fuTuRe sHOcK

Ramzy Baroud
Bush’s last bullet: Why the U.S. attacked Syria
The sovereignty of an independent, stable country that has carried out many constructive moves in recent months and weeks, which could have surely contributed to the stabilization of the Middle East, has been violated, its borders breached, and its civilians killed. But when the country targeted is Syria, an Arab country, and the perpetrator is the U.S. military, then, somehow things are not as appalling as they may seem. The U.S. raid on a small farming community near the Iraq-Syria border on October 26 is being treated differently than the Russian attack on Georgia in August 2008. The latter was vehemently condemned by every last leading U.S. official, who specifically decried Russia’s violation of international law, laws governing the sovereignty of nations, and the destabilization of a whole region. Few in the U.S. government, and fewer in the ever-willing mainstream media, dared offer any alternative reading to what truly triggered the conflict. For example, Georgia’s initial violent attacks on South Ossetia, killing many Russian citizens and peacekeepers, seemed a negligible fact.

The Syria case, where a dozen U.S. commandos killed eight Syrian civilians, including a father and his four sons, is somehow an entirely different story. Georgia is an ally of the U.S.; Syria is not. Georgia was armed and trained largely by U.S.-Israeli weapons and military experts; Syria is a key recipient of Russian weapons. Georgia was used as another U.S. foothold in an extremely strategic and rich region; Syria is a safe haven for the political leaderships of various Palestinian groups that continue to fight the Israeli occupation. Georgia is serving the essential role of tightening the geopolitical belt around Russia; Syria’s strong relationship with Iran is rather complicating U.S. efforts to tightly control Iraq.

Considering the Bush doctrine — not just the part about preemptive war and rationalizing torture, but the fact that it ranks U.S. interests above international law and regards U.S. actions with different standards than those of any other nation — one hardly needs to infuse UN resolutions that forbid actions like bombing a quiet village inside some other country’s borders. It is simply ‘irrelevant’, a term that is dear to President Bush, for that is how he wished to delineate his government’s view of the UN for refusing to give him the green light to invade Iraq. More

Tags: Bush doctrine, Georgia, international law, Iraq-Syria border, russia, U.S. raid syria