Assad: I’ll run for a third term in 2014

Assad was interviewed at his palace library room

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has poured cold water on prospects of an international conference for peace in Syria proposed earlier this month by the United States and Russia.

He also told Argentina’s Clarín newspaper in an exclusive interview he would run for a third seven-year term in the June 2014 presidential election.

I excerpted the salient remarks made by Assad from the library of his palace in Damascus to Clarín's reporter Marcelo Cantelmi. Here goes:

ASSAD SPEAKING:

Multiple factors make the Syria crisis intricate and long-drawn-out. The foremost cause is foreign meddling, which we are resisting so as to protect Syria.

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The death of any Syrian is a tragic loss but the death toll figures being spread around are inflated. There is no precise death toll figure to quote, but many of those killed were foreigners who came to Syria to kill Syrians.

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Without defining the term “excessive force,” you can’t determine whether government forces used it. Generally, the state’s response has been commensurate with the level of terrorism used against it. The more sophisticated the terrorists get, the more intense the response of our military and security forces.

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Our political reform measures -- including the endorsement of a new constitution, the lifting of the state of emergency and the initiation of a national dialogue with opposition political parties -- were met by amplification of the terror.

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Terrorism can never be an implement for reforms. What interest does a wanted terrorist from Chechnya or Afghanistan have with the internal political reform process in Syria? There are foreign fighters from different 29 nationalities now engaged in terrorist activities in Syria.

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Have the United States or European countries ever negotiated with terrorists? Dialogue is with legitimate political entities and a conventional opposition, not with terrorist groups.

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We support every effort to stop the violence in Syria and every endeavor that would lead to a political solution. We welcome the Russian-American understanding and look forward to an international parley to help Syrians overcome the crisis. But I don’t think many Western nations genuinely want a Syria solution. Powers backing the terrorists don’t want a solution either – they’ve already shot down the Russian-American agreement by rejecting dialogue with the Syrian state. While we support and welcome the Russian-American initiative, we have to be realistic. After all, it takes two to tango.

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The offshore opposition you mention is not independent. It is funded by foreign countries and lives under the shadow of their respective intelligence agencies. If the offshore opposition groups had a popular homegrown following they would be sitting in Syria. Still, they have officially come out against dialogue. Only last week, they said clearly they don’t want to negotiate with the Syrian state.

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We’re open to dialogue with everyone, except terrorists. There is a universal mix-up between terrorism and a political solution. They think a political conference would lead to a cessation of violence, which is wide of the mark. So long as countries like Qatar, Turkey and others have no interest in stopping violence and in a political solution in Syria, terrorism will continue. What an international conference can do is to stop the inflow of terrorists from Turkey and cash from Qatar and other Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia.

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Israel backs these terrorist gangs in two ways (1) logistical help, such as tending to the wounded terrorists on the Syrian side of the Golan front, and (2) directives on how to mount their attacks and what sites to target. For instance, it directed them to target a radar site belonging to an air defense system against incoming warplanes in case of a Syria-Israel war.

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The West brings up the subject of combatants from Iran and Hezbollah in Syria whenever we broach the subject of foreign fighters. Syria has a population of 23 million and does not need manpower help from any other country. We don’t need anyone from Iran or Hezbollah to help us. Our relations with them are manifest and decades old.

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Whether I remain in office or leave depends on the Syrian people. As a president, it is not my personal decision to stay or leave. You can’t rule without the people’s support. The decision belongs to the ballot box. People will decide on this in the 2014 presidential elections. But for America or the terrorists or some other nations to order the Syrian president to go is unacceptable.

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I don’t know if (U.S. Secretary of State) John Kerry or anyone else received a mandate from the Syrian people to speak on their behalf as to whether someone should stay or go. Syria is an independent state. Any decision about reforms in Syria will come from Syria and neither the U.S. nor any other state can decide what we do. Besides, the country is in crisis and a captain does not abandon a ship facing a storm at sea. In any case, to resign would be to flee and I am not the kind of person to shun responsibility.

