![]() ![]() Several of the potential Republican presidential candidates, most notably Jeb Bush, have expressed pro-immigration views. I’ve been thinking about my grandfather lately, because there are signs that 2015 could bring about the beginning of a truce - or at least a reconfiguration - in the politics of immigration. These immigrants were stealing jobs from “Americans.” After all, this wasn’t a matter of bigotry. He had no time for Hispanics, he told us, and he wasn’t backing down. But there was one view he wasn’t going to change. He stopped using racist and homophobic slurs he even hugged my gay cousin. By the time he died, 10 years ago, he had softened. He carried a gun and, like many men of his generation, saw threats in people he didn’t understand: African-Americans, independent women, gays. ![]() He was a blue-collar World War II veteran who loved his family above all things and was constantly afraid for them. Read the full text at the website of Syria Comment.When I was growing up in the 1980s, I watched my grandfather - my dad’s stepdad - struggle with his own prejudice. The only article in Syrian state media that refers to this concept heavily criticizes the notion and sees it as a US invention aimed at splitting up Syria and to maintain its military base in al-Tanf on the Syrian-Iraqi border. So, where does the term ‘Useful Syria’ come from if not from the Syrian regime? Tellingly, the term ‘Useful Syria’ has not once been employed by the Syrian regime’s itself. This, however, ignored the repeatedly and publicly stated intent of the regime to take back ‘every inch of Syria’. Nevertheless, Western analysts soon framed a kind of ‘Useful Syria’-doctrine that would supposedly guide the Syrian regime´s strategy to consolidate its grip over said parts of the country and of Iran to connect Hezbollah’s strongholds in Lebanon with Syria’s coastal region. Rather, four minutes later into the same speech, he stressed that all regions of Syria are equal and that the regime does not discriminate, but that military exigencies require a temporary preference to defend the more strategically important areas first. ![]() But Assad did not use the words ‘Useful Syria’ to refer to these territories. In a candid speech on 26 July 2015, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in fact conceded that the Syrian army could not guard every spot of Syrian soil because otherwise more crucial areas would be infiltrated by ‘terrorists’, endangering their stability. Since then, it has become a shorthand reference to the Aleppo-Homs-Damascus axis, as well as Syria’s coastal regions, with the implication that, in a pinch, the regime would consider restoration of its control over these areas as an acceptable outcome of the war. ![]() The Shiite population of the two cities was exchanged with the population of the Sunni towns of Madaya and Zabadani near Damascus, cities that had also been besieged by the Syrian regime. The term ‘Useful Syria’ was popularised by analysts in July 2015 after a deal between the regime and rebels was struck to end the siege of al-Fuah and Kafraya, two towns in Idlib in the north-west of Syria. as reference to the regime’s policies to consolidate its power by rewarding loyalty and punishing ‘betrayal’. It makes more sense to reconceptualise ´Useful Syria´ in terms of loyalty, i.e. This makes the Idlib offensive not the end of the civil war, but merely its next stage that will be followed by further regime manoeuvring and fighting to retake the country´s north and east. As the offensive to reconquer Idlib starts, it is useful to recall that the notion of ‘Useful Syria’ as geographic reference to the population-rich axis of Aleppo-Homs-Damascus, as well as the coastal areas of Latakia and Tartus, does not accurately reflect the regime´s intention of reconquering all of Syria. ![]()
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