By Sharmine Narwani

The Middle East is treading water these days. Two years of rhetoric about ousting dictators, revolution, freedom, honor, dignity and democracy – without result – has people on edge, their disillusionment now demanding an outlet.

There are no outlets though. Sensing the fast-growing disenchantment with undelivered promises, even the “bright new leaders” are tightening the reins and demanding compliance.

These new heads of state simply can’t deliver the goods for one main reason: They are just as caught up in global and regional power contests as were their predecessors. Nothing has changed with these uprisings – nothing.

Except now the stakes are higher than before. A recession-bound west, the fast-rising BRICS and their respective regional allies are locked in a competition to consolidate power and influence in this important region before it finds its bearings.

The relatively new influencers on the Arab scene like Qatar and Turkey have recognized this as a unique opportunity to slip into region-wide leadership roles. For the entrenched old hands – Washington, Riyadh, Paris, London – a race is on to prevent the region from shrugging off their decades-long dominance and embracing the anti-imperialism of the Resistance Axis.

The result has been an onslaught of interventions. Every tool in the arsenal has come out to play. Money, espionage, propaganda, weapons, assassination and that old colonial trick: divide-and-rule.

The main game is still the old battle of the blocs, Iran versus the United States, with everyone else filing in line behind their team. There have been a few surprises thrown into the mix: the newcomers like Turkey and Qatar have moved over to the US side; the BRICS, however, have lent their considerable clout to team Iran. Iraq has moved behind the latter formation and Hamas still doesn’t know where to stand so it straddles the two.

This is not a game for the faint-hearted, and it permeates every major social, economic and political decision in the region today. Want a new electrical plant outside Cairo, Beirut or Kirkuk? Good luck choosing a national supplier who doesn’t offend. IMF loan? Allowing over-flights or passage for ships? Inking a trade deal? Formulating a new constitution? Scheduling a football match?

Mideast states are now paralyzed and polarized over such things, and governance has come to a standstill. But in this paralysis lies a dangerous volatility: a backlash in the brewing, a pressure cooker about to blow.

The Backlash Against Neo-Islamists

After decades of oppression and marginalization by pro-West, secular dictatorships, the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) and similar Islamist parties have catapulted to power and prominence in several states. Quite counter-intuitively, however, these Islamist governments appear to have lined up behind the US bloc, eager to please, or at least placate, the very powers that colluded in their oppression.

It is an unnatural marriage, and the longer this union endures the more estranged Islamist parties will become from their domestic constituencies – in much the same way as their autocratic predecessors.

There is volatility in this balancing act between the two blocs, as groups like Hamas have come to discover. But for the new Islamist powerhouses in “post-revolution” states, yet another volatile contest is being played out to their detriment, this time on an entirely regional level: Qatar versus Saudi Arabia – or Sunni versus Sunni.

For years the Ikhwanists have been backed by the Qatari arrivistes, who are a thorn in the side of the other, larger Wahhabi state in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, for their own part, are throwing dollars and clout behind Salafists in all the countries where they intend to counter the influence of the Ikhwan and similar parties.

But Qatar and Saudi Arabia are now aggressively exporting their very personal competition to other Arab states – Libya, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Palestine – creating what I believe will evolve into a ferocious backlash among local populations, even as they reap the rewards of direct financial investment from these two Gulf states.

This competition has drawn in others like the UAE, Jordan and Kuwait, appalled at the Qatari push to Ikhwanize the region. And it has turned the Arab League positively cannibalistic, devouring the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states like Libya, Syria and Palestine that it once pledged to protect.

Qatar finds support from AKP-led Turkey in this fight, but the two are a cause for concern in the United States, which secretly suspects that that Ikhwanists are harder to control than Saudi-backed Salafists. Much of this fear is because that lynchpin of all US foreign policy calculations, the state of Israel, borders Ikhwan-heavy Egypt, Gaza and Jordan – none of which have yet sufficiently proven their loyalty to the idea of Israel’s regional hegemony.

But the biggest victim of the Saudi-Qatari competition to influence the direction of political Sunnism is likely to be political Islam itself.

The rise of political Islam – once an inevitable byproduct of democratization – arrived too hard, too fast; too aggressively championed, organized and weaponized by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Now, not only have the mentors lost credibility and support, but so have many of their political protégés in Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Palestine.

Volatility? We haven’t even started.

What yesterday’s global powerbrokers seek from the incoming class of political Islamists is the maintenance of the status quo, including, among other things, embracing Israel and rejecting Iran. But an open pledge of allegiance to Israel is impossible for the Ikhwan and similar parties – their very legitimacy comes in part from denouncing the legitimacy of the Zionist experiment in Palestine.

Nothing tested their limits as dangerously as last November’s eight days of rocket-volley between Gaza and Israel. Each passing day drove home the fact that, despite their standard rhetoric to domestic and regional constituencies, Islamist heads of state in Turkey, Egypt and Qatar were rendered paralyzed – and mute – as the IDF pounded Gaza.

Instead, it was firepower, training and strategic planning by Iran, Hezbollah and Syria that propped up defiant Palestinians through those dark hours. The unexpected arsenal of rockets that countered Israeli aggression came from Hamas’ Qassam Brigades, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and other smaller Resistance groups, who became the heroes of that conflict.

Not one missile, bullet or slogan came from the three new Qatari, Turkish and Egyptian “Sunni kings” vying for power on the coattails of the Arab uprisings.

Had the battle gone on for another week or two, the entire Middle East might have been reconfigured in its aftermath. Never have the Israelis so quickly signed a ceasefire agreement.

The global battle of the blocs and the inter-regional Sunni power struggle crossed paths in that Gaza battle. In it, the US bloc and political Islam exposed their vulnerabilities. Both groups are currently upholding – against a tidal wave of popular sentiment – systems, values and institutions that were supposed to be swept away by honor-and-dignity revolts. Any incident that highlights this fact can serve as a springboard for a backlash against the interests of the west and its Islamist allies in the region.

The Backlash Against Sectarianism

Shiite versus Sunni. Christianity versus Islam. Vilifying the “other” is common in conflict, especially when there exists some historic animosity or tension between sects, nationalities and communities.

But since the onset of the Arab uprisings there has been a concerted effort to escalate the Shia-Sunni divide and link it wholesale to an Iranian-Arab one.

With the loss of its dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, Washington wasted no time in formulating a divide-and-rule strategy to preserve its regional interests. The US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) for the Middle East jump-started the task by initiating a secret exercise to divide Arabs and Iranians in March 2011.

Gulf-backed media channels dove headfirst into exaggerating the threat from Iran, while hardline clerics issued increasingly belligerent fatwas against the Shia. Against this backdrop, Shiite civilians began to be targeted with violence throughout the region – with very little outcry or objection from the international community, so successfully have they been conflated with a “threatening” Iran and Hezbollah.

But as Christians began to be targeted, assaulted and killed in Egypt and Syria, the issue of sectarianism exploded beyond the old, more common storylines, and has made avoidance of this subject impossible.

Dragging the sordid issue of sectarianism – which is invariably accompanied by extremism – into the light has had an interesting effect on regional discourse: most Arabs don’t want to be part of it – in much the same way they rejected Al Qaeda a decade ago.

A recent Pew Research Center poll of Muslims worldwide reveals, among other things, that 85% of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa view religious freedom for people of other faiths to be “a good thing.” A majority of Muslims are “somewhat or very concerned” about Islamic religious extremism, while a minority of Muslims view Shia-Sunni tensions to be a problem at all. The poll indicates that religious strife remains a major cause for concern among Muslims in many MENA states, and that perceived hostilities between Muslims and Christians are on the high side in Egypt, but low in Lebanon, another country that has experienced these hostilities.

But even as sectarian tensions flare in various countries, the headlines do not tell the whole story. Many Arabs are rejecting these divisions, some of which is attributable to the shocking new level of violence now associated with sectarianism:

From Egypt to Kuwait, Bahrain to Syria, young Arabs are hearing – many for the first time – about women being raped because of their sect; about the cutting of heads, the hacking of limbs, the burning of bodies. This is not yesterday’s segregation of sects; this is the stuff of horror movies and genocidal sprees.

The backlash here has already begun. As violent sectarianism rises, so too does the realization that there is another discourse on the rise besides Shia versus Sunni or Muslim versus Christian.

Simply put, there is a new paradigm forming in the region that didn’t exist when it was just Iraq suffering the consequences of violent sectarian carnage: Today, throughout the Mideast, “sectarian” Shia, Sunni, Muslims and Christians are increasingly facing down “anti-sectarian” Shia, Sunni, Muslims and Christians. The re-framing of this issue is crucial in undermining sectarian strife. It offers millions an alternative communal identity to the one that always forces them to “defend sect first.”

