Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Nonsense

There is no state on earth that will not use the misfortune of its neighbour for its own benefit. It's a fundamental tenet of international relations (at least in realism) that states are self-maximising agents that constantly scheme against each other. In the Middle East, Syria took advantage of the turmoil in both Lebanon and Iraq for its own advantage, as did Iran. So why is it such a surprise that the Gulf states would seek to capitalise on the turmoil in Syria? And what on earth does that have to do with forcing the Syrian regime to stop killing its citizens?

There are some intellectuals, activists and writers who, blinded with their hatred for the West, are incapable of uttering a single word of condemnation against the Assad regime in Syria, that has killed over 4,000 of its own citizens, all because they fear this would weaken the "resistance" project against the Israeli state. I simply don't understand what could be more important than stopping this senseless bloodshed, taking place solely to maintain a police state that has treated its own people far more ruthlessly than the "Zionist enemy", which has bombed the country freely and without retaliation over the past number of years. It is this hypocrisy which is far more blatant than the obvious Gulf Arab bias towards the Syrian revolution at the expense of the crushed Bahraini one.

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