On the Danger of Arming the Syrian Opposition

On the possibility of the US and UK arming the Sunni insurgents in Syria fighting against President Assad's regime, Ahmad Samih Khalidi in the Guardian has written,

'The Syrian crisis is transforming the entire Arab Mashriq, encompassing Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and potentially Israel/Palestine into one vast arena for what is now a sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia Islam. Any external intervention bears the risk of an open-ended engagement'.

True, but the problem from the British perspective is that William Hague is arguing that intervention is necessary to support 'moderate' Sunni insurgents in order to prevent them joining Al Qaida and so maintain an opposition to Assad's Shia regime. The reasons for this are twofold.

Firstly, the shoddy realpolitik in which the lynchpin of Britain's strategic interests remains Saudi Arabia, a country with a large market for Britain's arms industry that supplies the West with oil and hosts US military bases. The KSA's main Gulf rival is Iran and so Britain effectively has to back Sunni militias in Syria against Shia.

The second is ideological. Hague is a messianic neoconservative with delusions of grandeur. He regards, as do most in Cameron's government, Iran as an 'existential enemy' and portray it in neo-Cold War terms. That can be seen in Michael Gove's propaganda tract Celsius 7/7 when he declares,

'The Iranian Revolution of 1979, like the French Revolution of 1789, was a moment that grew into a model. Islamist dreams of power before 1979 had been desert mirages; after 1979 Islamism had a mountain fortress....Iran's experience stands as a template for Islamist advance'. ( page 28).

Hague, like Gove, believes that Islamism consists of 'one seamless totalitarian threat', a convenient oversimplification that provides a rationale for any form of intervention. This is true whether, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, invading Iraq, or 'tilting the balance' against Assad in Syria by backing 'moderate' insurgents.

Khalidi is is correct to emphasise that,

'..the west, despite its long experience in the Middle East, remains profoundly alien to the region's most deep-rooted forces of religion, sect, ethnicity, tribe and clan, and seemingly incapable of grasping their complexity.'

But ultimately, the West has a 'lethal embrace' of Saudi Arabia, a dysfunctional regime that is far more responsible for funding terrorism and Islamism that Tehran and, unlike Iran, has no semblance of a democracy or even the chance of moving towards one.

Yet Britain and the US have as their ultimate New Great Game plan the aim of 'regime change' in Iran by whatever means they can. Iran is a problem because it has had an independent foreign policy that prevents Western control over the oil and gas both of the Middle East and Central Asia.

That is precisely why the obvious diplomatic need to negotiate with Iran at the Geneva Conference is simply not on the table. Britain's government, mirroring the more extreme neoconservative view of Iran shown by the belligerent John McCain, is at one with Obama on this: Iran is the enemy to be defeated and rolled back.

The danger now is that the US and Britain will push further for arming the 'right' Sunni insurgents against Assad to check Iranian influence and Hizbollah ( referred crudely to as 'terrorists' ). They will see Al Qaida's influence as a pretext to shore up Sunni opposition, especially as the Muslim Brotherhood is in disarray in Egypt.

William Hague and his "Diplomacy".

Historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote of William Hague and his readiness to arm the Syrian insurgents,,

'Given the country's combustible religious mix, as well as its strategic location, the war-torn Arab republic now represents the most dangerous fault line on the planet. ...What Mr Hague thinks he will achieve in Syria is beyond me.

Even so, the rebels' bloodthirsty tactics and links to Islamic extremism are a long way from the democratic Middle Eastern ideal that our Foreign Secretary claims to be promoting'.

Sandbrook even thinks that Hague harbour delusions of grandeur. But it is not surprising. Hague , in reality, is engaged less in real diplomacy. Britain has only the choice to advocate a policy that may be acceptable to Washington and works within that framework.

This is known as 'public diplomacy' . It depends on trying to present before the audience-i.e. the British people and the world-reasons why intervention by the US and UK is necessary from Assad is a brutal dictator to allegations of chemical weapons. And there are no real debates in Parliament

Foreign policy under Hague is thus a pretence. Essentially he is dreaming of being William Pitt as though he were in a position to make fine speeches about committing Britain to action abroad in a time when the decision about whether Britain is to engage in the world or not is largely obsolete.

Hague was pushing for lifting the EU arms embargo in order to make it look as though he was taking the initiative-as he was-on behalf of Britain. But Hague's job is anticipate any US foreign policy line, make it seem as an independent British one and justify it. Feeling that vicarious sense of global power can lead to delusion.

Yet the problem with Sandbrook's view is it underestimates the geopolitical factors and increasingly desperate strategies to ensure energy security that are drawing the Western powers into potential catastrophe in the Middle East. Sandbrook claims a form of imperialist thinking is still prevanent at the FO,

'The truth, I fear, is that Mr Hague - presumably in thrall to his officials - has gone native. Like so many foreign secretaries before him, he has fallen victim to the temptations of his office.'

Of course, as Sandbrook indicates,  Hague has not changed that much at all. He was a fervent supporter of the Iraq War, ' liberal intervention' and the notion of reordering the Middle East as if Britain really can determine events in Syria and instigate 'regime change'.