Interestingly, one communal identity they are tending to embrace is a national identity, i.e., “I am Bahraini, not Shia or Sunni.”

In Bahrain, despite efforts to paint a two-year popular uprising as an “Iranian project” pitting the majority Shiite population against a minority Sunni government, Bahrainis hoist their national flag at every opportunity to defy the negative sectarian characterizations of their “national” democratization project.

In Lebanon, where sectarianism is boiling in reaction to events in neighboring Syria, each incident has so far been thwarted by inter-sect efforts on a national level, and a growing desire among the population to empower the “national” army.

In Syria, widespread revulsion against what has to be the most violent manifestation of sectarianism in the region has morphed into new language to define the conflict there: Instead of being pro or anti-government/opposition, many Syrians are now underlining their allegiance to Syria first. Despite the international media’s partiality toward framing the Syrian conflict as a sectarian one, many pro-government and pro-opposition figures tend to reject this characterization outright. This is certainly notable among pro-government Syrians, many of whom have undergone a hasty conversion from political apathy to intense nationalism in a short time, and who reject being defined as “pro-Assad.”

“It is too limiting,” says one staunchly secular Syrian about that definition. “This is about my country and keeping it whole – it is not about a person or a government,” says another, an observant Sunni who backs her national army’s efforts to weed out mostly Islamist rebels.

The irony is that the very “sectarianism” encouraged by competing Islamists and their allies in pursuit of political objectives in the region, may have spawned the backlash to hasten their demise. Nationalism has long been the enemy of political Islam in the Middle East, and nationalism can once more bury it.

Throughout the Arab world, minority sects and non-sectarian groups are being thrust together to protect against the more zealous elements of political Islam, giving form to important civil coalitions that will form the backbone of new grassroots opposition movements in these countries – previously a position held almost exclusively by Islamists.

The backlashes are here, now. They will target all the interventionists clinging on to the status quo, and those keeping progress at bay. They may grow incrementally and tentatively – or they may explode onto a national or regional stage one fine day. “More of the same” will only hasten their arrival.

And it’s okay. These “backlashes” will be the revolutions you thought we already had.

This article was first published by Al Akhbar English on May 13, 2013

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By Sharmine Narwani

Let us be clear. The United States can verify absolutely nothing about the use of chemical weapons (CWs) in Syria. Any suggestion to the contrary is entirely false.

Don’t take it from me – here is what US officials have to say about the subject:

A mere 24 hours after Washington heavyweights from the White House, Pentagon and State Department brushed aside Israeli allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and the White House changed their minds. They now believe “with varying degrees of confidence” that CWs have been used “on a small scale” inside Syria.

For the uninitiated, “varying degrees of confidence” can mean anything from “no confidence whatsoever” to “the Israelis told us” – which, translated, also means “no confidence whatsoever.”

Too cavalier? I don’t think so. The White House introduced another important caveat in its detailed briefing on Thursday:

“This assessment is based in part on physiological samples. Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example, the chain of custody is not clear, so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions.”

“The chain of custody is not clear.” That is the single most important phrase in this whole exercise. It is the only phrase that journalists need consider – everything else is conjecture of WMDs-in-Iraq proportions.

I asked a State Department spokesman the following: “Does it mean you don’t know who has had access to the sample before it reached you? Or that the sample has not been contaminated along the way?”

He responded: “It could mean both.”

Chuck Hagel expands on that jaw-dropping admission: “We cannot confirm the origin of these weapons.” Although he goes on to conclude anyway: “but we do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime.”

Four-year-old shouldn’t have confidence in the US intelligence community at this point. Yet we are supposed to believe that the Syrian government must be behind a chemical weapons attack because Hagel says so.

Let’s consider the facts. The Syrian government has clearly stated it would not use chemical weapons during the crisis “regardless of the developments” unless “Syria faces external aggression.”

The US and other western states have warned for more than a year now that as the government of Bashar al-Assad begins to “topple,” the likelihood of using CWs as a desperate last measure will increase.

The White House reiterated this point yesterday: “Given our concern that as the situation deteriorated and the regime became more desperate, they may use some of their significant stockpiles of chemical weapons.”

Assad’s government is clearly not on its last legs. If anything, the Syrian army has made tremendous gains in the past few weeks by thwarting rebel plans to storm Damascus, pushing them out of key surrounding suburbs and cutting off their supply lines in different parts of the country.

This recent reversal of fortunes tends to validate the observations of those who have met with Assad and say the president remains confident that he can repel rebel forces whenever and wherever he chooses to do so.

Which frankly removes a major “motive” from any calculation by the Syrian government to use chemical weapons against civilians.

The constant reference to CWs in this conflict is suspect – there is no conceivable military advantage to be gained from the use of these munitions. Writing for Foreign Policy in December, Charles Blair says using CWs against rebels makes no tactical or strategic sense:

“The regime would risk losing Russian and Chinese support, legitimizing foreign military intervention, and, ultimately, hastening its own end. As one Syrian official said, “We would not commit suicide.”

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the government has calibrated its military responses throughout this conflict to avoid scenarios that would create a pretext for foreign military intervention on “humanitarian grounds.”

Just as there is evidence aplenty that rebel forces will go to great lengths to create a pretext for foreign intervention that would help them oust Assad.

On March 19, a suspected chemical weapons attack near Aleppo prompted the Syrian government to ask the United Nations to launch an investigation. Witnesses reported the “smell of chlorine in the air,” which led to speculation that this could have been a rebel-led attack given that opposition militias had seized Syria’s only chlorine gas bottling plant, east of Aleppo, that August.

The use of chlorine gas-based explosives by insurgents was seen not so long ago in Iraq, where attacks against both authorities and civilians are traceable to 2006. US military spokesmen, at the time, claimed that insurgent tactics had become deadlier, seeking to draw maximum attention and impose widespread suffering.

The Iraq connection and insurgent tactics there are important to the Syrian conflict because of the influx of jihadist rebels flooding over the Iraqi border, bringing with them experience and know-how from fighting the US occupation. That border also allegedly hosts training camps for groups in both countries allied with Al Qaeda – a development that has come to light since a recent announcement linking Jabhat al-Nusra to Al Qaeda’s central group.

The White House’s allegations on Thursday specified a Sarin gas connection to at least one other suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria. Even if this were true, a clear-cut connection linking the use of a CW explosive to the Syrian government is not at all inevitable. In 2004, an IED roadside bomb – a common insurgent tactic – containing the nerve agent was detonated in Iraq. There are no guarantees whatsoever that chemical munitions have not found their way into the hands of rogue elements – or in fact that they are not producing them in small quantities themselves.

At this point, almost everything being discussed in relation to chemical weapons inside Syria is conjecture – and to be honest – highly suspect.

The Times of London (which is behind a paywall so I cannot link to it) just published a detailed and timely “investigation” of an alleged CW attack in Aleppo, claiming: “the Syrian regime prefers to gas its opponents in this small-scale way, testing the elasticity of President Obama’s “red line.”

The article then goes on to describe the harrowing account of what appears to be a sarin gas attack from a victim, witnesses and medical staff. But experts are now questioning these accounts, saying that the evidence is “far from conclusive.”

In reference to the video of the alleged CW attack referenced by The Times, Jean Pascal Zanders, a senior researcher at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, tell McClatchy News that there are red flags in the footage.

“Why only one person?” he said, referring to the video showing one patient it said was a victim. “Why do I find the hospital setting, again, unlike what I would expect in a case of chemical exposure? Why is the guy ‘foaming’ in the hospital, considering the rapid action of sarin.” Zanders explained that without an antidote, death is possible within one minute after exposure to sarin.”

The Times article then gets even stranger. To quote:

“In the chaos of Syria’s civil war, no hospital in the rebel-held areas has the facilities to test which gas was used. Yet medical sources in northern Syria have told The Times that in the immediate aftermath of the attack a team from “an American medical agency” arrived at the hospital in Afrin. They took hair samples from the casualties for testing at “an American laboratory”.

It is likely that these samples formed part of the evidence cited by the US Defence Secretary yesterday.”

Really? A CW attack takes place in the middle of the night in Aleppo, and in its “immediate aftermath” an “American medical agency” arrives to collect samples for testing?

There’s more…

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Free Syrian Army Chief of Staff General Salim Idriss says that Israel is knowledgeable about the Syrian government’s use of CWs, because the Mossad has agents in the country: “Israel has this information because there are many, many members of security services who are now very active in Syria.”

Idriss is, of course, referencing the statements by Israel this week that kicked off all the recent speculation on Syrian CWs:

IDF intelligence analyst Brig. Gen. Itai Brun has been quoted far and wide on this issue, mainly referencing the April Aleppo incident highlighted by The Times and debunked by experts. Brun makes his assessment that sarin nerve gas was probably used in this episode based on dilated pupils and “foam coming out of their mouths.”

