This shall probably be
the last of the posts on this website; I have been asked by the editor-in-chief
of the Warwick Globalist (an international affairs magazine on campus) to begin
blogging for their revamped and rebooted website come the start of term in
October. So after 8,000 hits and lots of positive feedback from people of a
variety of political persuasions (or none at all) I am pleased with how the
experiment has gone, and have enjoyed writing this blog. I will post a link to
the new blog when it is up and running, and hope everyone will continue to read
it over at the Globalist website.
It had been said that the first casualty of war is truth, and
Syria is a perfect illustration of this fact. Deciphering and manoeuvring through
the labyrinth of lies, distortions, agendas, secrets, deals, threats, and power
politics that defines the Syrian civil war is no easy task. I have become
somewhat sceptical of the possibility of achieving a substantial degree of
knowledge about the conflict, at least for now. The historian often has a far
easier task than the political scientist.
Having said that, it is the responsibility of citizens of
this country, a country which maintains a disproportionate level of power and
influence around the world, to seek to understand the conflict as far as is
possible, since we have found ourselves once more faced with the possibility
that our government will attack a country in the Middle East (correction- for now at least, they won't. Seconds before publishing this Parliament rejected a motion for military action against Syria, an astonishing event).
The
Chemical Attack
There have been murmurs about the ‘ghost of Iraq’ casting a
shadow over potential intervention in Syria, and quite rightly. We as a nation
are far from coming to terms with and atoning for the devastation we wrought in
that country, a ‘moral obscenity’ (to borrow Mr Hague’s description of the gas
attack in Syria) that far outweighs the particular attack we condemn so
vehemently today. And the uncomfortable fact remains that, despite Obama and
Cameron’s rhetoric, we don’t know exactly what happened near Damascus on the 21st
of August. We can’t even conclude which side carried out the attack for
certain. If it was the regime, we aren’t sure whether it was merely a rogue
commander or an institutionalised policy carried out from the highest levels. ABC
News has reported that:
‘the
intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an
alleged chemical weapons attack that killed at least 100 people is no
"slam dunk," with questions remaining about who actually controls
some of Syria's chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself
ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say…multiple U.S. officials
used the phrase "not a slam dunk" to describe the intelligence
picture’.
This is highly significant given Obama’s
assertions that the US ‘concludes’ that the Syrian government carried out
the attack as a matter of government policy. Given the terrible record of botched
and distorted intelligence in the run up to the Iraq War (and throughout
‘post-War’ history), we ought to be highly sceptical of government claims of
this kind.
Why
Intervention?
No one should have any illusions that the proposed
intervention has anything to do with humanitarian impulses or the enforcement
of international law. A brief survey of Western policy and history in the
Middle East should put rest to that idea. America has frequently
disregarded international law itself, often refusing to sign conventions (such
as the Convention on Cluster Munitions) and ignoring international law even
when it has formally agreed to it. Western politicians only speak of the crimes
of the Syrian regime, and rarely if ever about the alleged atrocities carried
out by factions of the rebel forces- for instance it has been reported in
some foreign media that a massacre of hundreds of civilians was carried out
at Lattakia by rebel Islamists. Little interest has been shown in these allegations.
Selective empathy should come as no surprise to students of
international affairs, and the reasons underlying the distinction between
‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims are rarely hard to find. In this case the
Syrian government is considered ‘bad’ because it is Iran’s only major ally in
the region, and there is a cold war being waged in the Middle East between two
poles: Saudi Arabia, the Sunni states and the West on one side, and Iran,
Hezbollah, and Syria (and perhaps Russia) on the other. The US, UK and France
have been hand in hand with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and to a lesser
extent Kuwait and Qatar in their attempts to arm and fund the rebels. The CIA
has long been involved in training favoured
rebel forces at bases in Jordan, as well as helping organising the flow
of weapons across the Turkish-Syrian border. They all hope to weaken and
isolate Iran by knocking out its major ally; they would then enjoy the patronage
of rebel forces who would partly owe their victory to Gulf and Western backers. That
totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia are joining the US in backing the rebels
should tell you something about the motives underlying the support given: it
has nothing to do with democracy and freedom, but everything to do with power
and interests, as is always the case with Great Power politics. [1]
The Syrian story has got weirder and weirder as time has gone
by- this
article from Al Monitor purported
to record a ‘diplomatic report’ from the Kremlin on a secret meeting between
Russia’s Putin and Saudi Arabia’s head of intelligence, the slimy Prince Bandar
(who used to be the Saudis' ambassador to the US). This is how The Independent described Bandar:
‘His most recent
travels, rarely advertised, have taken him to both London and Paris for
discussions with senior officials. As ambassador, Prince Bandar left an imprint
that still has not quite faded. His voice was one of the loudest urging the
United States to invade Iraq in 2003. In the 1980s, Prince Bandar became mired
in the Iran-Contra scandal in Nicaragua. Months of applying pressure on the
White House and Congress over Syria have slowly born fruit. The CIA is believed
to have been working with Prince Bandar directly since last year in training
rebels at base in Jordan close to the Syrian border’
Al Monitor’s article,
which was reported
and expanded on in The Telegraph,
claims that Bandar gave a thinly veiled threat to Putin that if he didn’t
withdraw his support for Assad then Chechen Islamic terrorists would attack the
2014 Winter Olympics. He allegedly said to Putin that ‘I can give you a
guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea
next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are
controlled by us, and they will not move in the Syrian territory’s direction
without coordinating with us. These groups do not scare us. We use them in the
face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role or influence in Syria’s
political future’. I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I came across this-
if true it’s an open admission from a senior Saudi official that they have a
hand in Chechen terrorism, use Islamic terrorists against Assad’s regime in
Syria, plan to abandon them if they win and most significantly an open threat
to attack Russia if Putin refuses to comply. This was first reported in the
Russian press, and then the Lebanese-based Al
Monitor. Bandar went on to offer a grand deal which included ‘an alliance
between the OPEC cartel and Russia, which together produce over 40m barrels a
day of oil, 45pc of global output. Such a move would alter the strategic
landscape’ according to The Telegraph.
