SYRIA: REGIME
CHANGE AND SMART POWER The rise and fall of Turkey's
Erdogan By M K Bhadrakumar
Israel's emergence from the woodwork can
signal only one thing: the Syrian crisis is moving
towards the decisive phase. The lights have been
switched on in the operation theatre and the
carving of Syria is beginning. What is going to
follow won't be a pretty sight at all since the
patient is not under anesthesia, and the chief
surgeon prefers to lead from behind while
sidekicks do the dirty job.
So far,
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have done the
maximum they could to destabilize Syria and remove
the regime headed by
President Bashar al-Assad.
But Bashar is still holding out. Israeli expertise
is now needed to complete the unfinished business.
Someone is needed to plunge a sharp knife
deep into Bashar's back. Jordan's king can't do
the job; he measures up only to Bashar's knees.
The Saudi and Qatari sheikhs with their ponderous,
flabby body are not used to physical activity; the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization prefers to be
left alone, having burnt its fingers in Libya with
a bloody operation that borders on war crime. That
leaves Turkey.
In principle, Turkey has
the muscle power, but intervention in Syria is
fraught with risks and one of the enduring
legacies of Kemal Ataturk is that Turkey avoids
taking risks. Besides, Turkey's military is not
quite in top form.
Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan is also unable to carry the
majority opinion within Turkey in favor of a war
in Syria, and he is navigating a tricky path
himself, trying to amend his country's
constitution and make himself a real sultan - as
if French President Francois Hollande were to
combine the jobs of Prime Minister Jean-Marc
Ayrault and Socialist Party chief Martine Aubry.
Obviously, Erdogan can't risk his career.
Besides, there are imponderables - a potential
backlash from the Alawite minority within Turkey
(which resents the surge of Salafism under
Erdogan's watch) and the perennial danger of
walking into a trap set up by militant Kurds.
Al-Jazeera interviewed a leader of the
Alawite sect in Turkey last week who expressed
concern over the increasingly sectarian tone of
Syria's internal strife inspired by Salafist
Sunnis. They fear a Salafist surge within Turkey.
The Alawites in Turkey see Assad "trying to hold
together a tolerant, pluralist Syria".
Contingency plans But all that
is becoming irrelevant. The New York Times
reported on Friday, quoting American officials in
Washington, that US President Barack Obama is
"increasing aid to the rebels and redoubling
efforts to rally a coalition of like-minded
countries to forcibly bring down the [Syrian]
government".
It further reported that the
CIA operatives who are based in southern Turkey
"for several weeks" will continue with their
mission to create violence against the Syrian
regime. Meanwhile, the US and Turkey will also be
working on putting together a post-Assad
"provisional government" in Syria.
Accordingly, the leaders of Syria's
proscribed Muslim Brotherhood held a four-day
conclave in Istanbul and announced plans on Friday
to create an "Islamic party". "We are ready for
the post-Assad era, we have plans for the economy,
the courts, politics", the Brotherhood's spokesman
announced.
The New York Times said
Washington is in close contact with Ankara and Tel
Aviv to discuss "a broad range of contingency
plans" over "how to manage a Syrian government
collapse".
The emergent operational plan
is that while Ankara steps up the covert
operations inside Syria (bankrolled by Saudi
Arabia and Qatar), Israel will cross the border
into Syria from the south and attack Bashar's
military and degrade its capacity to resist the
Turkish threat.
Turkey has stepped up the
psywar, projecting through the media that the
Syrian regime is already tottering. Turkish
commentators are spreading the word. Murat Yetkin
of the establishment daily Hurriyet quoted a
Turkish official as saying,
Our people [Turkish intelligence] in
the field are observing that the urban majority,
which has preferred to remain neutral so far,
has begun to support the opposition groups. We
think the Syrian people have begun to perceive
that the administration is breaking
up.
But such riveting stories also
reflect the Turkish establishment's worry that the
Syrian regime is still not showing signs of
capitulation despite all the hits it took from the
"rebels".
