Once again the Arab peoples have to pay the price for the foolish obstinacy of a domestic power that claims the right to tyrannise its people and a foreign power that claims the right to give that despotic power a lesson. Once again the Arab peoples decided to rise up against a dictatorial ruler and foreign powers decided to intervene in order to control the revolution and its aftermath. Recent days have brought a flood of conjecture and analysis concerning Barack Obama's decision to launch a strike against Syria to teach its government a lesson and establish a moral model to serve as a warning to anyone else who might contemplate using chemical weapons against his people. Some analysts tried to build on past events. They constructed their arguments on the precedents of the build-up to the invasion of Iraq and the Iraqi government's reactions in 2003 and of the preparations for the intervention in Libya in 2011. Yet such analyses are only useful to the extent that we can assume that the dictatorships that ruled in Iraq and Libya then and that govern Syria today are alike in nature and that their reactions are similar, and if we overlook the profound changes that have occurred in the regional and international environments. We cannot, for example, ignore the huge roles being played today by such international powers as Iran and Russia and by movements and organisations such as Hizbullah and Al-Qaeda. The differences between what happened then and what is happening today in the world, the region and Syria, itself, are great. Take, for instance, the general enthusiasm that Western armies displayed, in advance of most cases of military intervention in the past, for decisions to go to war and compare this to the qualifications and reservations registered by great leaders in Britain and the US today. Recall, too, how mute and complacent public opinion had been in those two Western nations in spite of the flagrant fraud and deception that the governments of president George W Bush and prime minister Tony Blair brought to bear in their campaigns to justify military intervention in Iraq. Even the media, at the time, chimed an effort to do all it could to rally the necessary support for a war drive that did not meet a single criterion of law. In the past few days, we have observed the opposite occurring. Most reports suggest that the US is divided or at least wavering over military operation against Syria. They also indicate that there is a general consensus that intervention, if it takes place, would mark a departure from the very foreign policy that Obama had inaugurated in order to transform the essence of the US national security creed. According to the new creed, the US would stop playing global policeman, reduce military expenditures, and concentrate efforts and resources on rebuilding America, itself, so that it could once again become the world's unrivalled superpower in science and technology. Accordingly, the official line in Washington is that the intervention in Syria would be solely to accomplish a tactical objective and that there would be “no boots on the ground” or any attempt to impose a system of government, enforce security, or take part in drafting constitutional and legal arrangements, as had been the case with the intervention in Iraq. It took two and a half years of regional and international campaigning to reach this stage in which all are waiting for Washington to give the green light for war against Bashar Al-Assad. Two and a half years in which incredible sums of money were spent, vast amounts of energy were wasted, and tens of thousands of lives were lost. In spite of this, we have begun the hear that certain Arab countries would not be content if the operation were limited to a tactical strike that might topple or weaken the Al-Assad dynasty but leave Iran's advisors and Revolutionary Guard forces and Hizbullah in control of the keys to power in Syria. According to this school of thought, Washington together with Paris and perhaps London, if it decides to climb aboard later, would be wrong to accept the advice that holds that a surgical but tactical operation undertaken by US missiles and French, British, Turkish and Arab special forces would be sufficient to bring the Syrian crisis to a close. Some politicians in the West and in the Arab world very naively believe that, after this tactical strike, Obama could resume the plan to reorient US policy towards Asia and that the extremist and terrorist factions in this part of the world would relinquish the opportunity given to them by Western and Arab armies to unleash rampant chaos throughout the entire region. These groups had come to Syria in order to seize upon a similar opportunity but were checked by the tenacity and violence of the Syrian regime. When contemplating intervention in Syria it would be wise to bear in mind the Syrian saying, which I was reminded of by Lebanese writer Saad Mehio, in one of his daily blogs: “It's one thing to enter a Syrian bathhouse; it's another thing to leave it.” Which is to say, getting into trouble is easier than getting out of it. Meanwhile, Jordan recently hosted a meeting of military chiefs of different nationalities to study ways to collaborate with and help the Americans during the tactical strike as well as to study the methods and means of the extremist factions in Syria and the possibility of intervention on the part of militias from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hizbullah. I have always warned that if the regional crisis reaches Syria it would be very different from its predecessors in other countries in the region. It might be more fast-paced and more brutal, but what is certain is that it would spread the crisis to parts of the region that have so far remained out of reach. Syria is different because it is the only Arab country whose political leaders, since independence, have turned its weak points to strong points. As both the current situation and history testify, Syria has more weak points or cards than any other Arab countries. Observers of Syria's modern evolution in particular cannot deny that the country's religious and confessional plurality has actually been one of its strongest assets. Despite all domestic and external tragedies that were visited on Syria in the past years, Syrians retained their cohesion, probably less due to fear from or for the ruling regime than to fear of disintegration. Also, look at those extensive borders with Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon. Now recall how they formed a two-way extension of the crisis: as passageways for arms, fighters and money and, simultaneously, as potential sources of terrorism and retaliatory actions and as refugee routes. No regime in Iraq, Libya or Yemen, for example, succeeded as the Syrian regime has in using its numerous and far-flung borders to serve the purposes of its survival and perpetuity. Consider, too, the positions of Russia and China that have perplexed — and continue to perplex — many commentators. Indeed, one cannot help but be amazed at how effectively the Syrian regime has managed its relations with both countries in a manner that secured their support. True, both powers have their respective interests to tend to and their own visions for high level international relations, especially as regards their resolve to repel the US from interfering in their domestic affairs and their simultaneous determination to break through the fortifications that Washington has constructed in order to secure its hold on the summit of the international power pyramid. But it is equally true that Syria managed to place its crisis into that basket of great power disputes, which neither Iraq under Saddam nor Egypt since the beginning of the revolution could do. The Syrian crisis has thrown into relief important changes, or manifestations of important changes, in international politics. It has shown that Western public opinion has come to reject the idea of military intervention in the affairs of other nations. It has also demonstrated that among the major transformations resulting from America's immersion in the problems of Asia and Asian security that the special relationship between the US and the UK has begun to weaken, to the extent that the latter is now trying to free itself of a long-held policy of supporting every decision Washington takes to militarily intervene in another country. The Obama administration was morally wrong for biding its time for two years, during which it deliberately obstructed efforts to reach an appropriate settlement to the Syrian crisis — or at least failed to use its political leverage to persuade Russia of the need to assert pressure on the Al-Assad government. President Obama turned his back on the massacres in Syria and did not intervene in spite of the clarity of the moral dimension of the crisis. Washington, like all other parties to the crisis, knew from day one that the perpetuation of the Syrian crisis jeopardised the people of Syria and the security of the region. It also knew that the Syrian opposition, even with all the support it obtained from Arab parties, would not defeat the Al-Assad regime. Al-Assad, like other rulers of the region, knew that the only red line — for him, or Syria's revolutionaries or any of the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring — was Israel's security.
The writer is a political analyst and director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
