By Ibrahim Zabad, Ph.D., Contributing Writer
An alert reader might have noticed the word “suspected” in a New York Times article, titled, “U.S., Britain and France Strike Syria Over Suspected Chemical Weapons Attack.” The strike also happened on April 13, 2018, just few hours after investigators from the organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in Damascus.
But, if we have social media reports, who needs chemical weapons investigators? Just two days prior to the assault, the New York Times wrote, “Whether the injuries were the result of a chemical weapon attack is not yet confirmed,” and added that, “The United Nations has not determined responsibility for the attack.”
A few months ago, Defense Secretary James Mattis declared there was no evidence that the Assad government had used chemical weapons; the mainstream media ignored such significant statements. The above does not exonerate the Syrian regimes; it is a fact that the regime and the opposition have committed atrocities. The Assad regime is capable of using chemical weapons, but so is the opposition.
The Syrian tragedy needs some context. The Syrian revolution began peacefully in early 2011, when young people took to the streets demanding liberty and democracy. Unfortunately, this “peacefulness” of the revolution didn’t last long, as the protests morphed into an armed insurgency. Within a year or so, the vast majority of the rebels joined the ranks of radical Islamists, and we soon found out that the most powerful “rebel” groups in Syria belonged to al-Qaeda and ISIS.
The Syrian revolution was no longer a revolution for freedom but a civil war between a Syrian government defending its sovereignty and a hodgepodge of terrorists and radical Islamist groups financed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Worse, the Syrian Civil War quickly mutated into a proxy war that pitted Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, who supported the Syrian regime against the United States, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UK, France and other Western powers that supported what they called the “rebels.”
Within two years, after losing ground initially, the Syrian regime regained its vitality and started a successful counterattack to restore territories lost to the “rebels.” The Syrian government has achieved one victory after another. Despite Turkish, Saudi, American and European protestations, it regained its sovereignty over the second largest city in Syria, Aleppo, after a ferocious battle. This was an unmistakable sign of the impending defeat of the “rebels” and the end of the Syrian Civil War.
The Syrian government’s next move was in the suburbs of Damascus in Eastern Ghouta, which came under the control of several terrorist groups a few years ago. The Syrian Army has long surrounded the Eastern suburb and isolated it from the rest of the country and was just waiting for an opportune moment to liberate it and rid Damascus of the random bombings that target civilians every once in a while.
A week before the alleged attacks, the Syrian government succeeded in securing an agreement for the evacuation of the terrorists. Bizarrely, the Western media insisted on calling them rebels, even though almost all belong to the so-called army of Islam, a terrorist group backed by Saudi Arabia, the country that “gifted” the world “Wahhabism,” the ideology that inspired al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram and a multitude of other terrorist organizations. Indeed, in the first week of April, around 3,000 “rebels” and their families evacuated Ghouta peacefully; few “rebels” refused to leave. Then, the chemical attack happened.
All those facts on the ground should have at least prompted some serious questions regarding the chemical attack. Why would the Syrian government risk provoking the international community or the United States, especially after President Donald Trump appointed John Bolton as his national security advisor? What does the Syrian government get from using chemical weapons in a battle that it has already won? How does a chemical attack serve the interests of the Syrian government or its backers, the Russians or the Iranians? What incentives prompted the Syrian regime to use chemical weapons to kill civilians, knowing that images of suffocating or dying children and women would be on every smartphone and TV screen? Why would a government that is just about to restore its sovereignty to the suburbs of its capital target its own citizens with chemical weapons when it needs their support, not their enmity?
Those are the questions that the U.S. media, almost in its entirety, failed to ask. Taking this background into account, the Syrian regime does not have incentives to resort to this deadly and banned weapon. The rebels do. They are losing the war and an international intervention is badly needed. As mentioned earlier, those questions do not exonerate the Syrian government, but they must be asked to determine culpability and plan a response that would deter the future use of such terrifying weapons.
The United States, the French and the British ganged up against the Syrian government and launched an attack on Damascus. This wasn’t the first time a “trio” of Western powers attacked an Arab country.
In 1956, the French, British and Israelis hatched a conspiracy to attack Egypt after the Egyptian leader nationalized the Suez Canal. The “tripartite aggression,” as the Arabs called it, ultimately failed and the Egyptian leader, Nasser, emerged victorious. This time, Arab social media was abuzz with the “new tripartite aggression” and the crowds in Damascus and on social media cheered President Assad for standing up to this neo-imperial aggression.
Instead of weakening Assad, the aggression strengthened his hands. The next morning, as President Trump was celebrating his “mission accomplished,” President Assad walked into his office to conduct business as usual. What Syria needs is a political solution, not a military strike that emboldens the “rebels” and provides them with perverse incentives to cause atrocities in order to provoke a Western military response. The strike will only prolong this horrific civil war.
