Published on Feb 13, 2014
Hamid Dabashi: All foreign nations involved in Syria are attempting to quell the revolutionary uprisings for their economic and strategic interests, but the Syrian people will ultimately decide their own future watch full multipart http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?o...
Saudi Arabia and Iran Share A Common Goal in Syria
Hamid Dabashi: All foreign nations involved in Syria are attempting to quell the revolutionary uprisings for economic and strategic interests, but the Syrian people will ultimately decide their own future -
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop
Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University. He received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture
and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984,
followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote
his dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with
Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural
critic of his time. Professor Dabashi has taught and delivered lectures
in many North American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities.
Professor
Dabashi has written twenty-five books, edited four, and contributed
chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays,
articles and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies,
medieval and modern Islam, and comparative literature to world cinema
and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books and articles
have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese,
German, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic,
Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.
Transcript
JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.Now joining us is our guest, Hamid Dabashi. We're picking up our conversation where we left it off.Hamid is a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University.Thanks for being with us, Hamid.HAMID DABASHI, PROF. IRANIAN STUDIES AND COMPARATIVE LIT., COLUMBIA UNIV.: Any time, Jessica.DESVARIEUX: So, Hamid, my first question is really to discuss Syria. Why is Syria of strategic importance to Iran?DABASHI:
Over the last 30 years, since the inception of Islamic Republic--in
fact, more accurately, since 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a
strategic alliance developed between Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
And they called this line of connection /mo'rAb@nA/, resistance.
So Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine, they
formed a line of resistance vis-à-vis Israel and its support by United
States. This was the scenario that was operative and working, to
whatever degree a limited imagination that this kind of war of attrition
could possibly sustain, until the rise of the Arab revolutions in 2011.
That began to change the scenario radically. And if you go back and
look, immediately Hamas realized that its interests, the interests of
the Palestinians and the interests of Hamas, is actually in connection
with these revolutionary uprisings, and they began to side with the
revolution, they began to support the Egyptian revolutions, and they
decoupled themselves from Syria. This was a very important move.Hezbollah,
on the other hand, denounced the revolutionary uprising. I mean, the
social movement in Iran, the Green movement, Hassan Nasrallah dismissed
it as inspired by United States. And then, when the trouble began in
Syria, Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah refused to dissociate themselves
with Bashar al-Assad. And as a result, the credibility that Hassan
Nasrallah and Hezbollah had created for itself since the war of 2006,
that they have become the hero of the Arab world, they categorically
lost it. They now have fighters inside the Syria. They have been
projected, and they are in fact as a force against the Syrian interest.So,
because of the Arab revolution, that alliance began to crumble by,
first, Hamas decoupling from it, and Hezbollah using credibility. So all
remaining was Iran and Syria. Iran has invested heavily strategically,
militarily, intelligence-wise, in every possible ways in keeping Bashar
al-Assad in power, not, as I said earlier, because they have a love
affair with Bashar al-Assad, but they just want to make sure that the
interests in the region, and particularly in Syria, are kept intact. And
as a result, what we are witnessing today, namely the scenario that
China, because of its economic interests, Russia, because of its
economic and strategic interests, and Iran, for similar reasons, are
siding with Bashar al-Assad, whereas U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, and
others are against that coalition. However, that coalition
is--on both sides are very fragile. Why? Because the will of the Syrian
people, who are the majority of nonviolent people who began the
peaceful revolution two and a half years ago, are very much the people
who ultimately will decide the future of Syria. So all these
machinations that are happening at the state level, in terms of the
geopolitics of the region, are only successful to the point that they
finally come to a strategic resolution. But when they come down from
their horses and Humvees to rule, they will see that the Syrians are not
going to be the same Syrians who have been brutalized by the Assad
dynasty for half a century.DESVARIEUX: So, Hamid, I want
to go back to the point that you made about how Iran invested heavily in
keeping Assad in power. But now we're sort of seeing the weakening of
his regime in the Geneva II talks, Kerry's public statements that he's
made. I want to get your impression. Do you think that at the end of the
day, Iran is going to throw Assad under the bus?DABASHI:
Oh, absolutely. Iran, as I said, has no personal commitment to Bashar
al-Assad. Iran simply wants to make sure that it is a player in the
region. As you remember, UN initially invited Iran to join the
negotiations in Geneva II, but then they disinvited them. The fact is
that without Iran, there cannot be--Lakhdar Brahimi has repeatedly said
that without Iran, there cannot be a resolution to the Syrian crisis.
