BEIRUT Fears of an as-yet-undefined Middle Eastern war are darkening the
horizons of a region that only a year ago was celebrating the fall of
dictators, the ascent of people power and the promise of a new era of
democracy.
Iranian threats to mine the Strait of Hormuz raise the specter of conflict
between the United States and Iran in the Persian Gulf. Warnings from Israel
that it may strike Iran nuclear facilities open up the possibility of a
region-wide conflict.
Most worrying of all, as shells rain down on the Syrian city of Homs and TV
screens across the region replay gory scenes of casualties captured on
videos posted on YouTube, there is now little doubt that Syria is in the
early stages of a civil war, one whose potentially profound ramifications
provokes jitters far beyond its borders.
Although a wider war is by no means inevitable, 2012 is already proving a
dark sequel to the hope and possibility of 2011, as the demands of ordinary
people for greater freedoms collide with the competing agendas of big powers
in the region’t most volatile heart.
There are two different trajectories in the Middle East,”said Paul Salem,
director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. While Torth Africa
is moving toward more democracy,”he said, the Levant region including
Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq is Toving toward confrontation and
sectarian conflict. It is a much darker, gloomier trajectory.”
Despite chaos in Cairo and confusion in Tripoli, the three North African
nations of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are getting on with the task, however
messily, of building new democracies that may yet work after a year in which
authoritarian leaders in each country were deposed.
But in the Arab heartlands stretched between Israel and Iran, the awakening
of democratic aspirations has stirred also ancient rivalries and more recent
grudges across a network of crisscrossing fault lines, any one of which
could crack and trigger all the rest.
Tt feels like anywhere could explode, without knowing why, at any time,”said Umm Haya, a Syrian living in Baghdad, reflecting the widespread sense
of unease among many living beyond Syria’t borders. The whole region is
inflammable.”
At the center of it all is Syria, whose nearly year-long revolt began as an
overwhelmingly peaceful popular uprising against the rule of President
Bashar al-Assad but now is being reshaped into a far wider struggle for
influence.
‘Syria will explode’
Unlike Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, whose relatively limited regional reach
ensured that their revolts were contained within their borders, Syria lies
at the nexus of a web of strategic alliances, geopolitical interests and
religious jealousies that would be upended were the regime there to fall.
Tibya imploded. Syria will explode,”said a diplomat from a non-Western
country interviewed in Damascus. Tnd it will explode across the whole
region.”
It is not only that Syria’t religious and ethnic makeup complicates an
essentially grass-roots uprising against decades of tyranny. Assad’t
minority Alawite clan, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, controls most key
positions in the security forces spearheading the effort to suppress the
unrest, lending a sectarian dimension to a revolt dominated by the country’t
Sunni majority.
Assad’t own record, and that of his father before him, as a champion of
anti-Western causes, his alliances with groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas,
and above all his close relationship with Iran also puts his regime on the
frontline of a far broader struggle for influence.
Tegime change in Syria would have an impact on the entire region, because
Syria has geopolitical importance for Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan,
everywhere. So every country has its own interest in what is happening in
Syria,”said Iraq’t Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, who is striving to
balance Iraq’t delicate sectarian complexity with the unfolding eventsin
neighboring Syria.
Or as Claire Spencer, head of the Middle East and North Africa program at
the Chatham House think tank in London put it: The fate of Syria is
intertwined with the fate of everyone else in the region, and the fate of
everyone else goes through Syria.”
That the Syrian crisis is escalating just as America’t influence in the
region is waning only further complicates the picture. The withdrawal of
U.S. troops from Iraq in December and the advent of election-year
constraints have sent a clear signal to the region that the United States is
unlikely to intervene.
The American presence was a form of deterrence,”Zebari said. Tow people
feel there is some kind of vacuum, and they are competing to fill it.”
Among those powers is Russia, which thinks it was tricked by the West in
Libya, and has now stepped up forcefully in defense of Assad, letting it be
known that it will not stand by while a U.S.-backed alliance works to unseat
its chief Mideast ally.
The Russian and Chinese vetoes of a U.N. resolution condemning Syria, and
Russia’t energetic attempts to broker its own outcome to the Syria crisis,
evoke Cold War-era memories of an earlier struggle for control of the region
that had appeared to end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
U.S.-led rescue of Kuwait in 1991.
Iran vs. the West
Underpinning the struggle for Syria, however, is a far older battle for
supremacy between Iran and the West, Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Persians,
which appeared to have been suppressed by the popular clamor for change that
erupted across the Arab world last year but which now has resurfaced as a
key dynamic driving the competition for power.
Syria’t three-decade-old strategic alliance with the Islamic Republic of
Iran places it firmly at the heart of what Jordan’t King Abdullah dubbed in
2006 the Shiite crescent, an arc of territory stretching from Tehran to
Beirut, through Baghdad and Damascus, that is governed by Shiite-affiliated
leaders sympathetic to Iran.
If Syria were to be ruled by its Sunni majority, Damascus would anchor what
some are already calling a Sunni crescent, stretching from Saudi Arabia to
Turkey and severing Iran’t lifeline to the Mediterranean.
For the Sunni countries of the Gulf, led by Saudi Arabia, the unrest in
Syria presents a fresh opportunity to push back against Iranian influence,
which expanded dramatically into Lebanon and Iraq in the wake of the 2003
invasion, analysts say.
Though there is no evidence yet to support Syrian government claims that
Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been arming the Syrian opposition, that could
well change now that concerted international action to resolve the Syria
crisis seems unlikely, said Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for
Strategic Studies in Bahrain.
Tran remains the biggest actor in the region, and Syria is the convenient
battlefield,”he said. Tt’t a place where things can be done against Iran,
but Iran remains the biggest prize.”
With Russia already providing arms to the government and Iran offering
technical assistance and military advice, according to U.S. officials, the
stage is set for Syria to serve as the venue for a messy proxy war that
could spill into Lebanon, Iraq and perhaps beyond.
Often forgotten in this maelstrom of competing agendas are those who
initiated the unrest, the ordinary people who summoned the courage to take
to the streets to call for greater freedoms and better governance.
As Homs, the heart of the Syrian revolt, buckles under an eight-day-old
artillery bombardment, residents say they are beginning to despair.
Te can’t succeed without international support,”said Omar Shakir, an
activist in the besieged Bab Amr district of the city. T cannot believe the
world is watching in silence what is happening here.”
Yet although more bloodshed almost certainly lies ahead, it is still not too
late to discount the prospect of a brighter future, Hokayem said.
Things will get gloomier, but at the same time these uprisings and
revolutions are processes tat could take years,”he said. The geopolitics
are tainting it, the sectarianism is tainting it . but there is still
something good and true about the original demands of all these people
across the region.”
By Liz Sly
