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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: R2P

Humanitarian Farce

29 Sat Apr 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Humanitarian Farce

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Antonio Gramsci, Bashar al-Assad, Benjamin Netanyahu, Britain, diplomacy, France, Hardeep Singh Puri, hegemony, India, Iraq, Libya, machtpolitik, matsya nyaya, media, mindfare, Muammar Gaddafi, Paul Wolfowitz, Perilous Interventions, R2P, Right To Protect, Russia, Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, terrorism, think tank, Ukraine, United Nations Security Council, United States, veto, Yemen

Perilous InterventionsPuri, Hardeep Singh. Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016. 280 pp.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Marcellus tells Horatio in the opening act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Former diplomat Hardeep Singh Puri probably could not have put it better about the United Nations Security Council and the existing global order. Through his book, Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos, a devastating indictment of Western hypocrisy in international governance, India’s former permanent representative to the United Nations gives readers a ringside seat to some of the discussions that went on in the Security Council during some of the major crises of the past decade. Puri lambasts the existing system and warns that without reforms, faith in multilateralism will soon fade.

Disregarding the advice of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck about the making of sausages and laws, Puri details the discussions within the Security Council on the question of whether the international community should intervene in Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Yet long before then, Iraq had attracted the attention of certain American strategists such as Paul Wolfowitz. They had argued as early as the early 1970s, Puri reminds us, that the removal of Saddam Hussein from power could potentially result in a domino effect of democratisation in the region and with it better partners for the United States. Two other candidates for regime change to accelerate this region-wide democratic revolution were Iran and Iran. Revolution in the former in 1979 and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war extinguished all such thoughts from the White House.

However, they were not forgotten. In Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of the US Congress in 2002, the former and future Israeli prime minister reiterated this same idea. American fears about Iraqi ABCs – atomic, biological, and chemical weapons – rang his message sweeter to Washington. Looking to their own careers, CIA officials funnelled intelligence reports they knew would be prefered by the High Command rather than those undermining the public narrative of state sponsorship of terrorism and WMDs. The United States went to war in Iraq soon afterwards and the Middle East began to unravel – not in a manner either Wolfowitz, Netanyahu, or anyone else had envisioned.

Narrow national interests coloured the deliberations of the Security Council over Libya as well. Puri recounts how Britain, Germany, and especially France, more than the United States, were interested in deposing strongman Muammar Gaddafi from the beginning. Libya’s relations with Western governments had been slowly improving since 2003 when Tripoli reached out through the United Nations to make amends for its role in several acts of terrorism in the late 1980s. That, however, was not the public face of relations between Libya and the Western bloc. The Arab Spring protests gave the West, probably hoping for a quick success, the opportunity required to oust Gaddafi.

Under the guise of humanitarian intervention and R2P – the Right to Protect – Western nations placed onerous conditions upon Tripoli. Puri narrates the arguments over the language of Resolution 1970 and how, through wording that was loose at best and deceptive at worst, the Western powers tried to gain international sanction to bring Gaddafi to heel using “all necessary means to protect civilians and make available humanitarian assistance.” As Libyan government forces started to turn the tide against the rebels in the civil war that had devolved out of earlier protests, France, buoyed by an Arab League resolution calling upon the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, pushed through Resolution 1973 that was sufficiently lax in its formulation to allow military action. NATO, led by France and supported by the United States went to war in Libya. Puri strenuously makes the point that this was in complete violation of the spirit of the discussions in the Security Council but the West did not wait until even the inl was dry before invding Libya.

Everything has conequences, and the Western sleight of hand over Libya had got Russia’s back up over Syria. As a result, when the Security Council started deliberating on Bashar al-Assad’s civil war, Moscow was implacable in their opposition to any sort of intervention. It is also possible, Puri admits, that this was due to greater Russian interest in Syria – a naval and ar force base – or because there had been a change in power in Moscow from Dmitry Medvedev to Vladimir Putin. It is also possible that there was no appetite for yet another war in the Middle East in Washington during an election year. Yet the pattern of Western behaviour was similar: hollow humanitarian claims supported by regional powers with vested interests against the incumbent authority. Predictably, the results were also similar: chaos, instability, wanton destruction of life and infrastructure, the rise of private militias, and terrorism – all at the cost of the region. Any chance for an early peace was stymied by unrealistic preconditions such as the abdication of Assad. Furthermore, Washington’s too clever by half notion of ‘good terrorist’ and ‘bad terrorist’ helped spawn its own nemesis – something American politicians, despite several repetitions, are yet to learn from.