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International monitoring of the 2014 presidential elections is not a decision I can make alone. It’s a national decision.  Some people believe it would violate Syria’s national sovereignty. Others simply do not trust the West for this task. And others would want observers from friendly countries, such as Russia or China.

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The West’s statements on the use of chemical weapons change every day – there is proof, there is some proof, there is no proof etc… Chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction. The West claims we used them in populated centers. When you hear of a nuclear bomb killing 10 or 20 people, can you believe that? Using chemical weapons in urban areas would mean killing thousands or tens of thousands of people in a matter of minutes. Who could hide something like that? Why did the West shrug off Carla del Ponte’s statement saying terrorists used chemicals?

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Any war on Syria won’t be easy. They know this. They know it won’t be a picnic.

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Intervention is a clear probability, especially after we managed to beat back the armed groups in many areas of Syria. Israeli airstrikes were used, for example, to raise the terrorist groups’ morale. We expect an intervention at some point, albeit limited in nature.

Delving into the Muslim’s mind ahead of the next terror wave

File pictures of Homs  (top) and Grozny (below)

This think piece by Jamal Khashoggi -- Saudi Arabia’s analyst, author and kingpin of the impending Al Arab TV news channel -- appears in Arabic in his weekly column for al-Hayat daily

Investigators crowding around Dzhohkar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombings suspect, would wish to probe his mind.

But they find it hard to question him by the book, as he lies critically wounded in hospital.

They would be looking for an answer to the question puzzling them most. How, they wonder, did an immigrant Muslim teenager fully integrated in American society, who – in the words of one of his friends – “became like anyone of us Americans” and who (as he wrote on one of his social media pages) loved life and money, turn into a terrorist killer of innocents?

Amateur terrorists, who are not affiliated to any organization and who self-recruit through the Internet, are the security analyst’s nightmare.

The analyst is unable to find leads to track them down and expose them before they commit their crimes.

Two such cases came to light last week in Canada and France. In both instances, two young men mirrored the case of the two Tsarnaev brothers suspected of the Boston marathon bombings.

The phenomenon, best described as “the case of the two Tsarnaev brothers,” might trigger a new wave of Islamophobia.

Surely, someone must now be asking on rightwing American TV channels or printed media pages, “How can I make sure my Muslim neighbor, who seems gentlemanly, amiable and no less American than anyone of us, won’t suddenly turn out to be a terrorist?”

Though it sounds awkward to Muslim and Arab ears, the question is justified.

It reminds me of the words of my friend Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, head of Alarabiya News Channel.

Rashed came in for a lot of flak when he coined his famed phrase, “Not all Muslims are terrorists; sadly though, most terrorists in the world are Muslim.”

To help investigators striving to probe the mind of Dzhohkar Tsarnaev, let me map for them information from the brain waves of an angry Muslim.

I am already aware that an American or Western politician would automatically dismiss as “justification for terrorism” any attempt to dwell on reasons for a Muslim’s wrath.

The politician realizes that discussing anger motives inevitably leads to revisiting old files that better remain closed and the apportionment of blame.

Oblivious of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key role in the Chechnya massacres, some congressmen are urging greater security cooperation between Washington and Moscow instead of setting up a congressional fact-finding panel, for example.

As world politicians are transfixed by global counter-terrorism cooperation, they would do well to brace themselves for the next wave of “Islamic” terror.

I anticipate such a wave by virtue of a “pattern” set by its antecedents.

The first wave in the mid-nineties was a reaction to the incidents in Bosnia and Algeria.

The next wave, in the early years of the second millennium, revolved around Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya.

The third wave will surge as a sequel to the massacres in Syria, now the fountainhead of Muslim ire.

The ire is fed by incessant images of injustice, desecration and abuses.

Angry Muslim youths are exposed to a daily flood of video clips showing Syrian regime forces torturing to death and killing civilians or cutting their victims’ limbs.

TV news channels bar such images, but they are for show on YouTube, when their rightful place should be the International Criminal Court instead of the social media platforms.

