The games they play with Syria

S P SETH

Syria remains a blighted country. But a recent international conference in Vienna (and its follow up) has created some momentum that might create a framework, over time, for a peaceful resolution. That, at least, is the hope nurtured by some observers. The situation in Syria is such that nobody can predict with any confidence what might happen next. The hope from Vienna conference derives from the fact that it was the most representative meeting of external powers with involvement in the Syrian theatre, some of them at odds with each other pursuing conflicting agendas. For instance, Iran was a participant, for the first time, in any international gathering on Syria. Which is an important recognition of its pivotal role in Syria where it is a major supporter, economically, politically and militarily, of the Bashar al-Assad regime.

The nuclear deal with Iran became a precursor to its possible role as a facilitator in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. It would have been inconceivable, only a short time ago, to see both Saudi Arabia and Iran in an international conference on Syria, as one of Riyadh’s major goal in Middle Eastern politics is to keep Iran out as a pariah. It worked hard, unsuccessfully though, to prevent the nuclear deal between the US and Iran. And it has also not been successful to keep Iran out of the Vienna conference. Which could both be a plus and a minus. It is a plus because it is difficult to envisage any progress in Syria without Iranian engagement. And it could be a minus if Riyadh were to simply play a wrecking role by demanding the removal of Bashar al-Assad regime as a pre-condition, as well as the removal of foreign fighters (from Iran) and the Hezbollah militants.

At another, almost parallel conference, in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, of mostly Western and Arab officials, Saudi Arabia launched a counter offensive of sorts, which might wreck the international dialogue through the Vienna route. At the Manama Dialogue security conference in Bahrain, Saudi foreign minister Adel al Jubeir set forth Riyadh’s position. And, not surprisingly, he reportedly said that the timing of Assad’s departure and withdrawal of foreign fighters (from Iran in Syria) remained the main sticking points to finding a lasting solution to the civil war in Syria. In his way of putting it, the IS and, al Nusra and other militant groups, that are the enemy of both the Assad regime and the US-led coalition against IS, might seem benign. And Saudi weapons and aid for its favoured jihadis/rebels is for a good cause.

It would even appear that the international conference in Vienna and its follow up would be used to put enormous pressure on Iran and Russia to ditch Assad, making it sound like it would be in Moscow’s own interest. Iran, though, is unlikely to waver in support of Assad. Russia might buckle at some point, which seems to be the strategy. And it is because, first, Russia cannot sustain its military intervention because of the heavy costs involved. And, second, it would have to consider at some point that its deeper involvement in a conflict, which has strong sectarian elements (Sunni versus Shia), will put it on the wrong side of the Sunni Muslim world.

Antony Blinken, the US deputy secretary of state, highlighted the problems that Russia might face if it continued its military involvement in Syria. He reportedly told the security conference in Bahrain, “Russia cannot afford to sustain its military onslaught against everyone opposed to Assad’s brutal rule. The costs will mount every day in economic, political and security terms, but at best only to prevent Assad from losing.” And he predicted a “quagmire” that gets Russia deeper alongside Iran, and Hezbollah and, in the process, alienating Sunni Muslims. In other words, it is in Russia’s own best interests to work with the US-led coalition, comprising Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, to get rid of Assad.

The problem though is that Moscow doesn’t see it that way, because the simple removal of Assad will not solve the problem. Moscow, though, has made it clear that its support of Assad is not absolute and not a matter of principle. A spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry recently made it clear that they feared that another regime change in the Middle East “could simply turn the whole region into a large black hole.” In other words, Moscow’s support for the regime in Damascus is pragmatic in terms of the realities of the situation.

The US-supported anti-Assad elements do not have much sway in the country, and those wetted and trained by the US have not mattered much any way. The US has now abandoned that programme. It is now reportedly doling out more cash to the opposition, pledging another $100 million in aid that will take the amount to $500 million since 2012. These funds are supposed to help local and provincial councils, emergency services and so on. How these funds will be disbursed is not clear. At another level, for the first time, the US is making a commitment of a small contingent of about 50 special operations commandos to help the mainly Kurdish fighters in northern Syria against IS. This could be the thin edge of the mission creep, which has happened in other theatres.