It is likely that all the speculation in the past few days revolves around an incident that is looking more and more like the “false flag” operations anti-rebel Syrians have been warning about this past year. Given where the “evidence” is coming from, and the alleged presence of a western or American “medical agency” present on the ground, it is quite remarkable that Washington went full-court press on this.

It is almost as bad as the account in 2011 of a middle-aged, Iranian-American, ex-car dealer who, by virtue of some familial relationship with a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, decided to collude with a Mexican drug cartel to plot the assassination of the Saudi ambassador in Washington at a popular DC eatery.

Having just passed the ten year anniversary of an Iraqi invasion and occupation based entirely on false and falsified data on Weapons of Mass Destruction, western media needs not to be asking about “red lines’ as much as for iron-clad evidence.

This article was first published by Al Akhbar English on April 27, 2013

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By Sharmine Narwani

“The weapons of choice in (today’s) new conflicts are not big-ticket items like long-range missiles, tanks, and fighter planes, but small and frighteningly accessible weapons ranging from handguns, carbines, and assault rifles on up to machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and shoulder-fired missiles,” explained William Hartung more than a decade ago in an article entitled The New Business of War.

“Because they are cheap, accessible, durable, and lightweight, small arms have been a primary factor in the transformation of warfare from a series of relatively well- defined battles between ‘two opposing forces wearing uniforms’ to a much more volatile, anarchic form of violence,” says Hartung, now director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington DC. “More often than not, today’s wars are multisided affairs in which militias, gangs, and self-anointed “rebels” engage in campaigns of calculated terror, civilian targets are fair game, and the laws of war are routinely ignored.”

“The ready availability of small arms makes these conflicts far more likely to occur, far more deadly once they start, and far more difficult to resolve once the death tolls mount and the urge for revenge takes hold.”

Hartung could have been describing Syria today. And no – the anarchic, violent rebels he describes in his article do not appear everywhere else in the world except in Syria. They are the Syrian prototype.

Tens of thousands of Syrians killed, millions displaced as a result of violence in their direct environment. Would these figures be so wretched if there were no armed rebellion? Most certainly, no.

Since early 2012, the Syrian death toll has increased at least tenfold  – from around 6,000 to 60,000 – as rebel supply lines opened up, borders became more porous and the militarization of the conflict was accepted in the mainstream.

The more protracted a conflict, the increased likelihood that a “culture of violence” will develop, further contributing to illegal and dangerous behaviors that most often target vulnerable civilian populations and cause a general breakdown in human rights conditions.

Says security expert Edward Mogire, the “proliferation and easy availability” of these weapons “exacerbate the degree of violence by increasing the lethality and duration of hostilities, and encouraging violent rather than peaceful resolutions of differences.”

Sending weapons? Forget about that peace plan then.

So what’s stopping regional and international players from slapping a total arms embargo on Syria to prevent more death and destruction?  Russian President Vladimir Putin, an ally of the Syrian government, last week again called for a halt to weapon flows “to all sides of the conflict.”

Yet calls to increase weapons to Syria’s disparate militias still continue every day from other members of the UN’s Security Council. France, the UK and the US (FUKUS) – who claim they do not directly arm the rebels – have collectively provided hundreds of millions of dollars in “non-lethal assistance” to – er – make them more lethal.

Hiding behind a much-touted public posture of “non-intervention,” all three have in fact “intervened” militarily in the Syrian conflict – from training rebel forces, to providing them with military intelligence in preparation for battle, to actually coordinating and transporting weapons into the hands of militiamen.

Washington’s laughable excuse for helping transport weapons into the highly volatile Syrian military theater  is that  “other states would arm the rebels anyhow.” Whines one US official to the New York Times: “These countries were going to do it one way or another…they weren’t asking for a ‘Mother, may I?’ from us.”

Thought: You could sanction them, instead of helping them load the truck.

“They” are ostensibly Qatar and Saudi Arabia, two thoroughly undemocratic Islamist regimes who are aggressively vying for the upper-hand in the Syrian rebellion by channeling money and weapons into the hands of their preferred rebels. Washington has military bases – official and secret – in both countries, and therefore an awful lot of leverage.

The FUKUS states like this set-up. First, they get to maintain a sliver of deniability for weaponizing Syria. Second, all three western states are bankrupt on paper and have recalibrated their 21st century military strategies to utilize third parties to fight irregular wars against political foes.

FUKUS is fully aware that these weapons transfers are contributing to death, destruction and displacement inside Syria. They are ranking members of NATO, which says the following about the dangers of weaponizing conflicts:

“The illicit proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW) has a detrimental impact on regional security, fueling and prolonging existing conflicts thereby destabilising regions and exacerbating international security. Many of the security threats that we face today as organisations, states and regions can be linked to the pervasive problem of illicit SALW. Terrorists, organised criminal gangs, insurgents and even pirates, often find their crimes much easier to commit due to easy access to these weapons.”

Breaking out of the “Revolution Trance”

Two years into the Syrian conflict, there are no signs of “popular, peaceful protests” against the government of Bashar al-Assad. At this point, there’s little point in arguing whether there ever was significant enough opposition to unseat Assad through mass protest – a feature of other successful Arab uprisings.

Today, the only players inside Syria to present any kind of sustained, effective opposition front are armed rebels. Neither the domestic nor external Syrian non-military opposition play a major role in anyone’s calculations, except for rubber-stamping some political decisions.

Many opposition activists, who have no where else to turn in their quest to unseat Assad, still uncomfortably rally behind the rebels as their last shot to affect regime-change. But the fact is that there would be no sustained rebellion without massive direct assistance from foreign nations.

Is there a “revolution” when the entire Opposition-Operation is coordinated on the Jordanian and Turkish borders, orchestrated from Doha, and funded by the Americans, Saudis, British, French, Qataris and other smaller players?

No, of course not.

The Syrian “revolution” – whatever many intended for it to be – is one large foreign-backed regime-change special op. With all the various interests vying for dominance inside this space, it is no surprise that the “rebellion” has disintegrated into violence and chaos.

Even in early 2011, it was obvious that regime-change would need some help in Syria. From the first weeks, gunmen shot out at security forces from within peaceful protests; snipers targeted vulnerable civilians in areas where these deaths would have maximum impact; groups of armed men attacked army checkpoints, on and off-duty security forces, and pro-government civilians.

The first external observers in Syria – the Arab League – saw rebel groups bombing civilian and military targets, pipelines, infrastructure. The next lot of monitors – from the United Nations – warned rebels to desist in their looting, destruction of public and private property, assassinations, kidnappings and vandalism.

It took a very long time to concede that there are foreign jihadists in the battle – a story that went from “regime lies!” to “there are only a handful” to “yes, okay, a few dozen” to “thousands” today.

We recognize that the majority of the militias are ideologically Islamist, with an increasing number declaring their partiality to sharia law and an Islamic state in secular Syria.

We see with ever increasing frequency that rebel groups are carrying out crimes against humanity: summary executions, torture, kidnappings, human shielding – but we caveat it with “not as much as the regime,” although we have no independent measure of this.

Since 2011, Syria has seen armed militias entering villages, towns and cities that are not their own and stripping them bare. Shops are shuttered in these areas, remnants of burned vehicles dot the roads, factories are looted and the spoils of war are sold off to purchase more supplies – or for profit. Revolution isn’t what all of them are after. Some seek their own turf; others want power, money.

You’ve seen the videos of these militias. Unlike in 2011, these are now verifiable rebel videos – they have their own websites and they film their own atrocities. You wouldn’t want them in your town.

We can’t even really get to know them well, such is their fondness for militia-musical-chairs, which they play every time an opportunity arises to trade-up to better-funded, better-armed groups. This fluidity gives us pause – there’s also no way to track their weapons.

Question: Are there any decent rebels out there at all? Answer: Who cares?  Weaponization is Syria’s biggest enemy – the bane of all Syrians today. Weaponization is the single biggest factor contributing to the escalation of violence in this conflict and, more importantly, is the single biggest factor precluding its peaceful resolution. 

Good guys? Wrong question. On the same day that US Secretary of State John Kerry announced that there were “moderates” among the militias, America’s top military man shot him down:

“About six months ago, we had a very opaque understanding of the opposition and now I would say it’s even more opaque,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. “I don’t think at this point I can see a military option that would create an understandable outcome,” he cautioned, adding that Syria presented “the most complex set of issues that anyone could ever conceive, literally.”