Mission to
Moscow Erdogan's best hope is that the
Turkish intelligence could orchestrate some sort
of "palace coup" in Damascus in the coming days or
weeks. What suits Ankara will be to have Bashar
replaced by a transitional structure that retains
elements of the existing Baathist state structure,
which could facilitate an orderly transfer of
power to a new administration - that is to say,
ideally, a transition not different from what
followed in Egypt once Hosni Mubarak exited.
But Erdogan is unsure whether Turkey can
swing an Egypt-like coup in Damascus. His dash to
Moscow last Wednesday aimed at sounding out Moscow
if a new and stable transitional structure could
be put together in Damascus through some kind of
international cooperation. (Obama lent his weight
to Erdogan's mission by telephoning Russian
President Vladimir Putin on Thursday to discuss
Syria.)
But curiously, just before Erdogan
went into his scheduled meeting with Putin in the
Kremlin, a massive terrorist attack took place in
Damascus, killing the the Syrian defense minister
and its intelligence chief. In the event, Moscow
politely heard him out and assured Erdogan it
would make a clinical separation between Russia's
long-term strategic ties with Turkey and the
Syrian issue. At any rate, the Russian stance
remained unchanged, as evident from its veto at
the United Security Council a week later.
Clearly, Moscow sees that the end game is
underway in Syria. In an interview with the Russia
Today on Friday, Russia's ambassador to the UN,
Vitaly Churkin, spoke in exceptionally strong
terms about what is happening. He said the Western
strategy is to "whip us tensions in and around
Syria at every opportunity".
Churkin said
derisively, "There is much more geopolitics in
their policy in Syria than humanism." Churkin also
brought in Iran: "I would not rule out that then
they would move on to Iran ... And this growing
tension between Iran, the West and the Saudis is
not helpful."
Prior to the visit to
Moscow, Erdogan also travelled to Beijing, which
also senses that the US is closing the deal on
Syria. The Global Times newspaper commented in an
editorial on Friday that "It's likely that the
Assad administration will be overthrown ...
chances of a political solution are becoming
increasingly small ... changes in Syria might come
rapidly."
US National Security Advisor Tom
Donilon is travelling to Beijing to explore if the
Chinese stance on Syria can be moderated.
Both Russia and China view the Erdogan era
favorably for the upward curve in their ties with
Turkey. Russia won a $20-$25 billion contract to
build nuclear power plants in Turkey. China pulled
in Turkey as a dialogue partner for the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization. Turkey hosted a second
military exercise with China recently and is
aspiring to be a bridge between NATO and Beijing.
A man for all seasons However,
both Russia and China would factor in that as a
"new cold war" builds up, Washington expects
Turkey to get back into the fold and play its due
role as ally in a vast swathe of land stretching
from the Black Sea to the Caucasus and the Caspian
and all the way to Central Asia. In the ultimate
analysis, the US holds many trump cards, finessed
through the Cold war era, to manipulate Turkish
policies. This is quite evident from the
centrality attached by Washington to the Iraqi
Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, in the overall US
strategy.
Obama received Barzani in the
White House recently. Barzani has become a
"lynchpin" in the US-Turkish policies on Syria.
This was within months of ExxonMobil signing up in
October to develop the fabulous oil fields located
in the Kurdistan region controlled by Barzani,
ignoring protests from Baghdad that such a deal
with a provincial authority bypassing the central
government would violate Iraq's sovereignty.
Last week, the US oil giant Chevron
announced that it too has acquired an 80%
controlling share in a company operating in the
region covering a combined area of 1,124 square
kilometers that is under Barzani's control.
The entry of ExxonMobile and Chevron is a
game-changer in the regional politics over Syria.
The point is, the best transportation route to the
world market for the massive oil and gas deposits
in Kurdistan will be via the Syrian port city of
Latakia on the eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, an
altogether new dimension to the US-Turkish game
plan on Syria comes into view.
Siyah
Kalem, a Turkish engineering and construction
company, has bid for the transportation of natural
gas from Kurdistan. Evidently, somewhere in the
subsoil, the interests of the Anatolian corporate
business (which has links with Turkey's ruling
Islamist party) and the country's foreign policy
orientations toward Syria and Iraq are converging.
