Understanding the reasons behind Russia and China's UNSC veto against purposeful and engineered regime change are desperately lacking.
Do the West and Arab despots really care about human rights in Syria? The dim prospects in Syria go beyond human rights in the short terms.
Foremost, the concern should be the rise of Sunni and Zionist collaboration aimed at weakening Iran and Iraq, and the consequences on Shia and Christian minorities in authoritarian Arab states.
Rather than picking on falsified and exaggerated massacres which even the Arab League was hard pressed to find evidence to support Western claims, look out for the sinister agenda. The world is deceived yet again but many never seem to learn any lessons.
We have only Russia and China who saw through the ruse to prevent the dominos falling and worse human rights disasters. Ex-commis from the Cold War period continue to be demonized for not supporting colored revolutions in selective abhorrent countries.
Independent minded leaders are clearly obstacles to neo-imperialism propagated since earlier British colonial and American expansionism post-WWII. The US and NATO are not reliable allies. Just look at the villain turned darling Gaddafi’s downfall.. Having seen developments of Islamists hijacking the revolution in Egypt and Libya, would Assad be stupid enough to accelerate the demise of his government and all that he has built for the country without a fight?
National sovereignty and territorial integrity should be respected, the very rules set up by the West, but are constantly altered to serve their interests. To be fair, the United Nations should not be an extension of US and NATO but look after all states and humanity.
Warning: be careful who you depose
BY: JOHN R. BRADLEY
Fro The Australian
February 13, 2012 12:00AM
IS the Syrian regime hellbent on political suicide? There can be no doubt President Bashar al-Assad is determined to crush rebellion, but if he had really carried out a massacre in the city of Homs (as was reported by most of the Western media) it would have been an act of complete madness.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague has been deploring the Russian and Chinese veto of a Western-backed UN resolution against Syria, but a look at the Russians' reservations reveals legitimate concerns.
The West seems keen to portray the uprising as a simple story of freedom fighters opposing tyranny, when the situation is much more complex. An awful repeat of the Libyan debacle is beginning to unfold: Western reporters embed themselves with self-declared former al-Qa'ida fighters and bands of tribal fanatics, but fail to report this so as not to undermine the "Arab Spring".
The result of this in Libya is plain to see. Once the Islamist militias had established their rule in Tripoli, they imposed sharia law on the once secular country and set about torturing their enemies in a way that would have put even Gaddafi to shame.
Now the same voices that helped the Islamists to take over Libya - and then feigned surprise when they introduced a new and even worse type of despotism - are calling for another armed revolution in Syria. It doesn't seem to matter to them that should their insurrection succeed, the new regime might cause untold suffering for the Syrian people, most of whom (it is not often reported) have not joined the uprising. Why would they? They have plenty of reason to fear that what would come after Assad could be far more repressive and potentially murderous.
The NATO-sponsored government in exile, the Syrian National Council, is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and supported by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The ranks of the rebel Free Syrian Army have been swelled by radical Islamists from Iraq and Libya, who are being armed and funded by Qatar via Lebanon and Turkey.
The Emir of Qatar, darling of the West, has at least had the decency to make his intentions clear: he has declared he wants to overthrow the last secular Arab regime. He has installed proxies of the insane Wahhabi cult in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, and now aims to do the same in Syria.
The House of Saud cares nothing for ordinary Syrians - its interest in the conflict is simply strategic. Along with its undeclared ally, Israel, it would like to see a group of Sunni and Wahhabi despots, hostile to their common enemy, Iran, replace Assad, who has collaborated with Tehran.
But what of Syria's religious minorities, the moderate Alawites, the Christians and the Shi'ites? What of the women? What of the dwindling number of free-thinking intellectuals, or Syria's ordinary moderate Muslim "folks", in Obama parlance, who do not wish to live under a backward Wahhabi theocracy? They can suffer in silence, it seems. US and Israeli "security interests" must come first, and are best served by a pact with the devil.
Of course, the veto by Russia and China at the UN had nothing to do with concerns about human rights. For China, it was revenge for being duped by NATO after the UN approved a no-fly zone over Libya, supposedly strictly to protect civilians but which was used as an excuse for all-out war and subsequently to ensure China no longer had access to Libya's vast oil reserves.
Russia has extensive economic investments in Syria, whose main port is leased to the Russian navy; and it sells billions of dollars of arms to the Assad regime.
But we sell many billions more to Saudi Arabia, which is Britain's main trading partner. We installed the al-Saud dynasty back in the 1920s, and we'll continue to be silent, as we always have been, on that regime's repulsive human rights record.
What goes around certainly comes around in the Middle East, and it comes around with depressing regularity. The Arab Spring was never going to end the cycle.
John R. Bradley is the author of After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts
The Spectator
China on the Defensive : Syria under Seige?
This is an edited version of an editorial that appeared this week in China Daily:
When China joined hands with Russia on Saturday to veto an Arab-European draft UN resolution backing an Arab League plan to promote a regime change in Syria, its stance was consistent with its approach to international issues.
The draft resolution that sought to realize a regime change in Syria did not adequately reflect the state of affairs in this Middle East country.
In putting the resolution to the vote, western powers hoped to further exert pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, thus paving the way for the removal of a regime that is an obstacle to their policies in the Middle East.
By only exerting pressure on the Syrian government and explicitly trying to coerce its leader to step down, the resolution sends the message to armed groups and opponents of his regime that they have the support of the international community. This will undoubtedly make the Syrian situation even more complicated and make it impossible for all parties to reach a conciliatory agreement that is in the best interests of the country and its people.
We’ve seen what happened in Libya. With the armed intervention by some major western powers, the Libyan regime was overthrown. But instead of the democracy and freedom they were promised, Libyan people cannot even live in peace as the country is in the danger of falling into a sectarian civil war.
It is not a question of whether Assad should step down or not. It is whether the ever-worsening crisis in the country will be brought to an end in such a way that the country will not be plunged into a sectarian civil war and its people plunged into even greater misery.
China maintains that any attempt by the international community to help Syria solve its crisis must respect the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of the country.
A messy civil war in Syria will not be conducive to peace in the Middle East.
Russia’s stance that conditions should not be imposed on dialogue, and that any efforts should influence not just the government but also the armed groups is reasonable.
The draft resolution was presented too hastily and the international community should give the Russian diplomatic endeavour time to soften the positions of all the parties in Syria so that an agreement can be reached that is for the good of the country.
The Chinese government believes that, in line with the UN Charter, political consultations are the best way to help a nation solve any political crisis.