The US might be right that Russia’s deepening engagement in Syria would land it into a “quagmire” as it did the United States in other areas. But unless Russia and the United States and its allies come to a common understanding of their mission, which is to push back and eventually defeat IS, they might all end up in a “quagmire”. The recent downing of a Russian civilian plane in Sinai and the terrorist attacks in Paris clearly underline the need for a united international front against IS.

 If the forum of the international conference in Vienna is used to put pressure on Russia to get rid of Assad, this most likely will fail, at least for quite sometime. Russia clearly sees that the Assad regime is the only functional entity in the country. And to dump it in the absence of a clearly discernible and functional alternative is to make things even worse. As for Iran and Hezbollah, they seem to have come to the conclusion for quite some time that Assad’s Syria is their frontline against IS and other militant groups.    

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times. 

Netanyahu rewrites history

S P SETH

It is unbelievable that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has got away with his recent preposterous statement that Hitler’s massacre of Jews was in fact done at the instigation and encouragement of the then Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The way Netanyahu made his assertion would seem to suggest that he might actually have been present during the conversation on the subject of getting rid of the Jews. Netanyahu said, “Hitler didn’t want to want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews.” Just when Hitler was weighing his options, according to Netanyahu’s telling of the conversation, he met Haj Amin al-Husseini who said to Hitler, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ Hitler then asked the Grand Mufti, ‘So what should I do with them?’ The Mufti said, ‘Burn them.’ And Hitler obviously did what he was told by the Mufti. And the world ‘naively’ believed all this time that Hitler was the ultimate monster. In Netanyahu’s re-telling of the story, the bigger monster was indeed the then Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

The absurdity of it all is all too patent but its dangerous overtones for the Palestinians are not a laughing matter. Its underlying meaning is that the Palestinians and their leadership has been and continues to harbor destruction of the Jews and their state of Israel. And Netanyahu was not slow to own up to his real motive in making such a stupid, but dangerous, assertion. When questioned, he said, “I did not intend to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry.” Elaborating, he said, “My intention was… rather to show that the forefathers of the Palestinian nation, … without the so-called ‘occupation’… even then aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews.” 

In other words, the Palestinians are intrinsically an evil people and their hatred of the Jews is not due to ‘occupation’ of their country by Israel but is part of who they are. It is amazing how Netanyahu got away with such dangerously ludicrous distortion in a world so sensitive to Nazi Germany’s Holocaust of the Jews. Indeed, Isaac Herzog, the opposition leader in the Israeli parliament was quite critical of such rewriting of history. He reportedly said, “This is a dangerous historical distortion and I demand Netanyahu correct it immediately as it minimizes the Holocaust, Nazism and… Hitler’s part in our people’s terrible disaster.” (In a subsequent clarification, he did acknowledge Nazi Germany’s role in the mass killing of the Jews, but the Mufti still remained the main inspiration.)

Despite such rewriting of history, the world at large didn’t seem overtly concerned about how Israel’s prime minister twisted history to suit his country’s crusade against the Palestinians. Since the carving out of the Israeli state out of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli leaders have repeatedly emphasized a few themes. The first and the foremost, of course, has been the Holocaust their people suffered under the Nazi Germany. Which is true. But that they deserve a state of their own out of their mythical ‘holy land’, which is today’s Palestine, to feel safe was politically and morally a questionable proposition. At a very basic level, Palestine was not some empty desert land awaiting new Jewish settlers. The Palestinian people had lived there for generations. And there was no reason why they should be penalized for Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews, or their historical persecution in Europe. Of course, now we are told by Netanyahu that the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was behind it all!

The second point the new state of emphasized was to deny the existence of a Palestinian entity and the Palestinian people, as it started the process of violently expelling them from their own country. The whole idea seemed to be that these ‘homeless’ people will be absorbed in neighbouring Arab countries and this will miraculously resolve the Palestinian question. With Palestine occupied by Israel and Palestinians scattered and settled in other Arab countries, there will be no Palestinian problem. And the process of expulsion continued through wars, like the 1967 war and the 1973 war, with more Palestinians expelled and killed and more Jewish settlements in the occupied territory. And this violence against the Palestinians continues to this day. Despite their ever-increasing misery, Palestinian entity and Palestinian people have refused to vanish, not only in their own country but also in other Arab countries in refugee settlements.

