Michael Collins
James Joyce began Finnegans Wake with this passage:

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay bring us back by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howrth Castle and Environs."

Those sturdy enough to navigate the hallucinogenic, recursive, rhythmic prose to the very last page (or clever enough to proceed there right away) discover that the opening sentence is a continuation of the last sentence in the novel: "A way a lone a long a last a long the " … "riverun" etc. It's all a loop, where Finn constantly begins again.

We see a multilayered, recursive cycle of beginning again from the point at which we've just ended in the cycles of the tragic assault on Syria and its people.

On December 7, 2013, the Islamic Front, a Saudi Arabian rebel concoction, attacked a major weapons depot "belonging to the mainstream Western-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA)." The depot was just on the Syrian side of the Syria-Turkey border. "The Observatory [for Human Rights]," a FSA- sympathizing news source used by the Western media, "said the arms [in the depot] had been brought across the border from Turkey" (Daily Star, Dec 7).

Shortly after the humiliating FSA defeat on December 7, the United States and United Kingdom announced a suspension of aid to Syrian rebels, the good rebels of the FSA. This coincided with FSA's military leader fleeing to Qatar and the deaths of several of his key commanders.

Negotiations were planned in Switzerland in January but only one side agreed to attend, the government of Syria. FSA had vanished. The Islamist jihadist Islamic Front won't discuss attending and the openly Al Qaeda groups, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) and Al Nusrah, are not invited.

Just as everything seemed lost for the West in the latest chapter of the empire project, we saw the good rebel revival. The Army of the Mujahideen (AM) was formed at the start of January. The mission was to vanquish the Al Qaeda rebels from the ISIL. The Army took on the remnants of FSA as its partner. Ironically, the AM had strong connections to the Saudi sponsored Islamic Front, which had just four weeks prior taken the FSA arms depot and chased FSA's military leader out of Syria.

It doesn't stop there, not by a long shot.

As FSA and the newly formed AM joined to fight the Al-Qaeda aligned ISIL, FSA factions considered joining the government, the Syrian Arab Army, against Al Qaeda forces, including ISIL. What could this mean?

How can the bad government forces and the good rebels combine? The entire basis for the FSA's existence was to fight the Syrian government. Why? Because the Syrian government, we were told, was using snipers to kill Syrian protesters in 2011, a reprise of the recently discredited Libya storyline.

How could FSA surrender and join with the government forces that they once claimed had been killing protesters?

Why wouldn't the government forces simply shoot the FSA soldiers, who were obviously in position of surrender and switching sides, if those forces were as evil as portrayed by FSA and the Western media?

Here's what we need to know at this point.

Things are so bad in Syria that the United Nations has stopped its death count, now at 130,000 dead (and many more injured, maimed, and traumatized).

The U.S., NATO, and Qatari/Saudi-backed factions are fighting each other.

There's no point in negotiations. The Syrian government is not going to abdicate and turn the country over to FSA, the demanded starting point for any Geneva talks by that faction. The Syrian people can't afford to be ruled by the Islamist jihadist factions in view of the slaughters of minority and government loyalists to date.

U.S. policy demanding that the elected president of Syria leave the country and turn it over to foreign interests played a key role in direct and indirect aid to rebels by France, Great Britain, Turkey, and the Qatari/Saudi governments.

The Syrian affair began as an internal conflict. Outside forces and influence to encourage that conflict represent a "crime against peace," according to the Nuremburg Principles (VII, a). Instead of demonizing the Syrian government, the focus should be on those national leaders who are responsible for the carnage by their reckless interference absent even a threat to their nations.

END

Image: Josu

Also see Syrian Crisis

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