And Iran knows that fact, because Iran is on the ground. The military
intelligence apparatus of Islamic Republic is inside Syria. And they
want to use that as a leverage, not to keep Bashar al-Assad in power,
but to make sure that the regional interests are protected in the
aftermath of Bashar al-Assad.This same scenario's actually
applicable to the Russians. Russians were cheated out of the
post-Gaddafi scenario in Libya, and they don't want to see it happen in
Syria as well. Because of these revolutions, Jessica,
these uprisings, the counterrevolutionary forces that ranged from China
and Russia and comes down to Iran and Syria and Israel and Qatar and all
of these forces, they have mobilized to see how they can stabilize. The
term, for them, is stabilize the situation. So,
historically, we have to keep our eyes on the ball. What is the ball?
Masses of millions of people have risen against tyranny and against
abuse and for their civil liberties and for their ability to unionize,
to have their women's rights and similar civil liberties. And
against this we have a constellation of counterrevolutionary forces
that on the surface may appear to be at odds. Saudi Arabia may seem to
be at odds with the Islamic Republic. But ultimately they have one goal:
to quell these revolutionary uprisings for their own interest.DESVARIEUX: Alright. Hamid Dabashi, it's always a fascinating history lesson with you. Thank you.DABASHI: Absolutely. My pleasure. Any time.DESVARIEUX: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.End
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11469Death March
It's hard to understand the scale and spread of killing in Syria, until you see this map.
Tracking the casualties of Syria's civil war has been difficult, if not impossible, from the very start. Since March 2011, the United Nations has struggled to glean reliable information from the fog of war. The U.N. has relied on the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), a San Francisco-based non-profit "that applies rigorous science to the analysis of human rights violations around the world," to sort through data from eight different sources including independent observatories and Syrian human rights watchers. (Read Tina Rosenberg's fascinating profile of Patrick Ball and the methodology behind HRDAG's numbers, written back when the body count in Syria was estimated at less than 10,000.) Killings were counted only if the name of the victim and the date and location of death were known, making the figures provided by the United Nations and HRDAG non-exhaustive; rather, they are the minimum number of people who have died in Syria.Last week, the United Nations said it would no longer be updating its casualty figures. "It was always a very difficult figure," a U.N. spokesman told the Associated Press. "It was always very close to the edge in terms of how much we could guarantee the source material was accurate. And it reached a point where we felt we could no longer cross that line. So for the time being, we're not updating those figures."
The last time the United Nations announced casualty figures for the Syrian civil war was when the tally surpassed the 100,000 death threshold in July 2013.
The lack of access for reporters and humanitarian agencies within Syria has only made this task more difficult. Whether an authoritative tally of casualties in Syria will ever be possible remains an open question, but one thing is clear: over the past three years, the violence has spread dramatically. From the early hotbeds of resistance in Hama and Homs, to the political and cultural hubs of Damascus and Aleppo, to the Syrian borderlands and the Kurdish northeast, the war has metastasized.
This map illustrates what that toll looks like across space and time.
It visualizes the approximately 74,000 people who died from March 2011 to November 2013. Every flare represents the death of one or more people, the most common causes being shooting, shelling, and field execution. The brighter a flare is, the more people died in that specific time and place. The data used are drawn from the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), the documentation arm of the Local Coordination Committees in Syria which has been one of the eight sources on which HRDAG has based its count. In a June 2013 report, HRDAG cited VDC as the most thorough accounting of casualties in Syria, though the dataset has been found to contain some inconsistencies. Inaccurate data that has been found in these datasets has been removed, but because of the difficulty of reporting casualties in Syria, this should not be considered a 100 percent accurate or exhaustive documentation of Syrian war deaths. Indeed, it almost certainly is affected by a selection bias that favors reporting casualties in more scrutinized areas while neglecting violence in more remote areas. The VDC has also noted that some families decline to report casualties for fear of being targeted again.
What the map demonstrates is the escalation of the conflict -- with data from March 2011 through the VDC's Nov. 21, 2013 report -- and its quick descent from being a smattering of violence to a multi-front war with militias challenging the military (and other militias) almost everywhere at once. What it can't show, of course, is the horror and destruction of this war.
Jacopo Ottaviani
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