ISIS and an 'Extreme Islamist Regime'

'I'd disagree with those people who think this is nothing to do with us and if they want to have some sort of extreme Islamist regime in the middle of Iraq that won't affect us – it will"

ISIS is very much 'to do' with Britain and the US having backed its Gulf allies and their foreign policy. The bulk of past funding for ISIS came from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar both when ISIS was a force fighting the Shi'ite militias in Iraq but also when it was aligned with the Free Syria Army.

As recently as 2013 ISIS was fighting with ISIS against the Kurdish militias. Al Qaida broke with ISIS because its interests were better served by remaining with affiliated groups that both Britain and the US have assisted in their struggle against Assad by backing Saudi and Qatari policy.

Cameron's use of the word 'extreme Islamist' is a slight improvement on Tony Blair's use of the soundbite 'jihadi extremist' which implies there may well be 'jihadi moderates'. If 'extremist' is taken to mean ISIS, then Al Qaida affilated groups such as Al Nusra brigades could be correspondingly 'moderate'.

"The people in that regime, as well as trying to take territory, are also planning to attack us here at home in the United Kingdom. So the right answer is to be long term, hard-headed, patient and intelligent with the interventions that we make'

When Cameron uses the words 'that regime' it could be taken to imply that there could be a military intervention not only against ISIS but also against Assad of the sort he was itching for in the summer of 2013. ISIS is a jihadi group but it is not a government nor a 'regime' in any conventional sense

'..the most important intervention of all is to make sure that these governments are fully representative of the people who live in their countries, that they close down the ungoverned space, and they remove the support for the extremists.

If that were British foreign policy, then the emphasis would have to be upon being more forceful with Qatar and Saudi Arabia which have been at the forefront of backing militant Sunni jihadists in Syria. But , on the whole, both Britain and the US have tended to turn a blind eye to this.

"our engagement with the Saudi Arabians, with Qataris, with Emiratis and others is all on the basis that none of us should be supporting those violent terrorists or extremists'

This means that London and Washington have tried to dissuade Qatar and Saudi Arabia from backing Sunni jihadists through fear of 'blowback'. But Qatar has actually made it plain it does not care. The Qatari foreign minister stated in March 2014 ;"The independence of Qatar's foreign policy is simply non-negotiable".

The reason Britain's 'engagement' with Qatar has not meant preventing them from supporting Al Qaida affiliated groups is that Cameron's government has been forthright in courting Qatar as a major source of investment in Britain, important to prop up its ailing rentier economy, and of gas.

With instability in Ukraine and the need to diversify sources of gas away from dependence upon Russia, notable both Cameron and Johnson have been banging the drum for increased bilateral ties with Qatar, a power lauded by Johnson as a "dynamic friend'.

Britain has grovelled before Qatar because its domestic supplies of North Sea gas have been depleting in recent years. An essential reason for Britain supporting Qatar's policy of backing jihadists in Syria is to get rid of Assad and secure the contruction of the Qatar-Tukey gas pipeline.

Britain has been prepared to align with Qatar in such as way as to provide the space within which groups such as ISIS can flourish because it wanted to remove Assad and prevent a 'Shi'ite gas pipeline' running from Iran's part of the South pars gasfield through Iraq and Syria to the Easterm Mediterranean.

US Foreign Policy on Iraq: Breaking the Shia Alliance in From Syria to Iran.

The US is unlikely to intervene militarily in Iraq again unless the Kurdish region were threatened or if Baghdad were to fall under an an attack by ISIS and revived Baathist forces, thus opening the way for the major oil producing regions in the south to be menaced.

For the Obama administration the threat from ISIS presents an opportunity to put pressure on Maliki not to allow Iraq to be used as either a land bridge for Iran's support for President Assad or for its air space to be used to transport weapons to Lebanon's Hizbollah.

It has been a continued aim of the foreign policy of Clinton from 2011 onwards as Secretary of State and then, as potential presidential candidate, that 'Assad must go'. Washington is concerned at the possibility that Assad has looked like stronger in Syria and that Baghdad is moving too close to Tehran.

Not only has Iraq signed a $195m arms deal with Iran, the threat of the 6,000-kilometer "Islamic Pipeline' from the South Pars gas field to the Eastern Meditteranean would become closer to realisation, thus angering Qatar with whom Iran shares the huge reserves of gas in the Gulf.

