Belgrade-New York, aller/retour (ca 2002)--Next Stop Damascus?

[This was to be our 12th anniversary 911 post--and 14.5th anniversary of the NATO terror-bombing of Belgrade and environs post--but events in and around Damascus have conspired to nudge it up a little.

Of course, between US-backed interventions from Turkey and Jordan, where 1000 fresh pair of US boots have been on the ground since Spring, and the regular incursions into Syria, and especially its capital Damascus, by Israeli airpower, this another ancient seat of what can now only risibly be referred to as Western Civilization has been grotesquely degraded.  So, sad to say, looks like 911 is coming early this year.--mc]

Belgrade/New York: aller-retour

by
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
20 September 2001

Since the terrible day of the attacks on New York City’s financial center (and on Washington DC), the pundits have been talking about wars: wars in the past and wars to come. All have called on collective memory as a force for tempering the fierce nationalist urges for retribution.

Edward Said points out the multifarious nature of Islam and suggests that Arabs in the Middle East are the victims of a Zionist intolerance similar to that born of the virulent strain of Islam that supposedly hijacked those airliners.

Noam Chomsky compared the ‘atrocity’ at the World Trade Center to Antietam, the terrible battle in the American civil war. And as to overall loss of life he suggested the New York events paled in comparison to Clinton’s bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in response to the African embassy bombings or the sanctions against Iraq, both of which over time have claimed more than a million victims.

The Liberal columnist Wm Pfaff in the L.A. Times and the leftist radical gadfly Alexander Cockburn in his biweekly newsletter, CounterPunch, were among many who suggested the similarities between the attack on the WTC and Pearl Harbor. But Cockburn, who eats Liberals like Pfaff for lunch, suggested that as the Islamic terrorists who are supposed to have masterminded the September 11 suicide crashes were creations of the CIA, these attacks were more like the Contra war against the socialist Sandanistas in Nicaragua or the Mujahadeen’s conquest of the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

But so far no one has compared New York’s encounter with Islamic terror to that of Belgrade.

Shortly after the failures of the Rambouillet negotiations and the Holbrooke-Milosevic talks in Belgrade and the withdrawal from Kosovo of the Peace Monitors, and just before the commencement of the bombing of Yugoslavia on 23 March 1999, an editorial appeared in the New York Times taking a position against the bombing of the city of Belgrade. It said that no matter how evil the policies of Serbian and Yugoslav president Milosevic might have been, this European capital of two million souls with its long cultural and historical ties to the West should be spared whatever destruction was being planned for the Yugoslav military infrastructure.

One could almost hear a sort of fraternity, an empathy with the people of Belgrade coming from the people of New York City. They were both multi-cultural, multi-confessional capitals—and shared most of the same values: they loved rock and all kinds of music, theatre, and poetry and history; the Yugoslavs often elevating men of the arts and letters to high public office. They had been on the same side, the winning side, in the two great wars of the 20th Century. There had even developed over the decades a shared business culture. It was, after all, Western neo-liberal reforms that had been at the heart of the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1989-91.

But as soon as the NATO bombing started and quickly spread to all areas of Serbian civilian life, the Great Grey Lady, as the Times is sometimes sentimentally referred to, quickly fell into full goose-step with the rest of the media and beat the war drums demanding punishment of the Serbs for their aggressive nationalism in starting all the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

So when the horror hit Manhattan’s financial district on September 11th, (9-11, the date the way Americans write it, is also the number dialed for emergency assistance) and the perpetrators were quickly identified as Islamic followers of Saudi CIA asset Osama bin Laden, there was nary a word spoken or a line written about any of the history that links these two great capitals.

I’m only an amateur at all this, but here are some items that might have lessened the feeling of alienation and isolation for New Yorkers:

1) Osama bin Laden travels on a Bosnian passport—a letter of transit guaranteed by US and NATO occupation forces that hold up that incredibly corrupt and feeble state.

2) The bombs used in the African Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya were supposedly assembled by Islamist terrorists in Albania before being delivered to their targets.

3) The devastating loss of 400 firemen and rescue workers was the result primarily of the timing of the second airliner’s crash into the WTC South Tower. The 18-minute lag was just enough to get the rescue workers in place to be crushed by the crumbling building. I first discovered this technique in a Michael Parenti article in Covert Action Quarterly. It was employed by NATO in its bombing of Yugoslav civilian targets and for just that purpose: to trap and kill anyone who came to the aid of the victims of the first bombing run.

