Category Archives: Iran-Syria

Piling mistake upon mistake

The only way to achieve a peaceful transition to democracy in Syria is through the regime. Destroying the state will lead to a power vacuum and chaos

For two years, the United States and the European Union have done everything short of sending their own troops and aircraft into battle to evict Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria. Only recently have they begun to realise that they have made a historic mistake: in the euphoria created by the Arab Spring, they are in imminent danger of handing over the entire Arab world to Islamists for whom democracy is anathema.

In a front page editorial titled ‘The Death of a Country,’ The Economist has warned that if the West now simply draws back and lets the civil war run its course, Syria will become “a new Somalia rotting in the heart of the Levant.”

“Almost everything America wants to achieve in the Middle East will become harder. Containing terrorism, ensuring the supply of energy and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction … Syria’s disintegration threatens them all.”

BLAMING ASSAD

Where The Economist goes dangerously wrong is in heaping all the blame for this on Mr. Assad. Had he not “embraced a policy of violence from the start” and “attacked the Arab Spring with tanks and gunships” and turned his Alawite praetorian guard upon Sunnis, he would not have “turned peaceful demonstrators into armed militants” and drawn the jihadi hosts into Syria.

To prevent Syria from turning into another Mali, therefore, it asks the U.S. and the EU to administer the same medicine it fed to Qadhafi in Libya — impose a no-fly zone, destroy Syria’s air force and missiles, and arm ‘non-Jihadi rebel groups’ with surface-to-air missiles. These prescriptions reveal a profound ignorance of the situation in both Libya and Syria.

What is more immediately relevant is that its view in not shared by any leader of the democracy movement in Syria. On the contrary, in an article in The Guardian on June 22 last year, Haytham Manna, the chairman of the 16-party National Coalition for Transition to Democracy, and Mr. Assad’s most trenchant critic in the early days of the insurgency, placed the blame for the sidelining of the democracy movement squarely upon the West’s complicity in allowing the Istanbul based Free Syrian Army to recruit Islamist foreign fighters for the assault on Syria.

Six months later, on December 18, he wrote that the Syrian people had come to regard the foreigners not as liberators but as oppressors. “When the Syrian army attacks al-Nusra it is not as the suppressor of the popular movement, but the guarantor of the unity of Syria’s diverse society … It is the alliance between foreign jihadists and some Syrians that risks tearing the country apart, leading to religious extremism, long-term sectarian war, and the persecution of minorities and various civilian groups.”

The Economist correctly perceives that as Syria disintegrates, the jihadis could use “lawless territory as a base for international terror (and) menace Israel across the Goal Heights.” But what it does not perceive is that the collapse of the Assad regime will hasten this process and end by putting Israel in mortal peril. One has only to trace the likely aftermath of its collapse to understand why.

First, the end of Mr. Assad will not necessarily mean the return of peace. As happened in Afghanistan, it will make 5,000 to 6,000 foreign jihadis redundant and turn them into loose cannons in the country. Repatriating them will be far from easy because the ‘Arab Spring’ has shattered their home economies and left millions without work. This is why Libyans make up the largest contingent among the foreign fighters in both Syria and Mali.

STRUGGLE FOR POWER

But they cannot stay on indefinitely in Syria either for, with no common purpose left to unite them, the rivalry between the jihadis and more moderate opponents of Mr. Assad will almost certainly erupt into a struggle for power. Unlike the proxy war that it was able to wage upon Mr. Assad, this is a war the West will not be able to stay out of.

The moderates within the newly created Syrian National Coalition of Opposition and Revolutionary forces (SNCORF) already fear this. That is why within three months of being elected, its President Moaz al Khatib, a former Imam of the Omayyad mosque in Damascus, declared himself willing to attend a conference with Bashar al-Assad to chalk out a peaceful transition in Syria. But his weakness was exposed when the diehards in the SNCORF forced him to retract his offer within days. The only remaining option is also the easiest. This is to channel their fervour into a new jihad. The inevitable next target will be Jordan because it lies on the direct route to Al Quds (Jerusalem) and the Al Aqsa mosque, the second holiest shrine in Islam.

JORDAN, NEXT TARGET

Jordan will either cave in or give them free access to the West Bank. That will leave Israel surrounded, and isolated. Any pre-emptive action it takes to make its borders more secure such as re-occupying the Sinai to block access to Gaza will alienate the Arabs, increase the sway of the jihadis, and blight the prospect for a return to democracy and religious moderation in the foreseeable future. It could also put a question mark over the long-term survival of Israel.

If Barack Obama wishes to arrest the development of another, infinitely more dangerous, quagmire in Syria and Jordan, he must do the opposite of what The Economist is proposing and heed, however belatedly, the pleas of the original Syrian National Council, and other leading democracy activists like Manna, to stop the inflow of arms and foreign fighters. This will, admittedly meet stiff opposition from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Libya. But Mr. Obama does not have the choice of shirking hard decisions, because he or his successors will face worse ones in the future.

Second, Mr. Obama needs to recognise that the only way to achieve a peaceful transition to democracy is through the regime, as is happening in Myanmar, and not after its destruction. Creating a power vacuum by destroying the state does not make way for democracy but chaos. The resulting vacuum is always filled by the most organised, ruthless and therefore undemocratic groups in a society.

In his January 7 speech to his country, Mr. Assad invited all remaining Syrian opposition groups to a second conference on democracy and threw the doors open to a fresh election and the formation of a new government. He should be strongly urged to hold it as soon, and with as few preconditions, as possible. Haytham Manna and his colleagues should be encouraged to attend the conference. Moaz al Khatib also wants to attend it: Mr. Obama should make it possible for him to do so.

Note: This article has been withdrawn from the website without any explanation

(The writer is a senior journalist)

http://www.thehindu.com/topics/?categoryId=403

A Peace Package for the Middle East

Three highly-dangerous Middle East problems — Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the bloody civil war in Syria, and the long-festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict — pose a grave challenge to President Barack Obama and his foreign policy team of John Kerry at State, Chuck Hagel at Defence and John Brennan at the CIA, notes Patrick Seale.

Three highly-dangerous Middle East problems — Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the bloody civil war in Syria, and the long-festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict — pose a grave challenge to President Barack Obama and his foreign policy team of John Kerry at State, Chuck Hagel at Defence and John Brennan at the CIA. America’s vital interests in the Middle East, its political reputation, its ability to project power and influence are intimately tied up with the way it deals — or fails to deal — with these problems. So what advice might one be bold enough to give to President Obama and his team?

Each of these three problems is profoundly destabilising for the region as a whole and risks triggering a war of unpredictable consequences. Taken separately, each of them has so far defied resolution. One suggestion is that tackling them as a package might prove more effective.

Consider, for a moment, how closely inter-connected they are. No one is more concerned than Israel about Iran’s nuclear programme, which it sees as a threat to its military supremacy and ultimately to its security. It fears that a nuclear capable Iran would restrict the freedom — which Israel has enjoyed for decades — to strike its neighbours at will, when they seem threatening.

Iran, however, does not stand alone. Its fate is closely linked to that of Syria, its principal regional ally. Syria has also been the most ardent champion of Palestinian rights and of Lebanon’s freedom from Israeli control. Indeed, the so-called ‘resistance axis’ of Iran, Syria and Lebanon’s Hizballah has sought to deter or contain Israeli attacks while challenging U.S.-Israeli hegemony in the Levant.

Needless to say, Syria’s calamitous civil war has gravely weakened the resistance axis. Israel’s dearest hope is to destroy what remains of it by urging the United States and its allies to bring down the Tehran and the Damascus regimes, thus freeing Israel from any constraint from these powers in its relentless drive for a ‘Greater Israel’.

It can thus be seen that Iran’s nuclear programme, Syria’s existential crisis and Israel’s land hunger are inextricably linked. Attempts to deal with these problems separately have so far failed. The obvious conclusion is that they may be better dealt with as a package. These are not marginal problems which can be left to fester. If the United States wishes to protect itself, its interests and its allies in a highly turbulent environment it must make a supreme effort to resolve them.

Moreover, this is a unique moment: President Obama has been re-elected for a second term. His political authority has been enhanced. The world is looking to him for leadership. Although many other foreign policy problems clamour for his attention — the rising colossus of China first among them — he knows that the Middle East, for all its maddening complexity, latent violence, and the current resurgence of Al-Qaeda, not least in Syria, cannot be ignored.

He should consider the possibility of a trade-off between Iran’s nuclear programme and a Palestinian state. The proposal is simple enough: If Iran were to agree — under strict international supervision — to give up, once and for all, its ambition to become a nuclear-capable state, Israel would, in exchange, agree to the establishment of an independent Palestine on the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem. The exact terms of the trade-off would evidently need negotiation and refinement, but the main lines and necessary mutual concessions of an Israeli-Palestinian deal have been extensively debated and are widely known.

Such a bargain between Iran’s nuclear ambitions and an Israeli-Palestinian settlement is not as far-fetched or as fictional as it may sound. Iran has boxed itself into a corner. It knows that the United States will not allow it to become a nuclear power. It wants a dignified exit from its present predicament and an end to crippling sanctions. Israel, in turn, faces international isolation — not to speak of the permanent threat of terrorism — if it insists on stealing what remains of the West Bank. It, too, needs a dignified exit from the insanity of its fanatical settlers and religious nationalists who, if unchecked, would condemn Israel to pariah status and permanent war. A trade-off would resolve two of the region’s most intractable problems to the great benefit of everyone concerned. Peace and normal relations with the entire Muslim world would be Israel’s very substantial reward.

What about Syria? It lies at the very heart of the regional power system. Its on-going civil war is threatening to destabilise its neighbours — Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. Israel itself will not be immune. Islamist fighters, some linked to Al-Qaeda, are flowing into Syria, while refugees are fleeing out to neighbouring states in very large numbers. The toll of dead and wounded is heavy, material destruction great and human misery incalculable.

It is by now abundantly clear that there is no military solution to the conflict: Neither the regime nor its opponents can hope to win an outright victory. No outside power wants to intervene militarily. Yet the regime and its enemies are incapable of negotiating an end to the conflict without outside help.

What should the international community do? First, the United States and Russia (with active support from other powers) should join together in imposing a ceasefire on both sides of the conflict. This could involve deploying an international force around Syria’s borders to prevent the inflow of fighters, weapons, and other military equipment to both government and rebels.

Secondly, major external powers — Arab, Western, Chinese, Russian and others — should solemnly pledge to contribute to a Syria Reconstruction Fund of some $10bn-$15bn. The money would be entrusted to the World Bank and disbursed only when a permanent ceasefire is in place and when some clear progress is made towards a negotiated settlement. The existence of the Fund will provide a real incentive.

