so 153 Labour MPs voted against, along with 7 Tories and all the Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalist and the Green.The upshot is that the life and limbs of workers in Britain are now in greater danger. When ISIS strikes back the warmonger MPs will indeed have blood on their hands, our blood, just as Blair and the others who voted for the Iraq War did after the 7 July 2005 London attack on innocent commuters.

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