4) A rather cynical tendency to blame the US government for these attacks—if not for being actively complicit in a plot to save the foundering US economy by bringing about a world-wide war, then at least for being criminally negligent or incompetent in defending its capitals against a well-known, well-documented, and even self-generated threat—seems to be a reflex of modern public opinion. Remember how many in the West, as an expression of support for the Muslim terrorist-rebels in Chechnya, blamed the Russians for bombing their own apartment buildings and killing more than 300 of their own citizens? And how the subject was simply dropped when it became apparent that the Izetbegovic government in Sarejevo was itself responsible for the snipers and explosions that were blamed on the Serbs and brought about the first 14-day bombing in 1995? And how Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the Tribunal in The Hague, suggested that Milosevic was responsible for the deaths at Belgrade TV because he knew of their probability but failed to warn the employees and allowed NATO to kill them in order to boost his popularity?

5) And more anecdotally: When a former friend of mine, a former New York Jew (well, he’s still a Jew, he’s just lived in Paris for the last 25 years)—when in the Spring of 1999 this intelligent and literate Manhattanite was presented with the reality of his two countries’ bombing their former anti-fascist ally, the final resting place of many of their heroic native sons (and Belgrade was and is still a rare place of sanctuary for Jews); his response was: “We should bomb them and keep bombing them and when they beg us to stop we should bomb them some more.”

Of course, America is grief-stricken and living in the terror of what might follow these incredible attacks. Its suffering people really should not have been expected to draw comparisons to its longest continuous military campaign since Vietnam. And the media have conspired with the pharmaceutical companies to reduce public memory along with public attention to the bare minimum required for meaningless toil—the length of an MTV video or a chorus of God Bless America.

And when it is necessary for ego defense to see men with an ideal, a love or a hate, a passion, a faith so great they are willing to give up their lives, and take the lives of thousands of other innocents with them, as faceless cowards; it wouldn’t do to recall how for 78 days and nights from great altitude and with no allied casualties, one’s own government dropped nuclear filth, mutilating, murdering anti-personnel bombs on men, women, children, the sick and the aged, in hospitals and schools and factories and office buildings and churches and playgrounds and parks and all other public places in support of the very same kind of Muslim terrorists who have just visited on USA the greatest single civilian catastrophe in its history.

Yet one must also consider that Belgrade was complicit in this historical amnesia. In the 10 October 2000 Der Welt, it was noted that after the victory of the ‘democratic opposition’ of Kostunica and Djindjic and in honor of the many visiting Western dignitaries, the eternal flame at the memorial to the victims of the NATO bombing was extinguished.

[nb—This last graph was cut by the courageous editor at Balkans Infos when the article appeared (in French) in the October 2001 edition.]

NO WAR AGAINST SYRIA--Interview with the Syrian CP via the PCF--29 August 2013

An Interview with Ammar Bagdash, Secretary of the Syrian Communist Party

This interview with the Secretary of the Syrian Communist Party, Ammar Bagdash, took place at the time of a public meeting in Rome and a group-discussion about the causes, the evolution and the consequences of the civil war in Syria—or, to put it another way, about the attempted destabilization of a country that refused to take part in the Imperialist domination of the Middle East.

The interview was conducted by Sergio Cararo, Marinella Correggia,

and Maruizio Musolino

Why this attack on Syria?

Syria is a bulwark against North American expansionism in the Middle East, especially after  the occupation of Iraq.  But the real ramrod behind this project is actually Israeli president [Shimon] Peres, who has pursued this objective since the 1980s.  Syrian Communists have come to call this project ‘The Greater Zion’.  Syria has rejected all diktats by the US and Israel in the Middle East, supported the Iraqi resistance, that of the Lebanese and the right of Statehood for the Palestinians.

But how did the revolt, the crisis and the civil war in Syria come into existence?

In the analysis of Syrian Communists, the conditions were as much as anything the results of the neo-liberal measures adopted in 2005.  This policy had three negative effects: an increase in social inequality; social exclusion spread more and more throughout the suburbs of Damascus; and a decline in the quality of life for the general population.  This played to the advantage of the reactionary forces, like the Muslim Brotherhood, who are supported by the lower levels of the working class, especially among the rural proletariat.  When we denounced all this in the Parliament, we were accused of striking an ideological attitude, and of being idiots.

