“The Syrian civil war has led to a regular stream of misjudgments, resulting in widespread confusion and ignorance. Charles Glass’s slim, truthful and updated version of Syria Burning, originally published in 2015, is a perfect antidote to the lack of clarity by this seasoned reporter even if his analysis and reportage is also tinged with frustration.”
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Reading this grim account, it’s hard to disagree with Glass’ conclusion that Americans are “policymaking adolescents” — a view strengthened by historical parallels that Washington ignored and Glass draws with Syria’s uprising against the French in 1925. Or the implosion of Lebanon in 1975. Or vacillations in U.S. policy that long predate the Obama administration.
To read the rest of the review, visit Monterey Herald.
The conflict that’s taking place in Syria now began with protests in the city of Daraa in March of 2011 when some young students had written some anti-government graffiti on the walls. Some of those young people were then apprehended and tortured. Their parents and other people in Daraa thought that torturing children was a little too much, even for a dictatorship.
To listen to the full program, visit ABC.
These international attacks, as well as the oppression and terror that ISIS has inflicted on large parts of Syria and Iraq, do not call for a response.
They do not call for revenge. They do not call for gestures of the kind that British Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to ram through Parliament in Westminster. They do not call for Europe and the U.S. to deny shelter to refugees who are fleeing from ISIS terror that the world ignored when it was confined to Syria. They do not call for further erosion of privacy and other rights.
To read the rest of the article, visit The Intercept.
Glass, formerly the chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News and a veteran of Lebanon’s kidnapping heyday (he spent sixty-two days as a hostage in 1987), cuts none of the parties to the current Syrian war much slack. He establishes that the government’s murderous response to protesters in Dera’a was initially to blame for “escalat[ing] and radicaliz[ing]” demonstrations throughout Syria, and pulls no punches when it comes to highlighting the brutality of the state: “President Assad’s counter-insurgency strategy has appeared to involve targeting the civilian population and medical facilities in rebel areas, in order to deprive the armed opposition of its support.”
To read the rest of the review, visit Warscapes.
To listen to the interview, visit Between the Lines.
Charles Glass discusses the Syrian civil war and Syria Burning with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!. Visit Democracy Now! to watch the full program.
Yesterday evening, Charles Glass, author of Syria Burning, spoke to Boston College at an event sponsored by Christian Solidarity International.
In a press release, CSI summarizes Glass’s talk:
According to Glass, “The U.S., Britain and France had long harbored a wish to get rid of the Syrian regime.” When the Syrian revolution began, Glass said, his contacts in the opposition told him they were determined to keep the movement nonviolent, “to use a strategy the regime couldn’t cope with”: mass civil disobedience and general strikes. “It might have failed, but it would not have led to 250,000 dead and half the country homeless.”
Instead, Western states and their allies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey “persuaded members of opposition to take up arms, and turn peaceful demonstrations in a civil war.”
Glass described the spread of violent sectarianism in Syria as a consequence of this policy. Minority Christian, Alawite and Druze contacts of Glass’ who initially participated in the peaceful, secular uprising against the Syrian regime “have been driven out of the revolution by jihadists, and forced to side with the regime just to survive.”
Despite the utter lack of political freedom in Syria before the war, Glass said, there was “social freedom,” particularly for Christians, religious minorities and women.
But if the United States and its Islamist regional allies prevail, “that means Jahbat al Nusra [al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate] wins, Syria will be religiously cleansed, and its people will be enslaved to an ideology they don’t believe in.” Alternatively, if Russia, Iran and the Syrian regime prevail, “there will be reprisals and massacres against Syrians who opposed the regime”. On the current trajectory, Glass said, the most likely outcome is not victory for either side, but “a long and bloody war with a big impact on Europe that endures as a problem in U.S. foreign policy for years to come.”
Instead, Glass argued, the two superpowers should reach a settlement on Syria, and impose a peace on the country’s warring parties, as was done in Lebanon in the 1989 Ta’if accord. “Lebanon healed very quickly, in one respect,” Glass said. “That could happen in Syria. The most urgent thing is for the outside powers that are keeping this war alive to stop.”
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The United Nations’ latest “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic” paints a depressing portrait of the population’s unimaginable torment at the hands of government and opposition forces alike. The regime drops barrel bombs in Aleppo, and the rebels respond with gas cannisters of explosives and shrapnel. ISIS rapes and brutalizes Yazidi women whom it has declared slaves to be bought and sold. The regime’s security services practice torture on an industrial scale. Both sides besiege villages, and both sides commit massacres. The UN report’s forty-four pages of horrific war crimes should be sufficient for the outside powers to budge and call a halt to this war. What are they waiting for?
To read the rest of the article, visit The New York Review of Books.
Could Syria’s revolution have been different? At its birth in the spring of 2011, it promised hope for a better, freer life for Syria’s people. Syrian aspirations resonated with lovers of liberty everywhere: an end to governmental corruption and arbitrary arrest; an independent judiciary; a free press; equality before the law; abolition of torture; genuine elections leading to legitimate authority; and democratic institutions responsible to the governed. The state responded with arrests and violence. Dissidence evolved into war. Those who eventually captured the revolution dropped its original objectives in favor of supplanting a secular dictatorship with a dictatorial theocracy. The revolution was defeated from within, albeit with much assistance from outside powers motivated by anything but the good of the Syrian people.
