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1 Aug, 2013 14:33

Western governments don’t have any end game strategy in Syria

Syria is reverting not to a secular state, but to another failed state thanks to American policy in the region, Godfrey Bloom, a member of the EU parliament and the UK Independence Party told RT.

Thursday is the day after which EU leaders pledged to take a decision on arming the Syrian rebels. The deadline is unofficial, and it was set in May when EU ministers led by Britain and France, agreed to end their arms embargo.

However, they seem to have had a change of heart regarding weapons supplies to the Syrian opposition over extremism concerns. There are also fears of a potential terror backlash, with more foreigners now fighting in Syria, with many coming from EU countries.

RT:UK and France were the ones pushing the EU to lift the arms embargo. Does it mean that London and Paris will be sending shipments as we speak?

Godfrey Bloom: It would be madness to pump arms into a situation which is already out of control. We have, I am afraid, the Western governments to blame for a lot of this. What they seem not to understand is when they go into these countries, when they influence these countries they don’t seem to have any end game strategy. All that we have managed to have done in Syria is see a complete destabilization of the regime. We have seen murder; we have seen mayhem, we have seen revolution, now we are seeing refugees pouring across the border because we don’t understand how to deal with the problems in the Middle East. It’s a medieval society with unbelievable different interests. There are Shiite Muslims; there are Sunni Muslims, Kurds, Alawites, Christians. There is a whole boiling pot of problems out there we don’t ever seem to understand. Now we have got another mess in Syria. We had a mess in Iraq, we have got a mess in Afghanistan, we have got a mess in Egypt and we have got a mess in Libya. Why don’t the Western powers learn from any of this?

RT:The UK and France have long been warned of the extremist’s threat if they arm the rebels. Why such a U turn now?

GB: The whole policy was driven, as these things very often are, by the CIA and you could almost see the British Prime Minister, British Foreign Secretary reading their instructions direct from the Washington State Department, and as always, of course, Washington don’t understand anything which is why they get us into these terrible messes all the time.

RT:How great is the danger of hundreds of Europeans fighting alongside the rebels?

GB: We have a problem where we have sociopaths from Western European countries joining the religious psychopaths who are already there. They cut a catholic priest's head off with a kitchen knife the other day to chanting support from women and children. We are looking at people from the Stone Age. You cannot expect them to adopt parliamentary democracy. What they had before was not a very pleasant regime. It was corrupt and it was autocratic but it was secular. And are the people now better off than they were before? No, they are not. This is the trouble that we are going on doing these things. Who benefits from our interference in these matters?  The answer is, it’s not the people. We should have persuaded the Assad regime to liberalize when it came to their attitude towards the Kurds and democracy. But where we are in the situation now, it has called nothing but death and mayhem. And worse, Western television, Western radio covers it up. I haven’t seen any reports on the beheading of these Catholic priests, the kidnap of the Orthodox priests and the appalling things that are going on now. We’ve still got the British Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary singing off the CIA hymn sheet, and what we need to do is to get some pragmatism back into the situation.

RT:An Al Qaeda linked group in Syria has taken 200 Kurdish civilians hostage with the Kurds separately calling for a battle against the Jihadists. This is no longer just a Civil War, is it?

GB: No. This is turning into a gangster society, where 10 % of the populations are Kurds, the Sunnis are the majority, the Shiites are the minority. If you look back before all this started it was a secular society. People could go about their business and worship according to their own views. This is a society that we have now destabilized by Middle East standards, not by Western standards. By Middle East standards it wasn’t so bad. I don’t know how we are going to get out of this problem, because its reverting not to a secular state but to a theocracy, which is obviously what was going to happen and which is what a lot of people in the area wanted. A theocracy which was supported by the American government. We now have another failed state. Thank you, America.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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