Unless, of course, one wanted to foment a protracted, destabilizing conflict to split Syria into pieces and ensure even more chaos. With no guarantees about the flow and exchange of deadly weapons inside the country, Syria would be a classic war with no end:

“Guns rarely go silent after wars end,” said Human Rights Watch in a report on weapons in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. “To the contrary, the widespread availability of small arms in many post-conflict countries has greatly added to the death toll. Particularly where security is weak, former combatants have not been disarmed, and abusive actors have not been held accountable for past behavior, a situation of lawlessness can emerge where civilians are at grave risk.”

Next week, a number of states backing a military solution inside Syria will meet to ramp up the conflict – the US, Turkey, France, UK, Jordan, the UAE, Germany, Italy, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. On the table is a discussion to send further weapons into Syria.

Why? To protect civilians, to stop the humanitarian disaster, to stem the refugee problem, of course.

This article was first published by Al Akhbar English on April 10, 2013

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By Sharmine Narwani

The BRICS just became impossible to ignore. At the close of the Fifth annual BRICS Summit in Durban, South Africa last week, there was little question that this group of five fast-growing economies was underwriting an overhaul of the global economic and political order.

The eThekwini Declaration issued at summit’s end was couched in non-confrontational language, but it was manifestly clear that western hegemony and unipolarity were being targeted at this meeting.

The BRICS hit some major western sore spots by announcing the formation of a $50 billion jointly-funded development bank to rival the IMF and World Bank. Deals were signed to increase inter-BRICS trade in their own currencies, further eroding the US dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.

A series of unmistakable challenges were dealt to old world leaders: reform your institutions and economies – or we’ll do it ourselves.

Intent on filling a leadership void in global economic and financial affairs, the BRICS also began to draw some firm political lines in the sand.

For starters, the summit was focused on development in Africa – a resource-rich continent where competing economic interests have drawn increasingly polarized geopolitical battle lines in the past few years. The BRICS were invited to the African table via their newest member state, South Africa, and have used this opportunity to fully back the African Union (AU).

The AU has been Africa’s attempt to integrate and unify the continent economically – via the establishment of a single currency and development fund that could bypass the very punishing IMF – and militarily – via the establishment of security/defense organizations and joint military forces, among other things.

AU success would necessarily mean less old-style western imperialism in the region, reducing exploitative foreign economic activities and excluding foreign forces like the US military’s African Command (AFRICOM) from engaging in the African military theater.

At the heart of the Summit’s agenda lies the BRICS’ determination to anchor any emerging global order in “multilateralism” – whether by demanding permanent seats within the UN Security Council, forging alternative economic constructs that will shift the balance of power their way, or proactively influencing outcomes in global conflict zones.

Syria and Iran

The Durban summit therefore was not going to ignore the two most prominent issues on UN Security Council’s docket – Syria and Iran.

Last week, the BRICS collectively rejected any further militarization of these problems, advocated political solutions negotiated through diplomatic initiatives, expressed concern over unilateral sanctions and warned against infringement on the “territorial integrity and sovereignty” of these nations.

The eThekwini Declaration says about Iran:

“We believe there is no alternative to a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. We recognize Iran’s right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy consistent with its international obligations, and support resolution of the issues involved through political and diplomatic means and dialogue.”

And on Syria, the BRICS fully backed the Geneva principles as the framework for resolving the two-year conflict:

“We believe that the Joint Communiqué of the Geneva Action Group provides a basis for resolution of the Syrian crisis and reaffirm our opposition to any further militarization of the conflict. A Syrian-led political process leading to a transition can be achieved only through broad national dialogue that meets the legitimate aspirations of all sections of Syrian society and respect for Syrian independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty as expressed by the Geneva Joint Communiqué and appropriate UNSC resolutions.”

The BRICS positions on Iran and Syria cannot, however, be viewed solely within the parameters of the summit’s declaration. For starters, the statement is nothing new – the BRICS have been advocating these points in some form or another since they issued their first foreign policy communiqué in November 2011.

To understand the depth and breadth of commitment behind these Mideast stances, one needs to look beyond the sanitized, diplomat-speak of the summit environment. India, Brazil and South Africa, for instance, don’t offer up much commentary on Syria and Iran – they leave that to their UNSC permanent-member colleagues in Russia and China, who are the BRICS’ front-men on these issues.

Earlier in March, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow on his first foreign trip as head of state, and told audiences there: “We must respect the right of each country in the world to independently choose its path of development and oppose interference in the internal affairs of other countries.”

A clear warning against aggressive western interventionism, Xi’s visit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin emphasized the importance of their “strategic partnership” in geopolitical affairs.

On Syria, in particular, Russia has taken the BRICS lead with the blessing of its fellow members – including China – so Moscow’s view of the situation is a critical one to analyze.

The Russians have recently released a concept paper on the importance of their participation in the BRICS – a view that is likely to reflect similar priorities at the highest levels of fellow member states.

BRICS drawing red lines

Putin and Xi say the one way to end the Syrian crisis is through dialogue [Xinhua]
For all the BRICS, financial and economic considerations are the driving momentum behind the formalization of this strategic coalition. There is, say the Russians, “a common desire of BRICS partners to reform the obsolete international financial and economic architecture which does not take into account the increased economic power of emerging market economies and developing countries.”

But for fundamental economic shifts to take place, a simultaneous rebalancing of political power worldwide must also occur.

Moscow believes that the BRICS “can potentially become a key element of a new system of global governance primarily in the financial and economic areas. At the same time, the Russian Federation stands in favor of positioning BRICS in the world system as a new model of global relations, overarching the old dividing lines between East and West, and North and South.”

It’s a bold new world, but there’s real value in some of the old ways. For one, the BRICS are big proponents of the Rule of Law in global affairs, concepts the West often tosses around, but rarely adheres to in pursuit of its own strategic interests, i.e. interventionism, regime-change, militarization of conflict.

For the Russians, an absolute BRICS priority is “building on the commitment by the participating states to the rule of law in international relations, to progressively expand the foreign policy cooperation with BRICS partners in the interests of peace and security with due respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states and non-interference in their internal affairs.”

The BRICS are backing the UN model to help achieve these basic principles. For them, the vehicle is not what is broken – the problem lies with its drivers. And in particular, the notion that regime change, sanctions and military intervention are acceptable tools in international affairs.

The BRICS, according to Moscow, can “enhance in every possible way interaction within the UN as well as to preserve and strengthen the UN Security Council’s role as a body bearing the primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security; to prevent the use of the UN, first of all the Security Council, to cover up the course towards removing undesirable regimes and imposing unilateral solutions to conflict situations, including those based on the use of force.”

As an aside, it’s hardly a coincidence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sent a widely-reported letter to the BRICS during the Summit. Here, after all, was the head of state of a sovereign nation requesting the help of the newly-ascendant BRICS in protecting the territorial integrity of Syria by rebuffing ”blatant foreign interference” in contradiction of the ”UN Charter.”

That letter hit all the BRICS soft spots: Rule of Law in international relations, preservation of global peace and security, peaceful resolution of conflict, de-militarization … and recognition of the importance of the BRICS in the new world order.

Assad’s letter came one day after the Arab League gave Syria’s seat away to an external-based opposition coalition backed by Syrian foes – a move the Russians called “unlawful and invalid” and a hindrance to the peaceful resolution of the conflict.

It may be that BRICS intended to set an example here. Receiving this letter at the summit clearly bestows legitimacy on Assad and his claims – and it is hard to imagine that this was not an event coordinated in advance.

Moscow’s positions on the Syria issue cannot be seen out of the context of these shared BRICS principles. The Russians may have more at stake in what is going on in Syria – as others do in Iran – but these are consistent red lines in what the BRICS hope to achieve globally.

And they are willing to bet on it too. Part of the wager is that faltering western economies are so far gone on their current trajectories, that only “time” is required for these global shifts to materialize.

In any regard, shortly after the Summit concluded Russia vowed to prevent any measure in the UN Security Council to give Syria’s seat to the opposition.

The potential for chaos looms large though as a new political order emerges, and as a collective the BRICS will not be shy about pushing their agendas hard – a task made easier by the considerable clout they now share.

On his flight back from Durban to Moscow last Thursday, Putin ordered surprise large-scale military maneuvers in the Black Sea, which borders Syrian-foe Turkey – a move most observers took as a warning for foreign interventionists in Syria.

It is unlikely that BRICS nations would go to such lengths to draw red lines and not defend those positions. How this would transpire in the cases of Syria or Iran is uncertain – it is unlikely we are going to see a BRICS army fighting battles anytime soon. On the other hand, these strategic relationships are likely to give way to coordinated military positions and some special forces planning for exactly these kinds of scenarios.

This is not hard to fathom. BRIC was just an acronym created by Goldman Sachs to describe some fast-growing emerging economies a few years ago. Today, they are engaged in bilateral military exercises, funding banks, building institutions, and remapping global priorities for the 21st century.