Perilous Interventions also describes the paralysis of the Security Council owing to its veto provisions over the crisis in Ukraine caused by the secession of Crimea and its return to Russia. The author stops short of excusing Russian behaviour as he lambasts European and American ambition in seeking to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence. From the beginning, military force was out of the question in Ukraine for two reasons: Russia maintained a veto in the Security Council, and it was a major nuclear power that could not be trifled with as the likes of Iraq or Libya. The Western strategy, then, was to try and isolate Russia through economic sanctions. These may have worked partially but were doomed to fail eventually without the support of Moscow’s BRICS partners.

Yemen saw similar inaction from the Security Council. The country, already a regular on the UN body’s agenda even before civil war broke out, has experienced more death and destruction in five months than even Syria after four long years of fighting. Impoverished Yemen has for long been Saudi Arabia’s bete noire: fearful of foreign intervention – Egypt in the 1960s and Iran since the 1980s – in a country bordering its own restive Shia population, Riyadh has been quick and ruthless in its involvement in Yemen. The Saudi campaign, Puri reminds us, has received complete support from the United States and other Western powers despite the horrendous loss of civilian life due to the callousness of Riyadh’s military tactics that ranged from the use of missiles to indiscriminate bombing, which in one case even destroyed a Medecins sans Frontieres hospital.

Puri is not unfair in targetting only Western nations. He has a few choice words for the Indian debacle in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s too. However, the reader may surmise from the tone that the author is more understanding of Delhi’s compulsions than he is with Washington, London, or Paris. Furthermore, India’s reasons for getting involved in its southern neighbour’s affairs are a far more convoluted cocktail of domestic political considerations rather than the relatively straight-forward rapacious realpolitik of the West. The narrative also feels more restrained about the human cost of the tragedy in Sri Lanka compared to Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Yemen – but that may also be because the South Asian island has suffered far less despite a longer lasting conflict.

In each of the chapters is detailed a series of operational blunders that fed on each other and led to the present quagmire. From the insane notion of good and bad terrorism to the arming of certain rebel factions, from an utter disregard of historical follies to an almost stubborn refusal to accept intelligence from the ground, from giving ground to less informed commentators over professionals to cherry-picking intelligence, Puri’s rap sheet of Western political myopia and ideological blindness makes for a discomforting read – each of these mistakes, as we disapssionately read them, cost tens of thousands of lives.

Although Perilous Interventions is an excellent exposition of Great Power hypocrisy and the weakness of the United Nations in both, curbing the predatory instincts of some of its members and the oppressive nature of other members, it does not offer more insight on the crises of the past decade and half than a discerning reader could have gleaned from the regular perusal of the daily newspaper over the years. Why would a seasoned and distinguished diplomat be surprised by an unremarkable display of matsya nyaya?

The real punch of Perilous Interventions comes from its author’s assertion that this behaviour of the Western powers was given intellectual cover by their think tanks and media. In fact, Puri explicitly states that the push towards intervention in Libya came from the Western media over the inclination of a hesitant diplomatic corps. Gaddafi was portrayed negatively, incompletely, and even falsely – he had not, for example, threatened civilians with retaliation – in the tabloids to the extent that it was difficult for him to even get hotel rooms in New York during a 2012 visit. These observations by Puri only cement the cautious view of Western organisations in the rest of the world. They can no longer be seen as sources of intellectually rigorous, methodologically sound, and unbiased information. In fact, reading Puri between the lines, think tanks and media have become a new front for the West to propagate their hegemony through ‘mindfare’ – the war for opinions and minds throughout the world – true hegemony as described by Antonio Gramsci.

