No Good Endgame for Rebels

Anne Barnard and a reporter whose identity is being shielded by the New York Times have a story this morning about the the battle for Homs, "Ruins in a Center of Syria’s Uprising." After reading it a couple of things come to mind. First, the reporting that's done by Anne Barnard consistently centers blame for the civil war on the Syrian government while marginalizing any role played foreign-funded jihadis. To read Barnard one is still living the first hopeful, heady days of the Arab Spring uprising where the rebels are protesters looking for democratic representation and freedom from an Alawite Stalin. Barnard does write what is actually happening on the ground -- her reporting is not fabrication. For instance, in today's story about Homs, she does include the fact that the territory held by the rebels is awash in sewage and rubble while life continues as close to normal as possible in government-controlled districts. But for Barnard there is always the tactful sculpting of the story to push the truth about the rebels down into the later paragraphs, making it appear more as an afterthought, as unimportant.

The other thing that struck me after reading the story about Homs is that there is no happy endgame for the rebels. The government is slowly, methodically grinding away at the territory in opposition hands. The rebels respond by car bombings and assassinations, often outside Syria, like the pro-Assad commentator, Mohammad Darra Jamo, who was gunned down at his home in southern Lebanon early this morning.

At first this strategy of bringing terror to neighboring countries seemed somewhat effective at ratcheting up pressure for foreign state intervention. The Western press raised alarms, incoherently blaming Hezbollah while ignoring the Sunni jihadist fingerprints, and called for action to stem a regional war. But now, with a many-sided conflict breaking out among the rebels in northern Syrian -- Kurdish militants took control of a border town from the Al Nusra Front; last week a commander for the Free Syrian Army was murdered by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant -- there's no way that Western intervention can be neatly packaged in the Manichean narrative of good vs. evil that the editorial pages of the prestige press prefer. Support for the jihadis by Gulf Arab monarchies and Western powers has created the predicted blowback.