Understanding The Syrian Conflict: Russia vs. The West?

ACCRA — The crisis in Syria, which started with demonstrations against the Assad government in 2011, has fixated the attention of the world for the past four years. It is about to enter its fifth year and acquiring an international dimension with the direct involvement of major powers. The Syrian crisis contains important geopolitical lessons for Africa. Let us see why.

Saddam Hussein on August 2, 1990 invaded Kuwait setting in motion a chain of events, which has led to the Syrian crisis. The flux unleashed by Gorbachov’s reforms in the Soviet Union distracted the Soviet elite from a more activist international policy. With that background in mind, the US cobbled together a coalition that evicted Iraq from Kuwait by early 1991 in an operation that widely became known as the First Gulf War.

Sane minds might have thought that, that would be the end, the primacy of international law in not allowing the invasion of sovereign countries had been demonstrated. However, this was not to be the case. Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe General Wesley Clark gave a chilling insight into what was to be. In a talk he gave in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club of California on October 3, 2007, he described what he had learned just after the war:

“In 1991, [Wolfowitz] was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy — the number 3 position at the Pentagon. And I had gone to see him when I was a 1-Star General commanding the National Training Center.

I said, “Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.”

And he said: “Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t … But one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the region — in the Middle East — and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes — Syria, Iran, Iraq — before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.”

The American Deep State fervent in their quasi-religious belief of their exceptionalism had drawn up a plan to destabilize sovereign states in the Middle East. The election of Bill Clinton put a temporary freeze to the neocon fantasies, but the election of George Bush Jr. brought the neocons back to power and they renewed their plan of action.

This culminated in the illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq under a false pretext of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Syria was next on their plan. What was missing was the opportune moment. The concocted Arab Spring pinging on genuine grievances was used as the catalyst to implement the destabilization of Syria. Why was Syria so critical?

Syria was an important node in the destabilization matrix because of its geopolitical position in Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As far back as Pharaonic times, the Pharaohs considered it vitally important to control the Levant (Syria-Palestine) in order to project African power in West Asia (Middle East).

This geostrategic thinking was not lost on later powers. The effective conquest of Syria from the Byzantine Empire by Muslim general Khalid Ibn al-Walid following the battle of Yarmouk on August 20 636 destroyed for all purposes Byzantine power in West Asia making the Rashidun caliphate the dominant power in the region. Therefore, control of Syria was the geopolitical key to control over MENA.

The modern Syrian state arose as a consequence of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, concluded on May 16 1916 between Britain and France to divide the provinces of the collapsing Ottoman Empire among themselves. By 1970, the Assad family belonging to the Alawite group, a branch of Shia Islam, had seized power and allied themselves to the Soviet Union in return for Soviet help against Israel.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 in Shia Iran brought Syria and Iran closer to each other. Therefore, by the 1980s, Syria the geopolitical key to control over MENA was deeply in the Soviet and Iranian orbit of influence. These two powers therefore held the key to control over MENA. Adding to Syria’s geostrategic significance was, the possibility of the supply of natural gas from Qatar passing through Syria to European markets.

This made Syria a potentially important transit node in control over global energy supplies. American controlled Qatari gas passing through an American controlled Syria into Europe would have allowed the Americans to undercut Russian control over vital energy supplies into the American vassal puppy states of the EU. Thus, Syria acquired simultaneously geopolitical and geoeconomic significance in the MENA region.

The United States acting through its vassal puppy states in the Middle East in a web of alliances had created a hostile arc around Syria but still did not control this key thereby making tenuous her dominance of MENA.

An opportunity presented itself when the growing grievances of the Arab masses against their corrupt ruling elite spilled into demonstrations in Tunisia in December 2010. These protests found their way into Syria by January 2011. This was co-opted by the American Deep State and given the name the Arab Spring.

The operatives of the Deep State used the opportunity presented by the protests to activate their destabilization of Syria. The Deep State and its puppies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar began to fund a menagerie of assorted groups including radical Islamists and some elements of Al-Quada to overthrow the Assad government in Syria. This led to the Syrian civil war.

Some of these radical Islamists got out of control and morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as Da’esh), which has now established a “Caliphate” in large contiguous areas of Iraq and Syria with their capital in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa.

Currently in Syria, we have a chaotic situation where western backed “Free” Syrian Army rebels, Al Nusra (Al-Qaeda affiliate) and ISIS are fighting among themselves and against the Assad government which is openly supported by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and tacitly by China.

The Kurds of northern Syria now fighting against ISIS have further complicated the picture. The Kurds want an independent Kurdish State or an autonomous state within Syria. This is opposed by Turkey, which fears it might galvanize its own Kurdish minority that has been fighting for an independent Kurdish state in the Kurdish areas of Turkey. This geopolitical mess is what Syria represents now, a fractured geopolitical key for MENA dominance.