Perhaps the only criticism of Perilous Interventions is the author’s discordantly Pollyanna-ish view that India played a positive role during the deliberations over these crises. The Indian stance has always been distant, unhelpful, and predictable – urge a cessation of hostilities, encourage negotiations, and plead for an arms embargo on the region. Although these are perfectly rational recommendations, it is similarly irrational to expect that the agitated actors in a conflict that has already spilled over to violence wish to listen to sense. Consider, for example, the Indian response to international calls for restraint during its wars with Pakistan.

Furthermore, Puri’s suggestion that the permanent members of the Security Council volunatrily give up their veto powers – de facto if not de jure – is laughable. Such largesse may be expected only from foreign policy neophytes of the kind India has been blessed with but not anywhere else. Yet even if the Permanent Five were to surrender their veto powers, the question then arises as to who will bell the cat. Is the international community truly willing or capable of conducting a military intervention in China, for example, for any reason?

Perilous Interventions will certainly feed those who are already deeply sceptical of the West and subliminally hostile to it. However, rather than adding ghee to the fire of conspiracy theories, Puri records in detail, with evidence, genuine cases of opportunism and hypocrisy. His call for reforms in the United Nations is likely to go unheeded for the same reasons he gives for the crises of the past decade and half – machtpolitik and opportunism. As a result, Puri’s admonition that the Security Council and multilateralism will lose credibility may indeed come true.

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The Return of the Russians

05 Fri Sep 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Europe

≈ Comments Off on The Return of the Russians

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Abhkazia, ABM Treaty, Aleksander Prokhanov, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Asia, autocracy, Boris Yeltsin, China, CIS, Commonwealth of Independent States, Crimea, EU, Eurasian Union, Europe, European Neighbourhood Policy, European Union, Georgia, Gleb Pavlovsky, Islam Karimov, Kremlin, Moldova, NATO, Nursultan Nazarbayev, R2P, Right To Protect, Rodina, Russia, South Ossetia, Soviet Union, Transnistria, Ukraine, United States, Uzbekistan, Verkhovna Rada, Viktor Yanukovych, Vladimir Putin, Zavtra

Despite the best efforts of the Middle East, Russophobia seems to be the retro-chic fashion statement of 2014. Spurred on by either the naïveté of millennials participating in the political process for the first time or the opportunism of Arab Spring, or perhaps in a phase of moralising, the West has mocked, patronised, belittled, criticised, blamed, and threatened Vladimir Putin over Russian actions in Ukraine throughout the year.

The crisis in Ukraine started in November 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych chose to accept a Russian economic aid package rather than one from the European Union. Though the Russia promised $15 billion in loans, lower gas prices, and did not interfere in Ukrainian affairs, Yanukovych’s rejection of the EU offer was seen as a move to take Ukraine closer to Russia. The EU offer – $815 million in loans upon a change in several Ukrainian laws and regulations – was paltry but symbolised a more transparent and less corrupt system.

In February 2014, the calm protests suddenly exploded into violence at the Euromaidan in Kiev. Rioters marched onto the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, to demand that the 2004 constitution that Yanukovych had repealed soon after coming to power in 2010 be reinstated. Yanukovych had criticised the old constitution as ineffective as it diluted the powers of the Executive to the point that the President could not even appoint his own ministers and they had to be approved by Parliament. Fearing for his life in the violence, the Ukrainian president escaped to Moscow.

Although the dissatisfaction in Ukraine was over corruption and nepotism, Russia saw it as a shift towards the West. Indeed, many Ukrainians felt that reforms could be achieved only if they were forced from outside and the EU seemed the best candidate to do so. The Kremlin acted in support of their ally, demanding that France and Germany honour their earlier agreement and reinstate Yanukovych as president, under whom a new constitution would be written and fresh elections held.

To bring pressure to bear upon the Ukrainian opposition, Russia cancelled its gas subsidies to its neighbour and encouraged ethnic Russians in Ukraine to protest what it saw as a West-sponsored coup d’etat. This was most effective in Crimea, where a separatist movement had been simmering for the past 20 years. In a referendum boycotted by many and dismissed by the West as rigged, an overwhelming majority of Crimean voters chose to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.