This article was first published by the BRICS Post on April 3, 2013

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By Sharmine Narwani

An abridged version of this article appeared in The Guardian on February 15, 2013

A trip to Syria last January piqued my interest in the ubiquitous Syrian death toll that accompanies most news items on the country. The overwhelming assumption about these casualty numbers is that they represent dead civilians killed by a brutal regime, but inside Syria I found widely conflicting opinions on who was doing the killing and who was dying.

In my February 2012 investigation I concluded that the UN total of 5,000 victims of violence in Syria included a more diverse universe than what was being portrayed in the media: civilians caught in the crossfire between government forces and opposition gunmen; victims of deliberate violence by government forces and by opposition gunmen; “dead opposition fighters” whose attire do not distinguish them from regular civilians; and members of the Syrian security forces, both on and off duty.

When juxtaposed with the government’s list of around 2,000 dead Syrian soldiers and policemen, it appeared that there was some “parity” in the numbers of violent deaths on both sides. But that information would suggest that the Syrian army was responding in relative proportion to the threat posed, which is not the way we understand the conflict in Syria in the mass media.

The UN stopped counting casualties around that time because escalating hostilities made “verification” difficult. But a year on, it has reinstated its count – this time using seven lists and citing a figure of 59,648 – more than ten times its last number.

Yet this new count gives us no more insight into the nature of the Syrian conflict than the 5,000 number of a year ago. It doesn’t tell us who is killing and who is dying. And that information matters – the global political response to a genuine civil conflict would be different than to a genocide committed by a ruthless authority.

UN High Commissioner For Human Rights Navi Pillay does not attribute the nearly 60,000 deaths to the Syrian government, but neatly implies it by saying things like:

“The massive loss of life could have been avoided if the Syrian government had chosen to take a different path than one of ruthless suppression of what were initially peaceful and legitimate protests by unarmed civilians.”

This kind of complicity by influential officials to obfuscate details about the Syrian death toll continues unabashed. It is little wonder that the crisis gallops ahead today – the “solutions” offered have been based on false premises that have led directly to the weaponization of the conflict, and thus, to a staggeringly higher casualty count.

SOHR disputes the UN’s numbers

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) founder Rami Abdulrahman, whose casualty list is the one most widely quoted by the media, scoffs at the UN’s new numbers and believes they are inflated for “propaganda” purposes. Rami’s list has been used as a primary source in both UN counts, but his figures are on the lower end of the spectrum and he claims high accuracy for only reporting casualties with names or video footage.

“The UN is a political organization,” says Rami, who is amassing “evidence” of falsified data by some of the other casualty counters the UN used. During a lengthy meeting with him in Coventry, England in December, he provided me with anecdotal and video examples:

“Yesterday in Qahtaniyah, near al-Raqqa (northeast of Syria), I had a video of 21 people killed, but 19 names only. Other groups said 40 were killed – where are the 40? Tell them to provide me with only 21 names,” he demands, frustrated.

“Four days ago in Halfaya, the LCCs (Local Coordination Committees) said 200 were killed in an air strike on a bakery. I cannot confirm it was an airstrike and I now have the names of 43 people, 40 adult males and 3 women. The other groups say the majority were women and children! We have no evidence of this whatsoever,” insists Rami, “so why are they playing games with the lives of people?”

Between March 2011 and mid-January 2012, the SOHR has logged 47,605 deaths of which 33,279 are “civilians,” a number which includes non-combatants and nearly 9,000 rebels. Some smaller figures are also included in this count: 1,564 are defectors killed in clashes and 943 are unnamed people who feature on his video records, for example. The SOHR maintains a separate list for Syrian soldiers and security forces, which Rami says earns him the wrath of other opposition groups who don’t want to admit there are dead soldiers. There are 11,819 names on this list.

When asked about the high civilian count, he admits: “I have thousands of rebels in the civilian list. I put all the non-defectors in the civilian list.” Rami later says: “It isn’t easy to count rebels because nobody on the ground says ‘this is a rebel.’ Everybody hides it.”

So how does one gauge how many rebels are embedded in the “civilian” count? Rami’s casualty count for that day, December 27, 2012, may be a helpful guide:

- 103 “civilians” were killed — In Idlib, 24 killed, 18 were rebels, one a leader; near Damascus, 25 killed, 4 were rebels; in Allepo, 15 killed, 7 were rebels; in Damascus, 11 killed, 9 were rebels; in Hama, 10 killed, 5 were rebels; in Homs, 9 killed, 2 were rebels; in Deir Azour, 7 killed, 3 were rebels, one a leader; in Dar’a, 2 killed, 1 was a rebel

- 42 regular army were killed — 19 in Idlib, 4 in Deir Azour, 2 in Damascus, 5 in Hama, 2 in Homs, 10 in Aleppo

- 3 defectors were killed in Reef Aleppo and Hama; one was a colonel.

Rami counts 148 violent deaths in Syria that day – 49 are rebels, 42 are soldiers, 3 are defectors, and the remaining 54 are, according to Rami, likely to be a mix of non-combatant civilians and unidentified rebels. In this count, around two-thirds of the dead are armed men – an appreciatively different take on the perception of “civilian slaughter” in Syria created by the UN’s un-nuanced casualty numbers.

Peeling the onion further

When I ask UN spokesman Rupert Colville whether 11,000+ Syrian soldiers could be embedded in the UN’s casualty list, he replies: “It’s quite possible. And how many are in these statistics, we just don’t know.”

“The study makes absolutely no effort whatsoever to separate combatants and non-combatants,” explains Colville, adding that the motivation in compiling this list was “for indicative purposes; to gauge scale.”

Since the UN stopped it’s count last year because verification of deaths was getting harder, I asked if they were able to do those kind of checks this time around. “No,” admits Colville, “we can’t prove most of these people have died.”

Megan Price, lead author and statistician of the UN’s casualty analysis project, concurs but explains: “we were not asked to do verification of whether the casualties are real.”

Her firm, Benetech, a non-profit technology company experienced in casualty analysis in conflicts, drew its data from 7 combined lists of 147,349 reported casualties of violence in Syria. They discarded reports that did not include names, place and date of death, as well as duplicates, to arrive at almost 60,000 casualties.

So what’s the point of this UN casualty list if we don’t actually know the data is real and we aren’t even told if Syria’s victims are combatants or non-combatants – let alone who killed them?

Benetech’s data crunching actually does manage to give us a peephole into some casualty demographics that may be the most revealing “facts” we have in this conflict – depending of course on whether the data is real in the first place. Only 7.5% of the recorded dead are female, making this an overwhelmingly male casualty count. Furthermore, the largest segment of the 30% of victims whose ages are included in the records are between the ages of 20 and 30 – what might be classified as males of “military age.”

The combined demographic information could very well suggest that the violence in Syria is largely between armed men on either side and that areas dense with non-combatant civilians are not typically targeted, though some of that clearly occurs.

Alternatively, Colville suggests that the low female death toll may be due to civilians vacating areas of conflict, leaving younger men behind to protect property. This version of events, however, actually bolsters the Syrian regime’s claim that it does not target civilian populations and that it warns civilians to vacate areas before launching military operations against rebels, whether by air or by ground.

Conflict death toll controversy
Maintaining casualty counts during conflict is a tricky business. On one hand, it can help alert the international community to situations of violence, track the scale of the violence over time and act as an important baseline for investigation in the aftermath of conflict.

On the other hand, inaccurate death tolls in recent conflicts, as in the case of Iraq, Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have made casualty counting a politically-charged business. While some death toll disputes are over methodology, the most frequent criticism is that data analysis and subsequent results can be self-serving, more focused on politics and fundraising ambitions than accuracy.

Benetech, for instance, receives funding from the US State Department, a vocal and active advocate for regime change in Syria. For Washington, jacked-up casualty numbers are as desirable in this conflict as they were anathema in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq.  Although physically present in Iraq, the US and British governments were unable to provide estimates of the numbers of deaths unleashed by their own invasion, yet in Syria, the same governments frequently quote detailed figures, despite lacking essential access.

As if to underline the argument against casualty statistics, just last month we heard that Libyan death tolls had been highly exaggerated. Libya’s new government now claims that casualties on both sides have been revised down to around 5,000 each for rebels and supporters of Muammar Gaddafi. Did politics come into play? Recall that NATO intervention was enabled by allegations that Ghaddafi had killed tens of thousands of civilians. Opponents of NATO intervention conversely argue that the aerial bombardment of Libya resulted in 50,000 deaths.

And yet Benetech plans to launch a second phase of this bizarre numbers game for the UN – this time, to fill in gaps for deaths that “may have gone undocumented” in the Syrian conflict. Using analytical tools modeled from other conflicts, the statisticians will essentially extrapolate from the current Syrian casualty data, which they already acknowledge may not be “real” or accurate. In other words: more unverified data to compound the existing unverified data. And more hyped-up numbers to blare from headlines.

