There are growing calls for arming the opposition in Syria, which I believe serve no purpose but to unleash a devastating civil war. The Friends of Syria who met in Tunisia did not express great friendliness to the Syrian people. Indeed, they settled for agreeing to step up the sanctions and the embargo, i.e. punish the Syrians in their daily livelihoods and not the sated leaders of the regime. Then there were the calls for arming the opposition, which threaten the lives of the Syrians once more, and not the regime, its brutal security services or the murderous Shabbiha, - the pro-regime thugs-, and others. Arming the opposition in the current circumstances cannot involve more than light and medium weapons, RPGs and mines, against a large well-armed regular army equipped with aircraft, tanks and long-range heavy artillery. The regime will inevitably see in armed resistance yet another excuse – if it needs any- to step up the carnage. I give a large number of the eighty countries that participated in the Tunis Conference high marks for good faith. However, I completely dismiss good faith when it comes to the other advocates of arming the opposition. It is enough to look at the names of those advocates to confirm that these people do not seek what is good for Syria, the Arabs and the Muslims combined. Senator John McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham called on the administration of Barack Obama to supply arms to the rebels, a call that was also echoed by Senator Joe Lieberman. But each of the three senators had supported the war on Iraq, and now support a war on Iran for purely Israeli calculations, and perhaps they are hoping that the war on Iran would lead to a third Gulf war, so that Muslims can die at the hands of one another. Those Senators are famous first and foremost for supporting foreign wars, and I refuse to debate this with a Syrian dissident or loyalist. The mere request by those extremists for the Syrian opposition to be armed therefore means that this runs against the interests of the Syrian people. And to those I add a writer with Likudnik inclinations in the New York Times who titled his article: Arm Syria's Rebels. There were also many other writers in the extremist Likudnik websites who expressed similar views. I am aware that I can never please anyone, whether in the Syrian regime or the opposition, but then I am not trying to. To be sure, I have boycotted the regime since early last April, and made no contact with anyone in it what so ever, instead condemning the killing before any other party did. As regards the opposition, I have condemned the ignorance of some in it and the extremism of others, which seem to coexist with an unbelievable level of obnoxiousness and stupidity. So much so that I have received an e-mail message from a supporter of the opposition that said, “America does not harm Arab peoples but client Arab states…” But if they are client states, then why would America want to harm them? I urge this heroic dissident to tell his neighbors the Iraqis, that America did not harm them. In all cases, the problem in Syria is not America or any other country, but rather us, whether we are Syrians, Arabs or Muslims. The regime kills people, and the opposition is divided. The failure of the security-based approach did not discourage the regime from stepping up its killings. This is while the divisions in the opposition have increased between the internal and external branches, the liberals and the fundamentalists, the Free Syrian Army and local militias, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood who want Turkish intervention and Syrian Kurds who fear the consequences. The best thing I heard in recent days did not come from men, but from two women, who are Basma Kodmani from the National Council and Rima Fleihan from the Coordination Committees. Kodmani said that after the dramatic increase in killings in Idleb and Homs, the National Council started favoring foreign intervention; yet she was wise enough to describe both the intervention and the civil war as two evils of which intervention is the lesser. For her part, Fleihan called for deeds not words, and said that the members of the National Council quarrel more than they act. Personally, I say that while there are 310 members, each of them is a one-member group. In the meantime, the Syrians seem to be caught between carnage and ignorance. [email protected]