Contrasting the revolting clips from Syria are those emerging from Burma. They show opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi receiving her Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and Burmese gloating over newfound freedoms. But they recount little about the abhorrent persecution, hate, killing, burning and rape of Muslims in Myanmar.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzhohkar might have watched such video clips, which could have reignited their indignation as ethnic Chechens.

They must have also seen loads of images showing the suffering of their countrymen and co-religionists. They could have come across images of Russian soldiers laughing as their officer uses a small Swiss knife to bleed a Chechen fighter to death.

Here again, the place for such images should be the International Criminal Court, though no Chechnya referrals as yet.

What Bashar al-Assad is now doing in Syria is what Putin did in Chechnya before. Pictures don’t lie. They show Syrian cities biting the dust, much like Grozny.

Today’s irate Muslim mind sees that the guardian angel of Assad and his regime is the same man who pulverized Grozny and killed more than 100,000 Chechens.

The irate Muslim mind pays no heed to things like the international situation or the balance of interests.

It’s an incensed mind turning thoughtless.

Had the Tsarnaev brothers been thinking straight, they would not have targeted the marathon in Boston, the compassionate city that embraced them.

The aftereffects of film recordings on the fuming Muslim mind are massive. They magnify in the Muslim’s mindset:

• A sense of injustice
• The feeling of belonging to a targeted minority
• Suspicions that Americans are supporting Assad on the quiet and remain closemouthed on Putin’s crime and the Burmese opposition leader’s hypocrisy, and
• A belief that Muslims have been on the receiving end of the nastiest crimes in the previous century and to date -- the two exceptions being the Jews’ suffering at the hands of the Nazis and the Armenians’ suffering at the Ottomans’ hands. But whereas Jews and Armenians received global apologies and reparations, there was nothing of the kind for Muslims.

In context, no one should underestimate the hurt the Palestinian Nakba etched on the Muslim Arab memory. No population was uprooted from its native land such as the Palestinian population. Yet no one is prepared to offer Palestinians an apology. And who would even dare launch a museum in New York commemorating the Nakba?

Also, who would dare call for an official Russian apology to the 1.5 million Chechens evicted from their homes and forcibly dispersed across the former Soviet Union, where tens of thousands of them succumbed to disease and starvation?

When Chechen survivors revolted in their quest for independence, they were met by Russia’s fire and brimstone as the world looked away.

One can imagine how stories of the horrors and crimes committed in Chechnya dulled the rationale of an angry Muslim’s mind, turning a civil young man into a dangerous terrorist.

Some will read into my think piece a justification for terrorism. It is not.

No one can justify terrorism. But the only way to eradicate it is to address its causes.

Someone needs to have the courage to stand up and tell the West in the face: Your double standards are causing the rage breeding terror.

Swap on the cards: Iraq-Maliki for Syria-Assad

Maliki (top) and Assad in meetings with Khamenei

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is playing his regional trump card: Iraq to replace Syria and Iraq’s powerful Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to supersede Syria’s embattled Alawite President Bashar al-Assad.

Tehran’s theocratic government and Baghdad’s Shiite-dominated leadership have been moving closer all the time. And both share a similar interest in supporting Damascus.

Iraq abstained from a 2011 Arab League vote to suspend Syria’s membership. It is now quietly shipping crucial fuel oil supplies to Assad’s regime.

Iraq has also been laundering money for the Islamic Republic to help it overcome sanctions and ferry weapons and fighters to the Assad government.

Since it promised to ask Syria-bound airplanes passing through its airspace to land for random inspections after Washington said they could be ferrying arms to Damascus, Baghdad searched one cargo plane only.

At the same time, an agreement between senior Iraqi and Iranian officials allowed Tehran to make larger and more systematic transfers of weapons and fighters to Syria overland via Iraq.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be travelling to Baghdad shortly to confer with Maliki.

Maliki, who is in Moscow on a working visit to consolidate political, economic and defense ties and discuss developments in Syria, meets later today with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A joint statement issued after Maliki’s talks on Tuesday with his counterpart Dmitry Medvedev said more than $4.2 billion in arms deals were agreed between the two sides as part of a tighter military cooperation plan.