Qatar has bankrolled and funded Sunni jihadists, some in groups that are affiliated to Al Qaida, as a means of both removing Assad and furthering the rival plan to build a gas pipeline to Turkey and thence on to European markets, one reason why Britain and France have allied with Qatar.

One reason for the speed and scale of ISIS's surge from northern Syria into central Iraq, and Al Qaida's break with ISIS, is that Assad was cunning enough to have left it alone, realising it would fight against the other jihadists and tie up both the FSA and Kurdish separatists in the north.

ISIS was able to operate and spread because in 2013 Qatar was prepared to finance and arm the most fanatical jihadists such as Ahrar al-Sham and Turkey was prepared to allow ISIS to develop so as to fight alongside the FSA as a means of countering the threat of Kurdish irredentism.

Until 2014, ISIS was a staunch ally of the Free Syria Army until it became apparent that by attacking the Kurds, they were allowing Assad down south in Damascus the freedom to roll back the FSA from its positions outside the Syrian capital ( leading to accusations Assad was funding ISIS ).

In fact, the chaos and the rise of ISIS is more to do with the FSA being riven with factional struggles between those backed by Qatar and those by Saudi Arabia, both of which are vying to impose their leadership on the Sunni insurgent forces should Assad be overthrown.

Saudi Arabia has been wary that Qatar's preparedness to back the Muslim Brotherhood which is a traditional enemy and hostile to the Wahhabite state. But it has been more concerned with rivalling Qatar with Salafists that would do their bidding such as the Jabhat Al Nusra Front.

The upshot of this sordid power politics is that ISIS has grown into a major threat because of the way Syria has acted as a cockpit for backing the most ruthless Sunni jihadists so as to get rid of Assad and advance energy interests with the tacit backing of the US and Britain.

As a consequence of a shoddy realpolitik, the entire region has become even more unstable and Iraq more so than at any time since the sectarian warfare that erupted after the US invasion of 2003. ISIS is regarded by Maliki in Iraq as part of a Saudi plot; Assad is blamed by the FSA for supporting it.

Saudi Arabia clearly could have an interest in seeing Iraq descend into sectarian warfare. ISIS would engage the Shia government in Iraq and thwart Iran's plans to extend its interests westwards. The US would only intervene if the Kurdish oil fields or those in south Iraq were threatened.

Washington would be quite content to see Iran checked by having Maliki's government embroiled in a struggle against ISIS as it could then make military intervention to shore up his government conditional on moving away from Tehran and abandoning such plans as the Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline.

Back to Iraq: The Syrian Conflict and Jihadist Blowback.

The capture of Mosul and Tikrit by ISIS-and the potential military intervention of the US in Iraq once more being considered-is a consequence of the 'blowback' created by Western geostrategy in Syria and the continued chaotic aftermath of the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003.

One of the unintended consequences of Bush and Blair's invasion was that it has empowered the Shi'ites whose militias were needed to defeat the threat of Sunni militias and the remnants of Saddam's army which are now clearly involved in the retaking of the old Iraqi dictator's home city.

The US and Britain have been concerned since the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011 that should President Assad and his Alawite Shia government not be overthrown, that Maliki's Iraq would form a land bridge between Syria and Iran through which weapons and men could be sent to Lebanon's Hizbollah.

ISIS has been gaining ground throughout 2014 and so brutal and successful has it proved in battle, that both Saudi Arabia and Qatar,along with their ally the US, have been secretly backing jihadist groups in Syria in their opposition to ISIS which was considered 'al-Qaeda's most extreme wing'.

However, it is a fact that one of the jihadist groups fighting ISIS is the Jabhat Al Nusra Front. This organisation is funded and supplied with arms by Saudi Arabia as a means to bolster the power of Salafists against the Shia and also as a rival to the power of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood ( backed by Qatar).

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are aligned in opposition to the power of Assad in Syria and Maliki in Iran as both are Shi'ite administrations. However, the Sunni insurgents in Syria are divided between those backed by either regional power and that has weakened the military opposition to Assad.

Saudi Arabia opposes the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and went as far as labelling it 'a terrorist organisation' recently because Saudi Arabia has always feared Muslim Brotherhood ideas as subversive and because it Qatar is trying to assert its leadership over the Free Syrian Army.

With ISIS being rejected by Al Qaida for being 'too extreme', the absurdity is that Saudi Arabia , and by extension the US, are going to be effectively backing groups such as the Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaida affiliate, to fight against ISIS and bring the jihadist movement back 'under control'.