Thirdly, the United Nations Secretary General, with unanimous backing from the Security Council, should summon a conference of national reconciliation in Damascus attended by regime representatives as well as by all Syrian factions, groups, parties and prominent individuals prepared to renounce war.

The task will not be easy. The wounds of the conflict are very deep. But for the sake of Syria and its neighbours — for the sake of peace in the region — a supreme effort must be made to prevent the collapse of the Syrian state and its possible fragmentation. The difficult task will be to reshape Syria’s political system on democratic lines. Political freedoms will have to be guaranteed, individual rights respected, police brutality ended, the rule of law observed, government services restored and minorities protected. An essential goal must be the preservation of the Syrian Arab army as the indispensable institution of the state. In Iraq, it was the disbanding of the army which led to the collapse of the state, triggering the catastrophic civil war from which the country has yet to recover.

If Barack Obama were to adopt the programme outlined above and throw his full weight behind it, his place in history as a great peacemaker would be assured.

Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=56710

How Syria is Being Ripped Apart by Foreign Meddling and Sectarian War

One can no longer say that Syria is a moderate, pragmatic, stabilizing and secular regional centre keeping extremism at bay.
December 20, 2012  |

Everything about Syria is steeped in miasma: is this conflict politically and sociologically definable as a civil war? Has it become a sectarian war? How strong and widespread is the Salafist (and global Jihadi) presence? Was militarization wise or did the opposition have no choice in this regard? Are the armed groups able to defeat the regime’s forces or will there be a perpetual, bloody stalemate whose only certainty is Syria’s complete physical destruction and long-term division? Is a negotiated outcome, that is, a political solution the only possibility, or is it uninformed to speak of political solutions at this stage of the conflict?

Despite this fog, there are, in my mind, several certainties. One, Syria is not a clear-cut case of bad regime versus good society, for that society is not at one regarding the violent overthrow of the state. This is not a mass, democratic revolution but a Sunni rebellion. Any spontaneity to its genesis, including the goal of non-violent resistance, came to a speedy end, provided with a significant impetus by the flow of foreign arms, money, and intelligence, including from the US. A substantial ‘silent’ majority desperately wishes to avoid Syria’s disintegration because they simply love their country, not the regime or armed rebels, and prefer reform and a negotiated settlement.

Two, it is false to equate, as the regime portrays it, every Syrian’s opposition to the Ba’athi state with acting on behalf of Zionists and imperialists, and equally false to suggest that advocating a negotiated settlement equates to buying into the regime’s self-narrative of an indispensable anti-imperialist frontline.

Three, foreign powers, especially Washington, several of its NATO allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, the latter essentially monarchic police states, are violating international law in pursuing subversion and violent regime change, and share primary responsibility for the radicalization, destabilization, and horrific violence inflicted on the people of Syria. Washington is interested in regime change, not in ensuring that neither side prevails to force a settlement.

Four, the fundamental truth is the Syrian people’s case for dignity and freedom, rights brutally denied and violated for so long by fearsome regimes such as the Syrian Ba’ath. The revolt against the Ba’athist regime, despite its now tainted nature, is not a conspiracy.

Five, despite Syria’s social diversity and divided loyalties, the fact that the regime has many supporters, and that a majority desires peaceful change, calls for the Syrian socio-political system to become no less than a civil, human rights-respecting, citizenship-based state. Still, Syria’s internal complexity and regional role requires special care and objective realism. Take Aleppo as a microcosm of Syrian complexity, the largest Syrian city containing some 82% Sunnis. Listening to the western, Qatari, or Saudi media, one would think that the city erupted into spontaneous rebellion and from the beginning was fighting a heroic war against the regime’s military and security forces. By objective accounts, however, Aleppo’s denizens supported the Damascus government by a large majority, many of them paying the price of Free Syrian Army reprisals. Now, since the penetration of armed groups and the violent zealotry of Salafists and foreign Jihadis, with their suicide bombings, kidnappings, and beheadings, looting and rape, as well as heavy, indiscriminate government firepower leading to the slow obliteration of this great historic and commercial city – one wonders what has happened to its people and their loyalties.

We only know that government forces and loyalists still hold the city, minus a couple of districts, as they do most of the country. Countless people have fled, many of their empty homes looted and ransacked by their would-be liberators, fearful of returning to rebel reprisals. Aleppo’s Islamist leaning al-Tawhid Division, ostensibly part of the FSA, contains numerous-armed factions, including many Salafi Islamists, who, themselves, are varied, ranging from Brotherhood types to al-Qaida-like extremists. There is also quite noticeable and significant Salafi literalist influence among the armed rebels generally. The disparate factions that make up the FSA are largely Islamist-dominated. Its battalions contain thousands of fighters of the Salafi/Jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, a mainstay of the al-Tawhid in Aleppo.

In a situation of decentralized and disparate commands, such people are there at the front lines. All these groups, including the FSA, have an uneasy, distrustful relationship with the newly minted National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, as they previously did with the now discarded Syrian National Council, and as they have with the western powers. Fortunately, Syria does not have a tradition of extremist political Islam. On the contrary, given its pluralist diversity, its geostrategic location, and secular nationalist history, Jihadi-type extremism does not fit in Syria.

The chaos and physical destruction, the ever-present danger of the regime-Sunni war transmuting into a sectarian civil war are deeply worrying, and the Salafists thrive on such an environment. No question, though, in its militarist, violent manifestations, this is essentially a rebellion of the Sunni Muslims, at core from the regions of Hama and Homs, and battle-tested foreigners, including Salafis, supported by the Sunni autocracies and wealthy donors of the peninsula. It is unlikely that a literalist Salafist regime will come to power, much less global Jihadis, but likely that a Sunni-Brotherhood dominated regime, sidelining the National Coalition, will.

The defunct National Council’s main obsession was arming without a clear political programme. The new National Coalition has got itself political recognition as a sort of provisional government—even as Syria remains a member state of the UN led by the al-Assad government—from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, France, Britain, and Turkey, followed by the US, which, however, consigned one rebel group, the Jabha, to its terrorist blacklist. (This prompted all the rest of the armed rebel groups to declare their support for the Jabha.)

Western support is predicated on the promise that the Coalition will unify the opposition, at least act as an umbrella, and be a better watchdog that presumes to undertake the impossible, even inane, task of vouching for and endorsing those groups deserving of armed support, which Washington reckons amounts to two-thirds of the fighting groups and their commanders. These parties essentially cajoled through the expansion of the new Coalition’s membership to three times the previous Council’s size and which includes most of the old Council’s members. The new body’s composition is a safeguard to dilute Islamist influence.

Washington in particular rejected the Brotherhood-dominated Council because it could not deliver unity, or control or exclude extremist Islamists, even though Council members did what the US wanted most of all: they talked about peace and good relations with Israel.

Whether the US is willing to advocate a negotiated solution is in my view not an open question. Its apparent caution in providing advanced, or heavy, weaponry, unlike the reckless monarchic allies it shakily controls, is due to its fear of uncontrolled, unmanaged violence leading to an incompliant, even hostile, Islamist regime. The Obama administration’s ambivalence stems from the tension between aggressive regional allies and its recognition of several realities: the proliferation of extremist groups, the possibility of a bloody stalemate that will destabilize the region, and the potential that an armed group will get its hands on chemical weapons.

Thus, Washington’s most urgent and immediate goal, when not obstructing UN peace and dialogue missions, is to pressure the Coalition to construct a centralized military command and political unity and ferret out the extremists, supposedly one-third of the armed rebels. Its version of a negotiated solution is not genuine internal talks between Damascus and the rebels, but Assad’s departure, which Washington defines as a ‘transition’, but which is actually a precondition.

This, the US imagines, would avoid the concomitant augmentation of Salafi extremist power caused by protracted violence and keep international law and Russia out of the equation, ensuring an obeisant Coalition’s rule. Washington’s conception of ending Syrian suffering is not via morally, legally, diplomatically urgent negotiations between rebels and government. Instead, it repeatedly stresses Assad’s inevitably violent downfall, as only he is responsible for his people’s calamity, thereby absolving it and its allies of complicity in Syria’s torment and prolongation of this horrific upheaval.

Yet the foreign arming of the rebels – that is, the militarization of this conflict – has been Syria’s worst affliction. For Syria does not need lethal arms and war, but a coherent, truly representative opposition built without interference, and ready to find a negotiated political solution to violent conflict. This requires internal Syrian national agreement on a transitional regime change through supervised elections. This at least is the ideal, though not the reality; for everyone, from assorted rebels, hell bent on acquiring advanced weaponry to Coalition members to Washington to local Gulf regimes, wants Assad’s head. The Alawite core of the regime not surprisingly sees this as an existential threat.

What prevails in Syria today is maddening ambiguity and galling hypocrisy on all sides: of the relationship between the Coalition and armed rebels, the craziness of inter-Arab politics, Gulf and Turkish hatred of the Shi’i Alawite Syrian regime—which I call the Sunni Syndrome—nation-destroying French and British actions characterized as advocacy of democracy, and single-minded US control of Syria couched as constructive, responsible diplomacy.

With multiple external players violently pursuing their own agendas supporting multiple factions with their own visions, such as these are, the chance of Syrians reaching a negotiated political solution, much less a compromise leading to such, is virtually nil. In reality, the Ba’ath, the Syrian regime, al-Assad, the socio-political system that prevailed in Syria for nearly a half century all have ended, or at least will not be restored. This in itself is extraordinary. Ultimately, the horrific violence and terrorism from both the state and its opponents is the responsibility of the regime, for it chose to let the country go to hell, and unwittingly invited outside intervention, rather than peacefully oversee a democratic transition in the early phase of the rebellion.

This is an enduring quality of Arab ruling regimes, mostly because they lack fundamental legitimacy and rule over divided societies. One can no longer say Syria is what it used to be, a moderate, pragmatic, stabilizing and secular regional centre keeping extremism at bay. This political role is a natural function of its geography and relatively diverse ethno-sectarian make-up, as well as the political sophistication of its people. Under radically changing circumstances, most importantly, a weakened and fractured Syria, it may not be able to play that role again for decades to come. The west and their autocratic Middle Eastern allies are destroying one ruling group in exchange for another dominated by Brotherhood Islamists. And those Salafists/Jihadists on the front lines will not only want a share of power, but some of them may continue post-Assad violence and insurgency, to the continuing danger of many Syrians.