In Syria, they wanted to recreate what happened in Egypt and Tunisia.  But then these were two pro-imperialist countries.  In the case of Syria, things were different. It began with popular demonstrations in the rural areas of Daraa and Idleb.  But in the cities, there were huge demonstrations in support of [President Bashir] Assad.  Moreover, at the beginning, the police did not shoot, but certain elements among the demonstrators did initiate violent actions.  In the first seven months, there were more killed among the police and the army than in the other camp.  When the demonstrations were no longer effective, they turned to terrorism by killing those most visible (social leaders, public officials, journalists), attacking and sabotaging the civilian infrastructure.  The government reacted by enacting certain reforms, like the adoption of multi-partyism and greater freedom of the press, reforms that we supported.  But the reactionaries rejected these reforms.  As Communists, we understood this formula:  the debate and the actions had to be met with equal and opposite discussions and actions.  But, to reestablish order. terrorism could only be dealt with by the sovereignty of the law.

Then we moved on to a third stage.  A real armed revolt.  Attacks and targeted assassinations signaled the beginning of the assault on Damascus.  Next, the attacks were focused on Aleppo, with its geographical position making it easier to re-supply with smuggled arms and provisions from abroad.  The government responded by imposing the hegemony of the law.  It should be noted that the interventions by the army and the aerial bombardments took place in those areas where most of the civilian populations had already fled.  The rebels reacted to the Syrian Army’s counter-offensive with barbarity, even in areas where there were no combatants.  Then they laid siege to Aleppo.

Why did Syria resist?  What does this show?

In the last ten years in the Middle East, Iraq has been occupied, Libya forced to capitulate, but Syria has not.  Is this because of its greater internal cohesion, its more powerful armed forces, stronger international alliances, or because it has not yet suffered a direct military intervention by the Imperialist Powers?

In Syria, unlike with Iraq and Libya, there has always been a strong national alliance.  The Communists have worked within the government since 1966, without interruption.  Syria could not have resisted by depending solely on its military.  It was able to resist because it had a strong popular base of support.  And it was able to draw support from its allies like Iran, China and Russia.  And if Syria is still standing, the Imperialist crowned heads are going to roll because it clearly shows that there are other ways to go.  Ours is an internationalist struggle.  A Russian expert told me, “The role of Syria is like that of Spain in the war against Fascism.”

What effect could the events in Egypt have on the current situation in Syria?

There is a dialectical relation between what happened in Egypt and what is happening in Syria.  The common basis is popular discontent, but the Syrian resistance accelerated the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt, and that greatly helped Syria because it showed how the Brotherhood was rejected by the people.

In a recent interview, Syrian President Assad said,  “In Syria, we have checked the onslaught of political Islamism.”  What do you think of that?

We, Syrian Communists, do not use the category of ‘Political Islam.’  There is a certain diversity within Islam.  Some, like the Muslim Brotherhood, are pro-Imperialist reactionaries, and some are progressives, like Hezbollah and even Iran.  I am not an fan of the Iranian model, but they are our allies in the struggle against Imperialism.  Since our Fifth Congress, we have judged Iran on the basis of its position on Imperialism.  Our watchword is:  For an International Front Against Imperialism.

In Italy, a large part of the Left thinks the rebels are fighting a Fascist regime, the Assad government.  What can you say to such a position?

If we’re talking about the definition of Fascism—a reactionary movement that employs violent means in the interests of monopolistic capitalism—in Syria, monopoly capitalism is not the dominant order.  It is, rather, the rebels who represent the interests of Big Capital.  As History teaches us, revolts are not always revolutions.  Think about the Nicaraguan Contras, about Franco’s forces in Spain, and there are others.

But is the opposition to Assad all reactionaries?  Or, as shown by the internal conflict between the Free Syrian Army and the militant Jihadists, or, in the last few days, between the Kurds and the Jihadists, are there progressive elements with whom we could initiate a dialogue?

