‘Coalition of the willing’ promotes No Fly Zone in Syria

Since around Valentine’s Day, the dozens of parks in the city of Damascus, aided by some magnificent warm weather, have been receiving unusually large numbers of visitors. Many of these are Syrian soldiers on leave, enjoying the green space with girlfriends, families and friends.

The large garden known as Al-Manisha Park, with its numerous benches and sculptures, is located between two five-star hotels, the Dama Rose and the 4-Seasons. It is here one may find a number of soldiers. Some of them lay upon the grass, fast asleep under the warm, healing sunshine, while others laugh and joke, seeming pleased when citizens come up to them to offer them their thanks for their service to the country. The citizens want to know how things are going for them personally, and some inquire if there is any measure of help they might offer the soldier. Such is the nature of Syrian nationalism, the connection that many here feel to Mother Syria, that this observer has remarked upon previously. I love my country, but frankly I am not conscious of the same level of pride that Syrians appear to feel about their 10,000 year history as the cradle of civilization.

Over the past 30 months of frequent visits to Damascus, the city has never felt more ‘normal’ as it did last night. All night long this observer was reading, and not one bombing run, not a single mortar or artillery round, was to he heard—a first for more than two years. The historic Al-Hamidiyah Souk, the central souk inside the old walled city of Damascus, was for many months a place I tended to stay away from, mostly for reasons of self-consciousness—being one of the few shoppers to venture into its labyrinthine warrens, I was invariably approached by shopkeepers pleading with me to buy something—anything—to help them feed their families.

Today, Al-Hamidiyah Souk is quite different. While shoppers and visitors have not returned to the pre-March 2011 levels, still it is rather crowded, so much so that a foreigner can pass through it—well, almostunnoticed. At least the first hundred yards or so. And in Damascene neighborhoods, it is more or less the same. No longer do citizens quickly disappear into their homes at the first sign of dusk. Instead the streets and cafes these days are crowded until well past 9 p.m.

“Quo Vadis Syrie”, (‘where is Syria heading’) one Damascus University student asked this visitor as we sat on the steps of the Law Faculty while enjoying a bit of sun yesterday afternoon. “Is our crisis nearly over so we can start re-building Mother Syria, or do our enemies have other plans to destroy us? I worry that today’s calm will soon disappear with an arriving hurricane.”

His comment may have been triggered by a certain expectation, here and there amongst the public, that an assembling “coalition of the willing” may be about to press for a “humanitarian” no-fly zone. The American allies envisage creating such a zone stretching up to 25 miles into Syria, to be enforced with aircraft flown from Jordanian bases, according to Congressional sources.

In its actual reality, a NFZ would be very different from the altruistic model currently being advertised and promoted by certain war mongers in Washington, Tel Aviv and elsewhere. Consider the cynical deception of the “non-lethal aid” concept. Virtually all non-lethal aid is indeed lethal (for it facilitates killing carried out by certain forces—by supplying them with night goggles, telecommunications equipment, GPS equipment, salaries, fake IDs, and much else), and a “humanitarian” NFZ would have much the same net effect. A limited, humanitarian NFZ would almost certainly became a bomb anything/person ‘turkey shoot,’ as was the case in Libya in 2011 as witnessed first-hand by this and many other observers. The “limited humanitarian Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) promoted by Obama UN Ambassador Susan Rice for the no-longer-existent Al Jamahiriya was a misnomer in the extreme. And now Rice’s successor, Samantha Power, is pushing the same stratagem for Syria. Publicly the White House claims it is skeptical of the idea. However, Rice, who has moved up to become Obama’s national security adviser, met with Saudi officials last week to discuss an NFZ-related strategy, and has also told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US and Saudi Arabia are working together again on Syria policy after a year of increasingly bitter disagreement.

The Libya experience, conceding many differences between the two countries and their governments and military capability may be a prologue for Syria. Backed by a U.N. Security Council mandate, NATO charged into Libya citing its urgent “responsibility to protect” civilians threatened by claimed bloody rampages supposedly occurring across the country. Within days we witnessed the “limited, carefully vetted targets” multiply into more than 10,000 bombing runs using over 7,700 “precision guided bombs,” and from the ground it seemed like the targets were basically anything that moved or that looked like it might have a conceivable military purpose of some sort. Human Rights Watch documented nearly 100 cases of civilians being bombed and killed as part of the R2P campaign. Other estimates are several times those numbers. To this day Libyan civilians are demanding to know from NATO, “Why did you destroy my home and kill my family?” No answers have ever been provided despite investigations showing that NATO pilots disregarded instructions and that “we essentially bombed as if we were playing video games,” in the words of one contrite British airman.

This past week, post Round Two of Geneva II, the usual group of congressional war mongers, along with the Zionist lobby and the White House, are said to be re-thinking the idea of an NFZ, although the “coalition of the willing” has yet to be specified and it is clear that the Security Council will not endorse the move due, to among other reasons a sure Russian and Chinese UNSC veto. Also petitioning the Obama administration are the rebels, who tend to agree with France that problems lie ahead for them given April’s fast approaching presidential election in which the incumbent president, Bashar Assad, is likely to seek and win re-election.

In addition, Israel, according to a congressional source, has offered to help “behind the scenes” with airbases if needed and applying pressure to Syria’s southern border with occupied Palestine, while a majority of Arab League countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey, France, the UK and some members of the EU also support the proposal. Plus Saudi Arabia has already approved large quantities of Chinese man-portable air defense systems, or Manpads, as well as antitank guided missiles from Russia, and more cash, according to an Arab diplomat. Meanwhile, the US has upped its contribution by three million USD to pay the salaries of preferred ‘moderate’ rebel fighters.

Ominously, Patriot air defense batteries and F-16 fighter planes have already been moved into Jordan by the US. The US planes are equipped with air-to-air missiles that could destroy Syrian planes from long ranges, but officials advised Congress that aircraft may be required to enter Syrian air space if threatened by advancing Syrian planes. This could easily lead to all-out war with Syria, and if Russia decides to provide advanced, long-range S-300 air defense weapons to Syria, it would make such a limited no-fly zone far more risky for U.S. pilots, and it’s anyone’s guess what would happen next.

President Obama to date is keeping his own counsel as his secretaries of defense and state, current and former, and many other officials and politicians offer their advice. Hilary Clinton and General David Petraeus reportedly both favor a NFZ to “end this mess” in the words of the retired CIA Director.

To his great credit, Barack Obama appears to many on Capitol Hill to be reluctant to give formal approval to another NFZ, much as last summer when the president resisted calls not only for a war with Syria but also a strike upon Iran at the behest of the Netanyahu government. This week Mr. Obama acknowledged that diplomatic efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict are far from achieving their goals, “but the situation is fluid and we are continuing to explore every possible avenue including diplomacy.”

If President Obama extends his record of putting American interests first, and if he sticks with diplomacy rather than launch all-out war with Syria (and potentially the allies of Damascus as well) via a NFZ, he may just be on his way to actually earning his prematurely awarded Nobel Prize.

Franklin Lamb is a visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University and volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.com).

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