This is like something out of the 16th century; indeed the Saudi
state does in many ways operate as if it were still in medieval times.
Putin was reportedly outraged at the threats and refused to
back down from supporting Syria. Interestingly, The Telegraph claims that Bandar was ‘purporting to speak with the
full backing of the US’. The EU Times
then had
an article about how Putin ‘Orders
Massive Strike Against Saudi Arabia If West Attacks Syria’, but the online
‘newspaper’ has little credibility and the article fails to give substantial
sources for its claims. Thankfully, this final part of the Putin-Bandar story seems to be a highly unlikely dramatization.
The Consequences
The repercussions of a strike by the West on Syria are
impossible to predict accurately, but some inferences can be made. The
International Committee of the Red Cross has
claimed that ‘further escalation will likely trigger more displacement and
add to humanitarian needs, which are already immense’, a sentiment echoed by
Christian Aid, which warned of ‘catastrophic effects’ if an attack is
undertaken. Highly respected Middle East journalist Robert Fisk has
said that an attack would be ‘the stupidest Western war in the history of
the modern world’, and warned
that the US/UK would be on the same side as Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-linked
forces, such as Jabhat Al-Nusra, reminding one of the CIA programmes in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 80s. In Israel gas masks are
being horded as fears of a retaliatory strike by Iran or Syria grow. If a
strike goes ahead, the potential for a diplomatic solution will be severely
weakened; already the US has unilaterally
cancelled a meeting with Russia that was to set out plans for a grand
conference to help end the Syrian crisis. Diplomacy is considered by most sane
observers, such
as former chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, to be the only hope for an
end to the violence.
Furthermore public opinion is largely against ‘intervention’,
with
about 60% in the US opposed. A
YouGov poll found that ‘77% of the British public support sending “food,
medicine and other humanitarian supplies” to Syria. However, only 9% support
sending British troops, while 74% oppose the action. Support is equally minor
(10%) for sending full-scale military supplies or even small arms (16%) to the
Anti-Assad troops’. One must further factor in the history of the West in Syria
before we seek to appoint ourselves as global policemen. France is a former
colonial master in Syria, and as this
excellent article in The National Interest detailed, the US has a long record of overthrowing governments and
imposing dictators in Syria. The article noted how a US government report even
found that there is a ‘consensus narrative’ among the Syrian population that
‘foreign conspiracies’ had sought to control Syria in the past and that these
were ‘associated with the United States’. We should bear these facts in mind
when discussing what to do with Syria today- the West has the collective memory
span of a fish, but in regions like the Middle East history holds great
significance.
Thankfully momentum towards a strike seems to be slowing (as I write this parliament has voted against military action- a stunning, unexpected and happy result),
although I fear that Obama is now too committed to back down. Ed Miliband has
done one of the only decent things of his career so far in breaking
the usual cross-party consensus on foreign policy and refusing to
unconditionally back Cameron. He has called upon Cameron to wait for the
results of the UN probe into whether chemical weapons were used, and to
strictly abide by international law, very sensible proposals. The reaction from
Downing Street has been one of outrage- how on earth could Labour be so
reckless and oppose more endless violence and war from Britain?! A government
source was
quoted as calling Miliband a ‘fucking cunt’ over his decision. This
reaction is unsurprising: Labour and the Conservatives usually fight it out over
the most minute of policy differences, but if Labour dares to finally offer a
break from the two-party consensus on fundamentals then he can expect to feel
the wrath of Downing Street. Parliament, it seems, has just voted against military action, and credit needs to go to Miliband for this remarkable result.
International opinion also appears largely opposed, as one
would expect. The
Pope, Desmond
Tutu, and Egypt have come out strongly against intervention. Even the Western-backed Jordanian state has refused
to allow the US and UK to use Jordan as a launching pad for a strike, no
doubt fearing the contempt it will receive from Arab public opinion and its own
population, and perhaps even fearing that it could become the target of
retaliatory terrorist attacks. The
Arab League has refused to back an attack, despite being
comprised mainly of Western-backed governments.
A protest has been called in London this Saturday by Stop
the War Coalition to demonstrate against British involvement in Syria.Given that seconds before I posted this the UK backed out of intervention, it may not be needed, fortunately. Less happily, the US and France could still go for a strike. The last thing we need is another imperialist-driven war in the
Middle East led by the US, particularly in a conflict so complex; the
consequences are difficult to predict but it’s not impossible that this could
flare up into a much wider regional or global confrontation with Russia and the
US facing off. We haven't won this one yet.
[1]
Some have suggested that actual Western policy on Syria is a ‘realist’ strategy
to balance the forces within Syria and let them bleed each other to death-
engage US enemies like Iran and Hezbollah in a protracted battle that saps
their energy and resources whilst not giving enough support to the rebels to
allow them to overthrow Assad, since that could lead to an even more
anti-Western government. This has been suggested by Robert Fisk, Stephen Walt,
Noam Chomsky, Daniel Drezner and Alan Berger, amongst others. It may have some
merit to it, but space precludes the possibility of discussing it here.
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