Page 2 of
2 Syria:
Waiting for someone named
Obama By M K
Bhadrakumar
Taking stock of Westerwelle's
weekend trip to Istanbul, Deutsche Welle warned in
no uncertain terms that Turkey "risks getting
mired" in the Syrian conflict after having
"misgauged" it. The commentary was critical of
Erdogan:
Weapons deliveries from Turkey
remain the most important support the Syrian
rebels are receiving, which has helped the
anti-Assad Free Syrian Army to secure a strip of
territory nearly 20 kilometers deep into the
Syrian side on the border with Turkey. The
majority of the Turkish population has little
sympathy for Erdogan's
stance on the Syria conflict. For the first time
in his 10 years in office, the prime minister is
facing widespread opposition. Half of the
country's electorate voted for his AKP party in
last year's parliamentary election - largely
because it was perceived as offering stability
to the country.
Since then, Turkey has
enjoyed high growth rates and now belongs to the
biggest 20 economies in the world. With wide
sectors of the population having achieved
relative prosperity, many Turkish people now
fear that Erdogan's aggressive stance toward
Syria is endangering that.
Thoughtful Turkish
commentators have also voiced similar
misgivings. Mehmet Ali Birand, one of Turkey's
senior-most political observers, wrote in
Hurriyet newspaper on the weekend: "The civil
war in Syria does not threaten Turkey's vital
interests. In other words, it is not our duty.
It should not be our duty to save the Syrian
people from Assad. Let's defend them, support
them, but we should have boundaries."
Waiting expectantly Again, in
a column in the pro-government Islamist daily
Zaman, prominent Turkish commentator Abdullah
Bozkurt wrote on Friday:
The [Turkish] government seems to be
divided on how far Turkey should take the matter
with Syria. The relentless war lobby is after a
"fait accompli" to commit the government and the
country to a permanent war in Syria ...
Opposition parties are against the risky
adventure while the public is overwhelmingly
opposed to the notion of the
war.
Evidently, Erdogan is in two
minds (which also explains Putin's decision to
confer with him). But part of his posturing is due
to his lingering hope that with the nerve-racking
distractions of the election in the US on November
8 behind him, President Barack Obama will revisit
the Syrian question.
But having said that,
Turks are smart enough to hear the drums by now in
the Western capitals, beating the retreat from the
Syrian battlefield even before the battle has been
truly joined. Westerwelle made it clear in
Istanbul on the weekend that Germany would expect
Turkey not to precipitate the Syrian crisis.
To be sure, North Atlantic Treaty
Organization secretary general Anders Fogh
Rasmussen expresses solidarity with Turkey, but
then, he also underlines that it is a mere
"hypothetical" question whether Turkey would
invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter for an
intervention in Syria; he then quickly adds that
Syria can have only one solution - a political
solution.
Ironically, the one good thing
for world peace last week was that the European
Union is now saddled with the additional burden of
the Nobel Peace Prize, which all but forecloses
even a residual option for it to bankroll a war in
Syrian - that is, even if surplus savings could be
found.
But in all fairness, the Obama
administration has consistently made it clear that
it is not willing to engage in direct military
intervention. Its distaste toward intervention
probably increased after it transpired that
various Salafi groups and al-Qaeda affiliates had
entered the Syrian cauldron.
The White
House is having a tough time explaining what
happened really in Benghazi. The Republicans have
opened heavy artillery fire on the murder of the
US ambassador to Libya. The pressure is on
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (who
used to be the most ardent supporter of regime
change in Syria).
Besides, the disunity
among the Syrian rebel groups causes genuine
despair in Washington. Meanwhile, Muslim Brothers
are on the march in nearby Jordan and anything can
happen now in that country, which is a linchpin in
the United States' regional strategy.
To
cap it all, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
visited Moscow to wrap up a $4.3 billion arms
deal. Not surprisingly, the Chinese oil companies
have appeared all over the Iraqi oilfields, which
were supposed to be Big Oil's playpen after the US
made such huge sacrifices in men and resources.
And Maliki is beckoning the Russian oil companies,
too, to pick up the threads from where they left
off in the Saddam Hussein era.
Clearly,
the writing is there on the wall that the Syrian
crisis is having a "spillover". Polls indicate
that US opinion supports more sanctions against
the Syrian regime and a no-fly zone but no direct
intervention or arming of Syrian rebels.
But then, to be the devil's advocate,
there is the hawkish opinion, too. The influential
pundit Anthony Cordesman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington
argues that Obama should not remain trapped in
policy dilemmas and "hollow posturing" but should
actively "help to do the job" - namely, adopt a
strategy like in the 1980s when it gave the famous
Stinger missiles ("equalizers") to the Afghan
mujahideen.
He wrote last week that if
only the US could provide similar "equalizers" to
the Syrian rebels, it would ensure that the rebel
fighters "inflict far more serious casualties" on
the government forces and help expand their own
safe zones and thereby "take advantage of 'no fly'
or 'no move' zones enforced with limited uses of
US or allied force, and be able to quickly become
far more effective with limited training by US or
other Special Forces".
Beginning of end
game Cordesman may well be echoing an
opinion within the US establishment. But for
Obama, the clincher is likely to be lying
somewhere else.
Woven into all this
intricate Arab Spring tapestry, another new thread
is threatening to dominate the "big picture" - the
division among the Arabs themselves about the
crisis in Syria. Differences have appeared in the
stance of, say, Oman and Kuwait on the one hand
and Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the other - or,
between Saudi Arabia and Egypt and between Saudi
Arabia and Iraq.
When United Nations envoy
Lakhdar Brahimi visited Riyadh recently, King
Abdullah complained to him as much about Egyptian
President Mohammed Morsi as about Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad. No wonder Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is proceeding to Kuwait this
week. Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi just
visited Qatar. The isolation of the Saudis is no
longer possible to be ignored. The prominent
pro-Saudi daily Al-Hayat wrote bitterly on
Saturday:
The countries of the GCC [Gulf
Cooperation Council] do not now have the choice
to head to the Arab League and then to the [UN]
Security Council ... This sexpartite bloc
perhaps does not have the option of heading to
NATO and asking it to intervene ... In fact, it
may not even be possible to reach unanimous
agreement even among these six countries, due to
the differences in their stances.
In
sum, the United States' regional allies are
waiting expectantly like the pair of men in Samuel
Beckett's play vainly for someone named Godot to
arrive any time soon after November 8. To keep
themselves occupied in the meantime, they eat,
sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games,
exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide - in
fact, anything "to hold the terrible silence at
bay".
They may, it seems, even interdict
an airplane or two. The end game is beginning in
Syria.
Ambassador M K
Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the
Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included
the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and
Turkey.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times
Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
