We like to think our statesmen and diplomats are
wiser than the men who blundered into the defining catastrophe of the 20th
Century – the 1914-18 war, a conflict that brought imperial powers of Germany
and Russia up against Britain and, ultimately, America. Let’s hope they are.
But anyone listening to the sharp words between the Western ambassadors and the
Russians and Chinese at the UN last week must wonder whether both sides are
blowing the Syrian issue out of all proportion.
Hillary Clinton threatens Russia and China ‘will
pay a price’ for their vetoes over sanctions against Syria. But how does Washington
intend to punish these nuclear-armed states? Tough talk requires a
follow-through, otherwise it is a sign of weakness. Tying Washington’s prestige
to who controls Damascus risks subordinating America’s interests to one faction
in a civil war. It is horribly reminiscent of how in 1914, Germany and Russia
let their policies be shackled to local allies Austria and Serbia. Now, the
plates are shifting and Washington, Moscow and Beijing risk letting Syria’s
factions draw them into a global wrestling match.
In retrospect, for all its tension the Cold War
was a cosy competition between two superpower blocs. Neither the White House
nor the Kremlin would let its allies push the other over the edge and into
nuclear suicide. They fought proxy wars such as the one in Afghanistan in the
Eighties, but GIs and the Red Army did not shoot at each other. What we have
here is potentially a more unstable situation, and one has to ask if we could
be looking at a global war once more. Empires and clashes of culture are
waiting in the wings of what is clearly no longer simply a national uprising.
Some 20 years ago, the West was the beacon of
world prosperity to people beyond the Iron Curtain. Today, our economies
stutter as China’s roars forward. Moscow can still be complementary to China
because it has the energy resources and military technology that Beijing needs.
The West’s support for humanitarian intervention in civil wars cuts no ice in
the East. Russia and China see human rights and democracy as threats to their
regimes and regard such rhetoric as a cover for grabbing resources while the
West still can. This puts East and West on a collision course. Our leaders are
talking past each other.
This distrust is made worse by the fact America’s
power is declining. Instability follows because regional players are not pawns
as they were in the Cold War, and sometimes they set the pace. In 1914, the
really big powers let their smaller allies make the running. During the Cold
War, Washington and Moscow reined in their reckless allies. Now, however, East
and West are squaring off over Syria today, and Iran probably tomorrow. Moscow
and Beijing don’t really control the Assad regime, let alone Iran’s nuclear
ambitions. Washington knows Israel will make its own decisions and has limited
influence over the Saudi-Qatar axis which is pouring money, weapons and even
special forces into Syria.
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is preparing to
subject his own people to chemical weapon attacks in revenge for the killing of
four of his closest aides, a senior military defector warned yesterday. Former
Syrian general Mustafa Sheikh, who is now in southern Turkey, claimed that
Assad wants to ‘burn’ his own country. Citing rebel intelligence sources, he
told Reuters news agency: ‘The regime has started moving its chemical stockpile
and redistributing it to prepare for its use. ‘They want to burn the country.
The regime cannot fall without perpetrating a sea of blood.’ Although Syria has
denied any intention of using chemical weapons, Western and Israeli officials
are concerned that it appears to be shifting its stocks.
The White House said last night that the US was
‘closely monitoring’ the situation and ‘actively consulting’ the country’s
neighbours amid fears the weapons could fall into the hands of Assad’s allies
in Lebanon, the militant group Hezbollah. It is thought that Assad is planning
a military retaliation for the bomb that killed four members of his inner
circle last Wednesday, including his brother-in-law, who was his defence and
intelligence chief. General Sheikh, who quit his post in Assad’s army in
January, said the next stage of the conflict would see the regime resorting to
‘unconventional weapons’. The collapse of the regime was ‘accelerating like a
snowball’, he added.
His comments came as two more Syrian generals
fled to Turkey, along with other senior military officers, bringing the total
number of generals taking refuge in the country to 24. A second day of fierce
fighting yesterday in Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, also suggested that
Assad was losing his grip on another of his bastions of support. The acute
danger is that conflagration in the Middle East can spin out of control because
neither Washington nor Moscow and Beijing are really on top of the situation.