Issa Khalaf, a Palestinian-American, has a D. Phil. in Politics and Middle East Studies from Oxford University

http://www.newsnow.co.uk/A/617515563?-20865:11558

This Is Not a Revolution

The New-york review of books|

November 8, 2012
Hussein Agha
and Robert Malley|

All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

—Paul Simon

Darkness descends upon the Arab world. Waste, death, and destruction attend a fight for a better life. Outsiders compete for influence and settle accounts. The peaceful demonstrations with which this began, the lofty values that inspired them, become distant memories. Elections are festive occasions where political visions are an afterthought. The only consistent program is religious and is stirred by the past. A scramble for power is unleashed, without clear rules, values, or endpoint. It will not stop with regime change or survival. History does not move forward. It slips sideways.

Games occur within games: battles against autocratic regimes, a Sunni–Shiite confessional clash, a regional power struggle, a newly minted cold war. Nations divide, minorities awaken, sensing a chance to step out of the state’s confining restrictions. The picture is blurred. These are but fleeting fragments of a landscape still coming into its own, with only scrappy hints of an ultimate destination. The changes that are now believed to be essential are liable to be disregarded as mere anecdotes on an extended journey.

New or newly invigorated actors rush to the fore: the ill-defined “street,” prompt to mobilize, just as quick to disband; young protesters, central activists during the uprising, roadkill in its wake. The Muslim Brothers yesterday dismissed by the West as dangerous extremists are now embraced and feted as sensible, businesslike pragmatists. The more traditionalist Salafis, once allergic to all forms of politics, are now eager to compete in elections. There are shadowy armed groups and militias of dubious allegiance and unknown benefactors as well as gangs, criminals, highwaymen, and kidnappers.

Alliances are topsy-turvy, defy logic, are unfamiliar and shifting. Theocratic regimes back secularists; tyrannies promote democracy; the US forms partnerships with Islamists; Islamists support Western military intervention. Arab nationalists side with regimes they have long combated; liberals side with Islamists with whom they then come to blows. Saudi Arabia backs secularists against the Muslim Brothers and Salafis against secularists. The US is allied with Iraq, which is allied with Iran, which supports the Syrian regime, which the US hopes to help topple. The US is also allied with Qatar, which subsidizes Hamas, and with Saudi Arabia, which funds the Salafis who inspire jihadists who kill Americans wherever they can.

In record time, Turkey evolved from having zero problems with its neighbors to nothing but problems with them. It has alienated Iran, angered Iraq, and had a row with Israel. It virtually is at war with Syria. Iraqi Kurds are now Ankara’s allies, even as it wages war against its own Kurds and even as its policies in Iraq and Syria embolden secessionist tendencies in Turkey itself.

For years, Iran opposed Arab regimes, cultivating ties with Islamists with whose religious outlook it felt it could make common cause. As soon as they take power, the Islamists seek to reassure their former Saudi and Western foes and distance themselves from Tehran despite Iran’s courting. The Iranian regime will feel obliged to diversify its alliances, reach out to non-Islamists who feel abandoned by the nascent order and appalled by the budding partnership between Islamists and the US. Iran has experience in such matters: for the past three decades, it has allied itself with secular Syria even as Damascus suppressed its Islamists.

When goals converge, motivations differ. The US cooperated with Gulf Arab monarchies and sheikhdoms in deposing Qaddafi yesterday and in opposing Assad today. It says it must be on the right side of history. Yet those regimes do not respect at home the rights they piously pursue abroad. Their purpose is neither democracy nor open societies. They are engaged in a struggle for regional domination. What, other than treasure, can proponents of a self-styled democratic uprising find in countries whose own system of governance is anathema to the democratic project they allegedly promote?

The new system of alliances hinges on too many false assumptions and masks too many deep incongruities. It is not healthy because it cannot be real. Something is wrong. Something is unnatural. It cannot end well.

A media war that started in Egypt reaches its zenith in Syria. Each side shows only its own, amplifies the numbers, disregards the rest. In Bahrain, the opposite is true. No matter how many opponents of the regime turn up, few take notice. It does not register on the attention scale. Not long ago, footage from Libya glorified motley fighters with colorful bandanas and triumphant spiel. The real battles, bloody and often from the skies, raged elsewhere. Casualties were invisible.

Throngs gather in Tahrir Square. The camera zooms in on protesters. What about the unseen millions who stayed at home? Did they rejoice at Mubarak’s overthrow or quietly lament his departure? How do Egyptians feel about the current disorder, unrest, economic collapse, and political uncertainty? In the elections that ensued, 50 percent did not vote. Of those who did, half voted for the representative of the old order. Who will look after those who lie on the other side of the right side of history?

Most Syrians fight neither to defend the regime nor to support the opposition. They are at the receiving end of this vicious confrontation, their wishes unnoticed, their voices unheard, their fates forgotten. The camera becomes an integral part of the unrest, a tool of mobilization, propaganda, and incitement. The military imbalance favors the old regimes but is often more than compensated for by the media imbalance that favors the new forces. The former Libyan regime had Qaddafi’s bizarre rhetoric; Assad’s Syria relies on its discredited state-run media. It’s hardly a contest. In the battle for public sympathy, in the age of news-laundering, the old orders never stood a chance.

In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain, no unifying figure of stature has emerged with the capacity to shape a new path. There is scant leadership. Where there is leadership, it tends to be by committee. Where there are committees, they emerge mysteriously to assume authority no one has granted them. More often than not, legitimacy is bestowed from abroad: the West provides respectability and exposure; Gulf Arab states supply resources and support; international organizations offer validity and succor.

Those in charge often lack the strength that comes from a clear and loyal domestic constituency; they need foreign approval and so they must be cautious, adjust their positions to what outsiders accept. Past revolutionary leaders were not driven by such considerations. For better or for worse, they were stubbornly independent and took pride in rebuffing foreign interference.

Not unlike the rulers they helped depose, Islamists placate the West. Not unlike those they replaced, who used the Islamists as scarecrows to keep the West by their side, the Muslim Brotherhood waves the specter of what might come next should it fail now: the Salafis who, for their part and not unlike the Brothers of yore, are torn between fealty to their traditions and the taste of power.

It’s a game of musical chairs. In Egypt, Salafis play the part once played by the Muslim Brotherhood; the Brotherhood plays the part once played by the Mubarak regime. In Palestine, Islamic Jihad is the new Hamas, firing rockets to embarrass Gaza’s rulers; Hamas, the new Fatah, claiming to be a resistance movement while clamping down on those who dare resist; Fatah, a version of the old Arab autocracies it once lambasted. How far off is the day when Salafis present themselves to the world as the preferable alternative to jihadists?

Egyptian politics are wedged between the triumphant mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, more hard-line Salafis, anxious non-Islamists, and remnants of the old order. As the victorious Brotherhood tries to reach an arrangement with the rest, the political future is a blur. The speed and elegance with which the new president, Mohamed Morsi, retired or sidelined the old military leaders and the quiet with which this daring move was greeted suggest that the Islamists’ confidence has grown, that they are willing to move at a faster pace.

Tunisia is a mixed tale. The transition has been largely peaceful; the an-Nahda party, which won the elections last October, offers a pragmatic, moderate face of Islamism. But its efforts to consolidate power are a source of nervousness. Mistrust between secularists and Islamists is growing; socioeconomic protests at times become violent. Salafis lurk in the wings, assailing symbols of modern society, free speech, and gender equality.

In Yemen, former president Saleh is out of power but not offstage. One war brews in the north, another in the south. Jihadists flex their muscles. The young revolutionaries who dreamed of a complete change can only watch as different factions of the same old elite rearrange the deck. Saudis, Iranians, and Qataris sponsor their own factions. Minor clashes could escalate into major confrontations. Meanwhile, US drones eliminate al-Qaeda operatives and whoever happens to be in their vicinity.

Day by day, the civil war in Syria takes on an uglier, more sectarian hue. The country has become an arena for a regional proxy war. The opposition is an eclectic assortment of Muslim Brothers, Salafis, peaceful protesters, armed militants, Kurds, soldiers who have defected, tribal elements, and foreign fighters. There is little that either the regime or the opposition won’t contemplate in their desperation to triumph. The state, society, and an ancient culture collapse. The conflict engulfs the region.

The battle in Syria also is a battle for Iraq. Sunni Arab states have not accepted the loss of Baghdad to Shiites and, in their eyes, to Safavid Iranians. A Sunni takeover in Syria will revive their colleagues’ fortunes in Iraq. Militant Iraqi Sunnis are emboldened and al-Qaeda is revitalized. A war for Iraq’s reconquest will be joined by its neighbors. The region cares about Syria. It obsesses about Iraq.

Islamists in the region await the outcome in Syria. They do not wish to bite off more than they can chew. If patience is the Islamist first principle, consolidation of gains is the second. Should Syria fall, Jordan could be next. Its peculiar demography—a Palestinian majority ruled over by a trans-Jordanian minority—has been a boon to the regime: the two communities bear deep grievances against the Hashemite rulers yet distrust each other more. That could change in the face of the unifying power of Islam for which ethnicity, in theory at least, is of little consequence.

Weaker entities may follow. In northern Lebanon, Islamist and Salafi groups actively support the Syrian opposition, with whom they may have more in common than with Lebanese Shiites and Christians. From the outset a fragile contraption, Lebanon is pulled in competing directions: some would look to a new Sunni-dominated Syria with envy, perhaps a yearning to join. Others would look to it with fright and despair.

In Bahrain, a Sunni monarchy intent on retaining power and privilege violently suppresses the majority Shiites. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states come to their ally’s rescue. The West, so loud elsewhere, is mute. When Libya holds elections, Islamists do not fare well; their opponents believe they finally achieved their one victory in a country that has no tradition of political openness, lacks a state, and is sated with armed militias that regularly engage in deadly clashes. An octogenarian leadership in Saudi Arabia struggles with a looming transition, lives in fear of Iran and its own population, doles out cash to fend off dissatisfaction. How long can all this last?

Mohamed Morsi; drawing by John Springs

In some countries, regimes will be toppled, in others they will survive. Forces that have been defeated are unlikely to have been crushed. They will regroup and try to fight back. The balance of power is not clear-cut. Victory does not necessarily strengthen the victor.

Those in power occupy the state, but it is an asset that might prove of limited value. Inherently weak and with meager legitimacy, Arab states tend to be viewed by their citizens with suspicion, extraneous bodies superimposed on more deeply rooted, familiar social structures with long, continuous histories. They enjoy neither the acceptability nor the authority of their counterparts elsewhere. Where uprisings occur, the ability of these states to function weakens further as their coercive power erodes.

To be in the seat of power need not mean to exercise power. In Lebanon, the pro-West March 14 coalition, invigorated while in opposition, was deflated after it formed the cabinet in 2005. Hezbollah has never been more on the defensive or enjoyed less moral authority than since it became the major force behind the government. Those out of power face fewer constraints. They have the luxury to denounce their rulers’ failings, the freedom that comes with the absence of responsibility. In a porous, polarized Middle East, they enjoy access to readily available outside support.

