Arabs & Israel feel shortchanged by ‘Great Satan’

America's Obama Obama and Iran's Rouhani (from algemeiner.com)

Led by Saudi Arabia, Arab governments are dumbstruck by Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers and the Islamic Republic’s acceptance on the global stage.

Not so Israel, which calls the deal a “mistake,” and not so the overwhelming majority of political analysts and commentators in the Arab media.

Fahmi Howeidi, dean of these Arab public opinion-shapers, concludes his think piece today for Aljazeera TV news portal with a sentence saying: “The long and short of the new balance of power in the Arab world is this: Iran tops the list of winners but there is no mention of the Arabs anywhere.”

Tariq Alhomayed, writing today for Asharq Alawsat, the Saudi newspaper of records of which he was editor-in-chief, believes “the deal with Iran is more treacherous than 9/11.”

U.S. President Barack Obama overnight defended the deal between Iran and world powers on Tehran's nuclear program.

The six-month interim deal struck in Geneva on Sunday saw Iran agree to curb some of its nuclear activities in return for sanctions relief.

The accord has been generally welcomed but Israel's prime minister called it "a historic mistake".

The West has long suspected Iran's uranium enrichment program is geared towards making a weapon, but Tehran insists it only wants nuclear energy.

The UN, U.S. and European Union had imposed a raft of sanctions on Tehran.

"Huge challenges remain, but we cannot close the door on diplomacy, and we cannot rule out peaceful solutions to the world's problems," the BBC quoted Obama as saying during an event in San Francisco.

"We cannot commit ourselves to an endless cycle of violence, and tough talk and bluster may be the easy thing to do politically, but it's not the right thing for our security."

Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced an Israeli team led by national security adviser Yossi Cohen would travel to Washington for talks on the deal.

"This accord must bring about one outcome: the dismantling of Iran's military nuclear capability," he said.

Israel has not ruled out taking military action to stop Iran developing the capability of a nuclear bomb.

Saudi Arabia -- Iran's regional counterweight -- cautiously welcomed the deal yesterday.

Under the deal which will last six months, Iran would receive some $7bn in "limited, temporary, targeted, and reversible [sanctions] relief" while a permanent agreement is sought.

Key points of the deal include:

• Iran will stop enriching uranium beyond 5% and "neutralize" its stockpile of uranium enriched beyond this point
• Iran will give greater access to inspectors including daily access at Natanz and Fordo -- two of Iran’s key nuclear sites
• There will be no further development of the Arak plant, which it is believed could produce plutonium
• In return, there will be no new nuclear-related sanctions for six months if Iran sticks by the accord
• Some sanctions will be suspended on trading in gold and precious metals, on Iran's car-making sector and its petrochemical exports
• Frozen oil sale assets will be transferred in installments, bringing in some $4.2bn of extra revenue.

Howeidi, in his piece today for Aljazeera quotes unnamed Iranian experts as telling him:

• The deal recognizes Iran as a regional nuclear power with the right to continue its uranium enrichment program for peaceful purposes
• The Iranians and Americans rushed the deal through to sidestep adverse pressure by Israel, France and some Gulf Arab lobbyists
• The Iranian-American understandings go beyond the nuclear program and the easing of economic sanctions. “The most important understanding is over Iran’s participation in the fight against terrorism in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan”
• The deal allows Iran to receive some $7 billion in sanctions relief; about $1.5 billion of the frozen assets were promptly released to Tehran “by Asian banks in South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia as early as last Sunday morning”
• Shell, which was complying with the sanctions, was the first oil major to resume work in Iran.

Howeidi sums up the most important features of the agreement between the 5+1 world powers and Iran as follows:

1. It seems a new axis is taking shape in the region comprising Iran and Russia, the two countries that played a key role in aborting an American military strike against Syria.
2. The U.S. will henceforth “rely on Iran and Turkey to keep the peace in the region now that Egypt has lost its standing in the Arab world.” Iran is on the ground in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon and to some degree in Yemen, where it is supporting the Houthis. Turkey on the other hand has its role in Syria, Iraq and the Caucasus in Central Asia. Ankara also has its strong economic ties with many Arab countries.
3. There are still question marks over a sectarian war between the Sunnis and Shiites in the Arab world, over Iran’s support of the Islamic movements in Palestine and Lebanon and over future links between Cairo and Tehran.
4. Israel is in a win-win situation. Syria’s chemical weapons are being buried and checks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions are being put in place.
5. Iran’s clout in the Gulf, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon is on the ascendancy. The Gulf, which usually banks on the U.S. is now less prone to challenge Iran. That’s particularly true of Saudi Arabia, which lost its gamble on America’s air strike on Syrian regime forces and on mobilizing Sunni forces against Tehran.
6. “The long and short of the new balance of power in the Arab world is this: Iran tops the list of winners but there is no mention of the Arabs anywhere.”