Detail matters

“What does it matter who is dying and who is killing? Why should the essential journalistic questions of who, what, where, when and how apply when a hundred people are dying each day?”

Here’s why detail matters. In the past year the Syrian death toll has increased ten-fold. A big part of why this has happened is because of weapons flowing willy-nilly into the hands of unstructured, undisciplined rebel militias with competing ideologies and command structures. The weaponization of the conflict has, in turn, been made possible by non-stop narratives about “regime massacres of civilians” and the need for said civilians to defend themselves.

Provocative attacks on army checkpoints by rebels since early 2011 are not defensive postures. Neither are car bombs and suicide bombs in urban areas. Nor sabotage and destruction of key infrastructure vital to the citizenry – water, electricity, food factories, etc.

The fact is that, left unquestioned, the narrative of “regime massacring civilians” has scene-set and paved the way for governments hostile to the Syrian leadership to weaponize this conflict – as though this, in itself, was a humanitarian gesture that would “save civilians” somehow.

In whose warped mind does arming a disparate rebellion – representative of perhaps only half the population – against a far more sophisticated centralized army ever change the odds? The weaponization of the Syrian conflict was never to save civilians. It was about increasing the regime’s vulnerabilities and hoping for momentum that may lead to its downfall.

In the interim, this weaponization has killed tens of thousands of Syrians with no obvious signs that arming rebels contributes to the safety of civilians. On the contrary, Syria is scattered with the dead bodies of tens of thousands of these armed men, soldiers and militiamen both. And hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians have been displaced by the escalation of violent conflict caused by militarization.

Yet I see little evidence that the regime-massacring-civilians narrative will be relinquished by those pursuing their own political objectives inside Syria. Qatar just sent $100 million to the “humanitarian arm” of the Syrian opposition – as if there is such a body – because the European Union won’t officially remove an arms embargo. And western politicians are being prodded by self-serving “regime massacre” and “horrible death toll” headlines to consider further weaponization of the crisis.

Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani’s reasoning behind this new “humanitarian” paycheck: “the rebels only want to be able to defend themselves,” adding that an arms embargo “will only prolong the crisis.”

His British counterpart William Hague – who ostensibly does not send weapons to Syria for good reason, yet does not object to Qatar doing so - repeats a tired refrain about considering all options “to save the lives of the Syrian people.”

Saving lives indeed.

The UN casualty-counting-circus will plough ahead, fanning the flames of armed conflict instead of easing the way to a mediated political solution. But Navi Pillay would be well advised to think twice about participating in this non-contextual, numbers-over-details game in Syria, a country where disputed death tolls feature in its recent history:

Last autumn, the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) declassified its report on Syria’s 1979-82 armed Islamist insurgency. The document quite startlingly concludes that the Syrian Army’s infamous assault on Hama resulted in only 2,000 deaths in the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold, including “an estimated 300-400 members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s elite Secret Apparatus.” The DIA’s 2,000 estimate, which may be unrealistically low, is still a far cry from the 10,000, 20,000 and even 40,000 reported by history books and regime foes alike.

Syria has seen this dirty numbers game before.

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By Sharmine Narwani

Russia and China have drawn a great deal of censure this past year for resisting UN Security Council resolutions to intervene in the domestic affairs of Syria and Iran. Why, many ask, would this duo leverage their growing global political clout for two Mideast states so actively marginalized by their fellow UNSC members – the US, UK and France?

And do these new Russian and Chinese positions place them on a collision course with Washington – in the Middle East and elsewhere?

While the US has typically viewed this activism as a direct challenge to its global hegemonic interests, neither Moscow nor Beijing have any specific strategy to slay the American behemoth. On the contrary, the non-confrontational positions they take in the Middle East are “reactive” ones, designed to slow down, halt or counter US economic, political and military aggressions heading in their direction.

Russia and China have good reason to be concerned about US initiatives in the international arena in the past few years:

Empire confronts Emerging Powers

The UN Security Council has morphed into little more than a rubber stamp for Washington’s foreign policy ambitions. Instead of acting to preserve international peace and security, the UN body has either sponsored or tacitly accepted one too many US-backed regime-change adventures for the liking of the world’s newly emergent political and economic powers, the BRICS. But for obvious reasons, it is Russia and China who have been tasked to do the heavy-lifting.

For one, Washington’s hostility is focused most heavily on these two BRICS states. The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a unipolar world dominated in all spheres by the United States. Most threatening to this US hegemony today is China, whose dizzying economic growth has accompanied an American decline. Not only has the US racked up unprecedented financial debt with the Chinese, but Beijing, favorably positioned in the region most likely to enjoy explosive growth in decades to come, looks to go from strength to strength.

Economic hegemony is the driver of political power, so Washington has used every threat in the book to crash China’s party. Narratives now abound about the danger China poses in its direct neighborhood, so American warships head into the South China Seas to offer protective cover. In yet another anti-China storyline, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in 2011 warned shrilly about China’s “neo-colonialism” in places like Africa, ostensibly to shift business away from the enterprising Chinese back to the original colonial and imperial powers.

Clinton directly confronted the Russians in a no less aggressive manner when, in the aftermath of the 2011 parliamentary elections, she incited Russians to take to the streets and protest against “electoral fraud.” The incident was seen by US-nemesis Vladimir Putin as a color-revolution tactic to scuttle his anticipated victory in the upcoming presidential elections. By the time he won the poll, frigidity had seeped into bilateral relations.

But American tactics have misfired. US confrontation has not marginalized Russian and Chinese power – instead it has helped give it “direction.”

Forming Alliances for Protection

Unwilling to take these undeserved hits, Russia and China have been forced to form protective alliances against US aggression in various arenas. The most obvious of these is the BRICS, once nothing more than a convenient acronym to characterize four disparate emerging economic powers. In no small part because of US aggressions, this grouping suddenly found its feet, and began to collude on defense, economic and financial projects.

And then on November 24, 2011, the BRICS announced their first joint foreign policy statement – on the Middle East of all places – urging, among other things, the rejection of foreign intervention in Syria’s internal affairs.

This is no coincidence. For reasons of timing, geography, urgency and threat, Syria became the de facto “line in the sand” for the BRICS. There would be no more tolerance for the military and regime change adventures of the United States and its allies.

By virtue of their geopolitical and economic weight, these nations decided to decisively insert the concept of “soft power” into the dangerous Syrian crisis, and force the international community to grow up and find a political solution. The BRICS put their “arms around Syria,” so to speak.

While this was an important step forward for all involved, it was particularly urgent for Russia and China to intervene. As permanent members of the UN Security Council, these two wielded the most clout, but they also had the most to lose if the unpredictable tsunamis spinning in the Middle East did not stop at Syria’s borders.

For one, they believed the US would not reign in its interventionist behaviors until it had effectively landed at the doorsteps of Beijing and Moscow. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger points to the obvious in a Washington Post Op-Ed he penned last June about the repercussions of overzealous American interventionism: “Intervention that is unilateral or based on a coalition of the willing evokes the resistance of countries fearing the application of the policy to their territories (such as China and Russia).”

But there have been other critical considerations, some of these gleaned from more than a decade of watching American-led regime change operations in Afghanistan, then Iraq and more recently, in Libya – all disasters. Under the deceptive guise of “humanitarian intervention,” Kissinger argues that the United States is in effect undermining the existing world order which is premised on the territorial inviolability of the sovereign nation-state:

“In reacting to one human tragedy, we must be careful not to facilitate another. In the absence of a clearly articulated strategic concept, a world order that erodes borders and merges international and civil wars can never catch its breath.”

Political, not Military, Solutions

Sanctions, interventions and military escalations have proven to be destabilizing in the extreme, not just in the Middle East, but with sometimes global ramifications. Given the already debilitating effects of the 2008 global financial crisis, the human and economic cost of further conflict has the potential to plunge entire populations into depravation overnight. Russia, China, and other fast-growing, heavily-populated middle states have argued that these are critical times, and that active diplomacy must be employed to find political solutions and avoid military ones.

But Washington seems unable to take the long view in the Middle East, and continues its escalations with Syria, Iran and other regional players unwilling to cater to US interests.

China’s ambassador to Lebanon Wu Zexian told me last year: “Part of our divergence with the west is that they think that the problems cannot be solved by themselves in the region.” Arguing that Iraq and Afghanistan showed that “intervention is not successful,” the Chinese want a “dialogue and consensus to be an essential part of the political process.”

The Russians – and to a lesser extent the Chinese – also fear the ramifications of borders torn apart, lawlessness and chaos in a region where Islamic extremism can take hold and spread. Both states have had their own negative experiences with radical Islam, but importantly, have proactively reached out to moderate Islamists to counter and mitigate the spread of extremism.

