Vocal Voices

It seems like Groundhog Day in the idle east.
Another dictator overthrown, another load of bearded men firing guns into the air an shouting about Alan's Snackbar..
I wonder what will happen to Syria's Christians now?

A thought does occur though - where do these rebels come from?
Who pays for their uniforms, guns, motorbikes and pick up trucks?
It's not like Toyota offer a pick up truck with twin machine guns bolted to the back as a factory option.

But nobody ever asks the question.

Are all these small arms just left overs from the Cold War and failed regimes in Algeria, Libya, Mali, Tunisia and Egypt - the Arab Spring type things? They could also be from the Iran / Iraqi wars and the Soviet pull-out from Afghanistan. The Russians were said to have left lots of hardware behind including hundreds of thousands of guns and tens of millions of rounds of ammunitions for anybody to pick up and use.

And lets be honest, it does not take an expert welder to knock up a machine gun post on a pick-up truck.

Then there are the money men and launderers on the black market with their drugs derived funds. A deal can always be done when money is involved.

Let us hope that our Government does not see fit to intervene and advise the new regimes on the merits of democracy.

The world needs to be very cautious here.

It is not only an East v West thing, it is also a Democracy v Authoritarianism thing, as well as a Sunni Moslem V Shia Moslem thing.

Diplomats will be working overtime for a long time yet.

The old Syria is not yet one place.