Among the oppositionists, some have spent many years in Syrian prisons, and we have demanded and fought for their freedom.  These who oppose Assad have, however, all been against foreign interference or intervention.  Some of them live in Damascus and we work together for a national dialogue.  Even Haytham Menaa of the Democratic Coordination condemns the use of violence by the opposition army along with any interference from abroad.  Others like Michel Kilo come from the Left, but have betrayed these ideas, and, anyway, they cannot change the reactionary nature of this rebellion.

How do you explain the intensification of the differences between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and how do these then effect the divisions within the rebel militias?

It’s true, the influence and the role played by Qatar has diminished, while Saudi Arabia’s influence has grown.  The whole thing about the confrontation with the Kurds is another story.  There were confrontations between the Kurds of the Kurdish Democratic Union and the militant Jihadists of al Nusra, but there were also conflicts between diverse Kurdish groups.

What’s happening with the Palestinians who are living in refugee camps in Syria?

I recently met an official of the PLO and he told me, “If Syria falls, adieu to Palestine.”  Hamas sometimes acts in great haste, has made many errors and caused a lot of problems.  We can say that this organization, which belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, is reverting to its origins and will continue under the wing of Qatar.  But this is also dangerous for them.  Now, after what has happened in Egypt, what will happen in Gaza?  The majority of militants who are in the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria are not Palestinians.  The majority of Palestinians are totally against all interference in Syrian domestic affairs.

In Yarmouk, 70% of the inhabitants are Syrians because the refugee camps in Syria are not ghettos like in other countries.  There are still fighters in Yarmouk, but the Syrian population has left.  The Executive Committee of the PLO has come twice to Syria to ask about the protection of the refugee camps.  Yarmouk was overrun by al Nusra with help from Hamas in an attempt to provoke the Army, which had received orders not to react.

We don’t talk about it much, but what is the role of Jordan in the crisis and the civil war in Syria?

The Jordanian monarchy has always collaborated with the Imperialists, and the Muslim Brotherhood is intensely active there.  Jordan accepted the presence of the US troops on its territory, and the fourth attack against Damascus actually came from Jordanian territory.

And what game is Israel playing in Syria?

Israel supports the armed rebels, but when they don’t hit their assigned targets, it’s the Israeli air force that picks up the slack.  This happened in Damascus and also a few days ago in Latakia.

How is this tragedy going to play out?

We cannot hope to achieve any social progress, or with democracy, if we are under attack from external forces.  The daily goal is to defend our national sovereignty and protect the living conditions of our people.  As I said at the ANSA, the principal means for ending this Syrian massacre is first to stop all aid to the armed opposition from the reactionary and Imperialist countries.  Once the foreign aid is stopped, we can put an end to all military operations, including those of the Syrian government.  And resume a democratic process with legislative elections and political reforms, something obviously impossible at this stage of the armed struggle.  The political future of Syria will be decided in elections, notably the presidential elections of 2014.

Original Syrian translated by the CPF.

Translation from the French by CM/P

A Great Loss to Peace and Justice: Maître Vergès is Dead--15 August 2013

{Jacque Vergès died yesterday, Thursday, 15 August 2013.  Me Vergès was my friend--though, each time we met up, he seemed unable to remember who I was.  At the Paris premiere of his bio-pic, Terror's Advocate, directed by another friend of mine, Barbet Schroeder, he mistook me for some big San Francisco PI from the film.  I knew that the elegant Maitre was not potty, but he had this way of guarding his personal world that was every bit the junkyard dog.  To riff on Ordell Robbie:  "Me Vergès was my own personal Johnny Cochrane--and like Johnny Cochrane, he lived to fuck with State."

Whoa--it's not that I've got so many JV stories that I just can't get them all down here; it's that my stories about this sweet, absolutely committed man are too precious simply to toss off in a quick blog post.  I hope to write more later--I WILL write more later.  

After all, we were comrades in the great and noble struggles for Human Liberation and International Peace and Justice.  And along with another great legal mind, Ramsey Clarke, Me Vergès and I were the Three 'Fascist' Amigos on the International Defense Committee for Slobodan Milosevic.  This from another long, torduous story, from the steaming stench of a truly shitty mind, already overtold, and rightly passed over for now.  

Just to say, I loved Vergès (god, how he'd hate me for that!), and I will miss him everyday. 