In the midst of it all, Israel still claims to be the victim of Palestinian violence. And they do it by demonizing Palestinians as terrorists, barbarians and whatever else they can throw at them. The fact is that the Palestinians are an occupied people and they are easily suppressed, if and when they rise up, because Israel has all the power, militarily, economically, politically and internationally. Therefore, their occasional bursts of violence, mostly of a local nature and exercised through some stone-throwing and knife wielding, is essentially the rage of an exasperated and frustrated people largely abandoned by the international community, with the world’s most powerful country, the US, always behind Israel. And with that sort of Palestinian impotent rage, Israel uses all its propaganda to demonize them as subhuman or worse.

 With their country under Israeli occupation, they are subjected to the worst kind of apartheid, which is meant to humiliate them by virtual confinement surrounded by military check points, observation towers, searches and the like. And even that kind of humiliation and demonization is not enough for Netanyahu. And now, with Netanyahu citing the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as inspiration behind Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews, the Palestinians of all generations are implicated. With such ‘antecedents’ and practicing ‘barbarism’ and ‘terrorism’, the Palestinians don’t deserve humanity, as Netanyahu and his ilk would think.

In the midst of its sordid record of occupation, Israel has the temerity to talk of its democracy, including its justice system. About its courts and ‘democracy’ in general, David Shulman had this to say in an article in the New York Review of Books in 2009, “For decades now, the courts have allowed the settlement enterprise to proceed unimpeded by significant legal constraints, despite its evident criminal nature under international law… They have let rampant violence by settlers throughout the territories… go largely unpunished. They have sanctioned the fencing off of Palestinian villages into tiny, discontinuous enclaves cut off from markets, schools, hospitals, and work places…”

And it keeps getting worse as recent events, arising out of increasing restrictions at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to Muslim worshippers, testifies. For Palestinians, it would seem there is more of the same as long as Israel can get away with murder in daylight.     

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.  

Has Turkey lost the plot?

S P SETH

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is losing the plot when confronting the crisis his state finds itself in. The recent massive blasts at a peace rally in the Turkish capital, Ankara, believed to be the work of two suicide bombers, killed about 100 people and injured nearly 250. It happened at a mainly Kurdish peace rally held to protest against the government’s incessant bombing of Kurds in northern Iraq and inside Turkey. The Turkish government blames the militant Turkish movement, PKK, for terrorist acts inside the country in pursuit of autonomy/independence for the Kurds. For a period, there was some hope of peace and reconciliation between Turkey and its Kurdish population. But the parliamentary elections in June in which the predominantly Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) won more than 10 per cent votes (the minimum constitutional threshold) with 80 parliamentary seats, undercut the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) parliamentary majority requiring new elections now scheduled next month.

President Erdogan had put much hope on the June election, anticipating a comfortable parliamentary majority for the ruling AKP to change the constitution to become the country’s executive president. With new elections, held under his party’s interim prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, that might still not happen. Therefore, to ensure desired parliamentary victory, the moderate and predominantly Kurdish party, HDP, would need to be tarred with the same brush as the militant PKK. To this end, the government has repeatedly accused the HDP of links to the PKK. In other words, the entire Kurdish community is under suspicion of actual or potential subversion of the Turkish state and society; making the Erdogan government the country’s ultimate savior. It is hoped that this will rally much of the country behind them.

Against this backdrop, the rise of IS has created opportunities as well as pitfalls for the government. The opportunities lie in an increasingly bloody confrontation between the IS and Kurds, spread across Turkey, Iraq and Syria, that might weaken the Kurds. But as the Kurds are taking the fight on the ground against IS, they have won the admiration and support of the US that is helping them with weapons and aerial support. This hasn’t found favour with Turkey, as it might help to strengthen the Kurdish position to eventually carve out a homeland for themselves. Turkey’s first response to the US-led military coalition against IS was not only to keep out of it but also to deny them the use of Turkish bases for bombing raids. The US, a long time Turkish ally, was unhappy with it. Later, Turkey changed its position by joining the US-led coalition, as well as allowing the use of its bases for bombing raids on IS. But, simultaneously, it turned on the Kurds by attacking and bombing PKK targets in northern Iraq and in southeast Turkey.