To be in charge, to operate along formal, official, state channels, can encumber as much as empower. Syria’s military withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005 did not curb its influence; Damascus simply exerted it more surreptitiously, without public glare and accountability. Tomorrow, a similar pattern might hold in Syria itself. The regime’s collapse would be a significant blow to Iran and Hezbollah, but one can wonder how devastating. The day after such a long and violent conflict is more likely to witness chaos than stability, a scramble for power rather than a strong central government. Defeated and excluded political forces will seek help from any source and solicit foreign patrons regardless of their identity. To exploit disorder is a practice in which Iran and Hezbollah are far better versed than their foes. Without a Syrian regime whose interests they need to take into account and whose constraints they need to abide by, they might be able to act more freely.

The Muslim Brotherhood prevails. The newly elected Egyptian president comes from their ranks. They rule in Tunisia. They control Gaza. They have gained in Morocco. In Syria and Jordan too, their time might come.

The Muslim Brotherhood prevails: those are weighty and, not long ago, unthinkable, unutterable words. The Brothers survived eighty years in the underground and the trenches, hounded, tortured, and killed, forced to compromise and bide their time. The fight between Islamism and Arab nationalism has been long, tortuous, and bloody. Might the end be near?

World War I and the ensuing European imperial ascent halted four centuries of Islamic Ottoman rule. With fits and starts, the next century would be that of Arab nationalism. To many, this was an alien, unnatural, inauthentic Western import—a deviation that begged to be rectified. Forced to adjust their views, the Islamists acknowledged the confines of the nation-state and irreligious rule. But their targets remained the nationalist leaders and their disfigured successors.

Last year, they helped topple the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, the pale successors of the original nationalists. The Islamists had more worthy and dangerous adversaries in mind. They struck at Ben Ali and Mubarak, but the founding fathers—Habib Bourguiba and Gamal Abdel Nasser—were in their sights. They reckon they have corrected history. They have revived the era of musulmans sans frontières.

What will all this mean? The Islamists are loath either to share power achieved at high cost or to squander gains so patiently acquired. They must balance among their own restive rank-and-file, a nervous larger society, and an undecided international community. The temptation to strike fast pulls in one direction; the desire to reassure tugs in another. In general, they will prefer to eschew coercion, awaken the people to their dormant Islamic nature rather than foist it upon them. They will try to do it all: rule, enact social transformations incrementally, and be true to themselves without becoming a menace to others.

The Islamists propose a bargain. In exchange for economic aid and political support, they will not threaten what they believe are core Western interests: regional stability, Israel, the fight against terror, energy flow. No danger to Western security. No commercial war. The showdown with the Jewish state can wait. The focus will be on the slow, steady shaping of Islamic societies. The US and Europe may voice concern, even indignation at such a domestic makeover. But they’ll get over it. Just as they got over the austere fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia. Bartering—as in, we’ll take care of your needs, let us take care of ours—Islamists feel, will do the trick. Looking at history, who can blame them?

Mubarak was toppled in part because he was viewed as excessively subservient to the West, yet the Islamists who succeed him might offer the West a sweeter because more sustainable deal. They think they can get away with what he could not. Stripped of his nationalist mantle, Mubarak had little to fall back on; he was a naked autocrat. The Muslim Brothers by comparison have a much broader program—moral, social, cultural. Islamists feel they can still follow their convictions, even if they are not faithfully anti-Western. They can moderate, dilute, defer.

Unlike the close allies of the West they have replaced, Islamists are heard calling for NATO military intervention in Libya yesterday, Syria today, wherever they entertain the hope to take over tomorrow. One can use the distant infidels, who will not stay around for long, to jettison local infidels, who have hounded them for decades. Rejection of foreign interference, once a centerpiece of the post-independence outlook, is no longer the order of the day. It is castigated as counterrevolutionary.

What the US sought to obtain over decades through meddling and imposition, it might now obtain via acquiescence: Arab regimes that will not challenge Western interests. Little wonder that many in the region are persuaded that America was complicit in the Islamists’ rise, a quiet partner in what has been happening.

Everywhere, Israel faces the rise of Islam, of militancy, of radicalism. Former allies are gone; erstwhile foes reign supreme. But the Islamists have different and broader objectives. They wish to promote their Islamic project, which means consolidating their rule where they can, refraining from alienating the West, and avoiding perilous and precocious clashes with Israel. In this scheme, the presence of a Jewish state is and will remain intolerable, but it is probably the last piece of a larger puzzle that may never be fully assembled.

The quest to establish an independent, sovereign Palestinian state was never at the heart of the Islamist project. Hamas, the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, harbors grander, less territorially confined but also less immediately achievable designs. Despite Hamas’s circumlocutions and notwithstanding its political evolution, it never truly deviated from its original view—the Jewish state is illegitimate and all the land of historic Palestine is inherently Islamic. If the current balance of power is not in your favor, wait and do what you can to take care of the disparity. The rest is tactics.

The Palestinian question has been the preserve of the Palestinian national movement. As of the late 1980s, its declared goal became a sovereign state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Alternatives, whether interim or temporary, have been flatly rejected. The Islamists’ plan may be more ambitious and grandiose but more flexible and elastic. For them, a diminutive, amputated state, hemmed in by Israel, dependent on its goodwill, predicated on its recognition, and entailing an end to the conflict, is not worth fighting for.

They can live with a range of transient arrangements: an interim agreement; a long-term truce, or hudna; a possible West Bank confederation with Jordan, with Gaza moving toward Egypt. All will advance the further Islamization of Palestinian society. All permit Hamas to turn to its social, cultural, and religious agenda, its true calling. All allow Hamas to maintain the conflict with Israel without having to wage it. None violates Hamas’s core tenets. It can put its ultimate goal on hold. Someday, the time for Palestine, for Jerusalem may come. Not now.

In the age of Arab Islamism, Israel may find Hamas’s purported intransigence more malleable than Fatah’s ostensible moderation. Israel fears the Islamic awakening. But the more immediate threat could be to the Palestinian national movement. There is no energy left in the independence project; associated with the old politics and long-worn-out leaderships, it has expended itself. Fatah and the PLO will have no place in the new world. The two-state solution is no one’s primary concern. It might expire not because of violence, settlements, or America’s inexpert role. It might perish of indifference…..

Read More: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/08/not-revolution/?pagination=false

Egypt’s Morsi resets ties with US

By M K Bhadrakumar | 25 September 2012

The confusion in the American mind about Egypt ended this past weekend, a mere nine days since President Barack Obama made the famous remark in a television interview that he wasn’t sure of post-Hosni Mubarak Egypt being the United States’ ally.

The confusion actually arose when US National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor scrambled to clarify that “ally” is a “legal term of art”, whereas Egypt is a “long-standing and close partner” of the United States, and, thereupon, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland butted in to contradict both Obama and Vietor by insisting Egypt was indeed a “major non-NATO ally”.

In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday, Egyptian
President Mohamed Morsi offered to clear up the confusion. Asked whether Egypt was an ally, Morsi smilingly remarked: “It depends on your definition of an ally.” He then helpfully suggested that the two countries were “real friends”.

Growing up with the Brothers
Now, as Morsi probably intended, the thing about “real friends” is that they don’t expect either side to fawn, as a poodle might do by wagging its tail. Thus when he travels to the US to address the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Morsi doesn’t have to meet with Obama. Yet they will remain “real friends” – although they’ve never met.

According to The New York Times, Obama cold-shouldered Morsi’s request for a meeting. Cairo maintains that it is all a scheduling problem and the planning of a visit by Morsi to Washington was work in progress. Meanwhile, Morsi has “quite a busy schedule” in New York and Obama too happens to have a “tight schedule” – this according to Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr.

In fact, Morsi’s only meeting with US officials during this week’s visit to that country may be at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (which, by the way, Obama also is attending).

There is hardly any excuse left now for the American mind to remain confused about the bitter harvest of the Arab Spring on Tahrir Square. The spin doctors who prophesied that Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood would ipso facto pursue the Mubarak track on foreign policies have scurried away.

This is especially so after watching Morsi’s astounding televised interview on Saturday, his first to the Egyptian state TV since his election in June. He spoke at some length on the Iran question, which has somehow come to be the litmus test to estimate where exactly Egypt stands as a regional power.

Morsi affirmed that it is important for Egypt to have a “strong relationship” with Iran. He described Iran as “a major player in the region that could have an active and supportive role in solving the Syrian problem”. Morsi explained his decision to include Iran in the four-member contact group that Egypt has formed – along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia – on the Syrian crisis.

Dismissing the Western opposition to engaging Iran, he said: “I don’t see the presence of Iran in this quartet as a problem, but it is a part of solving the [Syrian] problem.” He said Iran’s close proximity to Syria and Tehran’s strong ties Damascus made it “vital” in resolving the Syrian crisis.

Morsi added: “And we [Egypt] do not have a significant problem with Iran, it [Egypt-Iran relationship] is normal like with the rest of the world’s states.”

Equally, Morsi spoke defiantly in his interview with The New York Times regarding Egypt’s ties with the US and the latter’s relations with the Arab world. The overpowering message is that Cairo will no longer be bullied by Washington. He said:

  • “I grew up with the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned my principles in the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned how to love my country with the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned politics with the Brotherhood. I was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
  • “Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region.”
  • It was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance with Egypt.
  • The United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.
  • “If you [US] want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment. When the Egyptians decide something, probably it is not appropriate for the US. When the Americans decide something, this, of course, is not appropriate for Egypt.”
  • The Arabs and Americans have “a shared objective, each to live free in their own land, according to their customs and values, in a fair and democratic fashion … [in] a harmonious, peaceful co-existence”.
  • Americans “have a special responsibility” for the Palestinians because the United States signed the 1978 Camp David accord. “As long as peace and justice are not fulfilled for the Palestinians, then the treaty remains unfulfilled.”
  • If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. The last bit in particular is ominous. Morsi could be hinting that Egypt intends to seek changes to the 1978 peace treaty. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman hurried to declare on Sunday that there was not the “slightest possibility” that Israel would accept any such changes. “We will not accept any modification of the Camp David Accords,” Lieberman said.

A ‘fast-forward’
The refrain by Western experts used to be that Egypt’s Brothers depended on US and Saudi generosity to run their government in Cairo. More important, Washington spread an impression that it enjoyed a larger-than-life influence over the New Egypt. The US was supposed to have acted as a mediator between the Egyptian military and the Brothers.