In the view of Saudi journalist Tariq Alhomayed, “fallouts of the deal on the region – specifically on Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab partners – will prove more treacherous than the consequences of the 9/11 terrorist outrage that pummeled the United States in 2001.

“I am not dramatizing. It is not so because the Obama Administration sold the region down the river or that the administration turned its back on its historic partnership with Gulfite Arabs.

Many forget that America betrayed Israel, her sacred cow in the region.

Alhomayed says Iran’s chief objective since the days of the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi was to become the “region’s policeman.”

The Islamic Republic will eventually rid itself of all economic sanctions and achieve its primary objective of creating nuclear weapons “much as India and Pakistan did under Bill Clinton, another Democratic Party president.” 

A millennium of isolation

The late theologian Yunus Khalis

By Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia’s authoritative political analyst, author and kingpin of the impending Al Arab TV news channel, writing in Arabic today for the mass circulation newspaper al-Hayat

I sat on the floor opposite the late Mawlawi Yunus Khalis, God bless his soul, in a modest abode in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

It was 1989 and I wanted to pick the Afghan theologian-cum-commander’s brains about democracy and elections.

It was the period when the Afghans and their allies in Islamabad and Riyadh were looking for the best way to seal the Afghans’ jihad with a glorious victory and a happy ending that would bring peace, harmony and prosperity to the people of Afghanistan after the Soviets’ defeat there.

Afghanistan’s political map was very simple.

It was based on power, money, arms, mobilization and special links to the region’s various intelligence services.

Since all these elements were readily available to all and sundry, each of the Afghan parties could claim the measures of supremacy and leadership.

The result was chronic discord among Afghan leaders interspersed with “plebeian” clashes and mysterious assassinations, which impeded the “happy ending” of the Afghan jihad.

Afghans lacked the culture of “elections.”

Prevailing were the old traditional tools of mass mobilization and clout on parochial, tribal, sectarian or ethnic grounds.

Once political Islam entered the scene, partisan ideology followed – until it also fragmented among the sides.

Someone suggested “elections” as a solution. The question was how? Who would oversee elections in an untested environment and a war-torn country?

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who proposed the elections, was himself a political party leader. He did not have everyone’s trust.

Being hungry for power, he did not hesitate taking “exceptional measures” – assassinations for instance – to settle his differences with others.

But there were more vital questions concerning elections and democracy, which is what I heard from Mawlawi Yunus Khalis when he criticized voting as the key instrument of democracy by saying: “How can you equate the ballot of the virtuous scholar with the ballot of the immoral evildoer?”

The question was akin to our surroundings. It belonged to a world of yore and had nothing to do with the present except for the two-wheeled Doshka heavy machinegun sitting on the roof, next to a relaxed turbaned fighter overlooking the valley.

On the valley’s opposite side, exhausted government soldiers were taking a breather from a decade-long war.

The Afghans never agreed an answer to the theologian-cum-commander’s question and did not opt for elections to settle their differences, keeping up their internecine strife until this day.

Yunus Khalis did not study at the Sorbonne or work in international organizations.

He was a religious scholar who studied at a Haqqania maddrassa (religious school), which formed most Taliban leaders.

The school offers simple and direct answers to modern-day problems revolving around two concepts of halal (lawful, based on the Quran) and haram (forbidden by Islamic law) with minimal diligence, reflection and insight.

The result was the Taliban’s failure and ceaseless conflicts in Afghanistan.

Going back to our Arab world, which is relatively more “advanced” than Afghanistan and where liberals and rights advocates have been championing democracy and human rights, we find that 30 months into what we dreamt up as the Arabs’ spring, democracy has hit rock bottom. The ruling elites are wary of it -- of its results rather -- and the marginalized forces have almost lost confidence in it.

