THE SYRIAN DILEMMA: NATO can ill afford another major war

M. Shahidul Islam

Waging war without assessing the cost and gain is the stupidity of highest order. Yet, the US and its NATO allies have gathered a vast array of armada to strike Syria following the accusation that the regime of Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against its people and the international community has a responsibility to stop the recurrence of the same.
Among the policy makers in Washington and within the NATO, a forgotten precedent is being invoked to justify an aggression against Syria: the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo that aimed to stopping a Serb-led genocide of the innocent Kosovans.

Syria is not Kosovo
But Syria is not Kosovo and a military move against the Bashr al-Assad regime is most likely to compound the crisis first, and, engulf the entire region of Middle East later. Besides, the use of force will be devoid of any UN mandate given that Russia, a permanent member of the UN Security Council (UNSC), will veto any Resolution at the Council, as it did from the beginning of the Syrian crisis since mid-2011.
The underlying contours of the two crises are different too. The Serbian regime was composed of Orthodox Christians and the victims were mostly of the Islamic faith. In Syria, the raging civil war is an intra-Muslim squabbling for power, sparked by the so called Arab Spring that has begun from Tunisia in early 2011 and spread across the region.
Now that the falsity of the Arab spring has begun to unravel after Islamists started winning elections in the affected countries – and the West choosing to bring back military regimes to rein in the Islamists­ Syria should not be allowed to fall into the hands of the radical Islamists.

Law & geopolitics
There is no denying that the anti-regime rebels in Syria are composed mostly of radical Islamists. And, unlike Kosovo, the Syrian regime is firmly buttressed by a regional and a global power.
The fact that the Syrian economy is still functional­ and its military these days is experiencing little or no defection ­is due to the fact that both Russia and Iran are funding and arming the Bashr al-Assad regime which has re-taken control over most of the strategic strongholds captured earlier by the rebels.
From a legal standpoint, if the Chapter 7 mandate of the UN to use force collectively is hamstrung by a Russian veto, the NATO members will be left with only two other pieces of legal leverages to justify using force against Syria. The first one is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) theorem espoused at the UN in 2005 to use force against regimes indulged in slaughtering of innocent civilians, and, the second one is Article 5 of the Washington Treaty that mandates NATO members to attack a country if any of its member nations come under attack from non-NATO countries.
The latter option, however, is unsustainable in this particular instance due to Syria not having attacked any NATO member state and, the only major incident so far being the shooting down of a Turkish military jet early this year which strayed into the Syrian airspace, making the shooting justifiable.
That leaves NATO with the vaguely defined R2P option, for which too, the General Assembly has preconditioned its use on obtaining the Security Council’s approval first so as not to temper with the intent of the UN Charter which allows use of force pursuant to collective and agreed consensus at the UNSC.

A changed Russia
That is precisely the reason why most of the NATO policy makers are fondly citing the Kosovo precedent which occurred under an arbitrary NATO decision.
Then again, the Kosovo intervention could only happen due to Russia choosing not to engage in a military confrontation with NATO; partly due to the ethnic and the humanitarian dimensions of the Kosovo crisis being too detrimental to global peace and security, and, partly due to the desperate military and economic situations under which Russia found itself at that time following the disintegration of the USSR.
Russia has since bounced back from its predicaments and is a bold player once again in the global arena; with an economy that is literally envious to the NATO members, and, a set of military teeth that can bite harder than ever before. In the strategic Middle Eastern theatre, Syria is Russia’s best bait while Iran, Syria and the Hezbollah fighters of Lebanon constitute a strong arc of power capable of sustaining any prolong war without substantive economic or military quandary.
Those are not the justifications, however, why the global community should keep watching and equivocating over what to do against a regime allegedly gassing its own people. The main reason should be the confirmation with predominance of evidence that the Syrian regime did use chemical arsenal against its people. So far, the evidence being cited by the US and its allies is mostly conjectural and much of it is based upon uncorroborated video footage.
In 2012, a plethora of debates centered on the safety of the Syrian chemical arsenals as defections within the military became rampant. None can vouch with certitude whether some of the chemical weapons from the regime’s stockpiles have not already fallen to the hands of the rebels through the defected soldiers and officers of the Syrian military who had looted armouryies before joining the rebel forces.
That prospect aside, the most convincing evidence the US and other NATO countries talk of are (1) conversations by regime loyal soldiers prior to using the chemical weapons, and, (2) forensic evidence being gathered by UN inspectors now visiting Syria.
While forensic evidence is likely to be authentic due to the chemical weapons having been used, as reports suggest, the conversation taping is not as authentic as is touted. The rebels too use sophisticated communication equipments supplied by NATO member states and such conversations could have taken place between rebel forces too, prior to the use of chemical weapons, as a calculated ploy to suck in NATO into the fray.

Israel factor
President Obama must think twice before intervening militarily in Syria in order not to become a ‘fake statesman’ like his predecessor George W. Bush who had attacked Iraq in 2003 on the pretext of Iraq possessing WMD and found no trace of such weapons in the end.
Iraq’s WMD possession was confirmed by the Israeli intelligence, as the UK admitted later. This time too, Germany’s The Focus magazine reported in its August 24 edition that “a squad specializing in wire-tapping within the IDF’s prestigious 8200 intelligence unit intercepted a conversation between high-ranking Syrian regime officials regarding the use of chemical agents at the time of the attack.” The report, which cited an ex-Mossad official who insisted on remaining anonymous, said: “The intercepted conversation proved that Bashar Assad’s regime was responsible for the use of nonconventional weapons.” Is that the wire- taping Secretary of State John Kerry is randomly referring too?
May or may not be, but Israel is a party by default in all the crises in the Middle East due to its entrenched interest in destroying the armed forces of Syria, Egypt and even Iran; which it seems to be doing successfully with NATO’s help. Israel’s main mission is to preserve the regional balance of power tilted to its favour. Nothing more, nothing less.

Perils for Israel
The Jewish nation is striving to do so at great perils to its very existence. In early May, Israel bombed targets inside Syria and The Jerusalem Post quoted a senior Syrian military source as claiming that “Israel used depleted uranium shells in that attack.” Imagine what would have happened if Syria responded to the Israeli attacks in kind.
That notwithstanding, there are those who think the Syrian chemical weapon phenomenon has sprung out from a calculated strategy to deflect focus away from the Egyptian genocide and to strike Syria at a time when the Bashar al-Assad regime has already turned the tides of the war in its favour and the rebels lost almost everything they gained after two and half years of fighting. Now that it’s a matter of not if, but when the NATO will conduct some punitive strikes against Syria, the Syrian regime will certainly respond in kind. Khalaf Muftah, a senior Baath Party official and a former assistant information minister of Syria said on Monday in a radio interview that “Damascus would consider Israel behind the [Western] aggression and Israel will therefore come under Syrian fire.”
For its part, Iran thinks the NATO economies and the moral of the NATO forces are not conducive enough to starting a new war in the Middle East. “No military attack will be waged against Syria,” said Hossein Sheikholeslam, a member of Iran’s Islamic Consultative Assembly. “Yet, if such an incident takes place, the Zionist regime will be the first victim of a counterattack from Syria,” he warned.
Shelving aside such negativities, the US and its allies will still go ahead with an attack on Syria, perhaps in days. The inevitable escalation the attack will trigger will result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people as the war will spread all across the region and the global economy will face another major setback after years of grinding recession. This game is hardly worth the sweat it will shed, Mr. Obama.

Source: Weekly Holiday