Antidotes to the Official Story on Syria

What unmitigated crap this is from The Economist's latest editorial:

"With [Russia's] help, the heinous dictator Assad has won Syria's civil war after nearly eight blood-soaked years... Rather than stitching Syria back together, Russia has let Assad continue to tear it apart. It has helped him bomb his opponents into submission and given cover for his use of poison gas... He has pushed bitter Sunnis into the arms of extremists. Inequality, corruption and divisive rule originally fuelled the rebellion and nurtured the jihadist insurgency... " (After saving Assad's regime, Putin must take hold of the peace, The Economist/ The Australian, 5/1/19)

In one form or another, it has been relentlessly peddled by one msm outlet or another as the official line on the war in Syria - in reality, a war against Syria.

You can see some of its elements above: the demonisation of Asad as a Middle Eastern tyrant out of central casting, masking, of course, his popularity among Syrians generally; the deliberate framing of the conflict as a civil war, to disguise the bleeding obvious fact that it was really just another attempt - after Iraq and Libya - by the US and its client states at regime change; and the perverse portrayal of Asad as a wrecker, rather than as a defender of his country's independence and sovereignty etc etc.

It's more than time for an antidote to the official story's false narrative. I take this opportunity, therefore, to commend either (or both) Tim Anderson's The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change & Resistance (2016) or Stephen Gowans' Washington's Long War on Syria (2017). Since I'm reading the latter at the moment, here's an extract, countering the alleged sectarian nature of the Asad government, another favourite anti-Syrian government propaganda trope:

"The myth that the Assad governments, both those of Hafez and Bashar, were sectarian, persisted for decades, and the myth's longevity was due in no small part to its political utility to Washington and its Sunni Islamist allies. The myth was insinuated into the journalism of North America and Western Europe where it was often used to frame the US war on Bashar al-Assad's Syria as a sectarian civil conflict pursued by a state captured by an Alawite minority to advance its sectarian interests at the expense of the Sunni majority. Accordingly, the Syrian government was often described in the Western press as 'Alawite-led' while the armed opposition was just as often referred to as 'largely Sunni.' This ignored the reality that both the Syrian Arab Army, and Assad's cabinet, were also largely Sunni, and that this was a political (rather than sectarian) conflict between secular Arab nationalists on the one hand, and jihadists (backed by the US and its allies) on the other. But propagation of the myth of sectarian warfare comported with the predilection of Western discourse for Orientalist depictions of the Global South as a territory riven by ancient inter-communal animosities, which necessitated the intervention of the United States - the self-proclaimed force for good in the world - to establish order. It was useful for US strategists to propagate this understanding for a few reasons.

"First, it undergirded the imperialist strategy of divide and rule. Ideological agendas conveyed in Western media reached not only Western audiences, but audiences beyond the West, including in Syria. If the Syrian Sunni majority could be led to understand the Assad government as an instrument of the Alawite community, all the better for the US foreign policy goal of extirpating Arab nationalism from the Syrian state.

"Second, the myth of the Assad government as an Alawite instrument of oppression concealed the central role that secular Arab nationalism played in the Middle East and in the politics of the Assad government. This obfuscated the true dimensions of the conflict. If there were any references in Western media to the Assad government's commitment to the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party's values of freedom from foreign domination, state direction, planning and control of the economy, and working toward the unity of the Arab nation, I'm not aware of them. Acknowledging the ideological framework within which the Syrian government operated, rather than presenting Syrian leaders as motivated by a lust for power to advance a sectarian agenda on behalf of the Alawite minority, would have presented Syria's Arab nationalists as rational actors pursuing what many may have considered defensible, if not praiseworthy goals. However, to serve US foreign policy objectives, US strategists favoured the portrayal of Assad as a power hungry Alawite despot, covering up the Arab nationalist themes that genuinely pervaded his politics.

"Third, the false depiction of the Assad government as animated by a sectarian rather than a secular Arab nationalist agenda encouraged an understanding that US leadership, which is to say, Western interference in Syrian politics, was necessary and desirable for the supposed lofty humanitarian reason of bringing about peace in a country troubled by the oppression of a religious majority by a religious minority.

"In short, the myth of Alawite oppression of the Sunni majority both encouraged the phenomenon of inter-communal strife, and then used it to justify a US-led program of regime change to overcome it." (pp 31-2)