But Morsi scattered the thesis. “No, no, it is not that they [military leadership] ‘decided’ to do it [stepping down]. This is the will of the Egyptian people through the elected president, right? The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed forces. Full stop … We are behaving according to the Egyptian people’s choice and will, nothing else – is it clear?” he asked the New York Times editors.

The picture that emerges from Morsi’s stunning interview is that the US has suffered a huge setback to its regional strategy in the Middle East. The fact that Obama has shied away from meeting with Morsi this week underscores the gravity of the deep chill in the US-Egyptian ties. And Obama’s snub comes after he took the initiative to invite Morsi to visit the US and insisted it should be an early visit, even sending Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to deliver the invitation letter and thereafter following up with visits by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to Cairo.

Morsi has taken a series of steps since he took over in July, which, in retrospect, had the principal objective of conveying to Washington that he resented the US diktat and intended to follow an independent foreign policy. His decision to visit China and Iran was a calculated one, intended to signal his empathy with countries that challenged US hegemony in the Middle East and to underscore that he hoped to reduce Egypt’s dependence on the United States. But Washington kept pretending that it didn’t take notice.

However, there has been a “fast-forward” in the past 10 days, since the anti-Islam American film, the killing of the US ambassador in Benghazi and the storming of the US Embassy in Cairo by Egyptian protesters. Morsi didn’t react to the storming of the embassy for a full 36 hours. Simply put, he could sense the Arab street heaving with fury toward the US and he decided that it would be politically injudicious for him to do anything other than let the popular anger play out.

Morsi’s deafening silence or inertia provoked Obama to call him up to admonish him (according to leaked US accounts), but all that Morsi would do was to send police reinforcements to protect the embassy compound. He never condemned the storming of the embassy as such.

Living with yesterday’s tyrant
Things can never be the same again in the US-Egypt relationship. A 33-year slice of diplomatic history through which Cairo used to be Washington’s dependable ally is breaking loose and drifting to the horizon. Uncharted waters lie ahead for the US diplomacy in the Middle East. Clearly, the axis that is pivotal to the US regional strategy in the Middle East – comprising Israel and the so-called “moderate” Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, etc – cannot hold together without Egypt, and the strategy itself is in peril.

In immediate terms, the fallout is going to be serious in Syria. A Western intervention in Syria now can be virtually ruled out. On the other hand, without an intervention, a regime change will be a long haul. In turn, Turkey is going to be in a fix, having bitten more than it could chew and with the US in no mood to step in to expedite the Arab Spring in Damascus. (Obama called up Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan last week to extend moral support.)

The good thing is that the US and its allies may now be open to the idea of a national dialogue involving the Syrian government. In fact, the most recent Russian statements on Syria hint at an air of nascent expectations. On the contrary, nervousness with a touch of bitterness is already apparent in the comment by the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper on the weekend, while taking stock of the United States’ growing difficulties with Egypt’s Brothers:

Will the US president allow his legacy to bear the headline of having kept Bashar al-Assad in power? It would be a terrible legacy to leave behind, no matter how much it could be justified by such arguments as the wisdom of living with yesterday’s tyrant because today’s tyrant could be worse – and what is meant here is not just the tyrant of unruly mobs, but also the tyrants of Muslim extremism and its relations with moderate Islamism in power.

Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia stayed away from the meeting of the quartet on Syria that Cairo hosted last Monday, without offering any explanation.

Simply put, Riyadh is unable to come to terms with Egypt’s return to the centre stage of Arab politics after a full three decades of absence during which the Saudi regime appropriated for itself Cairo’s traditional role as the throbbing heart of Arabism. Riyadh will find it painful to vacate the role as the leader of the Arab world that it got used to enjoying. Almost every single day, Saudi media connected with the regime pour calumnies on Egypt’s Brothers, even alleging lately that they are the twin brothers of al-Qaeda.

Uncontrollable anger
Again, the elaborate charade that the Saudis stage-managed – propagating the Muslim sectarian discords as the core issue on the Middle East’s political arena – is not sticking anymore, now that the two biggest Sunni and Shi’ite countries in the region – Egypt and Iran – are holding each other’s hands, demonstrating goodwill and displaying willingness to work together to address key regional issues. The worst-case scenario for the Saudi regime will be if in the coming months the Arab Spring begins its fateful journey toward Riyadh and the Arabian Peninsula, where the Brothers have been active for decades, welcomes it as a long-awaited spring.

The heart of the matter is that on a regional plane, the Iranian viewpoint that the Arab Spring is quintessentially “Islamic” stands vindicated. In an interview with the Financial Times last week, the Speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani, made the stunning disclosure that Iranian diplomats had met members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria as well as the Salafis (who are being financed by the Saudis) to encourage them to accept “democratic reforms through peaceful behavior, not violence”. This made complete mockery of the Syrian logarithm as per the Saudi (and Turkish and US) estimation – Sunni militancy as the antidote to (Shi’ite) Iran’s influence in the region.

In sum, Morsi’s friendly remarks about Iran point toward a regional strategic realignment on an epic scale subsuming the contrived air of sectarian schisms, which practically no Western (or Turkish) experts could have foreseen. It is a matter of time now before Egypt-Iran relations are fully restored, putting an end to the three-decade-old rupture.

The biggest beneficiary of this paradigm shift in Middle Eastern politics is going to be Iran. Arguably, we are probably already past the point of an Israeli attack on Iran, no matter Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tilting at the windmill. In the prevailing surcharged atmosphere, the Muslim Middle East would explode into uncontrollable violence in the event of an Israeli (or US) attack on Iran.

In the event of such an attack, Egypt’s Brothers would most probably annul the peace treaty with Israel – and Jordan would be compelled to follow suit; Egypt and Jordan might sever diplomatic ties with Israel. Baghdad is seething with fury that the US and Turkey are encouraging Kurdistan to secede; Lebanon’s Hezbollah has been threatening retribution if Iran is attacked.

Even more serious than all this put together would be the domino effect of region-wide mayhem on the Arab street on the fate of the oligarchies in the Persian Gulf, which lack legitimacy and are allied with the US – and where the Brothers have been clandestinely operating for decades.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NI25Ak02.html

Five reasons for Assad’s regime resilience

August 30, 2012|
There are five reasons why Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist regime survives, says a prominent observer.

Regional and international strategic rivalries reinforce the stalemate; the regime has exported the crisis to its neighbors, the complexity of the end game; the divided opposition; and the regime’s retention of a significant base of support, writes Time’s Tony Karon.

“Assad retains the fierce loyalty of a hard core of Alawites, a community that sees its own fate tied to that of his regime, fearing at best, disenfranchisement, and at worst, brutal retribution, should the Sunni-led rebellion triumph,” he notes:

Far from being ground down by the attrition of more than a year of full-blown civil war, the regime’s core fighting forces remain more determined and fanatical than ever. Indeed, as the International Crisis Group recently noted, the regime’s control has at once diminished and hardened,  its will and capacity to fight fueled by the sectarian character of the civil war.

Observers have expressed concern that the West’s failure to support democratic elements within the opposition is playing into the hands of radical Islamists.

Provision of technical assistance and even arms are needed to prevent extremists from filling a political vacuum, said Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US envoy to the UN and a board member of the National  Endowment for Democracy.

The US has offered to provide communications equipment and other forms of non-lethal assistance, but refuses to supply arms, at least openly.

With the formation of the Syrian Support Group, exiles and their allies have taken the initiative.

“If you keep giving people videos and cameras and satellite equipment so they can document how they are getting killed, it won’t stop the killing,” said Louay Sakka, one of the group’s eight board members, referring to the American aid. As for Mr. Assad’s loyalists, he added, “it’s only the language of force they understand.”

The New York Times reports that…

While maintaining good relations with the Obama administration, the group has also been a critic of the administration’s approach, with added credibility because of its ties inside Syria. Dr. Danan, for example, said President Obama’s warning that any use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces would be “a red line” that could provoke intervention amounted to a “green light” for Mr. Assad to use as much conventional force as possible.

Administration officials say that outsourcing the supply of money and arms to the rebels maintains a crucial distinction that keeps American military fingerprints off a conflict that has already turned into a bloody civil war.

“It’s not for us to determine what the donations are used for,” said one official, who requested anonymity to discuss administration thinking, describing a plausible deniability that might not be plausible to all. “It could be for medical supplies.”

Arguably, Assad’s strongest asset is, as Karon notes, the opposition is not only deeply divided, it also lacks a clear strategy:

When France’s President François Hollande urged the Syrian opposition earlier this week to form a transitional government in exile that France and other Western governments would immediately recognize as the legitimate government of Syria, he seemed to have forgotten one of the golden rules of French cuisine: You can’t reheat a souffle. …. The idea was quickly pooh-poohed by U.S. officials, who branded it “premature” given the consistent failure of Syrian opposition groups, over 18 months of rebellion, to create a single unified leadership.

Washington’s response was immediately slammed by Syrian National Council (SNC) leader Abdelbaset Sieda, who accused the U.S. of indecisiveness, but his complaints would have been undermined by the fact that his group’s longtime spokeswoman Basma Kodmani resigned from the SNC on the same day, declaring that it had failed to earn “the required credibility and did not maintain the confidence of the people”. Indeed, despite its support from the French government and Turkey, the SNC appears to have been largely sidelined, having failed to win the support of unarmed opposition groups on the ground, or of the various armed formations that fight under the Free Syrian Army banner.

Besides having no umbrella political leadership, the rebellion also appears to have limited military coherence, with hundreds of disparate fighting formations making their own decisions at local level, and Islamist fighters — some of them foreign — making an increasingly visible showing.

http://www.demdigest.net/blog/2012/08/five-reasons-for-assads-regime-resilience/

Romney’s Syria Problem

By Andrew C. McCarthy
June 2, 2012 4:00 A.M.

Congratulations to Mitt Romney. In calling for “opposition groups” to be armed and trained for their ongoing jihad against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the GOP’s presidential contender has managed to align himself with al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muslim Brotherhood icon Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Like the legacy media, the McCain wing of the Republican party, and the rest of Washington’s progressive, Islamophilic clerisy, Governor Romney is reacting to a regime-engineered massacre last week. Assad’s forces reportedly killed 108 Syrians in Houla, a rural enclave outside the “opposition” city of Homs. Victims included women and children shot at close range, in summary-execution style.

There is no gainsaying that Assad is despicable or that the Houla episode was barbaric. Neither can it be denied, however, that Romney and his advisers have had little to say about the similarly barbaric attacks carried out by the “opposition.” About two weeks before Houla, for example, a car bomb killed 55 people in Damascus — targeting a regime intelligence building, but detonated at rush hour, in the al-Qaeda fashion, for maximum civilian carnage. A few days later, nine more people were killed when a suicide bomber exploded his device in a parking lot near a military compound in Deir ez-Zor, a notorious jihadist hub from which thousands of terrorists crossed into Iraq to fight against Western forces.

