John Kerry likens the Syria conflict to Carthago vs Rome - analogy or threat?

[XXL]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/23/the-ancient-tragedy-john-kerry-used-to-explain-syria/

The ancient tragedy John Kerry used to explain Syria

 

In a Wednesday session on Syria at the United Nations Security Council, U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry deployed a curious historical reference.

 

"Those who believe this crisis couldn't get worse are dead wrong, as are those who believe that a military victory is possible," Kerry intoned at the special session, after urging a cessation of hostilities.

"This could be like Carthage with the Romans, if you call that a victory," he said, referring to the conquest and devastation of the ancient city in what's now Tunisia by Roman forces in the 2nd century B.C.

 

 

 

Kerry was aiming his analogy as a rebuke to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which remains convinced of its ability to win a decisive military victory against the constellation of rebel factions and militant groups that now have de facto control over a vast tract of Syria.

Even if such an outcome was possible — and the White House seems certain it's not — it would be ruinous for Syria. Assad's opponents are hardly on the verge of defeat, and the toll of half a decade of bloodletting and destruction would make it very unlikely that the current regime could ever regain the trust of the entire battered nation.

 

 

So what about Carthage? Some 22 centuries ago, the Mediterranean empire of the North African city-state rivaled the power of Rome. In two successive conflicts, known as the Punic Wars, the Carthaginians and Romans battled across a wide expanse of the ancient world, from Sicily to Spain to North Africa. In 218 B.C., the Carthaginian general Hannibal famously crossed the Alps with his army of elephants in what eventually was an unsuccessful, albeit epic, invasion of Italy.

By 149 B.C., Carthage had been largely defeated and subdued. But it refused to bend to Rome's will. A punitive Roman force, determined to stamp out the Carthaginian threat, marched on the city. A Roman embassy made striking demands: Carthage's population would leave their homes and move inland, away from their maritime base of power. Their city would then be razed.

"Such a diktat was the equivalent of a death sentence," wrote 20th century French archaeologist Serge Lancel. "There was no precedent in antiquity for a state's surviving the eradication of what constituted it on the sacred plane: the destruction of its temples and cemeteries, the deportation of its cults, were a more surely mortal blow than displacing the population."

Unsurprisingly, the Carthaginians refused. A three-year siege ensued that ended in the sacking and desolation of the city. The Roman chronicler Appian detailed the last days of Carthage, including the massacre of its civilian population.

"All places were filled with groans, shrieks, shouts, and every kind of agony. Some were stabbed, others were hurled alive from the roofs to the pavement, some of them alighting on the heads of spears or other pointed weapons, or swords," he wrote. He went on:

 

Then came new scenes of horror. As the fire spread and carried everything down, the soldiers did not wait to destroy the buildings little by little, but all in a heap. So the crashing grew louder, and many corpses fell with the stones into the midst. Others were seen still living, especially old men, women, and young children who had hidden in the inmost nooks of the houses, some of them wounded, some more or less burned, and uttering piteous cries. Still others, thrust out and falling from such a height with the stones, timbers, and fire, were torn asunder in all shapes of horror, crushed and mangled.

 

This gruesome spectacle, as well as the six days of looting that followed, is probably what Kerry meant when he declared: "This could be like Carthage with the Romans, if you call that a victory." For the Assad regime, total victory would involve a tremendous slaughter.

But the Romans certainly could call it a victory — their great nemesis was quashed once and for all. Appian recounts what happened when news of the siege's end reached Rome: The city's populace "poured into the streets and spent the whole night congratulating and embracing each other like people just now delivered from some great fear, just now confirmed in their worldwide supremacy, just now assured of the permanence of their own city, and winners of such a victory as never before."

This is very far away from the Syrian conflict and the international community's inability to bring it to an end. But even as Kerry sounded his warning, the Assad regime continued to embrace a zero-sum game, flouting a cease-fire and expanding its bombing campaign and ground offensive against rebel-held areas in eastern Aleppo.

"This means welcome to hell," a teacher who lives in rebel-held Aleppo told my colleague Liz Sly. "We expect extermination."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[karbatal]

Well US should have left Syria alone instead of going there to destabilise it to put a puppet government to control the Qatar gas resources.  Just the thought that Madonna was campaigning for Kerry in 2004 makes me sick.  And the fact that Obama has won the Peace Nobel. Obama's administration is responsible of the Syrian horrors. 

 

And Kerry goes and talks as if it has been Al Assad's fault.  UGH.  I hate those corrupted cunts. 

[karbatal]

Oh and those "rebels"  named in the article are ISIS soldiers,  but from different factions.  Radical islamists armed by US, which are being fought by Al Assad and afterwards by Russia.  

Just like the talibans were armed and trained by the US to defeat Russia in Afghanistan in the late 80s, ISIS has been nurtured by US to fight NATO enemies now.  They can spread all lies they want,  the truth is THERE! 

[XXL]

^  totally

 

Unfortunately most people are so used to being spoon fed the same daily 20 min of lies and half truths that they're more prone to sticking their heads in the sand and too scared to investigate how Western sponsored terrorism of the past 35 years is actually the reason why now we're on the brink of World War III in the first place, where terrorism is the pretext behind greater, long term, criminal, geopolitical agendas, funny how our own governments say they are protecting us from a threat they have created from scratch themselves and fuelled it through the decades against this or that other nation or faction, according to the convenience of the moment

 

They immediately dismiss it as crazy conspiracy talk or David Icke myths. I wonder if they think the late Labour MP Robin Cook and former NATO Commander US General Wesley Clark are David Icke type of sources at all.

 

 

 

Guardian article he wrote after the 7/7 London bombings 11 years ago, a few weeks before his death

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jul/08/july7.development

 

In the absence of anyone else owning up to yesterday's crimes, we will be subjected to a spate of articles analysing the threat of militant Islam. Ironically they will fall in the same week that we recall the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when the powerful nations of Europe failed to protect 8,000 Muslims from being annihilated in the worst terrorist act in Europe of the past generation.

Osama bin Laden is no more a true representative of Islam than General Mladic, who commanded the Serbian forces, could be held up as an example of Christianity. After all, it is written in the Qur'an that we were made into different peoples not that we might despise each other, but that we might understand each other.

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden's organisation would turn its attention to the west.

 

 

 

 

 

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