Politics hates a vacuum. It especially hates a vacuum in the tinderbox cockpit of the Middle East where the conflicting issues of money, vital resources, religious extremism , religious conflicts, historic rivalries and the geopolitical link between East and West dangerously clash.
The virtual collapse in 2011-2012 of Bashar Al-Assad’s despotic regime in Syria created such a vacuum. It was filled by the even more despotic Islamic State Caliphate.
Now the Caliphate is on its knees. The Western half of Mosul is recaptured. Only a handful of IS fighters remain in the dangerously narrow winding streets of the Eastern half.
The fundamentalists once boasted that their Syrian-Iraqi base would become a springboard from which to launch an Islamic conquest of the Middle East and Europe. They have retreated to their spiritual capital of Raqqa in Syria for the final battle to the death.
They will lose . But who will win? And what will they win? Assad, Russia, the US and its Western allies, Iraq, the Kurds, Turkey, Iran, a score or more of rebel forces—all are directly involved in the fighting. Then there are there are the backers—or interested parties: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Qatar, Kuwait, the EU, the United Arab Emirates, Somalia, Afghanistan and the wider Islamic world.
It looks as if Assad will regain and remain in power for the foreseeable future—but he will be a political shadow of his former self. Neither the Trump Administration nor any of its European or Arab allies have any stomach for removing a secular despot who can be replaced by another fanatic Islamic despot. And besides, he will have the military support of Iran and Russia.
Russia and Iran are set to be the big winners. They gambled on Assad when he was all but dead and buried . They can expect payback in the form of military bases, political influence and lucrative contracts to rebuild war torn Syria.
This is not good news for the US and its allies. They do not want Russian influence back in the Middle East at a time when Moscow is also flexing its muscles in the Baltic and Ukraine and hacking into Western computer systems. They especially don’t want Iran to extend its regional tentacles.
Israel should have special cause for concern. To have Assad on its northeastern border was bad enough. To have an Assad backed by Iran and—presumably—with Iranian troops is the stuff of nightmares.
The EU will have mixed feelings. They don’t want expanded influence in the Middle East for Russia or Iran, but they would welcome a return to normality which would stem the tsunami of refugees.
Then there is Turkey and, of course, the Kurds. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have designs for revived Ottoman greatness. Relations with the EU and NATO have been relegated to the back seat in pursuit of his goal. Erdogan’s troops are in Northern Syria and he will want them to stay.
Standing in his way are the Turks traditional bete noire– the Kurds. They have been struggling for a homeland carved out of Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey for more than a century. They have been the boots on the ground for the US-led coalition and expect their reward. The question is: “Will America be in a position to give it?
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are even more worried about spreading Iranian influence than Washington. Moscow they can live with, but not Tehran. The end of the civil war in Syria would free up battle hardened Iranian troops for the fighting in Yemen and embolden Tehran to foment discontent among Shi-ite populations in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
For the rest of the Islamic world the approaching end of the Syrian civil war eliminates a focal point for their dissident fundamentalist populations. Its removal undermines the Jihadists but also means that thousands of angry battle-hardened Jihadists will be returning home—many of them still firm in their warped political-religious beliefs. You can destroy a state, but you can’t kill an idea.
As the end approaches the players jockey for pole position and the stakes and dangers increase inexorably. Current conflicts are not so much between crazed Jihadists and super powers but between Super Powers keen to retain or regain influence at the other’s expense. All sides are aware of the dangers, but the closer we come to the end the more determined they become to succeed, or, at the very least, prevent the other from succeeding.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".
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8 Comments
This mess just shows the folly of pursuing regime change in the first place. Hopefully Britain will finally refuse any further involvement.
Personally, I also think we could save a lot of money and effort if we stopped trying to re-run the cold war. The soviet union collapsed 26 years ago. There are more productive things to do than pretending it still posses a bigger threat than it does. A lot of the time it looks to me as if arms manufacturers and the military do not know what to do without the big ticket spending only keeping the cold war going provides.
I am concerned at some of the myths you have swallowed. The Syrians haven’t been faced with a binary choice between Assad and ISIS – that is just how Assad tries to portray it for self-seeking reasons.
I don’t think Assad, even with Russian and Iranian backing, can regain secure military control of Syria. Moreover, Russia’s and Iran’s interests may not always coincide, and they must both be finding their efforts in Syria quite expensive. At some point a compromise will have to be reached. So there is still hope that something will come from the aborted Syrian revolution.