While it was trying to curry favour with the US-led coalition by coalescing with it on IS, it was making it clear that the Kurds wouldn’t be allowed to use their frontline role against IS to advance their Kurdish autonomy/separation agenda. And, at home, the electoral respectability of the predominantly Kurdish HDP party was a worry as reflected in the June election. There is, therefore, a concerted attempt to tar the moderate HDP with the militant PKK brush.  The bombing raids and round up of Kurds inside Turkey look like an attempt to create a security threat scenario for the Turkish state from inside and outside the country. Even though it is generally accepted that the blasts at the Ankara peace rally were the work of IS, President Erdogan seemed more inclined to blame all violence on PKK. He reportedly said after the blasts in Ankara, “The terrorist attack targeting civilian citizens today at the Ankara station is no different at all from the previous attacks in various locations against our soldiers, our police, our village guards, public servants and innocent citizens.” There is thus an attempt to blame the Kurds and the militant PKK for all the killings and security problems in Turkey to create a siege mentality, with the ruling AKP party seen as the only alternative to crush Kurdish violence. If this narrative were to take hold, AKP has hope of winning the parliamentary elections. There is thus a concerted campaign to somehow mix up HDP and PKK as one and the same.

This sort of confusion and resultant security operations against the Kurds must be music to IS ears, as much of the Turkish government’s energies are directed against a perceived Kurdish threat. This is bound to affect the effectiveness of Kurdish operations against IS, as they now have to face two fronts, leading one to wonder if the Turkish government is at all serious about fighting IS. The initial satisfaction in the US-led coalition over Turkey’s decision to join their ranks has almost disappeared because, on balance, it is probably weakened the coalition by weakening the Kurdish contribution on the ground that was considered quite effective.

The Erdogan government has been unhappy with the US for its handling of the Syrian crisis almost from the time when the rebellion to overthrow the Assad regime started in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring. And Erdogan is politically inflexible when he has taken a position on any issue.  His government seems to believe that the present mess in Syria, with IS emerging as a determining force in Syria and Iraq, is due to the US failure to act against the Assad regime. And this mess has also raised the profile of the Kurds across Turkey, Iraq and Syria, thus creating problems for Turkey. And this might need to be dealt with directly through security operations by the Turkish state and, indirectly, by IS. This pincer movement will most likely weaken Kurds over a period of time. In the meantime, this might win the ANP the parliamentary elections, thus entrenching its political dominance in place since 2002. Such calculations do not seem to factor in the threat from IS, not only for Turkey but the entire Middle Eastern region. And this is where the Erdogan government has lost the plot.

  

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@ yahoo.com

Russia’s bold Syrian adventure

S P SETH

An important recent development in the increasingly complex Middle East imbroglio is Russia’s open military intervention in the Syrian theatre. Moscow has been known to support the Bashar al-Assad regime in all sorts of ways but had refrained from jumping into the fray militarily. It is now conducting aerial bombing of rebel positions, storing and deploying heavy armaments at its naval base in Syria and is even said to have some ground troops for limited operations. Moscow’s justification for this is multi-fold. First, it is doing this at the invitation of the legitimate Syrian government of President Assad. Second, it is doing it to fight terrorism, which the Assad regime has been doing on its own. Third, its timing would appear to be dictated by the seemingly imminent danger to the Assad regime from multiple jihadi and rebel forces converging on it.

For Moscow, even though IS is the main target, it is pointless to be splitting hair to determine who is who is who among the jihadis because, in the end, they are all terrorists wanting to create an even bigger blood bath of their presumed enemies. And they are also a threat to Russia and its interests as some among them are former Chechen rebels and commanders now fighting for IS and other jihadi groups. Russia would hate them and IS to score even more gains, with the prospect of some of the Chechen rebels and their new compatriots returning to settle old scores with the Russian state. Therefore, it is not simply bravado on Russia’s part to help Assad regime, it is also in its self-interest to deal with them as far away from the country as is possible.

