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On 6/13/14 1:58 PM, Jack A. Smith via Marxism wrote:
June 13, 2014, Issue 203
ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
jac...@earthlink.net
Articles at: http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
1A. Editorial: The Tragedy in Iraq and Syria
Jihadist forces entered Iraq just after the U.S. invasion. There were
none before that. The jihadist uprising in Iraq today is connected to
the jihadists who are the main fighters against the Syrian government.
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The American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 caused outrage among Syrian
Salafists, who considered the occupation of ‘Muslim lands’ a legitimate
reason to take up arms. The regime’s well-honed strategy for dealing
with such events – organising staged demonstrations, allowing people to
vent their anger on state television – was no longer an option: the
Salafists were unappeasable, they wanted to go to Iraq and kill
Americans. For Assad and his intelligence chiefs, this presented a
serious challenge; after weeks of hesitation, they decided to embrace a
bold new strategy: rather than suppressing the Salafists’ rage, they
would encourage it.
Allowing the Salafists to go to Iraq was thought to be a good idea for
two reasons: first, it got rid of thousands of the most aggressive
Salafists with a taste for jihad, packing them off to a foreign war from
which many would never return to pose a threat to Assad’s secular,
minority-dominated government; second, it destabilised the occupation of
Iraq and thwarted Bush’s quest to topple authoritarian regimes (everyone
in Assad’s inner circle feared that Syria would be next). According to
Assad’s biographer David Lesch, ‘Damascus wanted the Bush doctrine to
fail, and it hoped that Iraq would be the first and last time it was
applied. Anything it could do to ensure this outcome, short of incurring
the direct military wrath of the United States, was considered fair game.’
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n07/peter-neumann/suspects-into-collaborators
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