Moreover, ISIS's success in northern Syria threatens to destroy the military opposition to Assad from the Free Syrian Army that the US and Britain have tacitly backed through supporting Saudi Arabia and Qatar as well as Turkey which had intitially allowed ISIS to operate along its borders.

This colossal mess is a consequence of Qatar and Saudi Arabia using Syria as a proxy war battleground against both Iran and Iraq, a strategy aided and abetted by the US and Britain. Baghdad has remained close to its Shia neighbour to the east as has, of course, Assad.

Both Qatar and Saudi Arabia fear a Shi'ite axis stretching from the Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean.Qatar has been allowed to 'play with fire' because it is a major supplier of liquified natural gas to Britain and France and a huge source of investment in both London and Paris.

In addition, Qatar and its allies in Britain and France has wanted Assad to go because they fear Iran could use its influence in Iraq and Syria, should the Free Syria Army be defeated, to construct an 'Islamic pipeline' which would allow gas from the South Pars field ( shared with Qatar) to flow west.

With ISIS poised to strike at Baghdad, the US would be clearly wary of Iraq being taken over by fanatical jihadists, even if both it and Saudi Arabia could see it as a chance to use the potential threat  as a means of getting a less militantly Shia and pro-Iranian government in Iraq.

Even so, ISIS would be poised to capture important oil installations in Kirkuk and threaten the Kurdish regions of Iraq, where the US and Britain have been at the forefront of vying for oil exploration contracts, and so affect global oil prices which are already running at a three month high.

More ominously, ISIS is believed to contain at least 20 British nationals in it as well as jihadists from across the world being trained in the art of terror and machine gunning and beheading civilians at random. The threat of terrorists coming back to Western capitals could increase.

Western foreign policy has clearly failed as far as the publicly declared aim of 'countering extremism'. The reason is that it has been too closely associated with backing the irresponsible policies of Qatar and Saudi Arabia because of the hold they have over the US, France and Britain as regards energy and finance.

British Jihadi Islamists and the Syrian Conflict.

'Counter-terrorism officers, fearful that some of those fighting in Syria will return to Britain radicalised with the ability to carry out violent acts on British soil, hope that female family members will curb the numbers of people intent on taking up arms against the Assad regime'.( Syria crisis: stop your sons joining war, urges Met police, Guardian 24 April 2014 )

Much about the Syria-related terror threat does not add up. The Metropolitan Police may have though 'counter terrorism' depends on educational campaigns and social work 'in the community' to prevent Muslims going to Syria. Yet this depends on the bizarre notion they have not been radicalised already.

By definition, British Muslims who went to fight in Syria or are intending to join the struggle, are radicalised. In the Age of the Internet, British Muslims have access to information and have been able to cross the border from neighbouring Turkey with ease.

The Metropolitan Police are wasting their time. If British Muslims have decided to go and fight along with jihadists, then it is supposed to be the task of MI5 and MI6 to monitor those involved in terror plots before they go, meaning they could be stopped on the border, or to keep tabs on them if they return.

Should British citizens get killed in Syria fighting against Assad, it is the responsibility of those who decided to go. If they join Al Nusra or other groups of fanatics, the chances are they will get killed (in which case they pose no danger to Britain ) or they can be monitored on their return.

The probability is that the British secret services are playing the usual power game in using British born jihadists as 'assets' in order to gain more intelligence or, in fact, to use them as proxies in the struggle to remove Assad. This has been the pattern since the Bosnian War in the 1990s.

This extremely dangerous game, where known Al Qaida affiliated operatives have been allowed to pass across the borders and not arrested, was once part of the Covenant of Security, the policy of permitting exiles and jihadists to settle in Britain so they would not attack it but could be used by MI6.

Since the 'war on terror' got going after 2001, that policy was formally dropped. Even so, the shadowy power game has continued. The security services most likely want British born jihadists in Syria so they can gain intelligence and have agents within groups espousing violent Islamist ideology.

Some radical groups patronised by the British establishment as part of a 'counter-extremist' strategy have, according to historian Mark Almond, have acted as a conduit for Islamists to go and fight in Syria and that the strategy of collusion could lead to blowback.

Since the threat of Al Nusra has grown disproportionately, the British government by late 2013 seemed to have grasped the fact that their strategy for Syria was counter productive and could risk bringing terrorism back directly into the cities and towns of Britain and other backers of the Syrian insurgents.