But, as Winston Churchill once said, democracy is better than those other forms of government that have been tried. In the Arab republics, democracy is better than a military coup mounted by a “nationalist officer” keen to put his country on the right democratic path.

The “nationalist officer” will always resort to exceptional steps, having applied them in the first place -- by using force instead of the constitution -- to inaugurate his rule. Problem is exceptional steps always hinge on interest and politics. Decisions made outside the rule of law are justified as being “well-intentioned,” except that they open the door to new problems.

Moreover, the outcome of exceptional steps is neither assured nor predictable. The call for a demonstration in support of a step can produce calm, victory and empowerment. But it could also end in bloodletting that leaves an open wound in the nation and its people’s body.

Democracy could turn out the wrong president or a one-sided parliament. But democracy has inbuilt corrective mechanisms that can go as far as impeaching the president and disbanding parliament.

There’s always room for a “second chance” in a democracy. But the second chance under extraordinary measures depends on the whim of the “nationalist officer.” As an individual, the latter is apt to make right and wrong decisions and to be swayed by his entourage and circles.

The big question raised at the onset of the Arab Spring is decidedly apropos: Why did its high winds sweep the republics and caress the monarchies as a breeze?

The answer lies in the republics’ social contract, which states: “The people are the source of all powers.”

Fact is the people discovered that the “nationalist officer” is the source of all powers. The find infuriated them. They revolted at a historic moment and have yet to mollify.

Democracy takes pride of place in the social contract. But it was defaced and turned into a “décor” by regimes prior to the Arab Spring.

Today, Arab liberal and secular forces are disfiguring democracy beyond recognition after it worked in political Islam’s favor. They shelved their “revolutionary purity” and accepted to go along with rationed democracy.

Is political Islam the problem of democracy in the Arab world? Or is an authoritarian culture permeating Arab minds?

These are hypothetical questions that need not be raised or answered. Neither political Islam will disappear, nor will authoritarianism prevail again.

What is certain until further notice is that we will learn democracy the hard way – by trial and error and by bitter experiences that is.

Our masses will face off and we will test rationed democracy, exclusion and forgery pending an awakening liable to challenge all this and persist in the endeavor, assisted by the force of history.

These are the same aspiring forces that took to the streets in Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt two-and-a-half years ago despite their torment and frustrations.

Some came from political Islam, despite its tribulations and immaturity. Others came from “deep states” that refuse to give up and go away. And the rest were trying to find their way after a millennium of isolation.

Obama, president of Lebanon?

"No winner and no loser" image from www.aljazeera.net

The White House readout of U.S. President Barack Obama’s call with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia:

President Obama spoke by phone today (July 12) with King Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.

The President relayed his warm wishes to the King on the occasion of Ramadan.

The leaders reaffirmed the strong and enduring partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia and discussed regional issues of mutual interest.

The President and the King shared their perspectives on the situation in Syria and expressed their strong concerns about the impact of the conflict on the region.

The President emphasized the United States’ continued commitment to provide support to the Syrian Opposition Coalition and the Supreme Military Council to strengthen the opposition.

The President and King also exchanged views on recent developments in Egypt.

They agreed that the United States and Saudi Arabia have a shared interest in supporting Egypt’s stability.

The President expressed his serious concern about the violence in Egypt and underscored the urgent need for an inclusive political process that will enable an early return to a democratically elected civilian government in Egypt. 

The leaders pledged to continue close consultations between their two governments.

Separately, Tariq Alhomayed, the former editor-in-chief of Saudi Arabia’s leading daily Asharq Alawsat, writes today of Obama seeming like a president of Lebanon:

A watcher of the U.S. president’s approach to our regional files does not perceive Barack Obama as leader of the world’s most powerful nation, but as the president of Lebanon, where the mantra is “no winner and no loser.”

In Egypt, the Obama Administration is still at a loss whether to describe the June 30 “corrective movement” as a military coup or a response to popular demands, despite saying Mohamed Morsi’s government “wasn’t a democratic rule.”

While confirming plans to send four shiny F-16 fighter jets to Egypt’s military, the Obama Administration formally puts U.S. aid to Cairo under review. It urges the Muslim Brotherhood to renounce violence and at the same time warns the interim leadership against Brotherhood arrests.

Worse still, the Obama Administration calls for Morsi’s release just as the White House says, “We’re not taking sides in Egypt.”

Can you imagine a worse muddle?