Western powers were alarmed by the principle that ethnic Russians in former Soviet lands could vote to return to a neo-Soviet empire; applied across the former Soviet republics, it gave Russia a powerful hand in their internal affairs. To deter Russia from further adventures in the region, Washington imposed sanctions on certain sectors of the Russian economy and put selected individuals on a no-visa list. The sanctions would prove reckless as the dependence of western European economies on Russian energy and US need for Russian space services would underscore very soon. However, Russia imposed a ban on several exports to the EU in retaliation, hurting several countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

Perhaps drawing from the lessons of Arab Spring on the use of social and conventional media, an unending stream of articles denouncing Russian actions started to appear. Saved from embarrassment only by the ham-handed propaganda of outlets like Russia Today, Western journalists and analysts decried the violations of human rights in Ukraine and labelled the Russian strategy as naked aggression. Vladimir Putin, the argument ran, is a disgruntled former KGB agent who has never accepted the breakup of the Soviet Union and dreamed of forming a Greater Russia yet again. Putin’s heavy-handedness with his critics and disregard of civil liberties was emphasised repeatedly, his shirtless photos morphed and the subject of puerile humour on social media platforms.

Despite their hypocrisy and weak grasp of Sovietology, there is little doubt that Western accusations about the authoritarianism of the Russian regime are accurate. It would be difficult to deny that Putin has mysteriously sidestepped several of his rivals and critics, or argue that he does not envision a Russia readmitted to the superpowers’ club. Yet Russian aims are no different from any other aspiring or reigning power and have been consistent over the past decade. The new batch of Western Russologists, complacent that their fathers won the Cold War, have failed to notice the consistent warnings from Moscow as the United States shifted from a mature policy towards its defeated foe in the early 1990s to basking in its own triumphalism in the 21st century as the world’s only remaining superpower.

It is not just Putin who has not accepted the collapse of the Soviet Union; by any imagination, his increased popularity after the takeover of Crimea should indicate that a return to Soviet grandeur is prominent in the minds of ordinary Russians, young and old alike. Just a couple of years after the 15 republics went their separate ways, Boris Yeltsin attempted to bring back together its former countrymen in a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In its bilateral relations, it attempted to control the former Soviet republics by creating economic dependencies, particularly through energy politics and migrant workers, and prolonging other political and military dependencies such as the stationing of troops and support to public figures sympathetic to Moscow. In a marked departure from his predecessors, Putin is the first Russian leader to use the purse before the sword to subdue Russia’s neighbours.

Barely a year after the Soviet Union broke up, in 1992, Moscow encouraged separatists in the Georgian region of South Ossetia and the Moldovan region of Transnistria to break away; in 1993, Yeltsin extended Abkhazia similar support. All three states are recognised by only three or four other countries in the world and have maintained their independence largely through the presence of Russian forces on their soil. In 1994, had it not been for the election of a leader in Kiev that the Kremlin liked, Yeltsin may well have achieved in Crimea then what Putin did now. Russia also intervened in the Tajik civil war (1992-1997) and helped Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov to put down a democratic rebellion in 2005. In an uncannily similar set of events to those in Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s involvement in the 2008 hostilities between Georgia and South Ossetia coincided with rumours that the former Soviet republic might join the Western alliance.

What the West sees as Russia goosestepping over its neighbours, the Kremlin sees as traditional power politics. Indeed, Russian behaviour in the sphere of influence it has carved out for itself would be familiar to leaders everywhere. The revolution in France saw British and Austrian adventurism in southern France and Italy as the Russian Revolution saw opportunistic manoeuvres from Britain and the United States post-World War I. Much more recently, the Iranian revolution in 1979 provided the opportunity for Saddam Hussein, backed by the United States, to invade his eastern neighbour.

