A Mediterranean Battlefield - Syria

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: For more on Syria, we're joined in Chicago by Bassam Haddad, director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Mason University, co-founder of Jadaliyya. He's author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Bassam. Can you just respond to both the British vote, the Parliament vote that says no to attacks on Syria, against Cameron's wishes, the prime minister, and yet the U.S. moving forward?
BASSAM HADDAD: Well, absolutely. The British have, you know, made their say, and the Americans, the U.S. government, and France is pushing forward. What I think we should do first, before we actually begin to talk about any of this, is to recognize that this is notno longer about the Syrian regime and whatever atrocities it may have committed and whatever atrocities the rebels may have committed. This is about invading a sovereign country before even the evidence is out, before even the U.N. inspectors are out. There are decisions to already invade, to attack, to launch a strike on Syria, by a country that we should actually check the record of. The United States is not qualified to do what it claims it wants to do, as a result of its own record in violating international law for a very long time and supporting dictators and rogue regimes and the apartheid state of Israel in opposition to all manners of international law. The United States violated international law by attacking and invading a country on false premise, which is Iraq in 2003. And most importantly, the United States, in Iraq, has actually used nerve agent, mustard gas and/or white phosphorus in Fallujah and beyond, left depleted uranium all over the country in Iraq, ruined and destroyed the lives of generations as a result, and now claims that it needs to do this to protect Syrian civilians, which is exactly the opposite of what will happen in any invasion or any strike on Syria, which is not possible to happen in the surgical manner that is being discussed right now.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bassam Haddad, what do you think would be the repercussions of such a strike, if the United States goes at it, especially if it goes at it with very little support in the international community?
BASSAM HADDAD: Well, the issue here also is the fact that the situation can spin out of control in a very, very quick manner. You have a very strong opposition to this strike, even from the camp that the U.S. is allied with, including Britain, as we have seen. We have international actors, like Russia and China, who are clearly not just against this move, but there havethere has been some movement, some military movements and preparations on the Russian side. You have a regional environment that is also, in many ways, opposed to this, including, of course, the allies of Syria in the region. And we have a possibility of this becoming something much more than what many envision. This is not Libya. Syria has a lot of allies locally. The Syrian terrain is very different than that of Libya. And we're looking at a potential serious set of consequences that actually might not be in favor of anyone, and certainly, in all cases, the Syrian people will be the victims.
And the cynical aspect here is that the United States is not actually looking to change the balance of power in Syria. There is a very marked insistence on a limited strike, supposedly, that actually will end up prolonging this existing civil war, this tragic civil war, and it will not serve the purposes that any ordinary Syrians would like to be served. In fact, on top of this mayhem that has caused the killing of more than 100,000 people, the regime perhaps is the main culprit here, but the rebels also have partaken in a lot of the atrocities that have taken place. On top of all of this, the Syrians right now in Syria are waiting for, again, the United States to strike and basically make Syria the seventh Arab country that the United States strikes in the past couple of decades.
AMY GOODMAN: Bassam, last week Democracy Now! spoke to Razan Zaitouneh in Syria. She is a human rights lawyer who works with the Human Rights Violation Documentation Center. She went to the site of the chemical attack, and she described it.

RAZAN ZAITOUNEH: We started to visit the medical points in Ghouta to where injured were removed, and we couldn't believe our eyes. I haven't seen such death in my whole life. People were lying on the ground in hallways, on roadsides, in hundreds.

There haven't been enough medical staff to treat them. There is not enough medications for more serious cases. They were just to choose to whom they will give the medication, because there is no medication for everybody. Even doctors were crying because they couldn't help the injured people, because the lack of the medication and oxygen.