Strange Fruit

Yesterday the main backers of regime change in Syria held a fundraiser in Kuwait under the auspices of the United Nations to raise money for the refugees they have helped create. Pledges totaled $2.4 billion, an amount that falls far short of the $6.5 billion needed, according to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. The current tally is 6.5 million internally displaced Syrians added to the 2.3 million who have fled the country, which is nearly 40% of the population.

What makes these numbers truly alarming is that the adjoining countries Syrians are fleeing to are also experiencing civil wars of their own. Iraq is being cracked. Yesterday 64 were killed. The violence in Anbar where the Iraqi government is locked in a struggle with Al Qaeda is creating a humanitarian crisis with tens of thousands displaced. Car bombs continue to detonate in Shiite neighborhoods in Lebanon as a show trial in The Hague begins on the 2005 Rafik Hariri assassination. Four men with ties to Hezbollah are being tried in absentia.

There is no indication that violence will decrease anytime soon. The main driver of the instability in the Middle East is Salafi jihad funded and, what is more apparent each day, directed by the Gulf Sheikhdoms and the West. The region is being transformed in a doomed attempt by these powers to maintain their control. Already warning signals are being sent up about the possibility of blowback as Muslims from the West travel to Syria for jihad and then return home to Frankfurt, Manchester, Detroit, Neuilly-sur-Seine, etc. with fighting and bomb-making skills.

It is all so obvious. We have seen this before in Afghanistan at the dawn of the neoliberal age. Except what is happening now is far worse because it is taking place in the heart of the Middle East; it affects far more countries with a great many more people.

The United States is not pursuing a legitimate agenda. The U.S. says it wants peace and is worried about the foreign-sponsored terrorism that the war in Syria is creating, yet it maintains a covert program that fuels the conflict. Such contradictions bear strange fruit.