Holy
war in Syria and the course of
history By Dmitry Shlapentokh
Washington is clearly displeased with the
intransigence of both Beijing and Moscow on
dealing with the Syrian crisis and their
unwillingness to justify a direct US strike
against President Bashar al-Assad with the full
authorization of the United Nations. The US
representatives to the UN have described vividly
the brutality of the Assad regime as an appeal to
the moral fiber of the international community and
in particular, of course, China and Russia.
The governments of both of those countries
are unconvinced, and for a variety of reasons. One
is that the moral indignation of Washington hardly
stands the test of history. Washington was a good
friend of Josef Stalin, Augusto Pinochet and the
Shah of
Iran. It has demonstrated
that it had no prejudice when it comes to dealing
with pressing geopolitical programs. It can deal
with dictators on both the right and the left. It
also has done nothing during genocidal slaughters,
from the Jewish Holocaust to the Rwanda massacres.
At the same time, it would not be logical
to assume that Washington has no foreign friends
in its Syrian venture. One that seems an unlikely
ally is Kavkaz Center, the major Internet vehicle
of jihadis from the Russian North Caucasus.
Recently, Moscow intensified its efforts against
the website, but Kavkaz Center successfully dodges
the Kremlin efforts and continues to function as a
weblog. Its contributors praise the Syrian
opposition as kindred souls and implicitly praise
their efforts to get rid of the Assad regime.
This is not an isolated occurrence. Iraqi
authorities have informed the world that a steady
stream of jihadis has been moving into Syria to
join the fight against Assad. They have not just
praised US pressure on Assad but actually
encouraged direct military involvement of the US
in Syrian affairs and, implicitly, direct
confrontation with Iran. Indeed, confrontation
with Iran would most likely be the end result of
such a conflict. But while encouraging its direct
involvement, these jihadis are hardly friends of
the US.
After the attacks of September 11,
2001, Kavkaz Center published an article by Pavel
Kosolapov, a Russian who converted to Islam - or,
alternatively, someone who used his name - in
which Americans were presented as ugly, immoral
infidel zombies who deserved their fate. He stated
that not a few thousand but tens if not hundreds
of thousand perished, and he praised those who
demonstrated how easily a superpower could be
almost vanquished by a few smart and selfless
heroes of the jihad.
One could assume that
this attitude of the jihadis, including those who
are engaged in the conflict in Syria, is not a
secret to Washington, and especially not to the
conservatives who are so keen to engage in the
conflict. Their drive is not, of course, due to a
desire to save lives. Indeed, they do their best
to destroy "Obamacare", regardless of data showing
that many thousands of Americans die annually
because of lack of medical treatment. The major
goal here is to weaken Iran, the major
geopolitical problem for the US in the Middle
East.
But where could such a strange
misalliance lead? Smarty-pants Washingtonian
analysts - possibly following the dictums of
Edward Luttwak, an American military strategist
and historian - believe that Washington could
outsmart its adversaries in a Byzantine type of
game. However, to understand the quite likely
result of such a strategy, one should go to the
birthplace of modern Byzantinism, Russia, and see
how similar events worked out almost a century
ago.
Vladimir Lenin, a radical Marxist who
matured politically in the beginning of the last
century, was convinced that the contented masses
would hardly rise to overthrow the global
capitalist order and that the Bolsheviks, his
party, were too weak to engage directly with the
czarist regime, whose downfall could lead to
worldwide revolution where the masses would
establish a global, ideal socialist - and later
communist - society, which reminds one of the
global khalifat, the goal of the jihadis.
The Bolsheviks, a tiny group in the
beginning of the 20th century, could succeed only
if the imperialists destroyed or weakened
themselves. Hardly the friend of the German
kaiser, Lenin nevertheless dreamed of a wholesale
confrontation between Moscow and Berlin; in fact,
he dreamed of a global war.
