Alphen, the Netherlands. 30 July.
The struggle for Syria is forging a new Middle East. Summer Olympics are often used by desperate, repressive,
time-expired regimes to act repressively. The Russians invaded Georgia in the midst of
the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Now, the Assad
regime is attacking Syria’s largest city Aleppo. Some estimates suggest up to 200,000 people have
already been killed in the war with the UN estimating another 200,000
internally displaced and some 250,000 having fled abroad. Certainly, the loss of Syria’s biggest city
to the diverse anti-regime coalition could mark the beginning of the end for President
Assad and his Alawite-dominated minority government. Such is the level of outside interference
that the simple truth is that none of us know when and how this will end. The only thing that can be said with any
certainty is that the Baathist Syrian state is already dead. How the corpse is disposed of could well decide the
future shape and ‘balance’ of the new Middle East.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid
Al-Muallem flew to Tehran Sunday to seek more Iranian support. For Tehran Syria is critical in their efforts
to construct an anti-Israeli coalition that they hope will surround
Israel. Republican US Presidential
hopeful Mitt Romney, speaking in Jerusalem on Sunday, as part of a strangely
amateurish foreign policy venture, called for the strong US defence of Israel
and said that preventing Iran obtaining nuclear bombs would be his “highest
national security priority”.
The Free Syrian Army is being
supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and to some extent Turkey. This not only reflects the split within Islam
between Shia and Sunni, it also reflects the uneasy balancing act between Arab,
Persian, Kurd and Turk that plays out across the region and the struggle for
influence and supremacy over what it now the new Middle East.
The new Muslim Brotherhood
government in Cairo will be a key actor.
Indeed, the true litmus test for Egypt’s future foreign policy
orientation will be the fate of Cairo’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Any linkage Egypt makes between the struggle
of the Palestinians and the struggle in Syria could well decide Cairo’s
relationship with Israel.
All of this means that Israel
faces layers of uncertainty on its borders unparalleled since 1967 and much of
it beyond Tel Aviv’s control. Lebanon is
being daily more destabilised by the Syrian struggle by allegiances for which
local borders are meaningless. With some
1000 Syrian refugees a day now crossing from Syria into Jordan the Hashemite
Kingdom is again being destabilised.
Israel’s nightmare is to be
surrounded to the north and east by Iranian-backed proxies with Hezbollah to
the fore and to the south by a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and a hostile
regime in Cairo.
In such an event Iran’s
nuclear bomb would not be used to directly threaten Israel but rather to
guarantee a free hand for Iran to build its anti-Israeli coalition. As ever the Palestinians are again being used
again for the wider designs of others.
It is a role into which they seem forever to have been cast.
And then there is the grand
strategic struggle. Syria is on the new
front-line of the new geo-politics. Yesterday’s
decision by Moscow to refuse to permit a search of any ship flying Russia’s
flag en route to Syria simply demonstrated the same old-fashioned thinking in
Moscow that led to the 2008 invasion of Georgia. However, the West’s reluctance to intervene
on humanitarian grounds is not simply due to Russian and/or Chinese intransigence. There are profound concerns about the impact
and cost of such an intervention and how it would influence a post-Assad government, the wider region and the dangers associated
with injecting Western forces into
the Middle East cauldron, particularly after such a bruising experience in
neighbouring Iraq and over-the-hill Afghanistan.
The simple truth is that the only
option available to the world’s real democracies (the conceptual West) is concerted
and systematic diplomatic and humanitarian pressure. Given that the West must focus policy on Syria
and Syrians. Now that the Annan peace
plan is dead the concerted aim must be to decouple as much as possible the
conflict from the regional and global issues that are so clouding it and put
all efforts into finding an early and durable solution for Syrian people. Only then and only in time might a successor
regime emerge in Damascus that is neither a threat to itself or others, but
there is no guarantee.
The simple truth is that this
struggle has so many players that anyone offering a clear view can only do so
from the perspective of ignorance or bias.
As the world loses itself in an
Olympian dream a nightmare is awakening.
It is time to wake up!
Julian Lindley-French
