Irish Anti-War Movement - Public Meeting:

'Solidarity with The People of Syria & Iran -
NO TO INTERVENTION!'

Guest speakers to include;

Simon Assaf
Dr. Abbas Edalet

Plus live link-up with Shirin Shafaie.

All are very welcome to attend.

www.irishantiwar.org/ plus Facebook & #Twitter

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SYRIA AND IRAN – TWO PAWNS IN THE WEST’S NEO-COLONIAL STRATEGY

There is real imminent danger of another war in the Middle East. The US and Britain are attempting to engineer a regime change in Syria while crippling sanctions have been imposed on Iran and its scientists have been executed as a prelude to war.

The Irish Anti-war Movement (IAWM) supports the right of the peoples in the countries of the Middle East to determine their own future but we are critical of any attempt by western powers to intervene there. As we have seen in Libya, the regime change veiled as ‘humanitarian intervention’ has cost at least 30,000 lives and reports from NGO’s tell of continued reprisals and torture. Military intervention only brings more deaths, division and misery.

Jamie Allinson - Socialist Review

Both those who call for intervention and those who condemn the revolution in Syria are wrong. Jamie Allinson argues that Syrians can liberate themselves

On 23 February the self-appointed "Friends of Syria" met in Tunis to demand, in the words of Barack Obama, that "the international community...send a clear message to President Assad that it is time for a transition". Given that this group includes the US, UK and France, who have never rallied anyone to demand Israel's withdrawal from occupied Syrian territory, and Saudi Arabia, whose troops have enforced a bloody terror against the Bahraini revolution, Syrian activists might think that with friends like these they don't need enemies. But where is the Syrian uprising to go, apparently trapped between a regime determined to bring the country down around it and imperialist projects to deflect the revolution?

The question of foreign intervention divides both the Syrian opposition and the left in the region and beyond. In the face of the regime's brutal response to the uprising, which has seen 6,000 people killed and tens of thousands injured or imprisoned, some in the Syrian opposition and in besieged cities such as Homs have come to see foreign intervention as a shortcut to the ousting of Assad. The opposition is not homogeneous, however. There are three main organised elements to it: the Syrian National Council (SNC), the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC) and the "Free Syrian Army" (FSA).

Divided

David Cameron and William Hague are at risk of over-simplifying a dangerous and complex situation

18 Feb 2012

The heart of Jonathan Freedland’s argument against the Stop the War Coalition in his recent Guardian article is that every case for military intervention must be taken on its own merits. It follows that it may be right to attack Iran and Syria when it was not right to attack Iraq.

Freedland argues the mistake of the anti-war movement is to think that ‘Because that's how it was with Iraq...so it will be true of Iran, Syria or any future conflict. And so the peace movement ends up fighting the last war – specifically, the Iraq war... We need to see again what we understood well before Iraq: that every case is different.’

Ever since I read this I’ve been envious of Freedland’s state of mind.

How wonderful it would be, I’m thinking, to wake up in the morning and confront the world as if it were born anew that very day. No event from the past impinges on our knowledge of the present. History is not our guide since it may all go differently today. It’s a kind of perpetually optimistic Groundhog Day.

But, as has long been recognised, those who forget history are doomed to repeat its errors. And Freedland himself, far from treating Iran and Syria as different from Iraq, exactly repeats the pro-war arguments from the Iraq era.

Freedland suggests that the anti-war movement is not, like him, ‘appalled at the sight of the world doing nothing as children and their parents are killed and maimed by Bashar al-Assad's troops’. Substitute ‘Saddam Hussein’ and the ‘Kurds of Iraq’ or ‘the Taliban’ and the ‘Women in Afghanistan’ and you have a precise reproduction of the moral blackmail that the neo-cons practiced in the run up to the Afghan and Iraq wars.

'In Homs we are all wading in blood'
Clinics are overwhelmed with casualties as the regime's snipers target anyone who moves in the rebel neighbourhoods

Jonathan Littell
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 February 2012 20.29 GMT

A doctor treats a wounded man in Homs. Photograph: AP
The corpse, already waxy, wrapped in its shroud, a crown of plastic flowers around its head, lies in a corner of the mosque. Kneeling next to the coffin, a boy in tears, his brother, strokes his face with infinite tenderness. The dead boy was 13. The night before, around 11 o'clock, he was breaking wood in front of his doorstep. His father, eyes swollen, but upright and dignified among his friends and relatives, tells me what happened: "He probably shone his mobile phone to see what he was doing. And the sniper killed him."

It was neither an accident nor chance. Their street is constantly under fire from this sniper, who, based in the neighbourhood school, practises on cats when he has no other targets. "We don't even dare take out the rubbish any more," a neighbour adds. Another man shows me, on his mobile phone, the corpse of his brother, killed while he was protecting his 11-year-old son, before explaining to me that he had to break down the walls between his house and his neighbours' to get out without exposing himself to gunfire.