Alastair Crooke's Pro Syrian Government Propaganda Echoes The Tactics Of The Corrupt Algerian FLN.

"goldenruleapplies" on the Guardian "Comment Is Free" website..................

Alastair Crooke's thesis is that the Arab Democratic Uprising is a game instigated by foreign powers and local elites to control the Middle East. All this sounds like the racist notion that people in the Middle East are fundamentally different to us. The truth is that the Middle East has been extensively internally colonized by regimes which do not represent their people or Islam. The people especially the youth are sick of it, and shout loudly a plague on all your houses.

The real parallel here is not Afghanistan as Crooke claims but the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s. In 1988 the ruling FLN (that ousted the French in the 1960s) allowed multi party elections. When the fairly moderate Islamic Salvation Front (in French "Front Islamique du Salut" or FIS) were about to win elections in 1992, the ruling FLN cancelled elections. The result was a radicalization of the regime's opposition with the creation of armed guerrilla groups. The resulting "dirty" civil war, lead to 200,000 deaths, 15,000 disappeared and the extensive use of extreme torture as an instrument of intimidation. The conflict only wound down after eight years.

The FLN created a propaganda campaign to try to persuade Western governments that the opposition to their rule came from foreigners, rather than a popular rejection of their corrupt rule.

"Within months of the latest insurgency, the Algerian government, in effect run by a coterie of privileged and immensely powerful army officers, cast around the Middle East for inspiration in their struggle against 'fundamentalist terrorism'. They produced books and pamphlets on the roots of Islamic revivalism in an effort to persuade diplomats and foreign journalists that the roots of Algerian 'terrorism' lay in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia ..... The Algerians searched everywhere - anywhere - for some way of proving that the Algerian insurgency was not Algerian."

[pp649 Robert Frisk " The Great War For Civilization." 2005]

This is exactly what Bashar al-Assad is dong. He is paying foreign public relations companies to do the work. What is Beirut based "Conflicts Forum" and what previous statements have they made? They claimed for example that the Iranian government did not steal the 2009 election.

I assume Bashar is hoping to be like the FLN who clung to power, and continue to have Syria run by the same corrupt elite. The difference is that in Syria, it has been and will be, mostly Shia Alawites killing and torturing mostly Sunnis. If there is no intervention then Assad will create the regional conflict that he is warning will be created if there is intervention. Iran will be drawn in further as the self declared defender of Shia Islam, while Saudi Arabia will be arming Sunnis some of whom will be foreign radical salifists.

We must trust in the ordinary people in Syria who are putting everything on the line for their human rights. We must support them now. They are calling to us directly.