Syria, and betrayal

Robert "make it up, they'll never notice" Fisk has a splendid piece in the Independent on Syria and "the West". It's barely coherent even by his standards. At a certain point I thought I was hallucinating when he started going on about Churchill and Potsdam, which obviously has everything to do with the war in Syria. Part of it is below, and it deserves - well, perhaps here it should be called an Eponymous-ing.

I sniff treachery. Because – let’s be frank about it – something is going very wrong with the narrative of the Syrian war. Whose narrative? Our Western lords and masters we live in democracies in these countries and elect our leaders – as untrustworthy today as they were when they sold Poland to Stalin at Yalta what's Poland and Churchill got to do with Syria today? – have started to talk much less about their visceral desire to destroy Bashar al-Assad they never talked about that in the first place and much more about their fear of the corrosive presence of al-Qa’ida within the rebel forces fighting to remove the Syrian president. well, der, if you don't intervene you get the medieval barbarians As the Syrian tragedy deepens, so our moral Western policy you what? meaningless towards the damned of this ghastly war has turned into a betrayal of its people. not intervening was the betrayal

... While claiming that Britain had not lost faith in the Arab revolutions – Churchill said as much about his fidelity to Poland after handing the country to Stalin Churchill again - he's been dead for well over 40 years, and the world, and the Middle East, have changed a bit since– William Hague said that Syria was the most serious case of a revolt being “hijacked” by militants. The country, he claimed, was “the No 1 destination for jihadists anywhere in the world today”. And your problem with that is?

Incredible. This might almost have been a speech by Bashar al-Assad himself Ah, we see who has been repeating this for almost two years about “al-Qa’ida terrorists” in Syria. Even putting aside the fact that Mali was supposed by whom? to have assumed the mantle of “terror centre” less than two months ago, that's not why France intervened this was an extraordinary statement for the pitiful Hague to make. except it's true

He babbled on about UK and other European extremists in Syria, then added: “They may not pose a threat to us when they first go to Syria, but if they survive, some may return ideologically hardened and with experience of weapons and explosives. The longer the conflict continues (in Syria), the greater this danger will become.”

Ergo, I suspect, let’s bring this war to a close. except that that's not being done. Fisk just made that bit up. Why else are Hague and Lavrov now talking about “dialogue” between rebels and regime? 

Did you know that in Fisk's book on Lebanon he wrote that Jesus was born in Jerusalem? Yes, he really did.