The history of the Cold War is replete with Western interventions around the globe, not always on the side of holy liberty and democracy. The support to military dictatorships in the Middle East, coups in Iran and Chile, political violence in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and dozens of other incidents hardly gives the United States room to act astonished and horrified at Russian involvement in Ukraine. In fact, Washington’s reaction to the communist takeover of Cuba was not at much variance with Moscow’s actions in Ukraine today. US appeals to liberty in Ukraine comes amidst Washington’s silence on the elimination of minorities in Pakistan and the brutal suppression of Shia Muslims in Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia.

Yet where does one draw the line between imperial vision and securing a sphere of influence? Chinese entry into the Korean War may be legitimately seen as the defence of its peripheries against Western encroachment but the US role in Central and South America over the past century smacks of an imperial complex. Is Putin safeguarding Russia’s peripheries or does he dream of reestablishing a Russian empire?

Born in October 1952, Putin grew up in the heyday of the Soviet Union with Sputnik and the Tsar Bomba. Little is known about his childhood and there have even been questions regarding who his actual parents were. After an undistinguished career in school, Putin studied law at Leningrad State University and started his career in the KGB during detente, entering politics just as the state he had grown up in and served for so long collapsed. In 1997, he was picked out of obscurity by Yeltsin and named his Deputy Chief of Staff. The Russian premier is rumoured to have been impressed by Putin’s loyalty to his mentor, Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Putin rose through the ranks rapidly, becoming the head of the state intelligence services and then prime minister in August 1999. Within four months, Yeltsin resigned as president and appointed Putin his successor for three months until the next elections. In March 2000, Putin won the elections in a landslide.

Russia’s leader is by no means a teddy bear but neither is he as bad as some of America’s other friends. During Putin’s meteoric rise, several opponents of Yeltsin and himself mysteriously disappeared, met with unfortunate accidents, or were murdered. Though there is little to implicate the political leadership in any case, investigators, witnesses, and lawyers revealed that they had received threats from the FSB. Even if the Russian premier is innocent of the suspicions about him, the open season on rights activists in Russia since the ascent of Putin has claimed many lives – Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Andrei Kozlov, Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, Stanislav Markelov, Natalia Estemirova – and is disturbing.

Russia has, no doubt, slipped into a more autocratic form of government since Putin’s rise and there is discontent over increasing corruption in government and the muzzling of the press. However, Putin also oversaw one of the country’s greatest economic booms; during his first stint in the presidency, Russia’s real wages tripled, unemployment halved, taxes fell, and nominal GDP rose over 600%. This record makes him popular with the average, politically disinterested voter. Luckily for Putin, his term in office ended just as the unprecedented decade of international growth stumbled to a halt.

During his first presidency, Putin had supported Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev’s idea a Eurasian Union that would create a common economic space from Vladivostok to Lisbon. The proposal met with lukewarm interest in the West, whose European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) was more aligned with the economic reality of Russia being a junior partner. Putin’s overtures were snubbed.

More significantly, Putin bears a deep resentment against the United States for the eastward expansion of NATO. Although disputed by US academics, Russia believes that the West had promised not to expand east if the Soviet Union loosened its grip on Eastern Europe and its republics. In 1999, Belgrade and Kosovo were bombed over the wishes of Moscow; in 2002, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty; in 2004, NATO absorbed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia; proposals were considered to station missile defence infrastructure in Poland and Ukraine, and there were discussions about Georgia joining NATO. In this backdrop, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine seemed like part of NATO’s eastward creep into the Russian sphere of influence. As a result, the confrontation with the West over Ukraine has seen a huge boost in Putin’s domestic popularity.

Putin feels a deep pain, along with millions of Russians, for the loss of Russian imperial glory in the flames of the Soviet Union. However, Putin is no ideolgue – as one of his former advisers, Gleb Pavlovsky, related, Putin admitted to him in 1999 that communism was a blind alley away from the mainstream of civilisation. Putin’s Rodina is a socially conservative state that derives its values and Russianness from the Russian Orthodox Church.

There is plenty of support for a more significant role for Russia on the international stage among Russians. Still not past the generations that vividly remember the last two decades of the Cold War, the idea of an important Russia, if not Greater Russia, retains much resonance. Despite its defeat in the Cold War and frequent newspaper stories about the fragility of the Russian economy, Russia still has the sixth largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity; its advanced military technology and nuclear weapons, combined with its demographics and size make Russia a natural power even in its weakened state.

