by Mark Nadim, member of step-back team

 

Perhaps as soon as this coming Wednesday, but no one really knows of course, the US will start missile and bombing strikes against the Syrian army and presumably also target the government and national infrastructure.

But how soon can we expect to see citizens inside Syria start thanking the American military for their ‘tough love’?

 

A Quick Fix?

Judging from US ‘surgical strikes’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Serbia, to name a few recent examples, one can expect thousands of immediate civilian and military deaths caused by the Western superpower’s attacks.

Soldiers fighting to defend their families and their secular tolerant country against the foreign jihadi sharia state seeking militias – against ‘terrorists’, as we and our news media would call them without hesitation in any other context – annihilated with superior weaponry.

Men, women and children will literally be blown to pieces and burnt alive by the most modern weapons (not officially chemical-weapons mind, so that’s ok) in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’.

Statistically we know that there will be a much higher number of wounded casualties, who will receive from the US attacks horrific life-changing injuries, many losing limbs and sense organs, and will remain physically and mentally scarred, if not permanently brain-damaged for the rest of their lives.

 

All Worth It In The End Right?

Looking at the long term physical effects of US weaponry strikes, one thing we can be absolutely certain of based on Iraq is that since a great many US weapons will contain Uranium in the cheap and effective DU form, birth defects will go through the roof – babies will be born with no eyes, their intestines outside their bodies, with multiple heads and so on.

We can also be very confident based on both wars in Iraq that tens of thousands will be killed over time indirectly from the lack of clean water, electricity and health care.

 

So We Must Be Talking Benefits In The Mid-Term, Correct?

If the US attacks serve to turn the tables in the conflict , as many including the apparently psychopathic but strangely popular “Bomb Iran” singer John McCain are pushing for, the opposition forces will clearly manage to take control of more parts of Syria.

If we limit ourselves to the bending-over-backwards fantasies of Western mainstream news media, where the ‘rebels’ have been consistently painted as the good guys, and even cannibals on the opposition side get a chance to explain their issues, such a change might seem a good thing.

The reality, however, is that our mainstream news has given us the most highly biased pro-opposition, pro-intervention reporting from the start of the conflict, in terms of sources and stories used, the choice of expert voices, and by, more often than not, blanking out completely the majority pro-Assad view. And contrary to what we’ve been told, the opposition forces are in fact mostly non-Syrian jihadis, many in the al-Qaeda linked Jabhat al-Nusra militia.

With support from Western and Western-allied governments, they have expressed that they are seeking to enforce a sharia state by using a brutal combination of ethnic cleansing, mass beheadings, summary executions, sanctified rape and even cannibalism of ‘infidels’.

It is abundantly evident that Syrians who currently benefit from a secular inclusive state, tolerant of its many varied minorities have nothing to gain and everything to lose from the so-called ‘rebel’ advances or, God forbid, a ‘rebel’ takeover, however much positive spin and selective reporting Western media applies.

 

Cui Bono?

We will never see any silver lining of US strikes on Syria because there absolutely is none. Iraqis equally have only seen mass death and suffering, the total destruction of a once highly developed educational and health care infrastructure, and a daily sectarian bloodbath that continues today after more than 10 years.

The only silver lining for anyone in this conflict will be the silver lining the pockets of the arms dealers – currently in London for the DSEI – and of other Western and Western-allied corporations eager to crack open Syria’s assets.