The threat of terror is, however, always of utility to British governments that have wanted to harness jihadists to destroy states controlled by those hostile to Britain's geopolitical interests and over pipeline routes ( e.g Syria ) and regions with copious oil and gas.

British citizens are going to have to get used to the fact that Britain's high octane consumer society depends on these hazardous strategies for control over pipeline routes from Eurasia and the violent consequences of being locked into a struggle for mastery over diminishing natural resources across the globe.

Blair's Speech and the New Great Game.

Tony Blair's speech, as with everything this man utters, is a carefully calibrated public diplomacy missive better called a propaganda offensive. The timing is instructive; Blair is upgrading his profile in the Middle East because the crisis in Ukraine is set to lead to EU states searching for alternative energy sources.

It was interesting that Blair claimed the Ukraine Crisis would distract attention away from the Middle East. And why his fellow strategist and sinister operative John McTernan is 'on message' to explain just what Blair meant to those who could regard him as an important critic of Western foreign policy.

As is standard with propaganda, words and meaning must be prized apart from their conventional uses

'Libya and Syria are at the heart of Blair's argument: action started by this government but left incomplete. The passage on Syria is a direct attack on Cameron and Nick Clegg, and their inaction'.

Firstly, the Coalition government were not 'inactive' over Syria. They continually called for Assad 'to go'. Sarkozy set up the Friends of Syria group in Istanbul in 2012 to create a unified opposition with the intention of ousting Assad and installing a client state.

Secondly, Britain and France in particular were highly active in agitating for a missile strike on Syria, far more so even than a more energy independent 'post shale revolution 'USA. Their main client in the Middle East is Qatar which is in rivalry to build a pipeline from the South Pars gasfield which it shares with Iran.

Britain and France have increasingly sought to diversify the gas supply away from dependence upon Russia. One reason why Qatar's copious production of liquefied natural gas is a lucrative opportunity whereby its petrodollars from selling it get invested in the London and Paris property market and arms.

'Not a defence of liberal intervention, but a scrupulous account of the costs of doing nothing – particularly where the coalition has called for regime change. And, typically, looking at the bigger picture. The Middle East matters.. It matters because of oil and gas and our economic dependence on them'.

That statement matters. Essentially, with Russia and the US in a dangerous stand off over Ukraine, like Syria another pipeline transit route between east and west, Blair is trying to revive the idea that democratising the Middle East could provide EU states with better energy security.

Yet 'liberal intervention' was what was on offer when NATO facilitated the victory over the Gaddafi regime in Libya and what was on offer with the West's humanitarian concern over the East Ghouta gas attack in Syria. The reason no action was taken in Syria was increased concern over Al Qaida's presence.

The Libyan intervention made a bad situation worse. It enabled Gadaffi to be removed only for immediate ( and highly predictable ) squabbles over Libya's oil production capacity to divide the rebels ensuring another failed attempt at regime change backfired.

Now jihadists from Libya are known to have gone to Syria. The danger is, should Egypt fall into increased chaos, that the entire Maghreb could become a zone of carnage and bloodshed. Al Qaida affiliates are already operating in the Sinai Peninsula and fighting the Egyptian military.

As in Syria, the reality in Egypt was that the US and US tacitly accepted a military coup, even if the Muslim Brotherhood's bungling policies and attempts at institutional takeover has divided Egypt and led it even further towards economic and political collapse.

The Western Powers need to stop pretending that they can control events in the Middle East. Energy security has to be attained by decisive policies to move away from the great car economy and to find alternatives to oil and gas as well as dealing cautiously with Russia over Ukraine.

Blair's understanding on the Middle East is both simplistic and deranged. But his siren calls for radical and decisive action and drawing up of cosmic battle lines between Good and Evil remain potentially lethal if politicians and the media hail it as delivering a solution to an a looming energy security crisis.

Syria: The US, Kurdish Designs, Turkey, Iraq and Iran

No matter how President Obama and his team try to spin it a military intervention and 'upgrading' assistance to the insurgents against Assad backed by Qatar and Turkey would be tantamount to directly taking sides in the Syrian conflict. Up until now, Washington has only given CIA help to the Sunni dominated Free Syria Army;

Washington's foreign policy has consistently called for Assad to go. In refusing to engage with Iran diplomatically has made a slide into involvement in the civil war inevitable. There can be no political settlement if Washington demands that the precondition for peace is for Assad's Shia government to surrender.

