I think the Assad regime is probably almost as bad as commonly portrayed, and none of this is meant in any way to deny that the regime has killed tens of thousands of civilians or more or to justify their war crimes. But I can’t reconcile the numbers with the mainstream depiction of the war by the likes of Roger Cohen, Nicholas Kristof, or other interventionists (who say nothing about our assistance to the Saudi war on Yemen, which is one massive war crime. So much for their humanitarian motives). Everyone agrees that the jihadists are the best fighters on the rebel side and that many of the “moderates” are similar in ideology and that they have genocidal attitudes, and they have supposedly killed over 100,000 Syrian soldiers and allied militia, yet–
1. When intervention isn’t intervention.
Supposedly the problem is we haven’t supplied enough aid. How the hell did the rebels manage to do so well against forces with tanks, artillery and an air force? Has this ever happened without massive amounts of outside armaments? The Max Fisher piece in the New York Times shows, without spelling it out, that the mainstream lament is wrong. The war has lasted this long and caused so many deaths precisely because outsiders on both sides keep intervening. One can’t help but notice that to liberal hawks US interventions that cause massive death tolls simply aren’t acknowledged and the answer to a failed intervention is more intervention.
2. The kinder gentler jihadists.
The rebels have killed 100,000 armed opponents, yet according to mainstream Western sources they have only killed a small fraction of the civilians. Is this true? Suppose it is. What that suggests is that the Syrian regime has done a good job shielding most of those who would be exterminated from the jihadis, even if they themselves are guilty of massive war crimes. Or are we supposed to think the jihadis are compassionate? Alternatively, perhaps most or all of our information comes from pro-rebel sources and the jihadis have killed far more civilians than we are led to believe. For instance, maybe some of the dead militia and Syrian soldiers in the Syrian Observatory figures were actually unarmed civilians accused of regime support. It would be amazing in a brutal civil war if rebels didn’t murder civilians accused of supporting the other side and this is even before we take into account the genocidal ideology many of the rebels are reported to have.
3. Cited death tolls.
For a long time the media tended to rely on the figures supplied by the pro rebel Syrian Observatory. The Wikipedia article I linked above gives their yearly totals and a breakdown by faction–at present, roughly 100,000 armed dead on the pro government side, roughly the same on the anti government side, and about 85,000 civilians. In recent months, however, various groups estimate the true death toll is close to 500,000 and so that is now the figure commonly cited in the press.
Compare this to Iraq. The mainstream press press commonly cited the figures of Iraq Body Count, which was an actual count of civilian deaths that could be verified with reasonable certainty from media accounts. By the late 00’s this number was over 100,000 and now is closer to 200,000. IBC has also estimated the death toll including fighters and that figure is 250,000. There were other ways of counting the dead– notably the Johns Hopkins team which found 100,000 by 2004 and 600,000 by 2006 using surveys, and more recently another study found about 500,000 dead as of 2011, also using a survey. What number does the press usually use? Generally, I see the “over 100,000” figure. Just look at this New York Times editorial from 2011; it says “tens of thousands” of Iraqi deaths, an amazingly low figure they probably got from either the US government or some think tank.
So a conservative count of civilians only is used for a war where America is mostly responsible (and too small even using IBC data), while the highest figure available is used for Syria with the American role generally papered over. The press, if it wants to use the smallest reasonable figure for Iraq, should use the 250,000 of IBC, since they don’t exclude fighters when citing Syrian estimates. And even IBC, which was very critical of the Johns Hopkins study, would probably agree that the total violent death toll is higher than their figure, and that is before one includes the deaths caused by the collapse of civilian infrastructure.
4. Comparisons to Israel in Gaza
Nobody does this, so I will. Of course the 2014 war in Gaza only lasted several weeks and was conducted against a population of only 2 million and therefore the death toll is 100-200 times smaller. All the same, the Western press seems to have two different standards here. When fighting jihadis and “moderate” rebels, the Syrian government bombs urban areas, killing civilians, and this is unequivocally condemned in Western media. Israel employs the same tactics and we hear much debate about whether it was justified because, allegedly, Hamas used civilians as human shields or stored weapons or dug tunnels or whatever. Often the defenses of Israel were clearly false, but they were always taken seriously. The issue doesn’t even come up with Syria– no one in the mainstream Western press even bothers to make the same arguments or refute them, because when Assad bombs urban areas he isn’t a Westerner and isn’t our ally and therefore he is obviously a war criminal, unlike when Israel does it.
Suppose Israel faced a combination of Al Qaeda and “moderate” rebels heavily supplied with both men and material from outside, openly declaring that they would massacre Jews and Christians if they won. Suppose they had a serious chance of victory. How would Israel fight such a war, given how they fight in vastly less serious circumstances (for them)?