Yes, Assad’s minority Alawite Muslim regime is a key ally of Iran’s revolutionary Shiite-supremacist government. That does not alter the stubborn fact that the anti-Assad “opposition groups” are dominated by Sunni supremacists. Stubborn facts cannot be evaded by clever labeling — “opposition groups” in Syria having become the euphemism du jour that “rebels” was in Libya, “peaceful protesters” in Egypt, “uprisings” in Tunisia, and so on. Nor can we confidently assert any longer that what is bad for Iran must be good for us. Threats are dynamic, and much has changed in the last decade. The Iranian regime is not the only virulently anti-American revolutionary movement realistically threatening to enslave the Middle East in its version of totalitarian sharia and implacable anti-Semitism.

The Muslim Brotherhood, leader of the Sunni supremacists, has a hammer-lock on the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main opposition group the Obama administration has been courting — with the McCain wing cheering from the sidelines. Meanwhile, as trumpeted on the Brotherhood’s website, Sheikh Qaradawi has been organizing Syria’s Islamist revolt for months, reprising the starring role he is playing in Egypt. Al-Qaeda — whose help the Brotherhood is happy to have when it is expedient, as it was in Libya — put its muscle into the Syrian revolt months ago. As the invaluable John Rosenthal reported here at NRO, Obama’s national intelligence director, James Clapper, has acknowledged al-Qaeda’s infiltration of the Syrian opposition. The terror network’s hand in the recent string of bombings is obvious, even to the Associated Press. Its presence and influence at opposition rallies are also patent.

Washington can idealize the Syrian “opposition” into liberty-loving freedom-fighters; to Syrian Christians, they are the jihad. With churches being torched, families being terrorized by kidnappings and murders, and thousands of believers being put to flight, Christian are now suffering the same fate “Islamic democracy” held for the Christians of Egypt and Iraq. (Jews face no such problem; after decades of humiliating dhimmitude, they have long since been driven out of Syria.)

Yet, here comes Romney, jumping with both feet into the Islamist camp. This week, he slammed President Obama for purportedly failing to work with our two fabulous “allies,” the Brotherhood-tied Islamist regime in Turkey and the jihad-propagating Wahabist regime in Saudi Arabia, in order to oust Assad. Obama’s temporizing, according to Romney, had “merely granted the Assad regime more time to execute its military onslaught.”

This is a specious critique. Put aside that Romney is wrong — the administration should stay on the sidelines. The reality is that Obama has been working behind the scenes with the Saudis and the Turks. The administration is supporting the Brotherhood-controlled SNC — just as it threw its weight behind Islamists in Egypt and Libya. What Obama has been smart enough to do, at least to this point, is refrain from direct military aid, undoubtedly realizing that he would be blamed when, inevitably, it became clear that American arms went to America’s enemies. But McCain and the Brotherhood goaded the president into using force in Libya — where the victorious “rebels” quickly installed sharia law and parceled out Qaddafi’s arsenal to Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. Another misadventure in Syria, it seems, is only a matter of time.

In their anxiety over our nation’s future, conservatives see the upcoming November election as a make-or-break crossroads. Thus, the Right’s indifference to Mitt Romney, the only alternative to Obama’s reelection, is striking. But it is not bewildering, and stories like Syria’s go a long way toward explaining it. Desperation to avoid the third Carter term does not translate into enthusiasm over the specter of the third Bush administration.

It was during George W. Bush’s second term that the original Bush doctrine of eradicating terror networks and their supporting regimes was fully superseded by the revised Bush doctrine of “Muslim outreach” and Islamist empowerment — gussied up as “democracy promotion.” It was during the second Bush term that the coherent, completed anti-terrorist mission of dislodging Saddam Hussein gave way to the incoherence of the “freedom agenda.” That was policy made of the pretense that Islamic hearts and minds could be won over by a kinder, gentler style of war-fighting, one that elevated the safety of hostile Muslim populations over the security of our troops and the vanquishing of our enemies. It was under Bush, not Obama, that the executive branch began indulging Islamist demands that the government purge references to Islamic doctrine in discussions of jihadist terror. It was Bush’s State Department, not Obama’s, that first sustained the Clintonian approach of appeasing Iran: a blind eye to the mullahs’ facilitation of terror against our troops and a blind faith in the capacity of sanctions to bring them to heel.

These policies were not merely unwise; they were immensely unpopular. Americans strongly favored military action against jihadists and their enablers. They never supported nation-building schemes and never agreed with the ruling class that propping up sharia states disguised as democracies was an appropriate use of our armed forces. And while official Washington lauds leaders of Islamist organizations as “moderates” who are willing to seek “change” through the political process rather than violence, Americans see them as extremists trying to sow sharia principles into our law and institutions. Thus, despite an unrelenting smear campaign by which Islamists — abetted by leftists — seek to silence their critics with accusations of bigotry and “Islamophobia,” Americans continue to support state initiatives to bar courts from relying on sharia law, to oppose provocations such as the Ground Zero mosque, and to applaud initiatives such as Senator Rand Paul’s worthy proposal to cut off U.S. aid to Pakistan because of its enforcement of such sharia strictures as the death penalty in blasphemy cases.

So unpopular was the second Bush term that it gave us, first, the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006, and then, in 2008, the Obama administration. The Republican establishment sloughed these electoral thumpings off to the country’s being “war weary.” But the country has never been war weary — when we are threatened, we want the threats dealt with decisively. What we are is Islam weary.

Americans are not predisposed against Muslims — in sharp contrast to mainstream Islam’s animus toward the West. We welcome with open arms anyone, of any creed, who is willing to assimilate to our culture of liberty — to the outrage of Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who regards asking Muslims in the West to assimilate as a “crime against humanity.”

We are exhausted, though, from defending ourselves against Muslim mass-murderers while walking on eggshells for fear of offending tender Muslim sensibilities. We are tapped out, emotionally and financially, from making enormous sacrifices on behalf of ingrate Muslim peoples, who gravitate to our enemies even as we labor to improve their lot. And we are sick to death of the suggestion that we need to apologize for our country when most of the violence that currently besets the world — a great deal of which is Muslim-on-Muslim savagery — is directly traceable to Islamic culture. We have never been at war with Islam, and we have no desire to conquer or occupy Muslim territory; but neither do we want any more entanglement with Islamic countries than is absolutely necessary. We hope Islam reforms, we hope Muslims stop killing each other. But we’re tired of that being our problem — especially since it’s a problem we can’t fix.

By refraining from American involvement in Syria — or, at least, overt American involvement — we have deprived the competing factions of the opportunity to unify around the superpower they love to hate. As a result, they are fighting among themselves. Hamas has pulled up stakes from Syria, its longstanding partnership with the Assad regime and Iran in tatters because of its support for the Syrian “opposition” (i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch). Relations between Hamas and Hezbollah, a key Assad ally, have frayed. Assad is increasingly crippled, which deeply wounds Iran. Erdogan’s honeymoon with Assad is over, and Turkey must tend to the strains in its formerly cozy relations with Iran and Iraq (while quietly replacing Iran as Hamas’s sugar daddy — proving, yet again, it is no ally of ours). The Saudis, who have bankrolled the Muslim Brotherhood’s global promotion of Islamic supremacist ideology, are panicked by the Brotherhood’s ascendancy, frosting their relations with Egypt and complicating their efforts to aid Syrian Islamists.

If we had tried to come up with a plan for simultaneously weakening all the anti-American, anti-Western players in the region, we’d never have been able to come up with something this effective. And it needn’t cost us a single American life or a single American dollar. All we need to do is stay out of it.

In Egypt, just across the sea from Syria, after the first “democratic” election yielded overwhelming Islamist control of the legislature, the next “democratic” election has produced a standoff between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and the Mubarak regime candidate (to be decided in a runoff election later this month). That didn’t happen because of the United States. It happened because, in the Middle East, there is no freedom culture: The authentic democrats are vastly outnumbered by the Islamic supremacists. The only thing that prevents the tyranny of the Islamists is the tyranny of the strongmen — which is why 23 percent of Egyptians, deathly afraid of the former, voted for the latter.

As in Egypt, there is no good outcome for us in Syria. There is the atrocious dictator or the atrocious Islamists. There is no “better” side for Romney to choose. By throwing in his lot with the Islamists, he signals that he has failed to learn the hard lessons of the last decade. Americans do not want four more years of an administration that looks at enemies and sees friends. We don’t want “outreach”; we want out.

Romney’s support for the Syrian “opposition” will undoubtedly play well inside the Beltway. But the groan you hear is from the rest of the country, where elections are won and lost.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Interview: Russian envoy to Lebanon on the Syrian crisis

Asharq Al-Awsat Interview: Alexander Zasypkin
Sunday 25 March 2012
By Tha’ir Abbas-