The Alawites fear retribution from Sunni jihadists who have fought with the FSA including elements affiliated with Al Qaida such as the al Nusra Front who are fighting against Assad. They are not controlled by 'official' Sunni insurgents and the Syrian National Coalition and want to ethnically cleanse Alawi villages.

Turkey, moreover, is a NATO member threatened with the conflict between the Kurds and the radical Sunni jihadists of al Nusra. spilling over the border. Backing the FSA in Syria, Washington would face the prospect of Iran intervening more to back militant Kurdish separatists.
 
The danger of Kurdish separatist struggles with Sunni jihadists in northern Syria on the border with both Turkey and Iraq is that it threatens to destabilise border districts and towns in a way that could yet draw in other Western powers should it escalate. 

The Syrian government no longer has much control over the north east of the country and is content to see the al Nusra Front pinned down by Kurdish militias. Iran also gave support for those seeking Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq in order to increase its regional influence.

The reason for move towards separatism that the West opposes, in order to show solidarity with Turkey as a NATO member, is opposition to a potential future for an oil and gas rich Kurdistan with its own ideas about its role in the world that elude the control of regional and global powers.

As part of a fractured Iraq, the relative autonomy of Kirkuk from the Shia dominated government in Baghdad has yielded benefits for Western oil concerns who are willing to invest. But the West does not want to drive Baghdad towards Iran by pushing for Kurdish autonomy too much.

Nor does Iran want to back Kurdish independence more than is needed in order to only cause problems for Turkey alone because it is backing the Muslim Brotherhood against Iran's Shia client Assad. Iran has its own large Kurdish minority.

When Obama states that Syria is not Iraq and not Afghanistan, because of the history the US had in its invasions of both countries, he only wishes to emphasise the distinction between limited military intervention and war.

Unfortunately, Syria is very much a similar case to its Iraq neighbour in being a country more opened up to the competing energy interests of global powers since the US invasion of 2003. Syria is also similar to Afghanistan in being a geopolitically vital pipeline transit zone.

The 21st century is set to be an epoch of intense and bloody struggles and conflicts over resources. Western nations are necessarily going to be involved in them due their overdependence upon oil and gas in those volatile lands where they lie. 

Why Obama Will Not Stop Military Aid to Egypt.

"If I'm an Egyptian general, I take notice and think President Obama is trying to take the least painful step to demonstrate to various constituencies in the US that he means what he says about democracy in Egypt," said Amy Hawthorne, who until recently was an Egypt policy official at the State Department.

The Egyptian generals do not care what Obama says. Nor are they interested in what impact he is supposed to be making on the US domestic audience who, in turn, mostly often not care about Egypt anyway nor understand what is at stake other than some vague sentiments about 'democracy' prevailing.

The reality is that SCAF has been able to get away with the execution of the coup and its follow up operations to eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood protesters from the streets of Cairo because it knows the US depends on it for 'counter terrorism' and the security of Sinai Peninsula which abuts Israel and Saudi Arabia

With the July 3 coup an a fait accompli already , the US is simply not going to 'suspend' aid because it is already pledged to deliver it until the end of 2013. Furthermore, Washington is hedging its bets as if the killings stimulate a resurgence in Islamist terrorism it will need the army to protect its interests.

Those interests are the protecting of the border with Israel agreed in 1978-9, preventing the sabotage of oil and gas pipelines West and to Israel and the Suez Canal. But they also include preventing Egypt from becoming a base for Al Qaida terrorism that could spread into the oil producing Gulf states.

Yemen, to the south of Saudi Arabia, is already menaced by Al Qaida and its operatives targeted there with the nation becoming a testing ground for killer drones. As many missiles have ended up killing civilians, even pro-US figures in Yemen are claiming the strikes are acting only to swell Al Qaida's ranks.

As with other Arab nations affected by the 'Arab Spring' of 2011, Yemen is another potential flashpoint where a failing state presides over a strategically vital oil and gas transit nation with a burgeoning youthful population that has run up against environmental limits and has a food crisis reaching catastrophic proportions

Yemen is a minor oil exporter but occupies the one of the world's seven most important oil 'chokepoints' that are vital to the flow of oil to Western nations overdependent upon it to fuel their consumerism. Al Qaida propaganda has always exploited the line that 'their decadent prosperity mean your poverty'.

Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. It is located between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea, and connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.

An estimated 3.2 million bbl/d flowed through this waterway in 2009 (vs. 4 million bbl/d in 2008) toward Europe, the United States, and Asia. The majority of traffic, about 1.8 million bbl/d, moved northbound through the Bab el-Mandab en route to the Suez/SUMED complex.

