Daniel R. DePetris wrote an interesting article in three
parts under the title: “3 Wars the Next President Must avoid,” published on
October 14, 2016 in the National Interest. The wars he discusses are Syria , Ukraine
and Yemen .
The three parts of the article are good to review, but I shall restrict my
comments to Syria
alone.
Like everything else, when the word Syria is
mentioned, all sorts of ideas, word associations and parallels come to mind.
This is how human beings set-up a context in which we evaluate the information
we receive on subjects that are familiar to us. We also take into account the
source from which the information has come because we know that both the
provenance and the carrier of information – known as messengers – have the
tendency to shape it. This happens to a degree that is so slight, it does not
alter the meaning of the message, or it can happen to a degree that is so
severe, it completely changes the meaning of the message.
Daniel DePetris sets-up another criterion by which to make
sense of the information that the American people receive with regard to the
three wars he discusses. This being an election year, he tells the readers that
the space in which information is flying these days has become so crowded,
“it's more than easy tor Americans to overlook the most important question when
deciding on which candidate would be a better commander-in-chief”.
To someone like myself who is not voting in the American
election and have no interest in what's unfolding in Syria but the honest
dissemination of the truth as I see it, my preoccupation has to do with the
messengers and the extent to which they distort the information. My wish being
to see the conflict contained rather than expanded, and having determined after
years of observation that the wish of the messengers is to see the conflict
expanded rather than contained, I thoroughly check the ideas, word associations
and parallels they mix with the information as they deliver it.
The information being a mix of the facts on the ground and
the generated opinions, I pay attention to what the journalists report and what
the contributors express. To evaluate the facts on the ground as they
disseminate them, I look for what they mention and what they omit. As to the
opinions expressed by the contributors, I look for key words in what they say.
The way to evaluate what I hear is to compare what they say about the Syrian
government against what they say about the Israeli government when the latter
experiences a similar situation.
For example, there is not one war during which Israel
refrained from using the horrific napalm, cluster or phosphoric bombs, and yet
never did the North American media mention this reality. By contrast the same
media make a big deal about Syria
using what looks like home-made barrel bombs whose destructive impact is
significantly smaller than even the ordinary “smart” or “dumb” bombs used by Israel , let
alone the horrific ones.
The media also keep saying that Assad kills his own people
when the reality is that the civil war ceased to be a civil war the moment that
foreign fighters joined the battle. That's when the war was turned into a
struggle by a number of terrorist organizations that seek to establish a new
caliphate at the expense of an Iraq
that was destroyed by Jewish America, and a Syria
that Israel is inciting America to
destroy.
What must also be said is that the appellation “killing his
own people” is used by the media to establish the notion that it's okay for Netanyahu
to kill his Christian and Muslim compatriots in both Israel proper and the occupied
territories because they are not his people. They may be citizens of Israel or
a population that was born and raised under Israeli occupation, but that should
not make killing them as shocking a proposition as Assad killing “his own
people” … if that’s what he is doing, which it isn’t.
And this is why every time that I see the media types
pretend to feel pain for the children of Syria , I see not genuine tears of
sorrow but fake crocodile tears. This being the case, why are these people
pretending to care about the Arabs that die in Syria
when they celebrate the Arabs that die in Gaza
and the West Bank ?
There is only one explanation. It is that they wish to raise
the level of hysteria in America ,
thus incite Washington to pour more weapons
into Syria
and help kill more Arabs while pretending to mourn them.