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Making Histories Jun04 2016, Amsterdam

Narrating Syria, Part 1: Abandoning the Mainstream Narrative

Banner image courtesy of Flickr/Wojtek Ogrodowczyk

My view of Syria is totally western-centric. But that view still holds weight if it can draw attention to how we in Europe are responsible for the instability there. In three articles, I would like to venture a brief reflection of my own personal interaction with the crisis in Syria, progressively building up to a more general statement of what is lacking in the mainstream narrative of the region.

My interaction with Syria began with what was then called the Arab Spring (it doesn’t seem right to call it that now). In late 2010 and early 2011, the Middle East was suddenly for once centre-stage for a positive reason, the people had risen up in the pursuit of social justice and democracy.

I remember talking a lot about the Middle East around that time. In one instance I got in an argument with my former girlfriend, about Zionism. She won the argument by simply saying “you don’t know enough”. She was dead right, all my information came from The Guardian and here I was being presented with a clear statement that it was more complex than their representation of things. But as someone who hates losing arguments I took a pretty drastic step a few days later and applied to study Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies in Exeter, my home town.

During the course I was fortunate enough to get some money from the Sheikh of Sharjah, one of the lesser know Arab Emirates, to go and visit Israel and Palestine. A lot of interesting things happened there, but in terms of Syria, the most significant encounter was with a Druze taxi driver.

The Druze are a quite unusual ethnic group: they practice a distinct religion which arose from Islam but which doesn’t really fit in with it, they’ve never sought to establish a nation and they are often fiercely loyal to the country they are in. So in Israel, unlike the Arab population, Druze participate in the Zionist parties and in the Israeli Defence Forces. Knowing this, I was quite surprised to discover that he was distinctly ambivalent about the Syrian uprising when I started talking about it, especially given that it seemed to signal a potential democratisation of the country.

But despite being well into my course by this time, I again felt I was unable to make a clear argument in favour of my position on the Middle East. I still didn’t know enough. This man presented me with a coherent framework for his argument which conflicted with mine. It was one of conspiracy, it suggested that there were always outside influences which were making the countries of the Middle East unstable and that Assad was good for Syria. In contrast, my framework which held that popular, horizontalist uprisings were good, and if co-ordinated well, could overthrow any authoritarian regime and replace it with a democracy, was a weak framework since it was still mostly derived from The Guardian, whose editorial line rarely sought to situate these democratisation efforts in a wider historical and geo-political context.

Yet despite this Druze man offering me hints of an alternative way of viewing what was happening in the Middle East (and indeed the wider world), I ended up leaving the course thinking I wouldn’t have to unpick these questions much more because I figured I couldn’t really carve out a career which involved exploring them (it’s difficult to do anything with Middle Eastern Studies if you don’t know Arabic, and I was too lazy to learn it).

Instead, like most young people in the UK I took a job in London, a reasonably well-paid but somewhat dull administrative role at the National Health Service. But by a lucky co-incidence I ended up being managed by a guy who had a Masters in International Relations, a particular interest in the Middle East and a proclivity for what most people would describe as conspiracy theories.

Since the job itself wasn’t too demanding we would often talk about what was going on in the world of geo-politics. Slowly but surely he revealed the extent of his anti-establishment position. He believed that every so-called “humanitarian intervention” conducted by NATO was a manifestation of Western imperialism, from Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, through to Afghanistan and Iraq and all the way to the present day with the interventions in Libya and Syria. At least in terms of their foreign policy he was pro-Russia, with caveats, and pro-Assad, again with caveats. His conversion to this way of thinking (because it usually is a conversion, few people grow up disbelieving the media) began around the time of the Iraq war.

When arguing against him I had the same issue as before, where I couldn’t properly articulate a clear opposition to the structure which informed all his arguments. I tried but he would just run rings around me. It became increasingly clear that the problem derived from the shallowness of the mainstream position I was basing my argument upon, a position which both lacked any attempt to link different events into a coherent geopolitical structure and omitted any consistent historical narrative.

ISIS Toyota Convoy (Black Catte)

Take Syria. Since 2011 we have been led by mainstream European media to see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as evil on the basis that he has sought to crush a popular uprising. So we supported opposition against him, with weapons and aid (and tacit military support). This is just about reasonable enough, although it should be noted that Assad enjoyed quite positive depictions in the European media prior to this and more importantly many other similar “Arab Spring” uprisings were crushed without the media reporting it as something we needed to do something about (Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, to name just a few).

But then all of a sudden, in 2014 we were presented with ISIS, a much more evil organisation that is described as if it has come from nowhere to invade Syria and Iraq (despite the its leadership having been incubated in an American run Iraqi prison camp and despite it having benefitted from an environment of wide-ranging support for any group opposed to the Syrian government). As a result we arrived at a situation in which there were gradations of evil, a situation which the news has still been unable to properly explain, wedded as it is to a binary good-versus-evil worldview. And so we continue to support a now essentially non-existent “moderate” Syrian opposition, with supplies that have largely fallen into the hands of radical Islamists (best exemplified by the massive convoy of gleaming white Toyatas used by ISIS in their invasion of Iraq).

As these developments were unfolding I found myself more and more amenable to my manager’s position. At least it provided some consistency, offering a view in which everything was down to a more wide-ranging contest between America on the one hand and anyone remotely opposing it’s hegemony on the other. And so I would increasingly find myself arguing from this position with other people outside of work. In an article to follow I’ll discuss the basic points I developed in these arguments.