But marchons, The Defense Never Rests. --mc}

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Vergès Interview: on Syria & Libya - from Michel Collon's webzine: Investig'action. (translated from the French by CM/P)

Maitre Jacques Vergès:  20 April 1924-15 August 2013

[CM/P is being run out of France--but, believe thee me, it's just temporary, and it'll change nothing about us.

I'd like to think we were under the guns of those French Fascist collaborators who are currently so exercised over Sarkozy's killing of innocents in North Africa and the Middle-East. Those little Pépés who are always trying to slarv the biggest dode in the room—then, as they wipe their petulant lips, claim they’re working undercover for the morals squad.

And here we're not talking about the National Front or their ilk. No, these are the polite cosmopolitans (as my friend Péan referred to Doc Kouchner), pretending to erudition and deep feelings for the Defense of Human Rights, Victims Rights—they’re frequently gathered into SOS Associations (like SOS Racisme: went after Péan for four pages of his monumental book on Rwanda, “Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs”; or SOS Attentat: went after those reparation bucks for the victims of Terrorist Attacks in 1980s France [almost always bogusly blamed on Libya: e,g,, La Belle disco, or UTA flt. 772, or Pan Am flt. 103 {La Belle is, to this day, bragged about as a false flag by the Mossad--see: Victor Ostrovski's "By Way of Deception . . .} or, my pants-down favorite, SOS-Papa: sets up mediations for bi-national couples, then [according to its leader, my asshole landlord, one of the principal reasons for CM/P's relocation to Jersey, and a Shoah-survivor who proudly supports the US/NATO aggressions against Libya and Syria], then sends mercenaries, 'paid black ops commandos' [like all short guys, the lord of my manor's a bit of a fantasist], in after the kids being fought over [think: Zoés Ark]).

–But, hey, this post is not about us, it’s about Maitre Jacques Vergès, one of the world’s greatest, most principled defense attorneys ever.

Yet these same organizations I was complaining about just now are the ones Me Vergès finds himself pitted against time after time in the media. My great pal, Jack (though, when he sees me, Vergès can never seem to remember who I am, where he’s seen me before—and I would never call him ‘Jack’ to his face!) has also been a formidable teacher and ethical model to me. His defenses of Carlos, Klaus Barbie, Omar the gardener (great film just out about this case: “Omar m’a tué”), Milosevic, Saddam and several African leaders, have been based on the ‘underdog principle’ (No one is more deserving of the best possible defense than an individual who is matched against the monstrous capital powers of a militarist State). Famous for clients that the Public assumed to be guilty as charged, MeV was the subject of my old Hollywood cronie, French director Barbet Schroeder's not entirely sympathetic documentary movie about the counselor, “Terror’s Advocate." In it the narrator asks the Maitre if he would even defend Bush. JV replied, gripping his stogie firmly in his steady at 83 year-old hand, “Yes, of course. But only if he first pleaded guilt.”

Of all that has happened to CM/P in these last 16 years in Paris (and some interesting shit has gone down), I don’t think anything can match the honor of being included with Maitres Vergès and Ramsey Clark as a ‘Fascist on the Milosevic Defense Committee’. Of course the bestower of this magnum accolade was the fat-headed and chronically amnesiac Jared (the greater) Israel, and it was as he was giving up on trying to subvert yet another progressive organization.

No, I can leave France a happy man, and never come back, knowing, for a column-inch or two, my CM/P and I were at the same table, smoking Cohebas and sipping Cognac with the likes of Ramsey Clark (Interational Action Center) and Jacques Vergès (the lawyer you want if you absolutely, positively don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting off).

Now, let’s give the ‘parole’ to Maitre Vergès. –mc]

************************

Maitre Vergès Interview on Syria and Libya
from Michel Collon’s webzine: Investig'Action
(translated from the French by CM/P)


Jacques Vergès: “In Syria, the current government must be defended!”

An indefatigable Defense Lawyer, on juridical and political issues, to those who resist the New World Order, Jacques Vergès, who was recently seen alongside Roland Dumas in a Tripoli under NATO bombardment, shares his feelings on what is happening and what could happen in Syria. His is an uncompromising analysis of the moral and geopolitical adventurism of an Americo-Centric West, and a rational optimism about the developments in Syria and elsewhere.


