NP: Syria, part 6

[gary webb]

This is a good piece. The US may on the surface seem like they want to
forget about Syria but I don't think we'll have that luxury. The conflict
has been the engine of disruption and despair over the decade, and the
endgame... a meaningless word, but somewhat useful... illuminates itself
over the horizon, though it's not an endgame in the classical sense, just
ugly stalemate. The long Saudi Arabia/Iran proxy war (1979-?) continues to
rage, though interesting things happening in Iran, and Iraq for that
matter, (
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/17/world/middleeast/iran-protest-rouhani.html).
And the Assad Regime has their Russian Backstop. Putin gets to play the
"Great Game" again. But how long will the Russian people put up with it?
Who knows? All sides are waiting on the other to completely
collapse...(Turkey, Israel, the EU, and the US...nobody seems to have a
handle on things... Also, interesting leaked info about Iran spying (
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/18/iran-iraq-spy-cables/)... There are
small glimmers of hope in Iran protests... Iran has a huge demographic
crisis in that younger people don't embrace radical ideology... you see
elements of it in the hijab protests... now, of course, this could all lead
to chaos, and Iran will probably turn its vast security apparatus on its
people to squelch nascent rebellion, but without Iran Assad is short an
Ally... and Russia/Turkey short of anti-Terror and petty border squabbling,
don't have any overarching strategic goals... especially if fires continue
to rage... But, the current situation is monstrous and the Syrian people
have suffered immensely, and will continue to suffer in the near future...

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 8:21 PM jody2.718 via Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
wrote:

> How did reporting on Syria change over the course of the seven years that
> you reported this story?
>
> There were a lot of things that evolved over time. Syria ended up
> becoming, in some ways, the most documented conflict maybe in history. What
> changed over time was that we were able to build amazing networks, really
> on all sides of the conflict, where we could have unprecedented real-time
> access to people in places that we couldn’t physically reach.
>
> But, at the same time, the physical access has waxed and waned. The
> government is very unpredictable about when and if it will give a visa to
> go to their side. We used to have a team inside the rebel-held territories
> all the time. And then that stopped when the bombing from the government
> got so intense and the risk of kidnapping increased. Then at some point the
> New York Times didn’t let people go anymore. Then it became possible to go
> sometimes into Kurdish-held areas, but not always.
>
> So it’s really been a mixed bag in terms of access, but I also think that
> one thing that’s happened is that, certainly, over the last year, the
> interest in day-to-day coverage and even enterprise coverage has really
> decreased. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this piece. Now,
> more than ever, it’s important to keep this in focus and not forget about
> it, as the world thinks that the war is over and they’re moving on and
> they’re even considering normalizing relations with this government. We
> have to know what it is that they’re normalizing with.
>
> -
>
> By:
>
> -
>
> Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the
> principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of timely interviews with major
> public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more
>
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>