The sting of the loss of empire is not unknown in international affairs. In the 1950s, Britain and France pursued their independent nuclear weapons programmes for la grandeur. The two invaded Egypt in 1956 with the impunity of world powers, forgetting their irrelevance in the post-war world order. Putin has the same saudade for Russian glory, which nationalists like Aleksander Prokhanov, the editor of the far-right newspaper Zavtra, paint in four empires – the Kiev confederacy felled by the Tatars, the Moscovy tsardom, the empire of the Romanovs that was hollowed by the Bolsheviks, and finally the Stalinist state that lasted until 1991. Putin would be the author of the fifth empire.

Since the last decade, rising oil prices due to war in the Middle East and greater demand from rising economies has given Moscow a new lifeline. Plush with energy wealth, the Kremlin could afford the desperately needed military modernisation drive and Putin could do what Yeltsin could not. Snubbed by Europe and with the United States snapping at its peripheries, Moscow has started to look for friends elsewhere. A rising China, hungry for energy, advanced weaponry, and mistrustful of the United States – seems like the perfect partner. The United States, which has repeatedly shown an inability to think across theatres, has pushed the Kremlin into Beijing’s arms and reversing Richard Nixon’s Sino-US rapprochement. BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) are potential avenues for the expansion of Russian trade and interests outside the framework of Western globalisation. However, Russia imagines itself as a European power and the fraternity it feels to its west is unlikely to develop towards its east. “Russia is part of European culture,” Putin told the BBC in a 2000 interview, “and I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world.”

Putin does not seek confrontation with the West; Russia is yet weak. However, Moscow will play a major role in shaping an alternative world order to the West. Russia’s membership in BRICS and the SCO affords it the indirect cooperation of some of the worlds largest markets and fastest growing economies. Additionally, the Kremlin has two products there is enormous demand for worldwide – energy and advanced weaponry. This will make sanctions on Russia unpopular and difficult to enforce. While Moscow will refrain from repeating the United States’ mistake of lending weight to Islamists, cooperation on Syria, Iran, and other trouble spots will become more difficult. Putin will most likely withdraw Russia from the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty and participation in the European Court of Human Rights ended.

Humanitarianism was rarely, if ever, a driver of international affairs. If anything, it is another weapon in the public relations arsenal of a country. In the era of embedded journalism and social media, the impact of the lofty rhetoric of the Right To Protect (R2P) is immeasurably higher on a public largely untrained in the ruthlessness and cynicism of international politics than in the past. Yet politics is ugly and power politics even more so.


This post first appeared on Swarajya on September 18, 2014.

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When Was The Last Clean War?

01 Sun Sep 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Middle East

≈ Comments Off on When Was The Last Clean War?

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Bashar al-Assad, chemical weapons, R2P, Right To Protect, Syria, Turkey, United States

What started out hopefully as an Arab Spring but became an Arab Winter in many countries has become an Arab Nightmare in Syria. When US president Barack Obama punted the decision to attack Syria for the probable use of chemical weapons against its own civilians, it was a subtle confirmation of what everyone knew to be true – there was no easy way out. For two and a half years, the Syrian civil war has raged on with no sign of respite; worse, from a Western, liberal perspective, each side makes the other look better.

Washington’s initial reluctance to interfere in Syria stemmed from its awareness that it had a reputation in the region of always propping up dictators, and it did not wish to taint a potential homegrown liberal movement. As chants turned into bullets, the United States urged regional players to take a bigger role in bringing peace to Syria.

The United States was also tied down by many constraints – it had economic woes at home, it was already in Afghanistan and trying to get out of Iraq, it faced strong opposition from Russia, Iran, and perhaps China, on Syria, and it had Iran’s nuclear programme to contend with. Outsourcing Syria’s rebellion to cash-rich Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar seemed the sensible solution. Whether as a result of this outsourcing and subsequent selective funding or other factors, Syria’s opposition today is composed of an unexpectedly large number of jihadists, from the infamous Jabhat al-Nusra to the rapidly growing Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The United States has, therefore, since found it difficult to justify arming the same rebels it was fighting elsewhere.