There is also an important geopolitical reason. President Putin has never forgotten and forgiven the collapse of the Soviet state as a global power. He called it the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20^th century. Its shrunken version, the Russian state, he has been presiding over for much of the new century, has been facing further pressures to constrict and constrain its role, including a perceived threat from an expanded NATO that now also include some eastern European and Baltic countries that were either once under the protective Soviet umbrella or its integral part. Which led Moscow to push back when Ukraine was sought to be included in the European Union, with the prospect of its subsequent inclusion in NATO. The crisis in Ukraine is still unresolved for which Russia is facing a slew of economic sanctions from the US and its European allies.

Though there is no direct connection between Ukrainian and Syrian crises, Syria happens to be the only Middle Eastern country where Russia still has a naval base that allows it to maintain and project a countervailing and/or bridging role, and has economic interests. And it is not just Assad’s Syria that is welcoming of Russia’s interventionist role against IS and other jihadist outfits, Iran and Iraq are also part of this new coalition with Russia apparently in the lead role. Moscow reportedly will coordinate intelligence with Baghdad and likely with Tehran in the midst of reports that Iranian forces are already on the ground helping the Syrian regime.

In the situation as it is developing, both Moscow and Washington are keen to push back and destroy IS. But the important difference is that while Moscow would like this to be done through the agency of the Assad regime as the only functional entity committed to it, the US and its coalition allies would rather see Assad step aside in favour of a broad coalition of preferably secular US-supported elements. At the most, they might tolerate a role for Bashar al-Assad during the “transitional” phase when a new replacement arrangement is worked out. Moscow is not wedded to Assad per se but doesn’t see any workable “transitional” arrangement emerging out of the medley of jihadi groups and the occasional secular elements that are, in any case, being subverted or over-whelmed by IS.

President Obama says that President Putin is entering a “quagmire” with his air strikes in Syria and by hitching his wagon to the Assad regime. At another level, the US and its allies are highly critical of the reportedly Russian targeting of non-IS jihadi groups, including some of its favoured and supposedly secular elements like the Free Syrian Army. Though Moscow says it is primarily targeting IS, its foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was unapologetic for hitting other terrorist groups like al-Nusra and the likes. Asked to define other terrorist groups while he was in New York, he said, “If it looks like a terrorist, if it acts like a terrorist, if it walks like a terrorist, if it fights like a terrorist, it is a terrorist, right?” In other words, Russia’s definition of a terrorist group is quite wide to include almost all the rebels fighting the Syrian regime. Which invites sharp criticism from the US and some of its allies. But, in some cases, the comment is more nuanced.

For instance, Australia’s foreign minister Julie Bishop is more pragmatic. She reportedly has said that, “President Putin maintains that Assad is not their man and they are talking about the stability of the regime, rather than the survival of Assad per se.” As if she were standing up for Russia, Bishop went on, “Their [Moscow] concern is that if Assad is removed there will be created a vacuum and there is no one they can identify who could step up and run that part of Syria.” She believes that “there is a common view that Daesh [IS] is a devastatingly successful terrorist organization, that cannot be allowed to prevail.” And within that wider parameter Russia’s larger role, even envisaging a place for a reconstituted Syrian regime (without Bashar al-Assad, perhaps), would need to be recognized. And that goes for Iran too as a participant at an international conference, though one can see how Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Gulf kingdoms and Turkey will be horrified at such a prospect.

The US, even if it were to heed Julie Bishop’s sensible interpretation of Russia’s important role (as it is of Iran), is likely to find itself vetoed by its Arab allies. Obama might be right that Russia would likely find herself in a “quagmire” with military intervention as has the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and now against IS, but such an outcome would be disastrous with IS eventually emerging as the dominant force not only in the Middle East but also in the Muslim world. And with its own freakish interpretation of Islam, it would need to be confronted and defeated. And that is only possible with a united international front where the US, Russia and other stakeholders recognize that the real enemy is IS and not the Syrian regime which, undoubtedly, is brutal in its own context. And that would be confronted when the larger IS threat is contained and/or beaten.

But don’t hold your breath about a united international front to confront IS. Russia’s intervention in Syria seems to be reviving elements of the old cold war, with NATO expressing deep concern about recent Russian incursions into Turkish air space for their Syrian bombing raids “despite Turkish authorities’ clear, timely and repeated warnings.”

Note: This article as first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au