Maybe Mark Levine is pulling his punches because he's writing at Al Jazeera and one of the Emir's relatives is looking over his shoulder.
That is one ultra-wordy exercise in hand-wringing about whether the Syrian opposition was too hasty in making their peaceful protest into an armed uprising. That transition to violence was measured in hours rather than months or years.
Levine speculates that unnamed states in the region might have made promises of external support to the opposition which they have since reneged on. Those unnamed states are of course named as Saudi Arabia and Qatar everywhere else, so why the reticence? Could it be because he's ever so obliquely accusing the backers of Al Jazeera of perfidy?
And nowhere in all those words does he mention that fighters and arms and money continue to pour into Syria from Turkey. Maybe part of his reluctance to speak boldly stems from his reliance on professional democracy activists, a species that invariably have their bills paid by Washington and work their magic in countries that Washington doesn't like.
Like the "senior non-violence trainer" he refers to in his postscript. What the hell is a non-violence trainer anyway?
If the architects of the Syrian crisis had wanted non-violence, all they had to do was stay home, mind their own business, and let Syrians chart their own course to democracy.
Instead, they lit this conflagration which has now gotten completely out of their control as Syria becomes a magnet for wannabe jihadists across the Islamic world.
Are the Syrian people better off than they were before all this started?
No comments:
Post a Comment