I can’t believe you are a Trump fan but you seem to have adopted his line on Iran being the cause of all instability in the region. Iran certainly has much to answer for (especially in Syria) but it is Saudi Arabia, not Iran, that has spread Sunni-Shi’i sectarianism and religious fanaticism generally. It suited Trump not to point that out. Neither do you.
I also can’t quite understand your perspective on Israel. Are you aware that it is Israel, not Syria, that has blocked peace efforts between the two countries? Israel’s persistent refusal to face up to the legitimate rights of Syria (and, of course, the Palestinians) has been a major factor in regional instability over many decades. At a time when hundreds of thousands have been dying in Syria and Iraq for reasons that have nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli dispute, this should still be remembered. The absence of a just settlement to the Palestinian issue remains a powerful recruiting tool for groups like ISIS.
My impression is that Iran is no worse than many of the other States in the Middle East (not that the bar is very high in terms of human rights) and the re-election of a “moderate” President by a large margin this year is encouraging. The Nuclear deal seemed to me to be very encouraging too, and Trump has so far not cancelled it.. In fact The Iranians are playing very canny by doing a deal for lots of Airbus planes that will create jobs in the USA! Of course Iran are on the Shia side of the current “30 years war” in the Middle east..
Saudi Arabia and Russia seem to be the reasons why the USA and the UK oppose Iran, rather than anything particularly objective…
I see Erdogan has just decreed that the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution will be dropped form the school curriculum, and will henceforth only be taught in Universities.
The man wants a ‘pious generation’ to copme out of what’s left of the educationb system. Why don’t world leaders see that he is gradually unravelling the secular (albeit fragile) democracy established by Kemal Attaturk?
By and large what battle hardened troops do after a war is go home to whatever life they had before. A quick look at any post conflict history will tell illustrate this. The problem isn’t troops it’s the fact that we now have an established pattern for spontaneous and planned acts of violence by unhinged people and far right Islamist groups. Bad ideas, like good ones, are remarkably resistant. There will always be individuals or groups that find them attractive. 70 odd years after WWII there are still supremacists who march about spewing their hate. There are still racially motivated l random attacks on strangers and so on. The legacy of the current crisis will last just as long and be just as intractable because the ideas are out there in the market place.
John McHugo’s comment is wise as always. He is of course too modest to mention his own book on Syria which is well worth reading. http://www.johnmchugo.com/syria-a-recent-history/
Wise words from Tom. And Glenn. The dreadful thing is that most of the mess was entirely foreseeable. And yet despite the recent lessons of Iraq and Libya, there are those who still think we should stick our useless/disastrous oar into ME civil/religious conflicts.
Perhaps history lessons could be made compulsory in Parliament!
It seems obligatory for western observers to brand al Assad as a tyrant, as though that were any different to any other country in the region (pace Israel, but theirs is a kind of collective imperial tyranny, over the Palestinians). Also Bashir is his fathers son -and not the one originally picked to succeed. Unquestionably many evil and cruel things have continued to take place under his presidency, but that has long been par for the middle east, “let he who is without sin, etc…..”
I disagree with the prospects suggested above, for what will follow. Understandably Israel is nervous of a militant neighbour on their frontier, but if the Syrians can eventually find peace, it seems highly unlikely that they will then seek to take on Israel, nor yet do I believe that Iran intends to do so. Israel is well defended by a number of measures. Far more critical, I believe, is whether the spread of militant Sunni Islam can be contained and tamed, now the contagion is so widespread. Al Qaeda is of course still present in Syria as is ISIS, and both of them have established themselves in Libya and Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda also in Yemen and the Sahel. On the whole prospects do not look good. Who amongst the powers is going to sort out Libya, the main point of departure for immgrants to the EU? As to democracy in the region? Look at Egypt’s recent history. Turkey has shown it is going the wrong way, as Erdogan cements his personal authority. The Qataris and Saudis who with Turkey, militarised the Syrian uprising to replace a Shiite regime with a Sunni one, now seem to have fallen out. They have funded the many foreign fighters from all over the Moslem world as well as Europe, now in Syria and Iraq, and brought in much of Colonel Qadaffi’s redundant arsenal to arm them. The West seems best advised to keep out of it once ISIS is down, although big customers for arms will be continue to be forgiven their human rights outrages. Western diplomacy has little to offer it appears, but there is no merit in the West trying to allocate blame, or playing favourites, as between Shiite and Sunni. Certainly the UN was set up to deal with such intractable problems, but it is always limited in what it can do, being subject to its members wishes. It was formed to prevent world war. It now needs to move on to outlaw localised and religious wars, but can only do that with the combined super powers making it happen – and how likely is that?