Still, no
major Europe-wide war was on the horizon; the last
wars, those of Napoleon, were almost a hundred
years ago. And everything suggested, if one
assumed the sanity of the major European leaders,
that such a war was unlikely. Weapons had become
too destructive; major alliances counterbalanced
one another. And Europeans had become so
integrated economically and politically that only
a madman like Friedrich Nietzsche, who predicted
enormous bloodshed in the future, would believe
that Europeans would engage in a major
continent-wide conflict.
Lenin understood
this and vented his frustration in a letter to
Maxim Gorky, the famous Russian radical writer.
"Dear Aleksei Maximovich," Lenin wrote in 1912 -
using, as is the practice in Russia and other
countries, his first name and patronymic - "the
great European war would be a great boon for
revolution. Yet, unfortunately, neither Niki [Czar
Nicholas of Russia] nor Willi [Kaiser Wilhelm]
will provide us with such a pleasure." Yet Lenin
(and he wasn't the only one) overestimated "Willi"
and his advisers. They, similar to Washington
neocons, believed that war would be a quick
blitzkrieg; and taking their own "September 11",
the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria,
as an excuse, they launched World War I.
The war did not follow the German
scenario, however, and the events were quite
similar to those in the Middle East almost a
century later. The blitzkrieg turned out to be an
ugly war of attrition, and Germany's resources
started to dwindle in its own version of the
coming US "sequestration" of its military budget.
While Europeans died in the millions,
Lenin was ecstatic, for the huge suffering of the
masses reinforced century-old grievances and made
revolution in Russia possible. Berlin also noted
Lenin and his followers and, similar to
present-day Washington, thought it could use these
Russian radicals to destabilize the situation in
Russia and lead Germany to victory. So Berlin
provided Lenin with funds and allowed him and a
few other radicals to travel to Russia in "sealed
trains" when the liberal Provisional Government
that emerged after the February/March revolution
of 1917 allowed them to return. The Bolsheviks,
indeed, led Russia into a new revolution and opted
out of the war in what Lenin called the "obscene
treaty" of Brest-Litovsk.
But Berlin did
not enjoy the fruits of its stratagem for long.
The germs of the revolution quickly spread to
Germany, and the new revolution led to the end of
the German monarchy. A few generations later,
Lenin's spiritual/political children rolled their
tanks into Berlin.
Of course, history did
not repeat itself word for word, but structurally
the events had a lot of similarities. Jihadis -
from the North Caucasus to the Middle East -
believe that the collapse of Assad and, even
better, war with Iran would accomplish what the US
war with Iraq failed to accomplish: ignite chaos
not just in the Middle East but possibly globally.
And it is this that would cause the jihadis to
thrive.
Were that to occur, however, the
tidal wave of terrorism could hit not just Moscow
and Beijing, Washington's enemies, but also
Jerusalem. This is the reason Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu is hardly excited by the
spectacle of Assad's sudden collapse. Still, it
appears that Washington hardly hears the sober
voices from Jerusalem, not only because they could
easily dump them as was the case with Egypt's
Hosni Mubarak despite all assurances, and not only
because they assumed they would not be affected by
chaos and waves of terror, but also because of the
fundamental changes in US policy.
As the
present economic troubles have become too evident
to ignore, the US elite feels that not just
economic but geopolitical predominance has started
to slip away from its hands with great speed.
America is not a woman who ages gracefully to
prepare for a future - in this case, a new global
order - where her economic standing, standard of
living and influence would be much more modest.
US President Barack Obama and the legions
of commentators continue to proclaim that the
present-day problems are just temporary before a
new rise. And for this reason "she" can engage in
reckless actions from which not she but her
vigorous and charismatic jihadist lover, who is
girded for perseverance, long-term planning and
sacrifice - qualities hardly of any value in the
US - would most likely benefit in the long run.
And thus history could move in an
absolutely different direction, as it did in 1914
when very few knew Lenin and even fewer were aware
of Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and
practically no one predicted what they would do in
the future.
As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel rightly acknowledged, "the Owl of Minerva
spreads its wings only with the falling of the
dusk" - that is, the meaning of events can be
understood only retrospectively.
Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is
associate professor of history, College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend.
He is author of East Against West: The First
Encounter - The Life of Themistocles (2005).
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