Debate: Syria’s parliamentary elections – Jim W. Dean with Lawrence Korb

by  Jim W. Dean, VT Editor   … with Press TV,  Tehran

[ Note: The clock struck 2:30 pm, with the half hour satellite window opening, all ready to debate the Defense Department blue blood Lawrence Korb, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan, and is still active through a number of associations, not the least of which is the Council on Foreign Relations… but no connection call comes from Iran.

Five minutes go by, and a call to the satellite booking people in New York to let them know we still had no connection… then ten minutes… and we were not connected until 2:45, so I missed the front of the show.

I had been on with Larry once before, and he never says anything silly or overtly propagandist, but certainly is within the inside the DC beltway arena on his positions.

I had planned to drop some mentions of my 2014 trip as an election monitor, but had to forget all that to stick with the host’s questions, as he was juggling a show with technical issues, but he gave me some good questions and then flipped them to Korb.

VT suspected Western media was going to trash or ignore this parliamentary election, which was of course a celebration for the Russians having turned a bad situation around.

This is not to snub the Syrian army, which had had units going through the Russian intense combined operations training with new equipment and weapons, but that was going to take too long to tip the scales. It took the thousands of air strikes in support to do that, and we all had a front row seat.

So why shouldn’t the Syrians go ahead with their parliamentary elections? The Geneva agreement still calls for a UN-supervised presidential election in 18 months, and Assad is fully on board with that and always said that when he loses his mandate he will be gone.

As I mention below, these parliament elections were a show of strength as to who has real support and who does not at the front end of the talks, with 80% of Syrian voters having access to the 7000 polling stations.

As VT has editorialized, the Western coalition will do everything it can to finagle from these talks what it could not win via their terrorist brigades on the battlefield. It is going to be a long road to the next presidential election, but we can be assured that Putin’s original plan will be validated, “It’s better to kill the terrorists in Syria than let them come back and train new terror cadres in their home countries.” Amen on that… Jim W. Dean ]

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– First aired on April 12, 2016 –

In this edition of The Debate, Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim W. Dean, the managing editor of VT from Atlanta, and a US foreign policy and national security analyst, Lawrence J. Korb, from Washington, to discuss how Syria’s parliamentary elections will help pave the way for peace in the country.

Dean believes that the parliamentary elections in Syria are “a show of force” from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The corporate media has been trying to portray the elections as a fifty-fifty battle between the Syrian government and the opposition, but the opposition’s numbers are very small in fact, Dean said.

“The last thing in the world they want to see is an election where the numbers go tremendously to Assad,” he added.

“The election is going to be a validation on Russians coming in, the war against terror being won by them and showing up the Western coalition and its failure to basically defeat Syria using terrorist proxy forces to do it,” Dean reiterated.

Meanwhile, Korb described the elections as a “good step” which should be supervised by international organizations in a bid to be held fairly.

Obviously, we still have a lot of violence in Syria and a lot of people are not able to vote and this isn’t an ideal circumstance, Korb said.

“If it were up to me, I would prefer that we get the peace talks taken care of and then move on at some point to internationally supervised elections. I think that would satisfy all of the parties involved,” he added.

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Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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