—First off, what is your analysis of the situation in Syria?—

Jacques Vergès: There is a very clear attempt to destabilize the government coming from outside Syria. Saudi Arabia is on the move inside the country using the Salafist Group it inspires and finances. And, of course, the US is in charge of this would-be civil war. Israel, a bordering state and an avowed enemy of Syria, and which has intelligence services and state-of-the-art military capabilities, is, I believe, directly involved here, as well. And I would not like to forget the motivational role played by France in the destabilization of the Syrian government.

I don’t deny that there are social problems in Syria. France, too, has serious social problems, and, one could even say, French society is facing a certain number of obstacles. Its enemies, inside and outside Baathist Syria, are doing all they can to add fuel to the fire. As for me, I am very openly a friend of Syria as it exists today.


—What, in your view, will be brought about by the attitude taken by Nicholas Sarkozy in this affair?—

JV: On a strictly ideological level, there are unarguably pro-Zionist and pro-American dispositions to this President, who dreams of being at the head of his class in Europe, or the peer of Britain’s David Cameron in their “NATO-studies” course. And here we touch on something more personal, more psychological, about the man: his pathetic need to see himself hoisted to the status of Statesman and to be able to play on the “Big kids’ yard” of this world, a status that a vast majority of French public opinion seems to be denying him these days. And then there are all these internal failures—in the areas of economics and security—that they try and make the electorate forget about by rolling out all the war hardware; this is a procedure as old as the political world itself.

Finally, there is the heavy responsibility born by French diplomacy for this Arab, Tunisian and Egyptian “Spring”: From (French Prime Minister François) Fillon’s putting his vacations on (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak’s tab to “M.A.M.” offering to work with (former-Tunisian President Zine el Abidine) Ben Ali on matters of police repression, there is no shortage of Things-to-be-Forgotten as soon as possible. And most notable among these is the undeclared war against (Libyan leader Moamar) Kadhafi, ordered up precipitously and without clear political objective by a simple injunction from Bernard-Henri Levy, delivered over the shoulders of (Foreign Minister) Alain Juppé and Gerard Longuet. Such a political escapade can only lead to chaos and the wasting of human lives and riches. And as with what is already a failure, like the War in Afghanistan: Kadhafi stands firm, less because of his military superiority than the support he continues to receive from a great majority of the Libyan population, and also because his opponents, who are given carte blanche by the West, demonstrate each day how lame and unprincipled they are, not only militarily, but politically, too. Faced with this Resistance, the media break out the old double-talk of psychological war: Have you heard this picturesque “information” coming out of our TV sets? Kadhafi has issued Viagra to his soldiers to get them up for raping the female rebels! When you have to resort to this kind of propaganda you know things are going badly.


—To you, the West’s action, in Libya as in Syria, is, in some way, improvised, badly thought out and meant to fail. Yet, shouldn’t we expect a less amateurish campaign from the US administration and NATO . . .—

JV: But you can see the waste that American bungling perpetrated in Iraq over the last nearly ten years: They started the war on the phony pretext of getting rid of Saddam Hussien, a “hard case” against Israel in the Arab camp. And after innumerable victims and vast destruction, they give power over to the Shiite majority, that is, to Iran, their Public Enemy #1. Is this the Great Geopolitical Game, here? Any analyst or expert on the region could have predicted this outcome for Bush and his Neo-Con clique! This Ubu-esque situation brought a frank quip from the great American intellectual Noam Chomsky, a man with few illusions: “I thought we were going to Iraq to fight Islamic Extremists, and then we put them in power!” Well, it’s the same thing in Libya. We gave the big guns to Kadhafi—who had mended fences with the West—and whom Sarkozy, as we all remember, recently honored—and now we have no one to turn to other than the broken down, impotent and foreign-infiltrated Islamic Radicals—who, at best, represent the Province of Cyrenaïque—and even there, their representation seems very weak, indeed. And will the French—or the British—stay on after their first helicopter or their first ground soldier is shot down?

And as for Syria, if the Americans and their Saudi friends happen to topple the Bachar al-Assad government, they will merely hand this country over, ipso facto, to Sunni sectarians, who will return a modern Syria to the age Ryad—which will bring some heavy consequences for Israel and its American protectors. That said, I remain an optimist about Syria, and even Libya. The Syrian people know that it is civil war and the destruction of their country that is being forced onto them by these opposition officials acting more or less as puppets of the Americans and the armed groups that have infiltrated their land. The Syrians do not want their country to become the new Iraq.


