CHICAGO TRIB:
The regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has found religion.Assad - the murderous tyrant of Syria - is an Alawite and a Baathist/socialist. His only major ally is the tyranny of Iran, with whom he has signed a mutual defense pact. The move towards from somewhat secularized Baathism to overt islamofascism is another DEFENSIVE move by the evermore beleaguered Leftist tyrant. The more pressure we put on him, the more reactionary he will get: more arrests and crackdowns, and more jihado-jingoism will certainly be evident as we get closer to the UNSC's Brammertz Report on the Hariri murder - which is suppposed to be published on June 15. Assad's days are numbered.
Green and yellow banners fluttered at every turn in this capital's ancient stone bazaar a month after they marked the Prophet Muhammad's birthday April 10. For the first time in years, Muslims were allowed to openly observe that day. Other government bans on religious life also have diminished in recent weeks: Mosques are open between prayers. Religious weddings, once deemed to be risky public assembly, no longer need state security clearance.
Mosques are urging women to join study groups that champion their role in Islam. The state military academy has invited religious authorities to speak for the first time in decades.
In the street, Syrians of every faith are adjusting to a strange political spring. The oft-brutal regime, while cracking down anew on secular reform advocates, is courting favor with Islamists to keep at bay some publicly defined devils: dissidents and the Bush administration.
... In February, state security in Damascus allowed mobs to torch the Danish Embassy to protest the portrayal of the prophet in cartoons in Danish media. ... Assad gained political points in Syria for allowing Muslims to vent, even excessively, over the prophet insult. Analysts said the regime was also sending a message to the West. "They want the international community to be afraid," said Anwar al-Bunni, a human-rights attorney. "Syrian Islamists are not radical, but they want to make them out to be a threat." (Al-Bunni made his remarks in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in April. Last week, he and five other secular human-rights activists were arrested by Syrian police.)
"The Islamist card is a very useful card for them," said Ibrahim Hamidi, a correspondent for Al Hayat newspaper.
If the Islamicists take over Syria
ReplyDeleteit will be a political defeat for Bush and America. In fact, that Assad is giving them more leverage is itself a defeat for America.
AB can't seem to understand,when Hamas supplants the PLO, it is not a win for Bush, when Islamicists
gain power in Syria it is not a win for America and when Shia
clerical fascists take the balance of power in Iraq it is not a win for America.
But Assad is not going to fall;
he can leverage the Islamicists enough to avoid it, as he is doing.
the islamofascists will not take over syira - where they are less numerous and less powerful than in the alanbar province of iraq.
ReplyDeleteassad is using everything he';s got to hold power, and even he doesn;lt have enough - alone.
this baathist-alawite-islamofasist alliance reiterates the syrian-iranian axis.
both will collapse.
the election of hamas was not a defeat for bush.
it is what the palis want, and we must respond accordingly.
then they will respond.
i do thinkl buish and sharon made a mistake in not demanding that hamas change BEFORE being allowed on the ballot.
yet hamas has clarified the conflict and made it clearer to most people that israel has no partner for peace.
this strenghthens israel politically.
sop there was a good outcome in this regard.
the shia islamofascists do not contorl iraq. the most powerful shia cleric is a secularist = sistani.
moki alsadr is troubole but the new cenral demnocratically elected government of iraw will deal with him - as they should.
you are a whiner and defeatist a pessimist who places no intrinsic value in the spread of democracy.
idealistic authentic classical liberals like me and bush and rice do believe that democrfacy is intrisically a UNIVERSAL human right a force for peace and prosperity.
thanks for reading and commenting.
now THINK.
Sistani is most definitely NOT a secularist and has defied Bush
ReplyDeletewishes at every step, forcing an election Bremer was appointed to AVOID. The fact he personally
does not want the kind of power
Khomeini had does not mean he is a secularist. Secularists compose perhaps 10% of Iraqis and do not want Shariah Law.
Sistani wants SHARIAH LAW and got it. He wants an anti-Israel,anti-American foreign policy once Iraq is stablized and will get it. He wants strong ties with Iran and will get them.
1 - FACT: sistani is most definitely someone who wants the separation of mosque and state and rejects the itranian model.
ReplyDelete2 - you say "defied Bush" as if iraqis were a colony and had to follow order from the usa. they are not. they are a self-regulating democratic republic - liberated by the USA from a tyrannical and genocidal kleptocratic maniac who supported international terror.
3 - your 10% number is bogus and wrong - you pulled out of your as--at. LOOKIT: ALL the kurds want demoicracy - as they have enjoyed it for a decade! and the shias want it to. that alone is 65% of iraq!
4 - sistani doesn;pt want shaira, and theiraqi constitution is NOT sharia.
thanks for reading and commenting. please think about what i write; please. and use sources for stuff like "10% of iraqis don't want sharia." if you can find any!
Wrong again on all essentials, unreliable. Ask the Christian women of Iraq who have been forced to wear the veil whether Sistani favors "seperation of mosque and state." Ditto the Christian alcohol sellers, free under Saddam to sell their wares,now having shops forcible shuttered and being killed. Ask the secular Moslem women who had more favorable divorce laws under Saddam than they
ReplyDeletedo under the new Constitution.
As for the Kurds, you haven't done your homework. They are pushing toward independence and most do not even consider themselves "Iraqis."
The Shia fascists won't permit their autonomy nor indepedence, though,and the increasingly
anti-American Turkey will help the Iraqi Shias restrain them.
we'll see. won't we.
ReplyDeleteperhaps your defeatist negativism will rule the day: maybe nabobs of negativism like you will win Congress in november and poull the plug on iraq and afghanistan like you did to south vietnam and the contras.
i believe - like fdr and wilson and eleanor roosevelt and jfk - that all humans deserve their innate universal human rights and self-rule, self-determination and self-government - government by consent.
we have goiven that to iraqis and sfghanis, we can help them forgewr their own democracies. it will take time. it took US time.
i belive it is the route from extremism to moderation, from poverty to porperistm, and from war to peace.
it is both MORAL and practical.
but it will take time, and sacrifice and perseverence,
you seem unwilling to giove anything to your brothers and sisters who ytearn to be free.
pity.
it's animmoral and isolationist and defeatist attitude.
thanks for reading and commenting.
BTW: why not just cut the childish UNRELAIBLE crap.
it pisses me off.
your chocie.
keep it up and i will delete ytour comments.
the criticism is fine. i'm happy to allow coments of people who disagree.
i likke that your commentd betray your true self: they shopw you to be a nihilistic negative anti-universal human rights person. the kind of person who would have opposed amerioca's entry into WW2.
BUT PLESE: avoid the idiotic knee-jerk leftie personal attacks. the stupid name-calling. criticise my views all you want, but leave of the "unreliable" BS.
thanks.
If there were a strong Kurdish consensus for separation, they would have done it. Same thing with the Shias.
ReplyDeleteIt could still go that way, but the fact of the matter is it has been going the other way in recent months. The Kurds and the Shia have the oil. The Sunnis don't. The Sunnis also make up only about 10% of the population. Still, the Kurds and Shia have sat down at the negotiation table and made concessions to the Sunnis.
This is rather amazing, considering the Sunnis were Saddam's people, and thus, were the oppressors in Iraq for all those years.
Anonymous could be right that it will go that way, but his insistence that it will betrays his desire, methinks..
pasto: you said it VERY well. thanks. and i agree woth your argument of the facts.
ReplyDelete