In the last fortnight or so the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to Washington and the increase in intensity of the Syrian government’s military assaults on its citizens, has raised fears that the Middle Eastern arena can well become the source of large-scale warfare, involving more than the regional combatants.
Pressure has come from Netanyahu on the American government, with the Prime Minister openly pressuring the Jewish-American community and the Congress to influence the United States President to take action before Iran is able to fine-tune its nuclear weapons capability, with the implicit threat that if the US and its allies cannot act, then Israel will have to take on the responsibility itself. The Prime Minister has also appealed to Western sensibilities about the slaughter of Jews in Germany by Hitler, in the face of what Jews worldwide have held to be Western pre-world War 2 hesitancy to act against his regime.
On the other hand, the government of President Assad in Syria has apparently turned a deaf ear to the pleas of the majority of the members of the Security Council to cease its attacks on its own citizens, in Homs and elsewhere. Indeed, in response, they have turned up the fire while claiming that they are faced with a form of terrorist warfare which no normal state would permit. The countries deemed to be Syria’s allies in the Security Council, Russia and China have given Syria de facto support by opposing any attempt at UN collective intervention in Syria.
They no doubt have in mind the Security Council-sponsored resolution legitimizing an intervention in Libya on the grounds of the new UN doctrine of a “responsibility to protect” citizens subjected to large-scale carnage. And their thinking no doubt reflects a perception that the NATO powers used what was supposed to be a kind of “rescue mission” for the Libyan people, into a subjugation of Libya that now places the European Union and the United States in a predominant position in oil and natural gas-rich Libya. And presumably, they note that in the wake of the Libyan intervention, France took the opportunity to do the same in the Ivory Coast, then in the throes of civil war. From the Russia-China perspective Western commentators and governments have claimed a victory specific to themselves, and not to the member-states of the UN.
The two sets of circumstances (Syria-Iran) have a relationship not only in the sense that they are in the same Region, but also because of the NATO powers’ particularly close, and morality-based relationship with Israel. Syria has been focussed on by Israel for some years as a result of its attempt to develop a nuclear facility which the Israelis deem to be potentially targetable at themselves, not necessarily as a practical threat, but as a stake in the wider Middle Eastern geopolitical play. They have seen Syria as a somewhat pivotal state in an unstable Middle Eastern situation, domestically stable over the years and able to influence the behaviour of less stable states like Lebanon and post US-intervened Iraq. Syria too is seen as an ally of the Palestinian Hamas from the point of view of the supply of military hardware.
The Israelis would therefore welcome a kind of intervention that specifically removes the Assad minority regime, and introduces a substantially neutralized Syria. The Israelis, too, perceive a defeat of the Syrian regime as helping to weaken an Iranian regime which has increased its influence in Iraq, for example, and which in the eyes of Israel, has an extensive ideological influence over the wider Middle Eastern arena. Though, given the complexity of the ideological and religious characters of regimes like Syria and Iraq, the Israeli perception is probably a deliberately exaggerated one.
The confluence of a racheting up of pressures in respect of both Syria and Iraq is seen in the pressures placed on President Obama, as Israel takes advantage of the impending presidential and congressional elections in the United States to exert pressure, in the face of the sensitivity of the American political class to what is often referred to as the Jewish question. The result has been much speculation as to whether President Obama would feel pressured to “up the ante” against both Iran and Syria, but particularly from an Israeli perspective, against Iran. But the President is presently doing his best to inhibit further negative political fallout from the situation in Afghanistan, and would hardly welcome the fanning of new flames in the Middle East and surrounding areas.
Already Senator John McCain has suggested a direct US or allied intervention in Syria, though from within American military circles there have been quick rebuttals that the Senator is underestimating the negative effects of this. They argue that many of the emplacements of Syrian missiles are in densely populated areas, and any aerial intervention by the US or NATO would lead to substantial casualties among the civilian population. And similarly in respect of any intervention in Iran, particularly in the Strait of Hormuz, a view prevails that the potential for economic chaos in a period of widespread recession, would create as much harm, though in different ways, for the NATO powers as it would for Iran.
President Obama is probably also somewhat reluctant to move too far beyond the current stalemate in the UN Security Council as Russia and China withhold assent for any attempt to move beyond verbal pleadings to the Syrians to stop the present carnage. The hope of some in the United States is that such will be the domestic outrage as Syria continues on its present path, that certainly Russia will be forced to end its stalemating responses. It is noticeable too that with the current initiative that has sent former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to Syria, China has now announced its own diplomatic initiative of consultation with President Assad. Both Russia and China are well aware that an increasingly influential country like Turkey would like to see some positive movement on both the Syria and Iran issues and is not pleased with the reluctance of either of these powers to commit themselves to a more active role in pressuring, in particular, the Syrian government.
The fact of the matter is, however, that politically closed regimes like Syria and Iran, which unlike Libya, have not opened themselves to Western economic and political influences in the new post-Cold War era, tend to be resistant to both the Western powers and de facto ex-communist powers like Russia and China, whose only interest is to limit the amount of leverage that the Westerners now have, in these times of demand for raw materials like oil and gas, over ex-colonial states. As the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in a now relatively free elections-run Egypt is now showing, they too now know that influence over the once-called Third World countries is harder than ever to attain. And that there is no political gain in fanning fires that one may not be able to control.