Beirut, Asharq Al-Awsat- Asharq al-Awsat recently met with the Russian Ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, to discuss his country’s position with regards to the ongoing Syrian crisis. During the interview, Zasypkin outlined the principles of Russia’s stance focusing on a political solution in Syria, and what steps are now required in order to implement this. He also dismissed reports of Russian involvement on the ground in support of the al-Assad regime, stressing that his country wholly rejects foreign military interference.
The following is the text of the interview:
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What is Russia’s genuine position towards the current events in Syria?
[Zasypkin] The constants of the Russian stance toward the internal conflict are known, and they have not changed throughout the past incidents. These constants focus on the need for all parties to cease violence, organizing comprehensive national dialogue between the authority and the opposition, and reaching an agreement on all the reforming steps in Syria to attain a democratic regime in this country. We seek to achieve these objectives and need the assistance of the international community to start the political process in Syria.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Can we speak about an “internal crisis” when the opposition is complaining of “violence from one side”, carried out by the authorities through a strong and disciplined army? Is it possible to talk about two kinds of violence?
[Zasypkin] Of course there is the regular Syrian Army, which has the military superiority over the armed groups. At the same time, when we speak about halting violence, this relates to all parties because should the authorities alone stop the violence, then this would lead to armed groups seizing their positions, and this would not calm down the situation.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] How can a peace process be reached in Syria in light of the opposition’s strong rejection of dialogue with a regime it considers to be criminal, and due to the brutality of this regime?
[Zasypkin] The opposition should agree to hold dialogue with the regime without preconditions. As for the role of the international community, we view the presidential statement issued by the Security Council yesterday as support for the UN envoy Kofi Annan’s mission, which aims to cease violence and start the political process in Syria. We hope that all the foreign parties will make efforts to influence the parties to the conflict in Syria to sit at the negotiations table.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Do you mean that foreign parties are having a negative influence on the Syrian issue?
[Zasypkin] Throughout this period, we have been trying to change the situation from a confrontation to a political process. We wanted to benefit from the Arab League’s initiative and the observer mission, but the task of the mission was curtailed soon after it began its work. We consider this as having an adverse impact on the political settlement. The second thing is that we believe that the sanctions are not beneficial because they do not influence the policy of the regime, but they increase the burden on the people. And now when we seek anew to activate a political settlement through Annan’s mission, we hear talk about new sanctions and calls for international and Arab interference and measures such as the recalling of ambassadors. All these things are not beneficial. Anyway, since yesterday, we have taken a concerted stance at the Security Council and we want to rely on it to unify the efforts of the international community.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Russia has directed criticism towards the Syrian authorities. Why was that?
[Zasypkin] Since the beginning, we have been adhering to a balanced and open stance. When the popular protests and peaceful demonstrations took place, we pointed out that the regime’s reactions to these demonstrations were unacceptable. At the same time, we also highlighted the provocative actions of the armed elements, within the context of demonstrators, since April last year.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Do you think that the policy the authorities are following in terms of confronting the demonstrations and the protests is appropriate?
[Zasypkin] We see mistakes, and at the same time we see the measures that have been taken over the past months, such as the issuance of laws and the holding of municipal elections and the referendum on the constitution, and now there are elections scheduled for the People’s Council, and we consider all these to be positive steps.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Do you think that the Syrian Government is moving on a positive track then?
[Zasypkin] Once again, I repeat that the reactions represented in the response to the demonstrations and the delayed reforms are unacceptable. At the same time, the reforms that have been implemented are positive steps.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] There is talk that Russia is risking its Arab relations as a result of its stance on the Syrian issue?
[Zasypkin] We are very concerned with preserving our traditionally good relations with all the Arab countries. At the same time, in light of the developments taking place at present, we adhere in the first place to the UN Charter and international legitimacy to a great extent, and we consider principles such as the sovereignty of the state and respecting the rights of people to self-determination to be more important than the temporary considerations in the relations with any state in the region. We think that this approach is better than playing for self-interests. The values related to the nature of international relations are more important than passing economic or military interests.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The Russian Foreign Minister yesterday spoke about concerns of “Sunni rule” in Syria. What did he mean by this?
[Zasypkin] We want to keep away from sectarian conflicts, and during the developments taking place in the region, we seek to preserve the fraternal coexistence among all ethnicities and sects in the Middle East. We in Russia give a great attention to this issue because Russia is a country that has multi ethnicities and sects, and we hope that no problems emerge among the sects in Syria or in other countries.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The same as the Christians are the majority in Russia, the Sunnis are the majority in Syria. Is their rule of the country not something normal in any democratic process?
[Zasypkin]We are putting forward a set of principles, including one that says that democracy means respecting the rights of all the sects in this society, and this is the most important thing.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] To what extent Russia is involved in the Syrian issue? We hear talk about shipments of Russian weapons to the regime and military warships paying visits to Syria. To what degree are you ready to defend your stance on the ground?
[Zasypkin] All that has been said about Russian ships calling at Syrian ports to support the regime is untrue. The first ship visited Syria to receive supplies of food and fuel, and the other ship that has recently paid a visit did so for the same purpose. It is participating in an operation against the pirates in the Gulf of Aden along with NATO and European Union. As for Russian weapons, they have been possessed by the Syrian Armed Forces for decades. And as for defending our stance, we rely on political action and no other means.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] The Syrian opposition talks about direct Russian support for the regime in terms of training, drones, and other services?
[Zasypkin] All this is talk within the framework of a media war that is taking place at present. We deny such talk on a daily basis and consider it untrue, like the talk about Russian warships.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] How do you assess the Lebanese stance toward the Syrian crisis?
[Zasypkin] We are aware of the peculiarity of the Lebanese situation concerning what is going on in Syria. We share the Lebanese officials’ opinion that the Lebanese should as much as possible avoid the negative impacts of the Syrian conflict. We positively appreciate the measures that the Lebanese Government and the commanders of the Lebanese Army are adopting to safeguard Lebanon’s sovereignty and unity. We also believe that the political forces in Lebanon are adhering to the security and stability in the country, and this is positive.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Do you have information about the smuggling of weapons and fighters from Lebanon to Syria?
[Zasypkin] We have information from various sources that weapons are coming into Syria from the neighboring countries regardless of the stances that the authorities in these countries are adopting and without a decision by them. We know that among the measures adopted by the Lebanese leadership are moves to tighten the monitoring of weapons smuggling, and we are confident that this policy will continue.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] It has been said that Russia has learned from two previous lessons, in Iraq and Libya, and it does not want to lose Syria. Do you seek a price in return for abandoning al-Assad?
[Zasypkin] The main lesson from what happened in Iraq and Libya is that the world should have to witness the tragic results of the occupation of these two countries. Therefore, we do not accept the repetition of the NATO operations or any foreign military interference in Syria, and this is a principled position for Russia. As for the talk about the stance toward the Syrian regime, it has been and continues to be the same. The priority for us in Syria is to cease the fighting and ensure the democratic option for the Syrian people, including selecting a leadership through fair and transparent elections. We do not decide the stance toward the Syrian president and leadership because this is an internal Syrian affair, and it is not the right for any foreign party to try and impose its will on the Syrians.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Who can ensure the integrity of the elections?
[Zasypkin] We are now seeking to arrange dialogue on the steps for reform, including the presidential elections, and this is one clause that the Syrian authorities can agree on with the opposition, so that the dialogue can then focus on the principles and the details. In light of the attention focused on Syria by the international community, it is possible to secure good international monitoring, and there would be no doubts about the results of these elections. I am explaining this subject on an assumption basis because we are now at the beginning of the political settlement. As for these steps, they are going to be followed by other steps later on.

http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=3&id=28994

Syria, Iran and the Balance of Power in the Middle East

November 22, 2011

By George Friedman

U.S. troops are in the process of completing their withdrawal from Iraq by the end-of-2011 deadline. We are now moving toward a reckoning with the consequences. The reckoning concerns the potential for a massive shift in the balance of power in the region, with Iran moving from a fairly marginal power to potentially a dominant power. As the process unfolds, the United States and Israel are making countermoves. We have discussed all of this extensively. Questions remain whether these countermoves will stabilize the region and whether or how far Iran will go in its response.

Iran has been preparing for the U.S. withdrawal. While it is unreasonable simply to say that Iran will dominate Iraq, it is fair to say Tehran will have tremendous influence in Baghdad to the point of being able to block Iraqi initiatives Iran opposes. This influence will increase as the U.S. withdrawal concludes and it becomes clear there will be no sudden reversal in the withdrawal policy. Iraqi politicians’ calculus must account for the nearness of Iranian power and the increasing distance and irrelevance of American power.

Resisting Iran under these conditions likely would prove ineffective and dangerous. Some, like the Kurds, believe they have guarantees from the Americans and that substantial investment in Kurdish oil by American companies means those commitments will be honored. A look at the map, however, shows how difficult it would be for the United States to do so. The Baghdad regime has arrested Sunni leaders while the Shia, not all of whom are pro-Iranian by any means, know the price of overenthusiastic resistance.

Syria and Iran
The situation in Syria complicates all of this. The minority Alawite sect has dominated the Syrian government since 1970, when the current president’s father – who headed the Syrian air force – staged a coup. The Alawites are a heterodox Muslim sect related to a Shiite offshoot and make up about 7 percent of the country’s population, which is mostly Sunni. The new Alawite government was Nasserite in nature, meaning it was secular, socialist and built around the military. When Islam rose as a political force in the Arab world, the Syrians – alienated from the Sadat regime in Egypt – saw Iran as a bulwark. The Iranian Islamist regime gave the Syrian secular regime immunity against Shiite fundamentalists in Lebanon. The Iranians also gave Syria support in its external adventures in Lebanon, and more important, in its suppression of Syria’s Sunni majority.

Syria and Iran were particularly aligned in Lebanon. In the early 1980s, after the Khomeini revolution, the Iranians sought to increase their influence in the Islamic world by supporting radical Shiite forces. Hezbollah was one of these. Syria had invaded Lebanon in 1975 on behalf of the Christians and opposed the Palestine Liberation Organization, to give you a sense of the complexity. Syria regarded Lebanon as historically part of Syria, and sought to assert its influence over it. Via Iran, Hezbollah became an instrument of Syrian power in Lebanon.

Iran and Syria, therefore, entered a long-term if not altogether stable alliance that has lasted to this day. In the current unrest in Syria, the Saudis and Turks in addition to the Americans all have been hostile to the regime of President Bashar al Assad. Iran is the one country that on the whole has remained supportive of the current Syrian government.

There is good reason for this. Prior to the uprising, the precise relationship between Syria and Iran was variable. Syria was able to act autonomously in its dealings with Iran and Iran’s proxies in Lebanon. While an important backer of groups like Hezbollah, the al Assad regime in many ways checked Hezbollah’s power in Lebanon, with the Syrians playing the dominant role there. The Syrian uprising has put the al Assad regime on the defensive, however, making it more interested in a firm, stable relationship with Iran. Damascus finds itself isolated in the Sunni world, with Turkey and the Arab League against it. Iran – and intriguingly, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki – have constituted al Assad’s exterior support.

Thus far al Assad has resisted his enemies. Though some mid- to low-ranking Sunnis have defected, his military remains largely intact; this is because the Alawites control key units. Events in Libya drove home to an embattled Syrian leadership – and even to some of its adversaries within the military – the consequences of losing. The military has held together, and an unarmed or poorly armed populace, no matter how large, cannot defeat an intact military force. The key for those who would see al Assad fall is to divide the military.

If al Assad survives – and at the moment, wishful thinking by outsiders aside, he is surviving – Iran will be the big winner. If Iraq falls under substantial Iranian influence, and the al Assad regime – isolated from most countries but supported by Tehran – survives in Syria, then Iran could emerge with a sphere of influence stretching from western Afghanistan to the Mediterranean (the latter via Hezbollah). Achieving this would not require deploying Iranian conventional forces – al Assad’s survival alone would suffice. However, the prospect of a Syrian regime beholden to Iran would open up the possibility of the westward deployment of Iranian forces, and that possibility alone would have significant repercussions.

Consider the map were this sphere of influence to exist. The northern borders of Saudi Arabia and Jordan would abut this sphere, as would Turkey’s southern border. It remains unclear, of course, just how well Iran could manage this sphere, e.g., what type of force it could project into it. Maps alone will not provide an understanding of the problem. But they do point to the problem. And the problem is the potential – not certain – creation of a block under Iranian influence that would cut through a huge swath of strategic territory.