On the other hand, Russia and China watch with growing concern American interaction with the Muslim world, where moderates – Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, for instance – are marginalized, and where in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen, US short-term interests appear to be increasingly aligned with those of Al Qaeda and other radical Sunni militants. Worse yet, the militarization of conflicts in many of these countries are unraveling the only authorities and borders that kept extremism in check for decades.

For months now, western media pundits salivate over every hint that Russia is about to abandon Syrian President Bashar al Assad or any suggestion that China is prepared to forsake Iranian oil.

Neither will happen, and here’s why. Iran and Syria are the only two regional countries with the collective will, interest and power to halt US hegemonic pursuits in its tracks, and have done so with relative success over the past decades. In a sense, Damascus and Tehran stand guard in the Middle East as important buffers against an increasingly militarized US – and as a valuable distraction keeping Washington from nipping at Russia and China’s heels.

Soft Power Leads New Global Order

But Iran and Syria also share some fundamental values with the BRICS and other emerging regional hegemons. They believe in the value of soft-power, diplomacy and trade as essential tools of statecraft. They believe that peace and stability, domestically and regionally, are vital for development and economic growth.

Importantly, they also believe it is past time for middle states around the world to have a seat at the decision making table – whether at the IMF, World Bank, WTO, UNSC or whatever emerges in the aftermath of this unipolar order.

For Russia and China, backing a political alternative to military conflict is a clear and compelling first choice in any region of the world. But in the strategically important Middle East, the threat of multiple confrontations has made it all the more vital for Moscow and Beijing to step up and engage in de-escalating crises.

The stakes are extremely high and come at a time when the world is also awaiting fundamental shifts in the global political and economic balance of power.

Whatever the short-term inconvenience, there is little chance that Russia and China will be swayed from their current positions in the Middle East, particularly in relation to preventing foreign intervention in Syria and unilateral sanctions against Iran. They understand full well that this is the Waterloo of the current global order – what comes next will be worth the wait.

This article was originally published at the BRICS Post on January 18, 2013.

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What a difference a week can make in the Middle East.

On October 19, when a car bomb tore through the upscale Christian neighborhood of Achrafiyeh in Beirut killing a major security official, Lebanon shuddered in fear that the era of political assassinations was back.

Politicians and commentators didn’t miss a beat. The murder of Internal Security Forces (ISF) Information Branch head Wissam al-Hassan was compared to the killing of his former boss, ex-PM Rafiq Hariri in 2005. And the Hariri-allied pro-West, anti-Syria, pro-Saudi “March 14” political coalition lined up to deliver a visceral blow to their opponents, just as they had in 2005 when they ejected Syrian troops from Lebanon.

Hassan’s body was not yet cold before his political allies started pointing their fingers at Syria and whipping up fury in the anti-Syrian Sunni enclaves of Lebanon. Young men spilled onto the streets with weapons brandished; some with RPGs and even combat uniforms. Clashes ensued, people died, but still their March 14 leaders did not call for calm.

In a replay of 2005 when hundreds of thousands of Lebanese rose up in the State Department-dubbed “Cedar Revolution” to oust the Syrians, March 14 groups on Sunday called for the masses to rally against Syria and its Lebanese government allies.

Except that not a single Syrian was ever charged by the international UN-backed tribunal that investigated Hariri’s death. And last week there was no evidence that Syria was implicated in Hassan’s assassination either.

But that didn’t stop the political theater at Hassan’s funeral service last Sunday when just a few thousand showed up to participate in what some hoped would be a replay of 2005.

There was no comparison whatsoever.

Instead of the sea of Lebanese flags, unifying slogans like “Freedom, Sovereignty, Independence” and the dazzling marketing and color-revolution choreography of, respectively, Saatchi & Saatchi and Serbia’s Otpor that marked the 2005 event…the scene at Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut on Sunday resembled a wake for the March 14 coalition.

There was barely a Lebanese flag to be seen. Instead, the throngs held up flags of the Future Movement headed by Hariri’s son Saad, right-wing Lebanese Forces Christian militia flags, Saudi flags, the colonial flag of the Syrian opposition and Islamist flags in black. Radical Muslims rallied alongside radical Christians, their one commonality, revulsion for the Syrian government and its allies Iran and Hezbollah.

The visible awkwardness of these March 14 alliances was impossible to ignore on Lebanese TV that day. Who failed to note the incongruity of a right-wing Christian Samir Geagea supporter standing next to a Sunni youth sporting an Al Qaeda headband? How can there be a future for a Future Movement so fundamentally at odds within itself, one wondered.

The crowds had little in common, their disparate leaders were smug, the mood was nationally divisive – little wonder then that the event ended with sticks and stones and tear gas. Not to mention a pitiful attempt to storm the Grand Serail and eject the Lebanese government headed by Hezbollah ally and billionaire Sunni, Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

Those few hours on Sunday produced the first post-bombing revelation: March 14 has nothing to offer Lebanon – they are morally bankrupt, out of ideas, yesterday’s leaders clawing for relevance as the region changes rapidly around them. Their supporters too are just treading water – this grouping exists only in opposition to something; it stands for nothing.

While the bombing had March 14 licking their opportunistic lips, it was their own western allies France, the UK and US (FUKUS) that crushed their political hopes. Without any apparent tactical coordination, FUKUS overrode March 14 publicly, and declared that PM Mikati and his government must stay.

What is surprising is March 14’s utter cluelessness about the way those winds were blowing. Not just FUKUS, but all five UN Security Council permanent members and Ban-Ki Moon’s personal representative in Lebanon weighed in on the side of Mikati’s government.

Not only was the UNSC speaking with one voice, but the speed and decisiveness of their message also undermined a key March 14-FUKUS refrain. In effect, the global powers were recognizing that the Iran and Hezbollah-backed Lebanese government was integral to guaranteeing the country’s stability at a vulnerable time. No longer could this duo claim that these regional players were acting to destabilize Lebanon.

And so another red line is bared. The three main western backers of the Syrian and Lebanese opposition have shown their limits: It is perfectly okay to sow sectarian strife in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, but not if it means destabilization on several of Israel’s borders. One conflict-struck country is manageable in the Levant, but more than that and things can spread like wildfire. Controlled chaos is fine, but certainly not concurrent with a power vacuum. A powerless Lebanese state will mean loss of control over the critical southern territories along the Israeli border and along the eastern border with Syria – both are hard limits for FUKUS.

The FUKUS states have of course realized that at this critical juncture in Syria, they need levers in neighboring Lebanon. They care not a whit about their allies being in power – a compliant government is far less valuable than one with “access.” The governing March 8 coalition is led by a weak and malleable Mikati, but importantly, he is a route to Iran, Syria and Hezbollah – which counts when regional stakes are this high.

No matter that Hezbollah has just flown a drone over FUKUS-ally Israel in an embarrassing breach of security for the Jewish state. No matter that Israel has been demanding military strikes against Iran just before a US presidential election. No matter that March 14 have been staunch FUKUS allies in both a local and regional geopolitical context against mutual foes Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.

The only thing that counts now is that FUKUS isn’t confident about the outcome in Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has outlasted all their predictions and opposition forces supported by the west are radicalizing in a direction that makes their mentors uncomfortable. If Islamist militants spin out of control in Syria, FUKUS will need to tame that chaos fast, before it spills into allied Jordan and Israel and further disrupts the Turkish and Lebanese borders.

The red lines hurriedly drawn in Lebanon last week have shown regional antagonists some new and unexpected cards. March 14’s diffuse political identity resonates little with the Lebanese, and its interests are diverging from traditional external allies. FUKUS and the UNSC views the Iran, Hezbollah and Syria-backed Lebanese government as a force for stability in the Levant. Western leaders fear loss of control in the Syrian crisis they helped fan. Iran and Hezbollah hold valuable levers for the international community.

We may never discover who killed Wissam al-Hassan, but Lebanon last week was full of revelations nonetheless.

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I haven’t posted any of my Syria media interviews on this blog – I figure most readers have heard these views from me in some form or other over the past eight months. It is worthwhile though to hear them in context of a broader discussion on Syria that includes other participants, with varying points of view.

Participants in the Voice of Russia (UK) radio discussion on Syria included Jonathan Steele, Guardian columnist, foreign correspondent and author; Nadim Shehadi, Associate fellow of the Middle East and North Africa programme for Chatham House, London; Gumer Isaev, head of the St Petersburg Centre for Modern Middle East studies – and myself.

The discussion was broad, but focused largely on recent events inside the country: armed clashes in the major cities, Syria’s chemical weapons cache, foreign intervention, the militarization of the conflict, use of information warfare to create perceptions, regime change and even whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad still enjoys popularity.

Click here to hear the full debate.

