Shelley — and Syria

After a few days of hurly-burly — torrential traffic and torrential sunlight — the drooping cloud cover, meditative sunsets and fleeing winds have lent a rather autumnal air to the past few days, steeped in green though grass and tree leaf may continue to be.

*

There, to press the lines of Shelley into service, will follow

O, wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion

and

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon

(and the rest of the poem is here.)

*

In the meantime, and not far from the sense of Shelley's Ode, the principal tumult seems to be supplied by the course of world events.

Since the camps of the Muslim Brotherhood were cleared from Raba'a and elsewhere in or around the capital of Egypt, and since the fuss surrounding the British detention of a journalist's husband on the ground of possessing journalistic material (which is safeguarded under British statute) and the supine arguments all over newspaper comment sections to the effect that this authoritarian wielding of muscle must be according to the rights of things, we have of course arrived at the seeming precipice of an Intervention in Syria.

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A long time ago I wrote that the uprising in Syria is not something which should be encouraged and that its spreading would only create a terrible situation for the region, which has as far as I can tell been borne out by events since then. But firstly that prediction, which I once thought rather sagacious, does nothing to solve the quotidian problems of Syrians, and secondly on further consideration it wasn't really a prediction, but a mere summing up of the information which I gathered on Twitter when I was still intensively reading on the issue and which I think laid bare pretty thoroughly the risks and ambivalencies which pervade the situation.

But as far as I am aware — and this information is not borne out by my Twitter-reading but rather through past, rather cursory reading about Syria's role in the war on terror etc. —the real problem of Syria in terms of foreign aid or outside diplomacy is that it has been a harbour for the rougher aspects of Russian, American etc. intelligence operations in the Middle East for a while. The Canadian engineer who, on mistaken premises, was taken from an airport and flown by the American government to Syria in the early 2000s, to be treated as poorly as possible there while the US could pull a Pontius Pilate and wash its hands of the matter, seems one of many innocent parties who have fallen victim to this kind of Wild West. The allure of Basher Assad, which I think continues, is that he is still a secular figure with allegiances to western countries, and promises to keep Syria as a 'neutral' field given his perceived stability. It's the underpinnings of this 'stability' which, I think, need to be investigated, because whether the government cares to involve itself or be aware of it remains an issue, but I think that its authority is constructed and held by a chaos of amorality, cruelty and impunity. Unfortunately I don't think that the rebel forces are free of these horrible qualities themselves; and I think that a defining trait of Syria's Arab Spring, and one which sets it far apart from the Arab Spring in other countries (even though my general feeling is that said Spring is already radically different country by country), is the depth of the culture of brutality and the depth to which the opposition has been infected by and shares it. The actions of the US and Russia in Syria since the early 2000s — exploiting or becoming infected by this climate — likely don't bear scrutiny, either.

As for the do-gooding impulse — firstly, since the mountain of dead is already so high, the artificial distinction between chemical and other weapons has become ignobly irrelevant. Secondly, the dropping of bombs on a foreign country by a foreign government is hardly to be regarded in the light of purest altruism. There is a defense industry presumably salivating behind the home front; there are civilian deaths and unforeseen consequences — not to mention deaths of military operators or foreign citizens like journalists and UN personnel — which must be trivialized before the Greater Good in advance; and above all I think the point is to Feel Good about Doing Something with reference only to one's own ego and a few opinion columnists who agree with your rationale, completely ignoring the basic, substantial needs of the civilians on the ground.One must also rationalize — particularly in the case of the US and Britain, possibly also of France — using taxpayer funds to jettison armaments over the eastern Mediterranean while people are inching along the poverty line in a recession-struck, budgetarily bereft country which is purportedly one of the world's most prosperous. If one wanted to do actual good, one would concentrate finances and attention on the lot of Syrian refugees — not via the UNHCR but directly, ensuring sound quality of life and some hope of returning to their country undeterred by political interference or financial inability — and above all negotiate the future of Syria not based on crabbed, selfish ideology of military or intelligence objectives, but of a pragmatic desire to see the situation of Syrian civilians returned to something commensurate with their human dignity and individual rights.

Edit: A sampler of proper international conduct: "On Tuesday [Sept. 3, 2013] Sweden became the first European country to offer asylum status to any Syrian that requested it." (Syria crisis blog, TheGuardian.com)