To read the rest of the excerpt, visit Mondoweiss.
Glass offers a personal and intimate journey through decades of history, providing the reader with a sense of the tragedy that has gripped the country since it was plunged into chaos over four years ago.
To read the rest of the review, visit Counterfire.
One of the problems of writing about the current situation in the Middle East, as Glass, a veteran journalist, knows only too well, is that today’s certainties are tomorrow’s laughable speculations. Iran may still refer to the US as the “Great Satan”, but the two states now share some strategic interests. Although the US used to insist that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad must step down, it is now considering the very real possibility that he could survive the war and, like America’s lamentable “red line” of chemical weapons, what was unthinkable recently could soon be the acceptable status quo. But if news moves fast, assessments have not, which is one reason why we should all read Syria Burning.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Observer.
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Do you see a negotiated solution here — and that would involve people who really don’t have any warmth for each other — actually sitting down at the table across from each other?
CHARLES GLASS: There can only be a negotiated solution. Neither side in the conflict, neither the Assad regime or the Islamist, have the power to defeat the other. They can bleed the other, which means basically bleeding all of the Syrian people. In the mean time, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and the United States should be leaning on the rebels to stop fighting, and Iran and Russia should be leaning on the regime to put an end to the fighting, and come up with some patchwork, even temporary agreement to stop the fighting and allow Syrians to come home and rebuild their lives.
To listen to the rest of the interview, visit The Takeaway with John Hockenberry.
In introducing the excerpt, the editor writes:
News coming out of the Middle East is nearly always bad, so bad, it’s like a road accident. You just want to look away, and keep on going. There’s nothing you can do.
How did it all come to this? Keep reading. Below is an excerpt from Syria Burning by Charles Glass, a book that is so beautifully written that reading it is more like seeing. And you will not want to look away.
You will see—better than what any photograph could show—little fragments of history explode before your eyes, as you fly through time and space, now and then swooping down for a close-up of some detail that brings the larger truth into focus.
This book is about much more than Syria or the Middle East. It may be what the poet William Blake meant when he wrote “To see a world in a grain of sand.”
Or a drop of oil.
To read the excerpt, visit Who What Why.
Old-style journalists, Erlich and Glass know Syria well. They have spent long periods drifting about, making friends, and enjoying the social worlds that they encounter. Neither feel the lash of a corporate media industry, pushing them to file breaking news and ignoring the density of social life and the passions of the people.
…
Khalifa tells Glass, “Stop the war. Stop the blood. The Syrian people are tired now. You can play revolution for some time. But not for a long time.” This is the attitude captured by Erlich and Glass. It reveals a great deal more than the reports that track the minutiae of this battle and that battle.
To read the full review, visit Frontline.
To listen to the interview, visit The Monocle.
The tragedy in Syria and Iraq is that arms are pouring into the hands of rebel jihadists who slaughter or kidnap and enslave non-Sunni Muslims and punish fellow Sunnis who do not share their obscurantist interpretation of Islam. In Syria as in Iraq, neither side has the strength to defeat the other. But the Obama administration believes it can win a war in Iraq while allowing its enemies to win in Syria. And they said the neo-cons were fantasists.
To read the rest of the review, visit the Evening Standard.
To listen to the segment, visit ABC News.
To view the segment, visit VICE News.
To the question of whether an international coalition should help protect the Syrian artifacts threatened by ISIL forces, Glass explains:
It would be demoralizing for Syrian people to see an international military intervention to protect ruins, but not to protect the 50,000 people who live around those ruins. It would be a way of saying to the Syrian people: your lives are not important, but these stones are. That would probably reinforce the Islamic Front’s propaganda that the world doesn’t really care about you but we do.
To watch the full interview, visit Democracy Now!.
The path that [Western powers] took ignored the fact that, in attempting to depose the regime, they would destroy the country. So there would be nothing left for those who took over, and those who now threaten to fill the vacuum, should the regime fall, are the most extreme Sunni fundamentalists—who are the ones who ended up taking over in Afghanistan; who are the most ruthless and the best fighters; and who are always the ones most likely to dominate the revolution.
To watch the full interview, visit RT.
Charles Glass and Syrian artist Sara Shamma join BBC Today to talk about daily life in Syria and how the current conflict might end:
No one is imposing a settlement, and neither side has the strength to defeat the other. We have a war where neither side can win, it means the war will go on and on unless there’s some agreement by outside powers, mainly the powers that are supporting the two sides: on the side of the regime you have Russia and Iran, in the case of the opposition you have the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. If they won’t intervene and force their clients to accept a solution, then the fighting will simply go on.
To listen the rest of the interview, visit BBC Today.
In an interview with BBC Newshour Charles Glass provides a grim summary of the violence sweeping Syria:
To see a whole generation losing its education, losing its healthcare, losing their homes, now living in refugee camps. Almost at every level, you see suffering and destruction without much light, without much hope that there will be a better because of all this suffering. In fact, there will probably be a worse outcome.
To read the rest of the review, visit BBC Newshour