The hesitation to act even after the use of chemical weapons last week – not for the first time – underscores the lack of a viable opposition as well as a workable attack plan. Legality has rarely stood in the way of national interest before, yet the notion of norm defence – chemical weapons, as WMDs, should never be used in warfare – seems to have galvanised many. Yet were it so simple: on the one hand, hitting Bashar al-Assad’s air force, missile sites, and chemical weapons factories may weaken him, but on the other, the rebellion is fractured and the probable replacement for Assad is even worse.

This is assuming, of course, that the strikes will be successful and Assad can be weakened or should be: special weapons will be required to destroy chemical weapons storage facilities because the heat and blast from regular explosives would only disperse the agents. Even then, it is not such an easy task. As one scholar has noted, we should be clear whether we want to protect Syrians or punish Assad – it will be difficult to do both.

Syria is a reminder, as if Iraq wasn’t, that there is only so much the force of arms can accomplish. Even if hostilities continued for another year and both sides were driven to the negotiating table by exhaustion, sectarian differences within the country, the Lebanese powder keg, and foreign influence from every power worth its salt would wreck the country and possibly partition it. There is no pretty option left for Syria save war exhaustion or outright victory.

Syria is also a reminder, as were Iraq and Afghanistan, that the sort of goals the West professes to wish to see can only be achieved through sweat and blood – local as well as their own, and over many years. The West has no stomach for empire anymore, and the Rest will resist it tooth and nail; therefore, any notions of surgical strikes, let alone quick interventions or regime change, must be viewed with scepticism. TLAM strikes may help ease frustration and may even serve short-term interests, but the sort of transformations wished for will need decades…if they happen at all.

Another interesting question one might ask is why the burden of intervention falls on the United States. Regional powers have for years been large recipients of US and European military hardware – Riyadh has spent billions on its air force, Jordan trains regularly with the USAF, and Turkey derives the benefits of being a NATO member. Frank Jannuzi, executive deputy director of Amnesty International, suggests, however, that a better long-term alternative to missile strikes is to impose an arms embargo on Syria and hold those responsible for war crimes accountable via the International Criminal Court. Though applaudable, the idea highlights the deadlock in the United Nations Security Council and the body’s repeated failure to address human rights issues.

Yet Syria did not just happen; a sequence of events, perhaps started fortuitously for some, in conjunction with another sequence of responses, brought it to this juncture. US interest in Syria at this specific juncture is for one primary reason: to isolate Iran. If Assad falls and Hezbollah loses its base, it will weaken Iran even further. Therefore, Washington has encouraged Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey to support the Syrian Islamists. Ironically, the US routinely bombs these same groups or their kin in Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Similarly, the United States has had to rely on questionable allies in Afghanistan too as its sanctions on Iran are getting in the way of a fully committed fight against the Taliban there. The question arises, just how much is the US willing to watch disintegrate to win on its terms in Iran?

It is no secret that Russia has been wary of increasing US reach in the Middle East and Central Asia; the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, pressure on Iran, bombing of Libya, and the assistance to the rebels in Syria via allies has left Russia nervous. Syria is one of Iran’s few remaining allies, and Tehran is not going to abandon it, chemical weapons or not, to the US. As in Afghanistan, Washington can expect a pushback to its extended Iran policy in Syria. If Moscow’s S-300 air defence system arrives in 2014 – there is little reason to doubt that Assad will not hold on until then – a no-fly zone, under discussion for a while, becomes even harder to implement.

This is not to ignore the myriad other reasons for the pig’s breakfast in Syria; however, it might do everyone some good to ponder about the wisdom of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as allies in a war against dictators and terrorism. The Good Book says that all the armies of the world will gather together at Megiddo at the end of the world. That is hopefully a long way away, but today, most of our hypocrisies have gathered not too far away, in Syria.


This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on September 02, 2013.

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