De-escalation by Slaughter and Displacement: Max Blumenthal’s Woke Syria Peace Plan

At the “Syria and the Left” panel co-hosted by Verso Books and Muftah, panelist Max Blumenthal called for ending arms shipments to anti-Assad rebels as a means of de-escalating a war that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

Disarming one side in a war is not a recipe for de-escalation but a formula for shifting the balance of power between the warring parties to the disadvantage of the disarmed side. But calling for an end to the rebel arms supply has a major political upside for Blumenthal — it allows him to posture as an advocate of peace while pushing a policy that would lead to more killing of Syrian civilians and the creation of more Syrian refugees and internally displaced persons.

In the name of de-escalation, Blumenthal wants to deprive the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front rebels of the anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs). Rebels rely on ATGMs supplied by the U.S. and its Gulf state allies to keep Assad’s armor from re-taking areas of the country currently governed by some 400 local democratic councils set up by revolutionaries to break the regime’s stranglehold over basic necessities.

Blumenthal evidently wants the rebels to fight Assad’s tanks not with ATGMs but with rocks, like the Palestinians.

For those who don’t know, throwing rocks at tanks and firing homemade rockets into Israel have done exactly nothing to slow the displacement of Palestinian families by illegal Israeli settlement construction. Nor have they ended the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

But thank goodness the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hasn’t been escalated by supplying Palestinian factions with militarily meaningful weaponry like ATGMs! Blumenthal can sleep soundly at night knowing that there is only one conflict in the Middle East in need of his woke ‘de-escalation’ scheme that benefits the oppressor at the expense of the oppressed.

Shutting down the supply of ATGMs and foreign funding for rebel salaries would seal the revolution’s fate by making the conflict more one-sided than it already is. With the rebels disarmed, one million or more Syrians would flee the forcible restoration of mukhabarat rule in rebel-held Daraa, Eastern Aleppo, Idlib, and Hama just as 130,000 fled from a single district in Aleppo in late 2013 when the regime flattened the area as the first stage of a successful offensive.

The human cost of Blumenthal’s ‘de-escalation’ scheme would be staggering but it is not a price that he would have to pay. And think of the upsides:

1. He would never run out of material for crocodile tear-filled articles bemoaning the plight of Syrian refugees.
2. His role as a cog in the outrage-industrial complex would be forever secure with the end of the uncomfortable ambiguities and jarring contradictions the Syrian conflict opened up on the Alt-Left.
3. He would not have to resort to writing vile hit pieces about Syrian first responders being bombed to bits by Russia to gain attention.