(1)
Syria and the Dogs of War
By Conn Hallinan
Foreign Policy in Focus
September 27, 2012
http://www.fpif.org/articles/syria_and_the_dogs_of_war

Cry "Havoc," and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial

Julius Caesar
Act 3, scene 1
William Shakespeare

"Blood and destruction," "dreadful objects," and "pity
choked" was the Bard's searing characterization of what
war visits upon the living. It is a description that
increasingly parallels the ongoing war in Syria, which
is likely to worsen unless the protagonists step back
and search for a diplomatic solution to the 17-month old
civil war. From an initial clash over a monopoly of
power by Syria's Baathist Party, the war has spread to
Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq, ignited regional
sectarianism, drawn in nations around the globe, and
damaged the reputation of regional and international
organizations.

Once loosed, the dogs of war range where they will.

Although the regime of Bashar al-Assad ignited the
explosion with its brutal response to political
protests, much of the blame for the current situation
lies with those countries, seeing an opportunity to
eliminate an enemy, that fanned the flames with weapons
and aid: the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and
Qatar, plus a host of minor cast members ranging from
Jordan to Libya.

The results are almost exactly what Russia and China
predicted when they warned about trying to force regime
change without a negotiated settlement: an opening for
radical Islamists, a flood of refugees, and growing
instability in a region primed to erupt.

The war has claimed between 20,000 and 25,000 lives and
wreaked havoc on a number of cities, including the
country's largest, Aleppo. Just who those casualties are
is in dispute. While it is undoubtedly true that the
Damascus government's use of heavy weapons in urban
areas has killed and wounded many civilians, the
opposition has carried out extrajudicial executions of
Syrian soldiers and Assad supporters as well.

"This is an asymmetrical war, and there is a degree of
expansion of violations of international law by both
sides that seems to be escalating," says Kristalina
Georgieva, UN commissioner for crisis response.

The Damascus government has developed its own spin on
the casualties, claiming they are not Syrians but
"foreign fighters." There is no question that "foreign
fighters" are involved-mostly Islamic jihadists from
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, and Turkey-but most
of the insurgents are Syrians. Truth is always the first
casualty in a war, particularly a civil one in which the
protagonists are not always easy to define.

The fighting has produced a refugee crisis that, while
nowhere near the catastrophe generated by the 2003 U.S.
invasion of Iraq-when 4 million fled their homes-has
still sent hundreds of thousands of people into
neighboring countries. At last count, the UN had
registered almost 250,000 refugees, some 80,000 in
Turkey, 70,000 in Jordan, close to 57,000 in Lebanon,
and over 16,000 in Iraq.

The uprising has also become increasingly sectarian.
Syria has one of the most complex mélanges of
ethnicities and religious identities in the Middle East.
Although most Syrians are Sunni Muslims, there are
sizable minorities of Druze, a variety of Christian
sects, and Alawite Muslims. The Alawites, among them the
Assads, have dominated the Syrian military since French
colonial days. The sect is associated with Shiism,
although it has a pre-Islamic history that is deeply
rooted in the country's western mountains.

According to reporting by foreign media, jihadists are
playing an increasingly powerful role in the fighting.
"The Islamist groups, which are superbly financed and
equipped by the Gulf states, are ruthlessly seizing
decision-making power for themselves," Randa Kassis, a
member of the opposition Syrian National Council told
Der Spiegel. "Syrians who are taking up arms against the
dictator but not putting themselves under the jihadists'
command are being branded as unpatriotic and heretics."

While the Syrian National Council and the Free Syrian
Army disavow the more extreme jihadists, the latter hold
the whip hand because of their support from Saudi Arabia
and Qatar, the main source of weapons and funding. The
rising number of car bombings is the signature of such
al-Qaeda-affiliated groups as the al-Nusra Front.
Speaking in Jordan on September 9, al-Qaeda leader Abu
Sayyaf called for a jihad against the secular Assad
regime.

French surgeon Jacques Beres, a founder of the
humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders who
recently returned from treating wounded in Syria, told
Reuters that 60 percent of his patients were foreign
fighters. "It's really something strange to see. They
are directly saying that they aren't interested in
Bashar al-Assad's fall, but are thinking how to take
power afterward and set up an Islamic state with Shariah
law to become part of the world emirate."

The surge of extremism is not restricted to Syria. Iraq
has been convulsed by bombings aimed at the Shiite
community, killing over 300 people between July 21 and
August 18. On September 9, nearly 400 people were killed
or wounded in 13 Iraqi cities. Alawites have been
targeted in Turkey and Shiites in Lebanon, the latter in
a replay of sectarian attacks five years ago in Tripoli
by the Saudi-funded Fatah al-Islam.

While Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Recep Erdogan is
playing a key role in the war by supplying the rebels,
Ankara is discovering that the dogs of war are ranging
uncomfortably close to home. Iraqi-based Kurds, who have
long fought for an independent state made up from parts
of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, have stepped up
operations against the Turkish military, and the Turks
are apprehensive that Syria's Kurds might join in.
Turkey's "Kurdish problem" might explain why Erdogan has
toned down his rhetoric against Syria, though the
explanation might also be simple politics-Ankara's
involvement in the Syrian civil war is not popular with
the average Turk.

The conflict has also damaged the UN, though that is
mainly fallout from the organization's role in the
overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya. Moscow and
Beijing backed UN Security Council intervention in Libya
because they were assured that there would be an attempt
to negotiate a political solution. The African Union
(AU) had already begun such talks when the French
started bombing and the war went full-tilt.

The AU is still unhappy at the United States, France,
and Britain over Libya, and the African organization's
warning that the collapse of Libya might fuel
instability in other areas of the continent appears to
be coming true. The current war in Mali is a direct
result of the massive number of weapons that poured into
the rest of Africa following the Libyan war, as well as
the empowering of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an
extremist group that played a role in overthrowing
Gaddafi.

As intractable as the Syrian war looks, there is room
for a political resolution, but only if the protagonists
and their supporters stand down. The Damascus government
will have to recognize that one-family rule went out
with feudalism, and that its opponents have real
grievances. On the other side, the opposition will have
to drop its insistence that there will be no talks until
the Damascus government resigns. A zero-sum approach by
either side will simply translate into a continuing war.

But this will also mean countries fueling the opposition
with guns and supplies will have to back off as well.
And those nations that constantly talk about the threat
of "terrorism" need to confront the extremists'
financers.

"The US and Israeli obsession with Iran has led
Washington to turn a blind eye to the dangers posed by
Saudi policy," writes Anatol Lievan, a war studies
professor at King's College, London, which "has helped
lay the basis for Islamist extremism in Pakistan and
elsewhere."

Other countries affected by the war, including Lebanon
and Iran, need to be brought into the process as well.

Lastly, the role of regional and international
organizations needs to be reconfigured. The Libya war
damaged the AU, the Arab League, and the UN because the
political process was hijacked by NATO and Gaddafi's
enemies. The UN can play a key role in bringing peace,
but not if it serves the interests of one side over the
other.

"The Western powers would be well advised to unite with
Russia and China in putting maximum pressure on both
sides to put up their arms and come to the table.
Diplomacy, rather than war, is the only way to preserve
what is left of Syria for its hard-pressed citizens,"
says Patrick Seale, a leading British expert on the
Middle East.

The alternative is death and destruction, floods of
refugees, religious extremism, restive minorities, and a
divided international community. Such ground makes rich
hunting for the dogs of war. It is time to bring them to
heel.

(2)
American Influence on The Middle East Is Past Its Peak -
Someone Should Tell Them

World View: Is the US now in the same position as the
Soviet Union in 1989, when it had to allow its
satellites to collapse around it?
Patrick Cockburn
The Independent
30 September 2012
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/american-influence-on-the-middle-east-is-past-its-peak--someone-should-tell-them-8190901.html

Are the days of American predominance in the Middle East
coming to an end or is US influence simply taking a new
shape? How far is Washington, after refusing to try to
keep Hosni Mubarak in power in Egypt, facing the same
situation as the Soviet Union in 1989, when the police
states it had sustained in Eastern Europe were allowed
to collapse?

The US is obviously weaker than it was between 1979,
when the then Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, signed
the Camp David agreement and allied Egypt with the US,
and 2004/05, when it became obvious to the outside world
that the Iraq war was a disaster for America. At the
time, General William Odom, a former head of the
National Security Agency, the biggest US intelligence
agency, rightly called it "the greatest strategic
disaster in American history".

Since then, the verdict of the Iraq war has been
confirmed in Afghanistan, where another vastly expensive
US expeditionary force has failed to crush an
insurgency. In the last few weeks alone, Taliban
fighters have succeeded in storming Camp Bastion in
Helmand province and destroying $200m worth of aircraft.
So many American and allied soldiers have now been shot
by Afghan soldiers and police that US advisers are under
orders to wear full body armour when having tea with
their local allies.