It should be remembered that in addition to Iran’s covert network of militant proxies, Iran’s conventional forces are substantial. While they could not confront U.S. armored divisions and survive, there are no U.S. armored divisions on the ground between Iran and Lebanon. Iran’s ability to bring sufficient force to bear in such a sphere increases the risks to the Saudis in particular. Iran’s goal is to increase the risk such that Saudi Arabia would calculate that accommodation is more prudent than resistance. Changing the map can help achieve this.

It follows that those frightened by this prospect – the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – would seek to stymie it. At present, the place to block it no longer is Iraq, where Iran already has the upper hand. Instead, it is Syria. And the key move in Syria is to do everything possible to bring about al Assad’s overthrow.


In the last week, the Syrian unrest appeared to take on a new dimension. Until recently, the most significant opposition activity appeared to be outside of Syria, with much of the resistance reported in the media coming from externally based opposition groups. The degree of effective opposition was never clear. Certainly, the Sunni majority opposes and hates the al Assad regime. But opposition and emotion do not bring down a regime consisting of men fighting for their lives. And it wasn’t clear that the resistance was as strong as the outside propaganda claimed.

Last week, however, the Free Syrian Army – a group of Sunni defectors operating out of Turkey and Lebanon – claimed defectors carried out organized attacks on government facilities, ranging from an air force intelligence facility (a particularly sensitive point given the history of the regime) to Baath Party buildings in the greater Damascus area. These were not the first attacks claimed by the FSA, but they were heavily propagandized in the past week. Most significant about the attacks is that, while small-scale and likely exaggerated, they revealed that at least some defectors were willing to fight instead of defecting and staying in Turkey or Lebanon.

It is interesting that an apparent increase in activity from armed activists – or the introduction of new forces – occurred at the same time relations between Iran on one side and the United States and Israel on the other were deteriorating. The deterioration began with charges that an Iranian covert operation to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States had been uncovered, followed by allegations by the Bahraini government of Iranian operatives organizing attacks in Bahrain. It proceeded to an International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran’s progress toward a nuclear device, followed by the Nov. 19 explosion at an Iranian missile facility that the Israelis have not-so-quietly hinted was their work. Whether any of these are true, the psychological pressure on Iran is building and appears to be orchestrated.

Of all the players in this game, Israel’s position is the most complex. Israel has had a decent, albeit covert, working relationship with the Syrians going back to their mutual hostility toward Yasser Arafat. For Israel, Syria has been the devil they know. The idea of a Sunni government controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood on their northeastern frontier was frightening; they preferred al Assad. But given the shift in the regional balance of power, the Israeli view is also changing. The Sunni Islamist threat has weakened in the past decade relative to the Iranian Shiite threat. Playing things forward, the threat of a hostile Sunni force in Syria is less worrisome than an emboldened Iranian presence on Israel’s northern frontier. This explains why the architects of Israel’s foreign policy, such as Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have been saying that we are seeing an “acceleration toward the end of the regime.” Regardless of its preferred outcome, Israel cannot influence events inside Syria. Instead, Israel is adjusting to a reality where the threat of Iran reshaping the politics of the region has become paramount.

Iran is, of course, used to psychological campaigns. We continue to believe that while Iran might be close to a nuclear device that could explode underground under carefully controlled conditions, its ability to create a stable, robust nuclear weapon that could function outside a laboratory setting (which is what an underground test is) is a ways off. This includes being able to load a fragile experimental system on a delivery vehicle and expecting it to explode. It might. It might not. It might even be intercepted and create a casus belli for a counterstrike.

The main Iranian threat is not nuclear. It might become so, but even without nuclear weapons, Iran remains a threat. The current escalation originated in the American decision to withdraw from Iraq and was intensified by events in Syria. If Iran abandoned its nuclear program tomorrow, the situation would remain as complex. Iran has the upper hand, and the United States, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia all are looking at how to turn the tables.

At this point, they appear to be following a two-pronged strategy: Increase pressure on Iran to make it recalculate its vulnerability, and bring down the Syrian government to limit the consequences of Iranian influence in Iraq. Whether the Syrian regime can be brought down is problematic. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi would have survived if NATO hadn’t intervened. NATO could intervene in Syria, but Syria is more complex than Libya. Moreover, a second NATO attack on an Arab state designed to change its government would have unintended consequences, no matter how much the Arabs fear the Iranians at the moment. Wars are unpredictable; they are not the first option.

Therefore the likely solution is covert support for the Sunni opposition funneled through Lebanon and possibly Turkey and Jordan. It will be interesting to see if the Turks participate. Far more interesting will be seeing whether this works. Syrian intelligence has penetrated its Sunni opposition effectively for decades. Mounting a secret campaign against the regime would be difficult, and its success by no means assured. Still, that is the next move.

But it is not the last move. To put Iran back into its box, something must be done about the Iraqi political situation. Given the U.S. withdrawal, Washington has little influence there. All of the relationships the United States built were predicated on American power protecting the relationships. With the Americans gone, the foundation of those relationships dissolves. And even with Syria, the balance of power is shifting.

The United States has three choices. Accept the evolution and try to live with what emerges. Attempt to make a deal with Iran – a very painful and costly one. Or go to war. The first assumes Washington can live with what emerges. The second depends on whether Iran is interested in dealing with the United States. The third depends on having enough power to wage a war and to absorb Iran’s retaliatory strikes, particularly in the Strait of Hormuz. All are dubious, so toppling al Assad is critical. It changes the game and the momentum. But even that is enormously difficult and laden with risks.

We are now in the final act of Iraq, and it is even more painful than imagined. Laying this alongside the European crisis makes the idea of a systemic crisis in the global system very real.

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2011/11/22/syria_iran_and_the_balance_of_power_in_the_middle_east_99768-full.html

Why Contain Iran When Its Own Aims Will Do Just That?

By Vali Nasr – Oct 31, 2011

Iran is once again in America’s cross hairs. Even before the allegations of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, concerns about Iran were high, with an impending U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq possibly leading to increased Iranian influence there. U.S. opinion and decision makers are expanding their estimate of Iran’s adventurousness and calling for new containment measures.

In both exercises, there is room for misjudgment. In fact, Iran has not become more ambitious of late; rather, its aspirations have been underestimated. As for attempting to rein in Iran, that could prove both counterproductive and unnecessary.

Until recently, the U.S. government regarded Iran as subdued, weakened and relatively isolated. There was considerable evidence for this view. Iran’s leadership is deeply divided. Its economy is reeling as a result of economic sanctions, which have reduced trade and therefore contact with the Arab world.

What’s more, Iran’s standing in the Middle East appeared to be declining after the Arab Spring. The “Arab street,” once enamored with Iran’s bluster, is now turned off by the country’s suppression of dissent at home and its support for the oppressive Syrian regime. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are helping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad put down a growing uprising. The possibility of a collapse of the Assad regime threatens to confound Iran’s plans for regional domination. Syria is Iran’s main Arab ally and its conduit for aid to Hezbollah, the militant, Islamist Lebanese group that Iran has used as a proxy to menace Israel, the U.S., Lebanon itself and others.

A Different View

From Tehran, however, the situation looks quite different. For one thing, Iran is not as worried about losing sway in a post-Assad Syria as many in the West think. Iran calculates that until Syria gets back the Golan Heights, a plateau captured by Israel in the 1967 war, any government in Damascus will need Hezbollah as a force to pressure Israel. And with Hezbollah comes Iranian influence.

Iran’s leaders are clearly preparing for the possibility of Assad’s fall. Even while claiming nefarious outsiders are fomenting the unrest in Syria, they have begun to add veiled criticisms of the regime’s brutal crackdown, an obvious means of pandering to the street.

What’s more, Iran’s leaders perceive that it is the U.S. position, not theirs, that has weakened in the region. They see U.S. troops withdrawing precipitously from both Iraq and Afghanistan; U.S. relations with Pakistan turning ever more sour; and Arab dictators who have been propped up by America for years under threat or already gone. The brazen nature of the Washington assassination plot supports the idea that Iran sees the U.S. as soft.

Given this perception, Iran is asserting itself. In the past two years, it has eschewed serious engagement with the U.S. on the Iranian nuclear program, Afghanistan or anything else. Rebuffing the U.S. idea of a hot line to avoid conflict in the Persian Gulf, Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, Iran’s navy commander said, “The presence of the U.S. in the Persian Gulf is illegitimate and makes no sense.”

Fill the Void

Iran’s goals are to hasten the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq and fill the void left behind. Iran has increased its outreach to the Taliban and is pushing to complete a project to supply natural gas to Pakistan through a pipeline connecting the two countries. In Iraq, it has supported stepped-up attacks by the Iranian-backed Shiite resistance and is talking about having an expanded role after the Americans leave, for instance by volunteering to train the military. Iran is also exploring diplomatic relations with Egypt, which it has not had in years.

In this U.S. election season, presidential candidates will be tempted to propose strategies to contain Iran’s aspirations. To be seriously effective, such plans would require Arab countries as well as Russia and China, major trading partners of Iran, to sign on to a concerted policy of isolating the country. That’s unlikely to happen, given the Arab world’s preoccupation with Libya and Syria and the eagerness of Russia and China to do business with Iran.

Moreover, if the U.S. confronts Iran directly, it would probably work to the advantage of Iranian leaders, allowing them to divert attention from domestic woes such as inflation, unemployment and the embarrassing alienation between Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The U.S. should not hand them that opportunity.

The alternative is to let Iran’s ambitious regional strategy play out. So far, it hasn’t gone so well. Iran has clashed over Syria with Turkey, which is hosting anti-Assad forces. And Iran’s strained relations with the other big Mideast power, Saudi Arabia, have been tested anew by the Washington plot and by the suspicious assassination in May of a Saudi diplomat in Karachi, Pakistan.

Iran expects greater influence in Iraq and Afghanistan once U.S. troops leave, but with that will come greater burdens. Once absent, America can no longer be the focus of opposition in both places. Instead, Iran may replace the U.S. as the target of popular anger, blamed for the failure of government to meet people’s needs. Iran may prove no more able to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan than the U.S. has been. Iran is adept at causing security headaches in the region but is untested when it comes to resolving them.

Failure on that front would leave Iran, rather than the U.S., in the middle of renewed civil conflict in Iraq or Afghanistan. It also would have direct implications for Iran domestically. Renewed chaos in either country would send refugees flooding into Iran and increase drug trafficking and violence in the border areas.

Iran may come to remember fondly the period when the U.S. military absorbed resentments in the region.

(Vali Nasr is a Bloomberg View columnist and a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Vali Nasr at vali.nasr@tufts.edu

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-31/why-contain-iran-when-its-own-aims-will-do-just-that-vali-nasr.html