Furthermore, go back to the kinder gentler jihadist notion. If the claims are to be believed, the rebels in Syria have managed to kill 100,000 heavily armed opponents and (supposedly) a much smaller number of civilians. The Israelis killed about 1500 civilians and several hundred Hamas fighters. Interesting. If one takes the Western press at face value (probably not a good idea), the Syrian rebels, including Al Qaeda, are fighting their war far more humanely than the IDF. Do I believe this? Not really, but the pro-Syrian-rebel American columnists should. And Hamas was only able to kill 66 IDF soldiers and 6 civilians. This is what you’d expect from a lightly armed force with essentially no outside help fighting a military with tanks, artillery, and an air force. Again, the fact that the Syrian rebels have been so successful in killing their armed opponents disproves the notion that the poor rebels are fighting without outside help against hopeless odds.
So Assad can bomb his way in getting a compliant, docile populace he can rule over, but the moment Bahrain start keeping anti-government protesters in check using minimal violence or brutality, the US or rather, Hillary Clinton should’ve intervened. Nice hypocrisy there.
Thank you for revealing the stark contrasts between how our media relies on outside groups and data in reporting the destruction caused by countries in and out of favor.
I would note that a slice of the Left does make exact parallels between Gaza and “liberated” (insurgent-held) areas of Syria. Qatar has been one of the major backers of the Syrian insurgency from the beginning. Its state-owned media, Al Jazeera, has extolled Muslim Brotherhood-allied insurgents across countries touched by the Arab Spring as revolutionaries and freedom-fighters. Many Progressives who had come to rely on AJ for its coverage of Palestine before the Arab Spring, continue to accept Qatar’s framing of the conflict.
In any fight between a secular government and throat-slitting fundamentalist maniacs I will choose the secular government every time. If the USA could ally with Josef Stalin in the fight against the Nazis I see no reason why it can’t ally with Assad to defeat ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al-Nusra and whatever names those scum are going under at the moment. US policy now reminds me very much of the time when the US supported the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese ran them out of most of Cambodia. There is seemingly no government or group too slimy for the US government if it suits their purposes.
If you have wondered why the US doesn’t seem to care that much about the maniacs threatening to topple the Syrian government, wonder no more:
“Israeli think tank: Don’t destroy ISIS; it’s a “useful tool” against Iran, Hezbollah, Syria”
http://www.salon.com/2016/08/23/israeli-think-tank-dont-destroy-isis-its-a-useful-tool-against-iran-hezbollah-syria/
Hamas used human shields and “allegedly” … “stored weapons, dug tunnels or whatever” .. its not ‘whatever’. its been conformed by dozens of reports , th UN and even ngo’s not particularly friendly to israel.
The idf uses tactics that have nothing in common with the tyrannical iron-fisted assad dynasty. when you can provide credible reports that assad warned civilians before he proceeded to slaughter them then you can get away with writing that israel did the ‘same thing’.
some of the authors points are well taken but is unsurprisingly tainted by the necessary comparisons to israel/palestinianconflict (which btw-has been going on for over 70yrs and the ‘body count’ total for all of those years doesn’t even touch the 5yr syrian war or the iraqi death toll -and-if i am not mistaken-the actual death toll from the US military war crime committed on the retreating iraqi army along with civilians (the infamous ‘highway of hell’ for is classified and may never be known for decades. but its huge. unless you are a rank propagandist-you can’t put palestinian deaths caused by israel into the same category-wether proportional or time-wise as the deaths caused by the assads , the jordanian husseinis , the iraqi saddam hussein or the iranian mullahs/irg/basij , al- bashir and now you can add the body count in yemen by the sauds if you want to be taken seriously.
I think it goes far beyond liberal hawks. Most progressive people just want that evil regime gone, which makes them effectively in favor of more intervention, so more general than hawks the description ‘liberal interventionists’ fits better. Everyone’s a liberal interventionist now.
And it’s normal too because the ‘realist’ position that prefers to keep the regime in place is ugly(it’s been my point of view all along but I wouldn’t call it attractive). The attitude of R2P(Responsibility to Protect) is generally accepted.
And it all becomes more palatable by representing the opposition as having a significant moderate component, which isn’t there. Progressives and warmongers, one front.
This week my daily newspaper published an interview with an expert on the matter, Syrian ambassador Robert Ford.
But if you read what wikileaks has to say on Ford, he’s one of the guys who has been trying to make the place blow up in the first place. It’s like that all the time.
This is not just about propaganda and people being fooled. Bluntly overthrowing bad regimes is just considered acceptable by many.
A key concept in such cases is : what options are you offering the other party. This is also relevant in the I/P debate: when people insist on nonviolent resistance, they are demonstrating to the other side that there are acceptable ways out of the situation.
Violent resistance can do that too, and it has more clout, but it’s harder to communicate that there’s a reasonable way out, and it’s easier for hasbara to obfuscate this.