The Arab Spring uprisings posed a new threat to the US,
but also opened up new options. Support for Mubarak was
decisively withdrawn at an early stage, to the dismay of
Saudi Arabia and Israel. But the Muslim Brotherhood had
long been considering how it could reach an
accommodation with the US that would safeguard it
against military coups, and enable it to chop back the
power of the Egyptian security forces. This was very
much the successful strategy of the Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and
Development (AKP) party, explaining why it was prepared
to join the US in invading Iraq in 2003 and why it has
become the chief instrument of American policy towards
Syria in the past year.

This alliance with Islamic but democratic and pro-
capitalist parties in Egypt and Turkey is obviously in
the interests of the US and the Atlantic powers. But
their support for democratic change in North Africa and
West Asia is determined by self-interest. It does not,
for instance, extend to Bahrain where the Sunni al-
Khalifa monarchy has been busily locking up its Shia
opponents and retreating from promises of meaningful
reform. But new allies must at some point mean fresh
policies. In sharp contrast to the Mubarak regime, a new
government in Egypt is unlikely to support covertly
Israeli military action such as the bombardment of
Lebanon in 2006 and of Gaza in 2008.

A problem for the White House is that American voters
have not taken on board the extent to which US influence
has been reduced. For all the rhetoric about the Iraq
war being a strategic disaster, the American political
and military elite has also failed to appreciate the
extent and consequences of failure. It is extraordinary
to discover, according to recent revelations, that as
late as 2010 Vice-President Joe Biden was under the
impression that he could blithely decide who would be
president of Iraq. Biden's grip on Iraqi geography
appears to be as shaky as his understanding of its
politics. On one occasion in Baghdad, he lauded all the
good things the US had done for Baku, the capital of
Azerbaijan, having apparently mistaken it for Basra in
southern Iraq.

The killing of the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher
Stevens, and the burning of the US Consulate in Benghazi
could have been a worse political disaster for President
Barack Obama than it turned out to be. It highlighted
that the rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi were not
quite as they had been presented by the US government
and media during the war past year. The US State
Department appears to have had an unhealthy belief in
its own propaganda, not seeing that its consulate in
Benghazi was in one of the most dangerous places in the
world. The assault did not come out of a blue sky.
Fighters had shot at the convoy of the British
ambassador, Sir Dominic Asquith, in Benghazi a few weeks
earlier. In July last year, the rebels' own commander,
Abdel Fatah Younis, was abducted and murdered by men
nominally under his command in revenge for repressive
actions he had carried out before he defected from
Gaddafi's forces.

Diplomats and soldiers are often curiously blind to
dangers facing them. It may be that both live in very
inward-looking communities and somehow cannot
internalise how somebody outside may think and act. I
remember in 1983 in Lebanon talking to the highly
intelligent US marine commander whose soldiers were
based near Beirut airport. In theoretical terms, he
could see very clearly that American forces had some
very dangerous enemies and were vulnerable to attack,
but he unaccountably failed to take effective measures
that might have stopped a truck packed with explosives
killing 241 marines when their base was destroyed.
Likewise, the Green Zone in Baghdad from 2003 on had
elaborate fortifications, but its outer defences were
manned at one moment by former Peruvian policemen from
Lima and, at another, by ex-soldiers from Uganda hired
on the cheap by a security company.

A more effective political opponent than Mitt Romney
could surely have inflicted damage on Obama over the
Benghazi debacle. A measure of Romney's ineptitude is
that he failed to do so and, instead of scoring points,
he came across as opportunistic and ignorant. After all,
Obama has been conducting a policy of retreat in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Egypt without quite coming clean about
it. Romney's denunciation of Obama for "apologising" for
America was shallow demagoguery, though rhetoric on the
American right should not be dismissed too casually.
George W Bush's supporters used to spout similar
nonsense, but only after 9/11 did it become appallingly
clear that they believed a lot of what they were saying.

Supposing Obama is re-elected in November, will the US
stance change at all? The endlessly repeated Israeli
threats to launch air strikes on Iran have always struck
me as being most likely highly successful bluff, since
threats alone have served Israeli purposes so well,
isolating Iran economically and diverting attention from
the Palestinians.

More immediately, will the US move after the election,
possibly acting through Turkey, to take military action
to displace Bashar al-Assad in Syria? There is something
deceptive about David Cameron implying that Russia and
China are responsible for the slaughter of Syrian
children.

A central problem in getting rid of President Assad and
the Baathist regime is that the war against him is not
just for and against autocracy. If this were the only
issue, how come that the Sunni absolute monarchies of
the Arabian peninsula are Assad's fiercest enemies? The
struggle is also between Shia and Sunni and between Iran
and its enemies, guaranteeing that Assad has support in
Tehran, Baghdad and Beirut. The quickest way to end the
war is to reassure Assad's allies at home and abroad
that they are not next in line for elimination.

___________________________________________

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