A senior Saudi official recently told John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, that from the outset of the upheaval in Syria the king has believed that regime change would suit Saudi interests: “The king knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.”
This is today’s “great game” — losing Syria. And this is how it is played: set up a hurried transitional council as sole representative of the Syrian people, irrespective of whether it has any real legs inside Syria; feed in armed insurgents from neighbouring states; impose sanctions that will hurt the middle classes; mount a media campaign to denigrate any Syrian efforts at reform; try to instigate divisions within the army and the elite; and ultimately President Bashar al-Assad will fall — so its initiators insist.
Europeans, Americans and certain Gulf states may see the Syria “game” as the logical successor to the supposedly successful Libya game in pushing the Arab awakening towards a Western paradigm. In terms of regional politics, however, Syria is strategically more valuable, and Iran knows this. Iran has said that it will respond to any external intervention in Syria. It is already no “game”, as the many killed by both sides attests to.
The radical armed elements being used in Syria as auxiliaries to depose Assad may well have a bloody and very undemocratic agenda of their own. I warned of this danger in connection with Afghanistan in the 1980s: some of the Afghan mujahideen had real roots in the community, but others posed a severe danger. A kindly American politician told me not to worry: these were the people “kicking Soviet ass”.
We chose to look the other way because kicking Soviet ass played well to the United States’s needs. Today Europe looks the other way, refusing to consider who Syria’s combat-experienced insurgents truly are, because losing Assad and confronting Iran plays so well.
Fortunately, the tactics in Syria seem to be failing. Most people in the region believe that if Syria is pushed further into civil conflict the result will be sectarian violence in Lebanon, Iraq and more widely too. The notion that such conflict will throw up a stable, let alone Western-style, democracy, is fanciful at best, callous at worst.
The origins of the “lose Assad” operation preceded the Arab awakening: they reach back to Israel’s failure in its 2006 war to seriously damage Hezbollah, and the post-conflict US assessment that it was Syria that represented Hezbollah’s Achilles heel, as the conduit linking Hezbollah to Iran.
Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia surprised US officials by saying that the solution was to harness Islamic forces. The US could not deal with such people. Leave that to me, Bandar retorted. Hannah noted that “Bandar working without reference to US interests is clearly cause for concern. But Bandar working as a partner … against a common Iranian enemy is a major strategic asset.”
Hypothetical planning only became concrete action this year, with the overthrow of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Suddenly Israel seemed vulnerable, and a weakened Syria had heightened allure. In parallel, Qatar had stepped to the fore. Azmi Bishara, a pan-Arabist who resigned from the Israeli Knesset and exiled himself to Doha, was, according to some local reports, involved in a scheme in which al-Jazeera would not just report revolution, but instantiate it for the region. Qatar, however, was not merely trying to leverage human suffering into an international intervention, but was also — as in Libya — directly involved as a key operational patron of the opposition.
The next stages were to draw France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy into the team. US President Barack Obama followed by helping to persuade Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to lend his legitimacy to the “resistance”. The transitional-council model, which in Libya has displayed the weakness of leveraging just one faction as the government-in-waiting, is more starkly defective in Syria. Syria’s opposition council, put together by Turkey, France and Qatar, is caught out by the fact that Assad’s security structure and popular support base are intact. Only external intervention could change that equation, but for the opposition to call for it would be political suicide.
The internal opposition gathered in Istanbul demanded a statement refusing external intervention, but the Syrian national council was announced even before the intra-opposition talks had reached any agreement — such was the hurry on the part of external parties.
The external opposition continues to fudge its stance on intervention, and with good reason: the internal opposition rejects it. The majority in Syria deeply oppose external intervention, fearing civil conflict. Hence Syrians face a long period of externally mounted insurgency, siege and international attrition. Both sides will pay in blood.
But the real danger, as Hannah noted, is that the Saudis might “once again fire up the old Sunni jihadist network and point it in the general direction of Shiite Iran”, which puts Syria first in line. In fact, that is exactly what is happening, but the West prefers not to notice, as long as the drama plays well to Western audiences.
As Foreign Affairs reported last month, Saudi and its Gulf allies are firing up the radical Salafists (fundamentalist Sunnis), not only to weaken Iran, but also to do what they see is necessary to survive: to disrupt the awakenings that threaten absolute monarchism. This is happening in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq.
If you tell people they can be king-makers and throw money at them, do not be surprised if they metamorphose, yet again, into something very political. It may take some months, but the fruits of this new attempt to use radical forces for Western ends will backfire.
One of the sad paradoxes is the undercutting of moderate Sunnis, who now find themselves caught between the rock of being seen as a Western tool and the hard place of Salafists waiting for the opportunity to displace them.
What a strange world: Europe and the US think that, to bring democracy about, it is okay to “use” precisely those Islamists (including al-Qaeda) who do not believe in it. But then, why not just look the other way and gain the benefit of the public enjoying Assad’s kicking? —