Yet it that foreign policy has been so risky depends on far more than just the culture of the FO.Unfortunately, the bleak fact is that Britain's unstable rentier and debt fuelled finance economy increasingly depends upon extending ever greater control the oil and gas of the Gulf region over and against any potential threat to it.

The US and Britain need stable or falling oil prices to boost up the economy when faced with the slowing rates of economic growth. Yet the competition of China and India ensures that peaking oil supplies and increased demand will challenge this. China now has the financial power to challenge the West in the Middle East.

The drive to intervene in Syria is part of the fallout from the Iraq War as the crisis has spiralled into a regional one because Iraq has now a Shia majority regime under Maliki that has leaned closer to Tehran. Iranian arms have flowed through Iraq en route to Hizbollah in Syria and as have Shia recruits to support them and Assad.

As a consequence, Saudi Arabia is now faced with a potential Shia axis of power stretching from Iran across to the Mediterranean where Iran would be able to pump gas out to via a pipeline should it be able to defeat the Sunni 'rebels'. So it is pouring money into Wahhabi militias in Syria. The Taliban is also a beneficiary.

The situation is incredibly dangerous. British 'statesmen' from Blair to Hague are either too mediocre to understand precisely how dangerous the crisis is or else, it has to be said, they know the geopolitical risks and their delusions are bordering on a form of insane recklessness.

Syria could be the Tipping Point for All Out Regional War in the Middle East

Syria really could be the tipping point where the civil war develops into a regionwide conflict intensified by sectarian enmities. So it adds to the instability caused by the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as well as surpassing the catastrophic bloodshed and carnage that happened as the power of the state disintegrated there and left a power vacuum

Yet the civil war in Syria could be more potentially lethal than Iraq as all the regional powers have turned the conflict into a proxy war. This will inevitably affect Britain because of its overdependence upon Saudi Arabia for oil supplies and to prop up the 'balance of power' in the Middle East against the main threat to Western interests in the shape of Iran.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague's preparedness to back Syrian insurgents is interconnected with these strategic interests. Turkey, which is backing Muslim Brotherhood militias from the north  is a NATO power that, along with Saudi Arabia, is concerned with the growing influence of Iran in Syria where it has acted to shore up Assad's Alawite shia regime.

The absurdity is that in Iraq the US and UK tacitly allowed shia militias to defeat the sunni ones that were fighting them for control over Iraq in the sectarian war that arose after Saddam's state was removed by force ('regime change'). Ethnic cleansing was involved in that and the US and UK looked the other way as the price of defeating them.

As a result of that the Shia Iraqis are now dominant, in partnership with the Kurds, and under Maliki have moved closer towards Tehran. Many willing shia jihadists are arriving in Syria from Baghdad. This a clear long term outcome of Tony Blair's disastrous foreign policy and one that is set to get worse as the Syrian conflict looks likely to spill over into Iraq and Lebanon.

In this sense, there is a definite continuity between Blair and Hague that is routinely ignored by political pundits desperately trying to pretend there is some fundamental difference between the New Conseratives and New Labour. There is none because when Cameron speaks of an 'existential threat' from jihadists he really also means one to our oil supply.

There is a difference in tactics involved in backing Syrian insurgents as opposed to military intervention and not in the intent. The ultimate 'game plan' is to destroy Iran because it is the only regional power that can challenge the US's militaristic endgame of removing it as an independent state capable of resisting designs to control the oil and gas of both the Middle East and Central Asia.

Three months before Hagues's decision to show his preparedness to arm the 'rebels', i.e sunni fundamentalists, by getting the EU embargo removed, Baghdad approved of plans for a Iran-Iraq-Syria Pipeline from the South Pars Gas Field which Iran shares with Qatar. These realpolitik considerations are foremost in the foreign policy towards Syria.

Both Qatar and Saudi Arabia started to arm the Sunni fundamentalists from the outset of the Syrian civil war to forestall the rise of Iranian influence so that the UK now has to stand by this corrupt despotic rentier regime to uphold its oil interests in the Middle East, as well as lucrative arms deals amounting to millions of dollars and pounds.
 
Therefore, the UK and France, and possibly the US in future, want to redress the balance of power by arming sunni insurgents as a counter to the rise of shia predominance they promoted in Iraq ! The same tired pretexts are already being wheeled out as 'Public Diplomacy'-'chemical weapons', 'humanitarian intervention' 'fighting extremism', 'terror threats' etc.

The fact is that  in backing unreservedly Saudi Arabia, the US and Britain is supporting a country that actually funds terrorists elsewhere, including Al Qaida, as well the Taliban in Afghanistan against whom British soldiers have been fighting and dying for twelve years now. The war in Afghanistan is crucially about securing the TAPI pipeline as an alternative to Iran's pipeline to Pakistan.

It is truly Orwellian as regards the ideological schizophrenia, doublethink, and changes of the official line. It's clear shoddy realpolitik has always underlain the purported humanitarian rhetoric about both Iraq and Syria. British people must wake up and think about the problem of oil consumption and dependence unless we want to lose the democracy we have taken for granted for so long.

For the foreign policy will only lead to greater volatility, increasing terror attacks and the increase in state power in Britain over people's lives; the price for thinking that 'business as usual' in such dangerous lands that spawn terrorists and fanatics is something that cannot be questioned or that some terror threat is somehow not connected to it.