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June 14, 2013
It seems that what began as a peaceful uprising against secular authoritarian rule of the Assad Regime in Syria in 2011 has increasingly become a war between Shia and Sunni that has engulfed much of the surrounding region.
This undercuts the conventional view in the West that Bashar al-Assad’s government would fall any day and that the end was just round the corner, given that Assad’s regime was on its last legs.
Martin Rowson
Patrick Cockburn in a column in the London Review of Books says that:
Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria: a popular uprising against a dictatorship which is also a sectarian battle between Sunnis and the Alawite sect; a regional struggle between Shia and Sunni which is also a decades-old conflict between an Iranian-led grouping and Iran’s traditional enemies, notably the US and Saudi Arabia. Finally, at another level, there is a reborn Cold War confrontation: Russia and China v. the West.
Syria is being torn apart by the conflict as the sectarian tensions are tearing the region apart.
For the US the policy is to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource-draining civil war, with as minimal costs as possible. For the low price of aiding and arming the rebels, the U.S. preoccupies all of its adversaries in the Middle East.
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Oh shit! Not again!!!??!
The last time the US tried to ensnare it's adversaries into a protracted civil war, by arming (predominantly Sunni Muslim) "rebels"... it came back to bite them on the arse!
Apparently hindsight is not always 20/20.