Storytelling: NATO rewrites the Syrian conflict

Yossef Bodansky, the U.S.-Israeli expert who wrote the official history of Al Qaeda, is back. The one who had explained with a straight face that bin Laden was both an Iraqi and Iranian agent, and that Saddam Hussein had financed the attacks of September 11, no longer works for the U.S. Congress and the Defense Department, but for the Institute Strategie für Politik-und-Sicherheits-Wirtschaftsberatung (ISPSW) in Berlin, a, Atlanticist think tank.

He has just published a paper soberly titled "A Heretic’s Up-Dated Musings on Syria" [1]. This document should not be taken literally, because his arguments are rooted in baseless accusations. However, it is very instructive in the figurative sense when understood as a "Storytelling" endeavor. Yossef Bodansky has nothing of an investigator and everything of a scriptwriter. His purpose is not to analyze what is happening in Syria, but to invent a new narrative that can justify NATO policies in the eyes of public opinion.

These are the storyteller’s two main feckless inventions:
• Tehran is already in possession of the nuclear bomb and is deploying a strategy to take over Jerusalem and Mecca, and then seize control of the Muslim world. Conducting a shadow war, Iran is supposedly manipulating Hezbollah, Hamas and the jihadists against the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Syria’s domestic policy is a game of fluctuating alliances of two against one, (1) the Alawites, Druze and Kurds, against (2) Westernized Sunnis, and Armenian Orthodox Christians, or (3) extremist Sunnis from rural areas and poor suburbs. These populations have distinct activities and live in separate areas. Damascus is implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing by expelling or exterminating Sunni extremists from areas where they represent minority, as is allegedly the case in Hama and Homs.

Yossef Bodansky’s fiction meets a strategic need for the Tel Aviv-Washington alliance. The anti-Syrian coalition was built around a dual objective: regime change to shatter the Axis of Resistance (in Israel’s interest) and to fragment the country to carry forward the reshaping of the broader Middle East (in the Pentagon’s interests). Now, after a year of fighting, developments on the ground indicate that a reversal of Bashar al-Assad would not benefit a pseudo-parliamentary democracy, but a Sunni religious dictatorship. The downfall of the Syrian President would set off a chain of usurpation of power by Sunni extremists throughout the region. Ultimately, Israel—now rid of the Axis of Resistance—and the United States would each have to face a mass population of Sunnis having reached a critical volume.

Accordingly, the author recommends the continued military support of the Free Syrian Army rebels with a view to their weakening Damascus, but rationed so as to ensure they will never be in a position to overthrow the Assad government (not the person of Bashar Assad, but the forces he stems from). Yossef Bodansky’s false scholarly analysis is solely designed to justify this level of support while hiding its real strategic motives: we must arm the Free Syrian Army (to stop the killings), but we can not do more (because the situation is too complex and Iran could make use of the atomic bomb).