May 08, 2013
The
big question being asked by many international, especially American, media is
whether the United States will now respond and actively engage militarily in
Syria, due to the reports of the use of chemical weapons there. I suspect both
parts of that question are the wrong issues to focus on, for neither chemical
weapons use nor American involvement strike me as the most significant elements
of the Syria conflict that should grab our attention.
The
Syria conflict has certainly crossed a significant red line, but not the one
that U.S. President Barack Obama has defined in terms of the use of chemical
weapons. The red line that has now been breached is the active, direct participation
of neighboring powers into Syria’s two-year-old war. The key words here are
“active, direct” participation in the war, because neighbors have been fighting
each other in Syria and Lebanon through proxy parties for decades.
This
should trigger our acknowledgment of bigger picture worries of the worst case
scenario that is slowly taking shape before our eyes: as the civil war in Syria
increasingly settles down into a vicious sectarian barbarism fest with a
growing element of Qaeda-like militants, neighboring countries like Lebanon and
Jordan feel the intense pressures of refugee flows and start to panic; others,
like Hezbollah and Israel, directly participate in aspects of the war; and, the
armorer-funder powers behind them all—Iran, Turkey, the United States and Saudi
Arabia—start talking about how they will react to all this.
The
big fear now is that the world’s biggest proxy war of the past century
dangerously approaches shedding its proxy status and morphing into direct
combat among a range of wild ones – the United States, Iran, Syrian government
and opposition forces, Israel, Hezbollah, Russia, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi
Arabia, to name only the main potential antagonists.
The
immediately dramatic elements in this picture are that Hezbollah declared last
week that it would continue to fight inside Syria (to protect Lebanese Shiites
there and defend Shiite shrines, it says), and Israel has actively entered into
the fighting, with its two consecutive air strikes against targets inside Syria
in the past week (to prevent the transfer of advances missiles from Iran/Syria
to Hezbollah, it says). One of my rules of thumb of observing which way the
wind blows in the Middle East is now in active operative mode: When Hezbollah
and Israel both are actively fighting in the same third country, and Iran and
the United States are both actively warning about their determination to act to
protect their allies and their interests in that same third country, it is time
to make another pot of coffee and make sure you have plenty of fresh batteries
at home for your transistor radio.
The
slow and continuing escalation in the fighting in and around Syria should come
as no surprise. Largely due to the wily ways of the late President Hafez Assad,
Syria has played a pivotal regional and global strategic role for over half a
century, in both constructive and destructive ways. Today, this web of Syrian
connections has simply been transposed into the realm of active warfare, as
Syria’s same, multiple regional/global partners and linkages now engage in
proxy fighting—and bursts of direct warfare—inside Syria, instead of diplomacy
and strategic bargaining via Syria.
Recent
history suggests that countries like the United States, Iran, Russia and Saudi
Arabia are perfectly willing to engage in savage, destructive warfare through
proxies in third countries (i.e., Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine, for
starters), and as of this week we can add Syria to that list. The likelihood is
high that we will continue to witness episodic military action inside Syria by
regional players. The main dangers now are that some of those actors (Iran,
Israel, Hezbollah and the United States are the main candidates) might decide
to take on each other, Syria could collapse into a Somalia-like ruined state,
and Qaeda-like militant-terrorist groups that now fight Assad under the banner
of the Syrian uprising might gain strong footholds inside parts of the country.
There
will be plenty of time for hand-wringing and blame-setting in due course, but
this might be a good time to remember a few things, so that we can avoid acting
like idiots and going through this scenario again a few years down the road: If
we had resolved the Palestine-Israeli conflict in the 1980s, many of these
regional tensions would not exist. If the Soviets, Europeans and Americans had
not actively supported Arab autocrats for half a century, many of these
regional actors would never have been able to achieve their current status. If
the Soviets had not invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and the Anglo-American-led
combine had not attacked Iraq in 2003, the appeal and reach of Salafist
militants probably would not have attained their current levels.
So
what the United States might do in response to chemical weapons use in Syria
strikes me as a pretty provincial perspective on a much larger and older
problem—that of thugs in power, and bullies who support them from abroad.
Rami
G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares
Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American
University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.
Copyright © 2013 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by
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