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The departure of Brigadier General Manaf Tlass from Syria continues to make headlines around the world. But amidst the fanfare, the question of whether this latest development has lasting significance is not at all clear. There are several points to consider:

First, gaining the “defection” of important members of the Sunni community and senior commanders of the Syrian Army has been a central goal of the external opposition and their foreign backers since the onset of protests in 2011. This is the Assad-must-go-no-matter-what crowd, and splitting key pro-regime communities (major cities, secular Sunnis, business elite, government officials, armed forces and minority groups) has been their only strategy to provoke regime change, outside of foreign military assistance.

Second, the regime-changers have gone to great lengths to actively promote “cracks” in these communities. This includes widespread misinformation campaigns as outlined by Stratfor last December, and through carefully calibrated unconventional warfare tactics as explained in this article. A slew of current and former regime officials/confidantes have been approached by external parties this past year to – if necessary – manufacture these fissures. One former senior government official who is known to be dissatisfied with Assad’s performance has told me personally that he was offered a specific large sum of money by the US Congress – brokered by a third nation – just to show up at a critical “Friends of Syria” opposition meeting. Gaining key defections from Syria has become that important.

Third, Brigadier General Tlass is, frankly, not that important from either a military or political perspective.

Since the news of his departure broke a few days ago, Tlass has stayed quiet. It is unlikely that he has “defected” – that would suggest he is joining the opposition, and it is doubtful that any but the most opportunistic of them would embrace a figure so closely associated with the Assad history in Syria.

But here’s a tidbit that hasn’t made the rounds yet in this well-hyped story: until very recently, Tlass was telling members of Basher al-Assad’s inner circle that he wanted the post of Minister of Defense.

“He believed he could help push forth a reform agenda, as he had envisioned with his old friend Bassel (al-Assad),” says an acquaintance of Tlass’.

A well-informed source close to the Syrian government tells me that Tlass had tested those waters last Spring before Assad announced a new cabinet in April 2011, from which he was excluded. In the early months of unrest in Syria, he had attempted to stem the crisis by mediating between the government and its opponents in various towns and cities, but had by most accounts not succeeded. Part of the problem appears to be that the Assad establishment did not put its weight behind his efforts after they faltered, choosing to pursue another strategy altogether. By August, as armed clashes and crackdowns escalated, Tlass was effectively sidelined by a regime that refused to entrust in his vision and was mistrustful of his family’s opposition credentials. He then simply stopped working, cut-off many of his ties with close friends and reigned in his legendary social life.

How does one just not go to work one day? A source explains that “Tlass’ military uniform was only 10% of his life anyway. The rest of his time was spent on running around, his social life, some business dealings. He was a privileged son of an important regime figure – that was his life and he had a sense of entitlement as did many others like him.”

But still Tlass apparently did not count himself out – he tried again for the top defense post in the lead-up to the last cabinet reshuffle, and was passed over a second time when Assad announced the new line-up on June 23.

The headlines this week that claim the “defection” of a major Syrian Army commander and a member of Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle lack a great deal of the nuance unique to Manaf Tlass’ case.

Tlass’ father, a longtime close friend and confidante of Hafez al-Assad, was Syria’s Defense Minister between 1972 and 2002, finally relinquishing his post two years after Bashar al-Assad was named president. The details of whether he was politely ejected by the incoming “younger generation” or resigned after having ensured the transfer of power to Hafez’s son remain unclear, but reports suggest that there is some truth to both.

Tlass’ family are from Rastan, in the Province of Homs, a major hub for opposition activity and armed clashes this past year. Tlass and his father have been pretty much the only hold-outs in a family that has long since abandoned the regime. His widowed, Paris-based sister Nahed Tlass who was married to Akram Ojjeh, a wealthy Saudi arms dealer 35-years her senior, and their brother Firas who runs the family business from the UAE, have been harshly critical of Assad for some time.

More notable yet is his first cousin defected Lieutenant Abdul Razak Tlass, frontman for the notorious Saudi-backed Farouq Battalion operating in Homs, which has been accused by local opposition groups of targeting their members and pro-regime civilians for extrajudicial killings, and for deliberately provoking attacks by Syrian security forces.

The media stories on Manaf Tlass focus heavily on his very senior ranking in the Syrian armed forces and his closeness to the president. While the latter is true – Tlass is a close friend of the Assads – he is not a member of the president’s innermost political/military circle and his social interests were always much closer to Assad’s now-deceased brother Bassel, once heir-apparent to their father, Hafez.

Tlass’ military value within the Syrian Army is even more dubious. Contrary to media reports, he has not been a member of the Presidential Guards for more than two years and last served with a regular brigade. Tlass apparently felt snubbed by the president for not being promoted to Major General from his current status as Brigadier General, but importantly, is viewed within the army as a token regime appointment rather than a commander capable of leading his forces.

Is Tlass’ departure significant? Certainly, it has been useful for some perception-creating headlines. But he was neither a pivotal figure within the Syrian Army nor the political establishment. His importance was rather in relation to his father’s standing within the elder Assad’s coterie, and as a member of a leading Sunni family long associated with the regime.

The fact is, after almost a year of inactivity and relative isolation, Manaf was in political no-man’s land in Syria. Scorned by people in Rastan for his continued allegiance to Assad, and marginalized by the regime in both the political and military spheres, Tlass had nothing to gain or lose by sitting tight.

“I don’t blame him. He had to make a choice,” says a Syrian who knows Tlass. “Nobody stopped him from leaving and nobody worked on him to stay,” says another, who knows the elder Tlass well.

So he went to France. End of story. But that won’t stop the spin.

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By Sharmine Narwani – The New York Times, June 25, 2012 (Unedited version)

When we look back at Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya this past year, we have to ask whether the premise of “dictator leaves, problem solved” is remotely valid.

It is a key reason why Russia has little incentive to relinquish support of its longtime ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Russian position was entirely evident during the recent Putin-Obama meeting when the question of Assad’s removal came up.

“Then what?” Putin is said to have responded.

Aside from Russia’s own strategic alliance with Syria, they have several urgent concerns. Firstly, the Russian position is firmly tied to that of the BRICs today. These four disparate economic-political powerhouses have resolved to redress a global imbalance of power and Syria has become a frontline state in this effort. The BRICs insist that Syrians should resolve their crisis with minimal intervention, which precludes forcing regime change from the outside.

Secondly, the external parties that are demanding Assad’s ouster are the same handful of NATO-GCC interventionists that brought us the Libyan catastrophe under the cloak of Responsibility To Protect (R2P) and Humanitarian Intervention narratives. The Russians deeply regret having signing on to the Security Council resolution that enabled the unraveling of Libya, and will go to great lengths to prevent the same scenario in Syria.

Thirdly, the creeping influence of Salafist oppositionists and even foreign jihadists is of concern to the Russians, who recall their own experience with these elements in Afghanistan, and worry about the potential spillover into their own Muslim communities if Syria implodes.

But while the Russians have been deliberately vague on their support for Assad himself, today they are unlikely to undermine him primarily because of the unpredictability of “what comes next.”

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton understood this reality when she said in June: “We are approached on a regular basis by representatives of different groups within Syria who are terrified of what comes next.”

So important is this question that American elder statesmen are starting to weigh in. Henry Kissinger questions whether the increasingly common practice of ousting leaders and breaching sovereignty could threaten the world order established in 1648: “In reacting to one human tragedy, we must be careful not to facilitate another.” Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that the conflict in Syria is “a difficult internal problem which has not assumed huge proportions yet” and cautions against turning this into “a global problem.”

And here’s why: Fifteen months of crisis and spin later, we have yet to see the emergence of a viable domestic or external-based Syrian opposition that offers a detailed political roadmap. Without a plausible alternative to Assad, Syria could quickly crumble into a failed state with broad spillover into the region and beyond.

The Russians are keenly touting the UN’s Annan Plan as the “only game in town.” They argue that Syria needs an urgent de-escalation in violence – under the watch of UN Monitors – followed closely by a genuine process of political reconciliation, at the end of which Syrians can decide on the fate of their president.

Recognizing the dangers of militarization and foreign intervention, Russia and the other BRICs have sought to put their arms around Syria to preserve the “homegrown solution” option. In fact, as armed conflict escalates, their motivation to help oust Assad will be further reduced, not encouraged.

Assad’s removal is not on Moscow’s mind today – the warships heading into Syrian waters make that clear. They have learned the hard way that forced regime change is not the solution – it is usually the start of something much worse. Think Libya. Think Afghanistan. Russians have learned from those lessons.

This short essay was in response to a query posed by The New York Times: “Is there a way that Russia can be persuaded to abandon Assad?” Fellow debaters include the Stimson Center’s Mona Yacoubian, Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Syrian National Council’s Radwan Ziadeh.

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