Moscow will supply 30 Mil Mi-28NE night/all-weather capable attack helicopters, and 50 Pantsir-S1 gun-missile short-range air defense systems. The contracts are among the biggest ever signed between Iraq and Russia.

Further discussions were also said to be underway for Iraq’s eventual acquisition of a large group of MiG-29 fighters and helicopters along with heavy weaponry.

Russian arms industry analyst Russian Pukhov of the Center for Analysis of Strategy and Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank, tells Novosti the deal showed Baghdad's desire to break Washington's monopoly of arms supplies to Iraq.

"It's clear that America's influence on Iraq has been excessive. The Shiite government of this country is starting to conduct itself more independently of Washington, and more looking toward Iran," he said.

Russia is seeking to take its ties with Iraq to a new level and win almost certain support for its position on Syria.

Baghdad needs Moscow’s help in defense and military areas and needs arms to “defend itself and fight terrorism,” Maliki said in the Russian Foreign Ministry mansion on Monday.

Tariq Alhomayed, editor-in-chief of the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, believes Maliki aspires to be Assad’s “substitute” in the region.

Alhomayed explains in today’s leader:

The Iraqi premier’s visit to Russia and his signing of a large arms deal with Moscow evoke ruminations to ponder as to strategic choices and regional power balances, chiefly as regards Syria

Maliki is obviously trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. He is after simultaneous alliances with Tehran, Washington and Moscow, something no one was able to do in the region.

Turkey’s zero-problems foreign policy finds Ankara today immersed in the region’s problems. Independently of policy, problems pop up even when you ignore them. And they will drown you if you don’t tackle them properly.

A huge Russian arms deal won’t rebuild the Iraqi army, not when the U.S. continues to train and equip the Iraqi military.

It is an open secret that Moscow’s chief arms clients are either isolated Arab regimes, or ones trying to blackmail the U.S. and Europe for political gain.

If Iraq wanted to be an active Arab power player supportive of democracy and stability, why do a deal with Moscow, chief spoiler of a UN Security Council solution for Syria?

All evidence suggests Maliki yearns for superseding Assad. He is reassuring Moscow that it has a client ready to buy Russian weapons at present.

What Iraq has done is simply gift the Russians an alternative to Assad’s regime. Moscow can now claim it is far from being isolated in the Arab world.

Maliki hankers after superseding Assad in the region, albeit rolled out in new packaging. The new packaging will prove faulty nevertheless, for how can Maliki square the Tehran-Washington-Moscow circle or forge exceptional ties with his fellow-Arab countries?

Maliki’s wish to serve in Assad’s stead in the region transpires from his own remarks – that Baghdad needs Moscow’s help “to fight terrorism.”

Russia has been regurgitating “to fight terrorism” since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution.

With the Russians taking “terrorists” to mean “Sunnites,” Maliki comes along to seek their cooperation in fighting them.

No need to think long and hard: Maliki aspires to supplant Assad in the region as the protector of its minorities and all the rest.

Film backlash is a Syrian revolution spoiler

Reuters photo of a young Syrian refugee on the Turkish-Syrian border

Syria’s allies -- chiefly Iran and its Lebanese offshoot Hezbollah -- are still whipping up a global Muslim outcry against the U.S.-made amateur film insulting Islam.

The obscure movie that ridicules Prophet Muhammad (see No one’s innocent in the film ‘Innocence of Muslims’) has no Syria links. But the September 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and the resulting outbreak of anti-American protests in the Muslim world shored up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s political survival prospects.

Western media have since been parroting the Assad line that he is mostly facing al-Qaeda and Jihadists. The implication is they are staunchly anti-West in general and anti-American in particular.

K.P. Nayar, filing from Washington this week for Calcutta’s Telegraph, reports: “At a hurriedly arranged media teleconference by the U.S. State Department which wanted to put across its version of the events in Benghazi, the very first question was: ‘…I know Secretary (Hillary) Clinton said that this would not affect how the U.S. dealt with the Libyans, and that you would move forward. But certainly, it must make you start to think about any precipitous rush to support groups in any other countries such as Syria or the like because of the uncertainty of who is on the ground.’

