While I have respect for the former United Nations’ Secretary General and hope that his mission does help stop violence and blood-shed, there is something decidedly unsavoury and inscrutable about the ways in which Western concerns are being manifest presently—along a continuum of interference and strategy—for the future of Syria and the whole region. If reports and accounts by the opposition are accurate, the present regime’s clinging to power is probably serving no one, but a peace negotiated by the US and the UN could be a very suspect treaty indeed, who may well be basing their assessments off of another disgruntled Curveball character (DE/EN). Since Western involvement with Libya, there has been a marked departure from the uprisings and revolutions of the Arab Spring, which took much of the world unawares, and like bankers and speculators trying to profit from the controlled-collapse of distressed and overburdened markets, petroleum-politicians are wanting events to unfold or crumple on their terms.
It all seems a bit opaque—outside concern that’s neither quite spontaneous nor quite a natural consequence of emboldened rebellions or business interests, but yet like
dรฉjร vu all over again. Pacifying Syria may also appear a selfish, self-interested and calculated endeavour in the larger framework of the parallel troubles that are occurring in the region, which I believe are bundled together in the view of most of the public and diplomatic corps: tensions are growing over Iran, a fulcrum waiting to tip one way or the other depending on which hostile fires the first volley. Despite the arguments of many authorities who hold that the country maintains only a scientific and benign nuclear programme, the West insisting that Iran recant hostilities that it has not perpetrated and a weapons programme that it probably does not even have. Such swaggering demands sound uncomfortably like the trigger and fuse for another American led crusade, and local yapping it is not helping mattering. It is also not reassuring that the Arab Spring awoke in the lumbering police-states of the US and the UK, leading by example, their penchants for spin, censorship and holding a population in contempt and under complete surveillance—outstanding examples of what they purport to combat in foreign lands. I hope that negotiations can help save lives and preserve livelihoods for the Syrian people but without orchestrating prime conditions for neo-colonialists and the West to battle for and amongst themselves by proxy.