Local allies such as Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia are making their own policy
but trying to use a superpower ally as a guarantor if things get out of hand.
With a presidential election coming in November,
Barack Obama is in a tough position. Conventional wisdom says he won’t let
America be drawn into a foreign conflict before he’s re-elected, but Mitt
Romney is breathing down his neck and accusing him of being weak in the Middle
East. Obama has the tough task of managing America’s decline. Once Washington
was the world’s banker, now it is in hock to China. China’s trade surplus not
only eats away at American industry at home but enables Beijing to play a major
role in Africa and Latin America. Americans have an ominous sense that the
balance of power, economic then military, is slipping. It could trigger
dangerously re-assertive behaviour.
Back in 1914, German leaders felt that Russia’s
growing economy and military power was looming over them. Their generals told
them that the German army could still win a war, but by 1917 the alliance of
Russia and France would be too strong. ‘Now or never,’ screamed the Kaiser, and
his army plunged into Belgium, hoping to knock out France quickly but drawing
Britain into the conflict instead. Nuclear weapons should mean that no one in
Washington, Moscow or Beijing is going to be mad enough to try to knock out a
superpower rival. But a regional crisis could provoke a miscalculation. There
are too many places where East and West are rivals beyond Syria and Iran. Let’s
not forget that China and America’s allies in the Far East, such as Japan and
the Philippines, are constantly jostling over claims to valuable energy
resources in the South China Sea. The regional players don’t have to drag the
superpowers after them. Tying the West, for instance, to one side in a
Sunni-Shiite Syrian civil war whose winner will hardly promote our values seems
naive. Equally, ultimately Russia and China have more to gain by good relations
with the West which can buy their exports than relying on unstable rogues.
But never forget in 1914, wise voices said a
Balkan squabble could never lead to a world war. After all, Britain and Germany
were each other’s major trading partners. It would be madness to commit
economic suicide on behalf of Serbs or Habsburgs. Yet once the dynamic of
conflict gripped leaders’ minds, the psychology of fear and self-assertion
trumped rational self-interest. It is vital for our leaders, East and West, to
refuse to repeat diplomatic history’s mistakes. No one can guarantee that
they won’t make new ones. But brinkmanship is not the way to secure peace now. East-West
rivalry over a nasty Middle Eastern crisis is not a return to the Cold War but
to a situation much less predictable and controllable. Only history can tell
whether our leaders are up to the challenge. If they are not, there may be
nobody left to write it.
There is a pattern of sorts to life in the Syrian
capital. Mornings tend to be quiet but by the middle of the afternoon, the
shooting invariably begins. Overhead, most days, a slow, bulky Russian
helicopter gunship circles over the dusty, concrete suburbs and, increasingly,
the city centre too. This weekend, one has been firing into the heart of
Mezzeh, a key Alawite district of Damascus where many senior military live. Alawites,
who follow a liberal branch of Islam, account for 12 per cent of Syria’s
population but have been the most politically powerful religious group for more
than 40 years. The idea that this privileged enclave would need such overt
defence would have been unthinkable until recently. Even a week ago, you could
see the rich and impregnable dining in restaurants and cafes – the Damascenes
of the regime, all silk suits, big hair and obvious gold bling, either
oblivious or impervious to a war well beyond their city.
Not any longer. Last week, Damascus was engulfed
in violence as fighting broke out between government forces and the rebel Free
Syrian Army. The suburbs of al-Midan to the south and al-Qaboun in the north
have become war zones. On Wednesday, four top security officials, including
Assad’s brother-in-law, were killed during the bombing of a government
building. More than 300 people died on Thursday alone, including about 100
soldiers. It was the biggest daily death toll across Syria in the whole of the
16-month uprising. Now, the wealthy are gone from the glitzy new arcades of the
central districts and the restaurants are shuttered, not because of Ramadan –
the Muslim month of fasting – but because staff are too frightened to travel to
work.
