Michael Meacher MP

Now that Baba Amr has fallen with appalling brutality, The Western press is full of demands for intervention to forestall any further such genocidal episodes.   More thoughtful minds insist that Western intervention would be counter-productive.   Syria is no Libya: its 20 million population is three times that of Libya, concentrated in big towns and cities which combine a variety of ethnic and religious groupings.   Syria has nothing like the Libyan divide between a pro-rebel east focused on Benghazi and a pro-regime west centred on Tripoli; in Syria protests have occurred throughout the country.   Nor has there been a clear demand for foreign military intervention from Syria’s opposition which remains fractured and split.   However, what has received no mention at all in the Western media is that low-level Western military intervention is already well under way, indeed has been in action since May 2011.   According to Milliyet, a Turkish newspaper, France has already sent its military training forces to Turkey and Lebanon to train the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and the French, British and Turkish authorities have reached an agreement to send arms into Syria.   Even more significantly, Ahmet Davitoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, has openly admitted that Turkey will invade Syria as soon as the Western allies agree to do so. (more…)