—And if the war being waged by the Americans and their European and Arab allies were just, why, instead of trying to take over Syria, would they want to destroy the country or return it to a stage of development 50 years or more in the past, as certain trans-Atlantic strategists have bragged about having done with Iraq?—

JV: But it is precisely the example of Iraq that shows this is a politics of the short view, and dangerous for Washington’s geostrategic interests: today’s Iraq is closer than it ever has been to Iran. And the de facto creation of an autonomous Kurdish state in the north of the country has pushed Turkey further from the US. We gain nothing from creating these uncontrollable situations, and the chaos you have created will come back to you like a geopolitical boomerang! And what would Miss Clinton [sic] have achieved when the jihadists start parading in the streets of Tripoli, or after that in Benghazi? As for Syria, I think, the support that the Bachar al-Assad government continues to receive remains the most effective obstacle to Americano-Israelo-Saudian strategies.


—So, in Syria and elsewhere, the West is practicing a relentless, counterintuitive pursuit of war, a sort of gunboat diplomacy from one day to the next?—

JV: Precisely. Because the West is sick. Economically. Politically. And, above all, morally. To me, these costly military gesticulations, from Kabul to Tripoli by way of Baghdad or even Damascus, are like the involuntary throes of someone in grave suffering. America is, especially, very sick, with its ruined economy, its colossal debt, its dollar turning into a piece of Monopoly money and its giant scams à la Madoff. And, also, with the arrival into the geopolitical marketplace of emerging powers, or re-emerging powers, like Russia, China, India, and Brazil. To maintain a semblance of moral and political legitimacy, and, with that, world leadership, we have to create an enemy, a “Great Satan,” as the Iranians would say, which makes domestic opinion forget about our imminent failure. But what kind of moral credibility is accorded to those powers that practice a double-standard? So, to hold on to the Near-East, we bomb Tripoli and threaten Damascus, as we let Israel continue, against repeated UN Resolutions, its colonization and bloody repression, just as we let the Saudi troops, more American pawns in the Gulf, put down a popular protest movement in Bahrain. We stigmatize Iranian fanaticism, while we support a Saudi Arabian theocracy that practices the most sectarian and obscurantist form of Islam. I could also go on at length about Côte d’Ivoire, where France, again carrying out American orders, proclaimed that Alassane Ouattara was the mild-mannered Democratic in that movie, and Laurent Gbagbo the villain, even while the UN found evidence of numerous crimes against the civilian population carried out by Ouattara’s troops in the reign of terror they established in their northern fiefdom during the now-famous presidential elections. And if we explain this as Ouattara’s not being in control of his troops, then he is simply inept!

I repeat: these colonial expeditions into Africa and the Near-East—after all, the two former colonial powers, France and Great Britain, are in the front ranks militarily and diplomatically, just as they were at the time of the Levant—are proof of the ill-health of their instigators. Is America sick? And France, too? The DSK affair (Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the IMF, charged in NYC with raping his hotel chamber maid) shows me the moral and political failings of the Liberal-Socialist elites, corrupt and exhausted; and this moral failing compounds the failure of institutions and the economy, without forgetting domestic insecurity: each of these shows the French state, the state which is currently bombing Tripoli, is incapable of making the gang-leaders in its banlieues (comparable to the Projects) listen to reason! Why are we surprised when a president like Sarkozy, the last avatar of this governmental cast, tries to redraw his image on the backs of Libyans and Syrians! A fraud! A fraud in its death throes! The West runs the risk of dying from its cynicism and moral weakness!


—To finish up, you said you were rather optimistic about the evolution of the situation in these countries on the “front line”?—

JV: Yes. The Americans and their goons can do quite a bit of damage—just look at Libya, and Afghanistan, or still in Sudan, you can see it in Iraq and in the ex-Yugoslavia. But I don’t think they will be able to prevail over these people, these nations: We are seeing it, or we will see it, in Syria, in Libya, in Egypt, in Lebanon and in Palestine. In Syria, we must be vigilant against the destabilizing tactics and the campaigns of disinformation.


—Maitre Vergès, thank you very much.—

This interview was recorded on 9 June 2011 by Louis Denghien.

Source: http://www.infosyrie.fr/2011/06/jacques-verges-en-syrie-il-faut-defendre-letat-actuel/