The fruit of Arab spring: a strange case of collective amnesia among Western politicians and journalists

There were several statements made this week by the American, French and British politicians which can only be explained by some sort of collective amnesia. All of these statements were on the Middle East and they all were in direct contradiction to what these same politicians said just 2, 3 or six months ago.

The freshest example is the attack by senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham against Susan Rice, America’s representative in the UN and a possible candidate of the newly elected president Obama for the position of the Secretary of State. What are the senators blaming Ms. Rice for? During her interviews in the immediate aftermath of the attack against the American ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, in September this year. Rice said that the attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim video and she even uttered some praise for similar demonstrations in neighboring Egypt, seeing them as an indication of a newly acquired freedom of assembly there.

Condemning this reaction, Senator Lindsey Graham on Wednesday said Rice’s comments were "disconnected to reality” and this is the reason he "did not trust her.” Actually, Mr. Graham may be right on "disconnection with reality,” the blind belief of representatives of both the administration and Congress in the "democratic” character of the upheaval in Libya and subsequent murder of Colonel Qaddafi is indeed astounding. But who is the author of this critique? The same Lindsey Graham, who, together with his friend John McCain, wrote in The Washington Post in August, weeks before the attack against the American ambassador in Libya that "profound gratitude for America’s help in the war against Moammar Gaddafi has laid the foundation for a bright new chapter in relations between our two countries.” (The Washington Post)

Why should anyone care about protecting an ambassador in a certain country amid the "bright new chapter” in this country’s relationship with the United States?

"I think, McCain and other Republican hawks have no moral right to judge the inadequacy of the American authorities’ reaction to the events in Libya. If the United States followed their recipes and if the Republican candidate won at the last presidential election, the world would be in much greater danger now,” said Clifford Scheckter, the author of the 2008 biographical bestseller "The Real McCain.”

What is even more interesting, before the murder of the American ambassador in Libya, McCain and Graham tried to justify by Libya’s example a possible American intervention in Syria or at least a sending of not very "non-lethal” aid to the Syrian opposition fighters. Here is the full quote from their August article in The Washington Post: "Our lack of active involvement on the ground in Syria also means that, when the Assad regime finally does fall, the Syrian people are likely to feel little goodwill toward the United States — in contrast to Libya, where profound gratitude for America’s help in the war against Moammar Gaddafi has laid the foundation for a bright new chapter in relations between our two countries.”

Now that the new chapter in Libya’s existence appears to be anything but bright, the senators are obviously reluctant to present Libya as an example to other countries, including Syria. Unlike them, the French president Francois Hollande did not shy away from repeating a controversial step of his predecessor, former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Just like Sarcozy was the first Western leader to recognize the National Transition Council for Libya, Hollande now is the first foreign leader to give formal recognition to the recently formed umbrella group of Syrian opposition. The group, tentatively named the Syrian National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (or just National Coalition), was proclaimed by Hollande to be the single legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

The problem is that until recently another opposition group, the Syrian National Council (SNC), merited similar words of praise from the French, American and British governments. Earlier this year, at the summits of the so called "friends of Syria” both the American secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the British foreign secretary William Hague several called the SNC "the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” They suddenly stopped doing it this November, when Hillary Clinton suddenly came up with a statement that the SNC "can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition.” So, the international community was kindly asked to forget everything that had been said by Mrs. Clinton about the SNC before and brace up for new beginnings with the Syrian National Coalition. What is striking, more than 100 countries forming the group of "friends of the Syrian people” (formerly known as Friends of Syria) also made a U-turn in their policies, toeing Washington’s line. It remains to be seen, howe

ver, who will trust another "legitimate representative of the Syrian people” whose legitimacy is determined in Washington and Paris, not in Damascus.

The British envoy to the Syrian opposition forces, John Wilks, is reportedly behaving more like this opposition’s leader and a conjuror of political puppets (Puppenmeister in German), than some kind of an ambassador. The French daily Le Figaro quotes him as saying during a recent meeting with opposition’s leaders: "You should prepare yourself to all sorts of outcome, including a defeat of your Intifada”. It should be noted that several months before Mr. Wilks, quite in chorus with other British politicians, said that Assad’s regime was "doomed” and the opposition’s success "imminent.”

The problem would not be so great, if it were only the politicians whose eyes would suddenly be open to the misdeeds and shortcomings of the Syrian National Council and the general pitiful state of affairs in the Syrian opposition. Unfortunately, the same "revelation” dawned on the Western press – on American, British and French news outlets at the same time. And they all made a U-turn, generally following the statements of their political leaders. The Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin, who had been claiming in spring 2012 that "Syria would certainly be a better place without Mr. Assad” suddenly discovered even greater dangers in "chaos” and called the previous Western intervention in Libya, which he had praised until the Benghazi attack, "ill-advised.”

"Washington never ceased to demand that the SNC should address itself to minorities, in order to alleviate their reservations about their plight after the eventual fall of Assad. But the SNC, dominated by the Moslem Brotherhood, turned a deaf ear to Washington’s admonishments,” Le Figaro reports. Interestingly, before that Le Figaro never made a link between the SNC and the Moslem Brotherhood. Obviously, the new Syrian National Coalition is so much better and so devoid of extremists, that the French president added that the formal recognition of it "presupposes” a positive response to the question of arms deliveries. Obviously, it is about time for hypocrisy and lies to open the door to violence.