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On 4/6/17 9:56 AM, Michael Karadjis via Marxism wrote:
So once I began reading the article, I came across the nonsense of
Russia offering to remove Assad in 2012
I just wrote Chomsky on this:
Noam, I understand that you are busy addressing many different topics
but your knowledge of Syrian politics is superficial at best.
Yes, in 2015 the Guardian reported on the claim made by former president
of Finland Martti Ahtisaari that when Vitaly Churkin proposed a deal in
2012 that would have resulted in Assad stepping down in exchange for
peace, the USA, Britain and France said no.
I was not surprised to see the Islamophobic left taking this at face
value 2 years ago.
Writing for CounterPunch, Peter Lee considered this “an instance of
neoliberal ass-covering, as if the Western allies were just waiting for
Assad ‘to fall’” while Information Clearing House, a reliably pro-Assad
website, reposted the Guardian article with the obvious intention of
showing how Putin stood for peace and the West for war. Then there is
David Swanson of Lets Try Democracy who concludes: “peace has been
carefully avoided at every turn.” (http://davidswanson.org/node/4914)
The only problem is that Churkin was not the ultimate authority on such
matters. Much closer to Putin and certainly speaking for him, Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov stated just four months later: “We will not
support and cannot support any interference from outside or any
imposition of recipes. This also concerns the fate of Bashar al-Assad.”
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