“Three State Department officials participated in the teleconference, the ground rules for which prohibited reporters from identifying them. None of the three officials came forward to answer that question because the anti-U.S. backlash in Libya has added a new dimension to what will happen in Syria now.”

John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is tipped to be the next secretary of state if Barack Obama is reelected in November, said the violence in Libya “will certainly give pause, or should give pause, to people who are pressing for a kind of involvement (in Syria)...”

All this is music to the ears of Russia.

In a recent Web article quoted by Russia Today, the chair of the Russian parliamentary committee for foreign affairs, Aleksey Pushkov, wrote that such a scenario would be almost certain to take place if Assad were ousted: “Instead of the secular rational state we had in Syria under Assad, where all ethnic and religious groups lived in peace and accord, we will get a second Iraq.”

The Russian politician went on to argue that Russia had repeatedly warned Western states, who are blinded by “the narrowness of their minds” and political calculations, and are incapable of heeding such warnings.

There are no guarantees that whoever replaced Assad would not immediately turn their guns against the United States, even though Washington is actively aiding rebel forces, Pushkov said. He cited the current situation in Libya as an example, claiming Libyans showed no gratitude for America’s role in the overthrow of the Muammar Gaddafi regime.

Alarabiya TV news channel supremo Abdel Rahman al-Rashed notes today that Russia is clapping with glee after the Benghazi attack let out of the bottle “the genie of al-Qaeda in Libya, jihadists in Sinai and Salafists in Tunisia.” But he hopes press reports of Obama consequently reappraising U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Syrian revolution are unfounded.

In his think piece for the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, Rashed writes, “It’s obviously difficult for me to explain briefly the importance of winning the great powers’ support for the Syrian people and their revolution – actually, for any revolution. Without great powers’ support, Syrian revolutionary organizations could be branded terrorist. They could be banned in Turkey and Jordan. It would be impossible for them to raise funds and arms in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In practice, they would end up like the armed Kurdish movements that have existed for decades, but remain outlawed and under siege.”

Rashed continues:

I concede, the Syrian revolution has no fewer problems than Libya’s. Future risks after regime change in Syria can’t be overlooked. But it would be ill-considered if Western states looked at Syria through the prism of their fears of radical fundamentalism.

Syria is not Egypt and Assad is not Hosni Mubarak. Failure of the Syrian revolution is more hazardous than its success because armed Islamist radicals would mushroom since they feed on government failures and chaos. Overpowered and demoralized insurgents would rally around them.

In a year of armed conflict, the opposition has broken the back of the regime and its institutions.

To re-establish his authority, Assad would have to come down harder on citizens, the neighboring countries and Western interests. Western states would ultimately have to revisit Syria and take him on. We had a precedent in Iraq, where allies broke the Saddam regime’s back in the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait then left Saddam wounded but standing. The allies had to return in 2003 to finish him off. The outcome is the chaos we have today as we watch the Iraqi regime being eaten alive by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Furthermore, bringing down Assad’s regime is more important for Syria, the region and most of the world than toppling Saddam or Gaddafi.

The Syrian regime is Iran’s cat’s-paw in the Arab region. It has been sponsoring terrorist groups in regional and Western states for 40 years.

There is abounding evidence linking al-Qaeda to both the Syrian and Iranian regimes. The former was an accomplice in most terrorist attacks mounted in Iraq over the past eight years. And I suspect it might eventually emerge that Assad’s regime, or its allies, orchestrated the attack by al-Qaeda and the like on the American consulate in Benghazi – especially that the outrage was timed to coincide with 9/11 in order to intimidate the U.S.

Lastly, I don’t know of any cause paralleling Palestine’s over the past half-century other than Syria’s. The scope and intensity of sympathy in the Arab street for the Syrian people is immeasurable because of the untold crimes committed against them.

This is what turned most Arabs against Iran and Russia. Arabs are also angry that the West continues to sit on the fence.