The road to Russian war in Syria

Trying to understand the regional and international war going on in Syria beyond sectarianism and its rotten logic is almost absurd. The United States has, since its occupation of Iraq in 2003, succeeded in making sectarianism a magic key that is used to explain military conflicts and political dynamics within the Arab world, including areas which are free of sects, where an ideological foundation that is based on all that is Sunni is being prepared and is waiting for the birth of an organised Shia group. If the game of sectarianism becomes difficult, it usually gets replaced with ethno-sectarianism, just like what happened in Ghardaia in Algeria, or the tribal factor in Libya.

Changing the direction of the Yemeni revolution, the intifada of poor Yemenis, to another sectarian war between a Sunni team led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under the name of the Arab coalition, and another called the Houthis – nickname: “Ansarullah” – which is supported by predominantly Shia Iran (although there are other sects living there), is a very clear example of the wide spread of this cultural, sectarian and religious scourge of societies, which destroys civilisations and progress when it is mismanaged and employed in the game of political interests.

Few people know much of the results of the research conducted on Arab community infrastructure and its fragile and fragmented religious, sectarian, ethnic and tribal structure, although hundreds of years passed in genuine coexistence as one nation and civilisation sharing one language, religion and history, even though it is distributed politically across more than one country or entity. The component parts of that civilisation, which were once the source of richness and power, have all of a sudden become sources of weakness and the cause of fragmentation, with members and groups being eliminated, states dismantled along with their institutions and armies, as well as open collaboration with the West and open defence of the occupation, without fear or shyness, although such an act used to be considered a major sin that could never be forgiven.

This is the new swamp in which official Arab politics and culture has drowned, and which has become part of governments and systems divided along sectarian meta-nationalistic lines.

This issue reached its peak in the halls of the Arab League, which was headed by the late Abdel Rahman Azzam Pasha (1873 – 1976) when it was established after World War Two as a home for all Arabs and their countries liberated from European occupation. It has turned into a home whose only basis for shelter is victorious sectarianism.

Arab peoples and governments lived for many years without letting their political relations be subject to ethnic and sectarian ties; Arab nationalism and regional nationalism as sources of legitimacy were more powerful and more effective. When national regimes fell or were overthrown by arrogant and powerful international forces, the door was wide open for regimes to have religious and sectarian references and the authorities of muftis, imams and shaikhs which could not last long and collapsed quickly.

This is how we can understand the war in Syria, the stages it’s been through and how it came to the point where new international forces are entering the conflict, it having previously been the monopoly of the US, NATO and their traditional Arab allies. The new allies led by the Russian bear are backed by China and Iran as international forces which do not hide their opposition to the US.

Let us not forget that the Syrian regime spent many years as an ally of conservative Arab countries led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and it participated with them in the war on Iraq in 1991 as part of the alliance to liberate Kuwait. The same regime took part in the Madrid peace conference in the presence of Israel in November 1991, sponsored by the then US President George Bush Senior. The aim was to negotiate peace with the Zionist state and agree something similar to the 1979 Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel. Madrid was a fiasco, with the bitter reality for Syria that Israel does not intend to withdraw from the Syrian Golan Heights which it occupied in 1967. The Israelis wanted to impose their own terms for peace, not just peace for land; in particular, they wanted Syria to close the camps run by Palestinian nationalist and Islamic factions.

The Syrians stood by the mirage of peace with Israel, sponsored by the US. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak convinced his Syrian counterpart, Hafez Al-Assad, to do so. The Syrian authorities pulled back from this when Bashar Al-Assad succeeded his father at the beginning of 2000; the new Syrian regime refused to take part in the US=led 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation and dismantling of the Iraqi state and its institutions. After the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005, the Syrian army was forced to leave its neighbour in a move designed to boost strategic relations with Iran and give support to Hezbollah during Israel’s June 2006 invasion of Lebanon. The Bashar Al-Assad regime also supported the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas – and armed it, particularly during Israel’s war against Gaza in 2008-2009. There was also new openness towards the Iraqi regime now dominated by ayatollahs which, ironically, is also supported by Iran and the US.

The prevailing 2011 analysis of the war in Syria, although legitimate at the time, is no longer useful. We cannot limit our conception of what’s going on to the popular movements that arose then, which were meant to transform into a revolution to overthrow the ruling Ba’athist regime and establish a liberal, democratic, pluralist regime similar to that set up in Tunisia, or even in Egypt. That popular movement hasn’t managed to become an intifada, nor is it a civil, popular and peaceful revolution with its own clear goals. If we apply Max Weber’s political theory to the scenario, it was not only Bashar Al-Assad and the Syrian state – with the monopoly on legitimised violence – who aborted this movement; it was also the conservative Arab regimes and international community led by the US, which is temporarily in line with Erdogan’s Islamist Turkey (which has been allied with Israel since 1949, is a member of NATO and has new Ottoman ambitions). These powers chose the moment that the Syrian regime used violence against peaceful protestors to intervene directly in events, similar to what happened in Libya.

The Syrian movement was effectively aborted on the day that it was adopted by the international powers and their Arab allies. It was funded and armed by their intelligence agencies, and they hired mercenaries from all over the world to fight in return for the overthrow of the Assad regime. This fooled many young Muslims who believed that Syria is the land for jihad and so were an easy target for groups linked to political Islam and militants to fight in a battle that they believed to be their own. In reality it was an international and regional fight that has strategic aims and both hidden and goals for domination that aim to change the geopolitical facts of the entire region.

So what is the problem about Russia’s involvement in the game of interests and domination of people and wealth? Such a game is always on the international agenda; only its rules and methods change.

If this is about Russia occupying Syria, then we should know that the entire region has been living under US and Western domination and there is not one country that has full sovereignty over its land, air and territorial waters, or fully possesses its own national decision-making ability. If Russia is coming to protect its interests in Syria, and the Middle East in general, other western countries have done so before it, led by the US. Finally, if Russia is assigned to take up a role delegated to it by America, as some allege, the entire discussion will become naïve and unconvincing, and a possible alternative assumption would be that Russia has managed to take part in the global game again, since its intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea without any major reaction from the US or its allies, unlike what happened in Kuwait in 1991. Hence, Moscow is now welcome in the international club, which has long been accustomed to distributing political, economic and financial dividends to its favoured members.

Thus, most of the arguments used against the Syrian regime by its opponents for calling in the Russians to protect it and thus allow it to stay in power, are weak, and lack coherence or any relationship with the facts. Indeed, the regime’s argument looks stronger if it is using the Russian intervention to return to Damascene control the Syrian land which has been seized by Daesh/ISIS. Those states which are criticising Syria for calling on Russia for protection in return for military bases are the same states which have in the past invited other foreign powers to do the same for them.

The issue is no longer about the survival of Al-Assad’s regime, because it seems that this has already been decided in the corridors of power, after thousands of young “religious believers and supporters of political Islam” have been sacrificed on the battlefields and rich Arab countries have used up vast swathes of their fortunes in arms spending. In fact, the issue is now related to the restructuring of the Arab political map, and the game of fortune and domination. Many Arabs no longer care if they become followers of American imperialism or Russian imperialism, because as far as liberation, independence, sovereignty, renaissance, unity and progress are concerned, they are now mere terms that have lost their meanings and implications in the absence of an Arab vision or anyone to represent it.

Translated from Al-Araby Al-Jadid, 12 November, 2015

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.