Syrian Uprising Morphs Into Regional and Global
Wars

    A divided, balkanized Syria looms as a
    dangerous possibility as even UN Secretary-
    General Ban ki-Moon acknowledges the
    conflict has become a proxy war between world
    powers.

By Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies
August 10, 2012 ·

http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/syrian_upri_sing_morphs_into_regional_and_global_wars

The news from Syria is really bad these days. And
bad stuff in Syria doesn't stay in Syria - though
Syrian civilians are paying by far the biggest price.
With outside governments calling the shots in a civil
war, arming both sides, and motivated less by
concern for civilians than by their own narrow
national interests, we've got serious trouble.

And right now unfortunately, that outside super-
power game remains dominant. Syria has become
the crucible for a number of separate wars, battles
for power and influence, for regional resources and
access, for strategic location and military expansion.
These wars pit regional contenders of the Arab Gulf
states and Turkey against Syria and Iran. They set
the terms of the rising sectarian battle between
Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and Qatar vs. Shi'a
power in Syria, Iraq and Iran. They shape the Middle
East competition between the U.S. and Russia for
global military/strategic power. And crucially, of
course, Syria is a central component of the U.S.,
Israeli and western campaign against Iran.

Even UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon, who
usually reflects Washington's positions,
acknowledged that the Syrian conflict has become a
"proxy war."  He called on the major powers to
overcome their rivalries to figure out how to stop the
violence. So far, no such move is underway. It
should not be forgotten that Moscow's implacable
hold on its naval base at Tartus, on Syria's southern
Mediterranean coast, matches perfectly
Washington's commitment to the Bahrain port that
hosts the Pentagon's 5th fleet. Russia will fight for
its Tartus base to the last Syrian - just as the U.S.
will do anything, including supporting a Saudi
military intervention to suppress peaceful Bahraini
protesters, to keep the 5th fleet in port.

And none of those players have any interest in what
happens to the Syrian people.

Syria's Democratic Opposition Alive but "Drowned
Out in the Cacophony of Artillery and Rifle Fire"

The little bit of good news, such as it is, is that the
original democratic, largely non-violent Syrian
movement that rose defiantly in early 2011 as part
of the Arab Spring, has not entirely disappeared.
Former ABC News chief in the Middle East and long-
time Syria hand Charlie Glass described:

    "the people who actually started this, people who
    had done time in prison over the years, who were
    prisoners of the Assad regime who wanted
    popular demonstrations, who wanted civil
    disobedience, who wanted negotiations with the
    regime, to have a transition - a peaceful
    transition - in which they would ultimately be
    freed elections by which the regime could would
    lose, those people's voices are being drowned out
    in the cacophony of artillery and rifle fire all
    around Syria at this time. These people, I think,
    are disenchanted with the United States. .[T]
    hose people in the peaceful opposition do not
    want to become pawns in a super power game."

Charlie Glass is right. In the United States at least,
we do not hear those voices. The opposition voices
we hear are those the U.S. has embraced as its own
- the widely disparate, disconnected, mostly
unaccountable militias of the Free Syrian Army, and
the exile-based and badly divided political forces
grouped in the National Syrian Council. All those
groups are being strengthened with money, new
weapons, and crucially, political endorsement from
the U.S., Europe and their regional allies. They
clearly have some level of support inside Syria, as
does the regime itself, but it's far from clear just
whom the western-backed armed opposition really
represent.

The internal opposition remains - holding on to
political mobilization, remaining committed to non-
violence as much as possible, and opposing U.S. or
other international involvement in the military
struggle.

But in the meantime, there are deadly battles raging
in the ancient city of Aleppo and in parts of
Damascus itself, as well as in towns across the
country. The government military has escalated its
attacks, though it faces serious challenges in
personnel and especially in equipment, helicopter
gunships and other weapons unable to cope with
the blistering heat and sand of a Syrian summer.
The opposition military forces appear to be stronger,
with access to tanks and other heavy equipment
either captured from government bases or brought
over with defecting soldiers. Unlike much of the
internal democratic, non-violent opposition, the
NSC and the FSA completely reject any negotiations
or political settlement supported by many Syrians
inside. But there can and will be no military
solution to the Syria crisis.

The role of outside forces reinforcing either side's
military serves only to expand the fighting. The
weakening of either military force could reduce the
brutal cycle of fighting. The government military
appears to be facing new military challenges from
equipment degradation and through defections,
which could help reduce the fighting. But the rising
sectarianism of the Syrian conflict remains
dangerous. The flight of high-ranking government
officials from inside the Syrian regime, such as the
recent defection of Prime Minister Riad Hijab,
represents a powerful attack on the regime's
legitimacy. But almost all of the most senior
defectors are from the few non-Alawites among the
top echelons of Syria's military and political elites.
Hijab, for example, is a Sunni. So the Alawite
identity of the Syrian government's remaining power
center is stronger than ever. The Syrian military
could be reduced to essentially an Alawite militia,
with the regime left intact but forced to retreat to an
isolated Alawite redoubt. A divided, balkanized Syria
looms as a dangerous possibility.

