Regarding what we think we know and what we know we know: the world has a huge black market going in military arms. You should know the name Viktor Bout and then imagine that personality recapitulated for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the FARC (Colombia), the Sineola people (Mexico) and so on. The small stuff, like the Kalashnikov the Russians overproduced to keep factory employment high, and the RPGs and other small, transportable arms seem to have zero issues getting to these small conflicts. Even when Al Shabaab were kids running amok in Somalia, they were able to fire an RPG into a living room (they didn’t like the man watching a soccer match on his television). To say the U.S. Government supports Al Qaeda in Syria is an “iffy” supposition.
However, let’s look at the kind of curtain suspended everywhere in Islamic and related tribal states — also in states dealing with other insurrection or organized crime: it’s curtain sewn of privacy in communication. A wink, a nod, a slip of paper, a promise, a signal can do untold damage anywhere in the world at any time predicated on the will of those colluding to do evil.
It is natural for the United States to oppose dictatorship of any kind anywhere in the world, but the realpolitik also involves enormous sums in cash, hard assets (like landing strips and naval ports), and investments, and the states of the Arab Peninsula have made fortunes on energy sales, essentially, and reinvestment: there is no one surprised that they would use that financial power to expand their combined political-spiritual enterprise. Whatever officialdom may say, OBL showed the power of the individual to act in accord with the sword verses and sally forth into the infidel world.
If General Idris could get his grip on the loose collection of rebel forces reporting to him and exercise true western-backed control, the Al Qaeda presence in Syria would be marginalized, but because of religious fealty and motivation, which may be misguided (you heard that from a Jew) but is powerful, that Al Qaeda presence may be holding its own in the Syrian — soon to be Syrian-Lebanon — theater
The story is complicated and more so than Facebook “bilge talk” (or international cocktail-type chatter) allows.
To bring freedom to parties who fear it and constituents whose information environments have been managed specifically to engender the fear and hatred of others on one hand and an immense “civilizational narcissism” (check in with Mobarak Haider’s on that) on the other proves difficult — one may stop to look over the Iraq story on that.
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Filed under: Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Lebanon, Middle East, Politics, Qatar, Regions, Syria Tagged: Al Qaeda, arms, financing, Syria