The concentrated Al Qaida threat to Yemen thus focuses on throttling oil supplies to the West. Somalian pirates also menace the area. But the heavy overdependence upon oil from the Saudi peninsula and Gulf Region, as well as Al Qaida threats, means plans to establish US military bases in Yemen. will lead to conflict.

The geopolitical significance of Yemen is an extension of a prime concern that dovetails with the continued support the Egyptian army-the security of the sea route for the US navy between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea through the Gulf of Aden and thenceforth to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.

Ultimately, Egypt's stability remains a cornerstone of the entire framework for the balance of power set up by the US to guard Western oil interests during the 1970s from the strategic military partnership with Saudi Arabia against its Gulf rival Iran to the backing for Pakistan as bulwark against Iran to the east.

Syria: What Could Happen if the Conflict Intensfies.

The Syrian Crisis deepens day by day. David Cameron is a vain, incompetent and blustering figure, the leader of a nation with too much of a global role, none of the responsibilities that come with being one of the five permanent security council members and no independent foreign policy.

Cameron states his predictable backing for the US and is trying to act the statesman by pretending the US now can see the wisdom of the lead Britain and France took in bringing to light claims about President Assad's  use of chemical weapons ( sarin nerve gas ),

"I welcome this candid assessment by the Americans. I think it, rightly, puts back centre stage the question, the very difficult question to answer but nonetheless one we have got to address: what are we going to do about the fact that in our world today there is a dictatorial and brutal leader who is using chemical weapons under our noses against his own people."

War clouds are darkening and amassing steadily on the horizon. The Syrian Crisis has potential consequences far more lethal than the invasion of Iraq, though that invasion is a major cause of the current crisis in having led, over the last decade, to Shia government favourable to Tehran.

The US has expressed considerable concern over growing Iranian influence. So the US and UK are highly likely to back the Sunni militias with weapons. Encircling and controlling Iranian ambitions is a basic tenet of US foreign policy. Iran will step up its supply of weapons, cautiously backed by Russia.

Faced with this Cameron and Hague are out of their depth, mediocrities trying to cope with the immense complexities that they do not fully grasp. They live in a detached world of abstract theoretical geopolitcs in which 'existential enemies' can be combatted only through sabre ratting and 'resolve'.

Cameron emits same rhetoric as Blair with Iraq, the same shrill oversimplifications and messianic overtones. There will be no point of return from this one if the conflict escalates further across the Middle East. Too much is at stake.

The Western economies depend far too much upon oil and gas to let Iran have dominance over Syria. Iran occupies what Zbigniew Brzezinski called one of the most important 'geopolitical pivots' in the world, an area between the Middle East and Central Asia where most of the globe's oil and gas is.

Iran is facing economic crisis as US sanctions create inflation and falling living standards. Hemmed in from the east by US presence in Afghanistan, blocking the IP pipeline in favour of the TAPI pipeline is an extension of the sanctions policy and it is leading to Iranian resentment of the West.

The temptation for Tehran to step up the conflict in Syria as an escape westwards and to retain it's influence is considered a direct threat to the US's ability to control the balance of power over the Gulf. Bahrain faced Shia protests against the minority Sunni regime in 2012.

The prospect of Shia dominance in Syria and the defeat of Sunni fundamentalist 'rebels' ( i.e. insurgents ) is anathema to the US and UK so there is no prospect for peace nor the diplomatic resolution of the crisis and they no more want to negotiate with Assad than with Iran.

There are no signs the Sunni insurgents will not continue to suffer set backs and military defeats with Hezbollah now supporting Assad from Lebanon. So it is very probable the US and UK and France will supply arms so as to counter Iran and it will respond by doing the same.

The escalation of a lethal proxy war and more weapons entering Syria can only create create a total bloodbath to happen on a scale that could not only exceed Iraq but which could polarise the regional and global powers and ramp up the conflicts over oil and gas supply routes to a new level.

Should the conflict lead to the destabilisation of Lebanon and Jordan, as well as turning Syria into a version of Afghanistan, that could have severe consequences for the 'blowback' from Sunni militias and Al Qaida reaping havoc across the border into Saudi Arabia.

The US and Britain will do everything to shore up Saudi Arabia from collapse but the knock on effects upon oil production would seriously destabilise global oil supplies and prices. The slump in the West would be intensified and the blowback from Al Qaida terrorists cause mayhem.