Increasing the militarization of the conflict -
including by repairing or replacing the regime's
weapons, or sending more, better, heavier arms to
the opposition - will not end the killing, it will lead
to more.

At the moment the Obama administration seems
clear it does not want or intend to join the fighting
in Syria - certainly not with ground troops, and for
now not with warplanes or bombs either. The most
important reason is that the Syria military,
especially its anti-aircraft defense system, is one of
the strongest in the region. A U.S. bombing
campaign in Syria, unlike in Libya, would not
simply end when the pilots turned their planes
around and flew home.

As then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates reminded
us last year while discussing Libya, establishing a
no-fly zone "begins with an attack on Libya to
destroy the air defenses. That's the way you do a no-
fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the
country and not worry about our guys being shot
down. But that's the way it starts." That was Libya
-which had virtually no anti-aircraft defense system.
This is Syria. If they bomb Syria, U.S. planes will be
shot down. Pilots will almost certainly be killed or
captured. That puts the U.S. right into the war, not
as supporters of one side, but as participants on the
ground. Because even if you didn't intend to send in
ground troops, when the first pilot is shot down, his
boots will be on the ground. And that means other
troops - probably special forces - will be sent in to
rescue the pilot, and some of them get captured or
killed, and Syria starts to look much more like Iraq
than Libya.

Kofi Annan Resigns

On the United Nations and international diplomatic
front, there are two new developments: Kofi Annan's
resignation and the Security Council's inability to
agree on a resolution that might help end the
fighting in Syria.

Given the primacy of outside actors, and despite the
escalation of the war, the former secretary general's
decision to resign from his post as UN (and officially,
Arab League) envoy on Syria was certainly
understandable, absolutely reasonable, and maybe
inevitable. Annan was not even close to success in
achieving a ceasefire, the starting point of his six-
point peace plan. But his resignation reflects two
stark realities. First, that as is always the case,
outside players - most especially the United States,
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Russia, Iran - are
operating solely for the own narrow strategic
interests, not for the interests of the Syrian people.
And second, the UN Security Council and its
member states provided no support for any potential
political solution, acting instead to strengthen the
military forces on both sides.

It is telling that Annan directly criticized the Council
and its members, especially the five permanent
members - Britain, China, France, Russia, U.K.,
U.S. - known as the Perm Five. While the Council
had endorsed the Annan plan early on, there was
never any real support for it or for the work of the
UN observer team in Syria. The three U.S.-British-
French resolutions called for harsh UN sanctions
and a range of other economic and diplomatic
pressures on the Syrian regime. They were all vetoed
by Russia and China. The U.S. and its allies
maintained (and for the moment, probably
truthfully) that it had no intention of engaging
directly in the military battle against the Syrian
government. But the three insisted all of those
resolutions be taken under Chapter VII of the UN
Charter - the same precondition required to
authorize the use of force.

The resolutions might well have set the political
stage for direct U.S./European/NATO participation
in the fighting. Looking at the precedent of last
year's Council vote on Libya, when the Council-
authorized "no-fly zone" was immediately
transformed into an all-out U.S./NATO air war, that
kind of escalation was a reasonable assumption.

We'll never know whether, for instance, Russia
might have accepted resolutions calling for
pressure, even perhaps including an arms embargo
(prohibiting military sales, assistance, repairs or
anything else) to both sides - if they were not based
on Chapter VII. That might have actually had some
value.  Instead the resolutions failed.

But is the UN paralyzed, or is it actually doing its
job?

Ironically enough, the great divide between the Perm
Three (the U.S., Britain and France) and the Perm
Two (Russia and China), that stalemated the chance
of a Chapter VII authorization, actually allowed the
Council to follow its Charter obligation to prevent
the "scourge of war" from spreading further. In other
words, if the Council had agreed on a Chapter VII
resolution, there would have been a greater
likelihood of escalation and more violence, than of
bringing a quick end to the war.

There is a kind of revisionist history of the United
Nations. The terrible legacy of the "humanitarian
interventions" of the 1990s and the Iraq War of
2003 means the UN is considered a failure when it
rejects participation in military action, rather than
being recognized as a failure when it joins the war
train.  We should remember that one of the greatest
achievements of the UN was the refusal of the
Security Council to endorse George W. Bush's war
on Iraq in 2002-03. The eight months of UN
resistance brought the global institution into
partnership with the extraordinary global peace
movement of that period - the moment when "the
world said no to war." That should be a moment to
reclaim, not to reject.

One of Syria's non-violent resistance leaders, Michel
Kilo, was part of the opposition delegation that
travelled to Moscow, meeting with Russian officials
to try to figure out a strategy to end the fighting. "If
this destruction goes on and the ruling regime wins,
it will rule over ruin and thus suffer a strategic
defeat. If the opposition wins, it will inherit the
country in an unmanageable condition. In any case,
it is necessary to stop this violence, stop this
bloodshed.

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