In September 2014, the US and its allies forming a coalition began to bomb ISIS their creation gone rogue. In what can arguably be called a stranger than fiction story, despite thousands of air sorties, ISIS territorial expansion continued unabated in Syraq (Syria and Iraq). Many people began to scratch their heads, as it did not follow any logical process as to how that could be. Thus, the war in Syraq limped on monotonously sometimes punctuated by paroxysms of public brutality by ISIS and assorted groups.

Its latest incantation was the dramatic Russian military intervention starting on September 30 2015 on the side of the Assad government that stunned the American Deep State. This had the effect of forcing the foreign powers with a stake in the conflict to the negotiation table in Vienna. It culminated in the joint declaration of October 30 2015 by the representatives of Russia and her allies mainly Iran and China on one side, the US and its allies mainly Saudi Arabia and Turkey on the other side, and the participation of the UN. The Vienna declaration set forth the following key points:

1. Syria’s unity, independence, territorial integrity, and secular character are fundamental.
2. State institutions will remain intact.
3. The rights of all Syrians, regardless of ethnicity or religious denomination, must be protected.
4. It is imperative to accelerate all diplomatic efforts to end the war.
5. Humanitarian access will be ensured throughout the territory of Syria, and the participants will increase support for internally displaced persons, refugees, and their host countries.
6. Da’esh, and other terrorist groups, as designated by the U.N. Security Council, and further, as agreed by the participants, must be defeated.
7. Pursuant to the 2012 Geneva Communique and U.N. Security Council Resolution 2118, the participants invited the U.N. to convene representatives of the Government of Syria and the Syrian opposition for a political process leading to credible, inclusive, non-sectarian governance, followed by a new constitution and elections.  These elections must be administered under U.N. supervision to the satisfaction of the governance and to the highest international standards of transparency and accountability, free and fair, with all Syrians, including the diaspora, eligible to participate.
8. This political process will be Syrian led and Syrian owned, and the Syrian people will decide the future of Syria.
9. The participants together with the United Nations will explore modalities for, and implementation of, a nationwide ceasefire to be initiated on a date certain and in parallel with this renewed political process.

The key points of the Vienna Declaration was the implementation of the U.N Security Council Resolution 2118, where the UN would convene a process where the representatives of the Syrian government and Opposition would agree on a road-map leading to an inclusive political process and free and fair elections, where the political process will be Syrian led and Syrian owned with the Syrian people deciding the future of Syria. Laudable words indeed.

However, is it achievable in reality? It is interesting to note that on the same day that the Vienna declaration was announced, the Obama White House announced a new policy of sending Special Forces to Syria to train and coordinate with “moderate” rebels on the ground. Latest reports indicate that they are planning to send fighter planes tasked with air-to-air combat to the region. This will lead to a potentially risky confrontation with Russian air forces in Syria apart from it being a gross violation of the sovereignty of the Syrian state.

This seems like a slippery slope to more war, leading to a possible partition of Syria into a Russian controlled Southern Syria, and an American controlled Northern Syria. There are historical grounds for this assertion, from which Africa can learn important geopolitical lessons.

We recall the Geneva Conference and its final declaration of July 21 1954 on restoring peace in Indochina. It was meant to bring peace to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, US Foreign Secretary John Foster Dulles, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Chinese Premier Chou Enlai and French former Prime Minister Georges-Augustin Bidault leading the French delegation, together with the representatives of the various factions of the Indochina war, met to work out this “final” accord to end the war. We all know what happened.

Shortly afterwards south of the 17th parallel, the Americans began to pump in advisers and special forces troops to their allies on the ground. We all know the result as the Vietnam War that dragged on until the last American helicopters fled Saigon the capital of South Vietnam from the advancing forces of communist North Vietnam on the last days of April 29-30 1975.

What will happen in Syria, we do not know. We only know that influential American think tanks like the Brookings Institute with channel access to the Deep State are calling for the partition of Syria into several states in a loose confederate structure. However, history has an inexplicably funny way of repeating itself.

What are the lessons for Africa?

We have to ask ourselves, what plans the neocons of the American Deep State have for Africa. The geopolitically important states in Africa are Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Kenya and South Africa with the other African states, with regions that we will call geopolitical plasticity.

Are the geopolitically important states in Africa being prepared directly for balkanization or have pressure exerted on them using the regions of geopolitical plasticity? We should carefully follow the course of the Syrian crisis and analyze the Geo-political tool kit of the Neocon Deep State. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.