Residents, who have fled their
homes, gather in the centre of Damascus as rebels seized control of sections of
Syria's international borders and torched the main police headquarters in the
heart of old Damascus The traffic in this city, notorious for its diabolical
snarl-ups, is extremely quiet. Many streets are deserted and there are
roadblocks everywhere. ‘It is holiday. But normally more people. Many, many
more people,’ Ahmad tells me while setting up his watermelon stall in the
already blistering summer heat. ‘Now people stay home or they go – Lebanon,
Jordan, Turkey, all these places. My family have gone. It is the only way.’
It is not just street traders
who are packing their relatives off to safety. Many senior regime officials
talk of ‘beating the terrorists’ in public, while installing the wife and kids
with friends in Beirut in private. Some 30,000 Syrians are said to have fled to
Lebanon over the course of 48 hours last week. There are odd and unpredictable
shortages of food, which seem to come and go without warning. A note passed
under my hotel room door tells me that I should not use the steam room during
the twice-daily scheduled power cuts. The curtailment of steam-based therapy,
it says, is due to the ‘national energy crisis’. This is a new and unusual term
for what the Red Cross now calls ‘civil war’.
On my phone, a welcoming
message happily pings in every day telling me that I can call 137 for tourist
information. There are no tourists. In the district of Dariya,
permanent-looking machine-gun rests are sandbagged into the ground, and tanks
and armoured Russian-made tank-like vehicles, with a heavy-calibre gun mounted
on top, are stationed at key intersections. Where once a drive to the frontier
with Jordan would be a breeze of around 90 minutes, it can now take eight
hours, through approximately 20 military roadblocks. The Syrian guards check
everything, from the chassis of your vehicle to the serial number of your
mobile phone to your mother’s maiden name. ‘I am so sorry,’ says Captain
Mohammed, pouring us tea at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Damascus. ‘The
terrorists are everywhere now,’ he says, shaking his head. And then the
familiar mantra of the House of Assad. ‘Only President Bashar al-Assad can hold
Syria together. Only he can do it.’
A soldier walks towards our
vehicle and introduces himself as General Faisal. ‘Tell me, if your British
Government was faced with an uprising like this – would it fight so strongly?’
The men gather round and it is clear what the answer must be. ‘Of course not,’
I say, making the required fist-clench gesture. ‘The Syrian Army is very
strong.’ There is laughter as the General says goodbye, adding: ‘Give my
regards to George Galloway.’ Out along the highway connecting Damascus to the
frontier with Jordan, you notice an odd sound when you drive. It is the
familiar music of travel in a war zone – the rhythmic whine of car tyres
rolling along tarmac rutted by the tracks of tanks. The motorway south now
bears these ruts, the stigmata of civil war.
An hour’s drive north of the
capital, giant Ilyushin transport planes arrive at a vast military airport on a
daily basis. Their cargo is made up of rockets, mortars, communications
equipment and assorted armaments from Russian factories. So there is Russian
hardware on the ground and Russian gunships hovering overhead. The regime’s
command-and-control structure is still very obviously intact.
And, in a certain way, life
carries on. You can, for instance, sit in an office, discussing yet more
paperwork with officials of the regime, even as small-arms fire and mortar
rounds are traded a mile away. Over this Ramadan holiday weekend, many bazaars
and offices are functioning as normal. The ceremonial guards are still outside
the defence ministry, the fountains are still working. The message is clear. As
far as the government is concerned, it is business as usual.
It is a curious mix – the calm
of the religious holiday together with the tension of the fighting that breaks
out every day. Rebels and soldiers both plead for the same thing. ‘Please,’
they say. ‘Tell the truth of what is happening here.’ But their respective
truths are so very different. I am reminded constantly of the last thing a
customs official said to me as I left Jordan and entered Syria. ‘Be careful,
sir. Take care. In Syria, there are good people, but now, many angry people and
many different sides.’
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