The US and Turkish interests overlap in the
geopolitics of northern Iraq's energy reserves.
But Barzani is not only a business partner
for Washington and Ankara but also a key agent who
could leverage Turkey's Kurdish problem. With
Washington's backing, he has launched a project to
bring together the various Kurdish factions -
Turkish, Iraqi and Syrian - on to a new political
track.
He held a meeting of the Kurdish
factions in Arbil last month. Plainly, Barzani
tried to bribe the leaders of various Kurdish
factions with funds provided from Ankara. He
claims he has succeeded in reconciling the
different Kurdish groups in Syria. (The Kurdish
insurgency in Turkey is led by ethnic Syrian
Kurds.) He also claims to have persuaded the
Syrian Kurds to snap their links with Bashar and
line up with the Syrian opposition.
These
tidings from Arbil have a vital bearing on
Erdogan's future course on Syria. As a prominent
analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, Soner Cagaptay, pointed out recently, the
bottom line is that "Syria's restless and
well-organized Kurdish minority doesn't for the
most part trust Turkey."
Salafism on
Israeli wings However, in the final
analysis, only Israel can resolve Erdogan's
dilemma. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak
stated over the weekend, "Syria has advanced
anti-aircraft missiles, surface-to-surface
missiles and elements of chemical weapons. I
directed the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] to
prepare for a situation where we will need to
consider the possibility of an attack."
Barak added that the "moment [Bashar]
starts to fall, we [Israel] will conduct
intelligence monitoring and will liaise with other
agencies." He spoke after a secret visit by
Donilon to Israel the previous weekend. Close on
the heels of Donilon's consultations, US Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton travelled to Tel Aviv
after a historic meeting in Cairo with the newly
elected President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim
Brotherhood, who assured Washington that he
wouldn't contemplate creating any problems for
Israel in a conceivable future.
Barak's
disclosure tears apart the thin veil of
indifference that Tel Aviv so far maintained over
the Syrian developments. What emerges, in
retrospect, is that Washington kept Israel in
abeyance for the ripe moment to physically
demolish Bashar's war machinery, an enterprise
that Erdogan is unwilling or incapable of
undertaking.
Most certainly, Erdogan was
in the loop that he was going to partner Barak,
but being a shrewd politician he kept up an
appearance of agonizing publicly over the Syrian
crisis - while, of course, covertly fueling it.
Simply put, Washington has outwitted
Moscow and Beijing. It kept assuring Russia and
China that a military intervention by the US all
by itself or a Libya-style NATO operation was the
last thing on Obama's mind. No doubt, Obama kept
its word.
What is unfolding is a
startlingly refreshing sight - Salafism riding the
wings of the Israeli air force and landing in
Damascus. Erdogan will now set out with renewed
vigor to shake up the Bashar tree in Damascus,
while any day from now Barak will begin chopping
off the tree's branches in a lightning sweep.
Erdogan and Barak will make the Bashar
tree so naked and helpless that it will realize
the futility of standing upright any more. There
is no "military intervention" involved here, no
NATO operations, no Libya-like analogy can be
drawn. Nor is Erdogan to order his army to march
into Syria.
Secretary of State Clinton
would say this is the "smart power". In a
magnificent essay titled "The Art of Smart Power"
penned by her last week, as she surveyed the
curious twist to the tale of the Arab Spring,
Clinton wrote that the US is nowadays "leading in
new ways". [1]
Clinton underscored that US
is expanding its "foreign-policy toolbox [to]
integrate every asset and partner, and
fundamentally change the way we [US] do business
... [the] common thread running through all our
efforts is a commitment to adapt America's global
leadership for the needs of a changing world."
At the end of the day, Erdogan will bite
the bullet, which is greased with pork fat. The
plain truth is that Israel is going to complete
the messy job for him in Syria.
Erdogan
has no choice but to accept that he belongs to
Washington's "toolbox" - nothing more, nothing
less. He was never destined for the role to lead
the Muslim Middle East. The West was merely
pandering to his well-known vanity. That role is
Washington's exclusive prerogative.
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