As concerns Syria, the fumbles are greater, more serious and profound.

Obama had asked all sides to wait for his reelection campaign to end, but nothing changed thereafter.

He did zilch despite Bashar al-Assad forces killing more than 100,000 Syrians and disregarding his “game-changer” threat that moving or using chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and “change my calculus.”

When Iran and Hezbollah intervened in Syria to defend Assad, Obama remained passive.

And after he undertook to arm Syrian rebels, he failed to deliver.

His administration cites broad-based concerns the weapons could fall into wrong hands of hardline Islamists. Strangely, the administration has no such concerns about Egypt’s hardline Islamists, despite the Egyptian Army being targeted in Sinai by terrorists loyal to the Brotherhood.

The Obama Administration’s fumbling and dithering is countless.

The president’s rash exit from Iraq turned it into an Iranian springboard to attack Syrians and defend Assad through the Baghdad government and armed Shiite groups.

Also we’re now into the fallouts from the planned U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, not to mention American heedlessness to Libya.

President Obama doesn’t want to do anything anywhere, despite all the security threats, risks to U.S. political interests and the violations of laws and principles such as in Syria.

The Obama Administration has also disconcerted other regions. European countries are demanding that Washington immediately stop its eavesdropping on European Union officials and diplomats.

There too, Obama is trying to circumvent the issue à la Libanaise – “no winner and no loser.”

Obama has the earmarks of a president of Lebanon, instead of the president of the most powerful nation on earth.

Syria as Iran’s Afghanistan quagmire

An Afghani war carpet

“In early 2012, a few months after the outbreak of the militarized Syrian revolution,” Jordanian-Palestinian political analyst Yasser Zaatra says in a think piece for Aljazeera portal, “I wrote about Afghanistan becoming the template for Syria.

“I think time proved me right. But I hope the Syria war won’t last as long as Afghanistan’s.”

Zaatra continues:

Syria-watcher Robert Fisk, who has been Middle East correspondent of The Independent for 30 years, wrote lately about the Syrian government army’s recent advances and expansion of territory. He wrote, “This war – beware – may last another two, three or more years. Nobody will win.”

This sort of pessimism could be meant to promote a political solution, given that Fisk is not exactly a fan of the revolution. On the contrary, his travels to Syria are by special arrangements with the regime and he is usually embedded with its military units.

Obviously, historical experiences, including revolutions, are never cloned. But parallels and close similarities always exist – not only in details and the course of events, but in the outcome at times.

The first analogy in the Afghanistan-Syria case is that Iran’s entanglement in Syria mirrors the Soviet Union’s embroilment in Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union was defending its international status after a protracted cold war with the United States and the West, which had earned it superpower status in a bipolar world.

The Soviet Union felt its defeat in Afghanistan would wear down that status.

The outcome proved much worse than expected, having ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union altogether.

Iran is in Syria defending her aggrandizement project, which cost her an arm and a leg to get off the ground.

She feels losing Syria would cripple the project and force her back to her former status – a nation-state confined to her borders and a regional power comparable to Turkey.

The Soviet Union thought it was defending a major design, deeming the implications of losing the battle won’t be short-lived but the commencement of sequential retreats.

Iran is in the same frame of mind. Otherwise, Iranian leaders wouldn’t be saying defending Damascus is like defending Tehran.

Tehran is not under threat so long as she remains open to dialogue. What’s under time pressure is the aggrandizement venture she has been fostering for the past 30 years.

For the Soviet Union, the rallying call for the Afghan war was communism. It was the time when the Islamic revival was in its early stages, had no issues with the West and felt threatened by the atheist communist tide.

Like the communist threat of former times, the threat of Shiism raised by Iran picking up the wrong end of the stick in Syria, made hackles rise in Arab popular and Islamic circles.

They feel non-Arab Iran has exceeded her territorial bounds and her expansionist and hegemony plans must be restrained.

To be more precise, hostility towards Iran today goes deeper than resentment of the Soviet Union during its Afghan war – perhaps for Arab proximity and emotional reasons.

Another conceivable reason is the role of the social media in relaying news and exposing Syrian regime crimes.

Much as the majority of Arabs resented the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the past, they now believe Iran has taken over Syria after it had swallowed up Iraq and empowered its cat’s-paw Hezbollah to rule Lebanon.

True, Russia is also playing dirty in Syria – supplying arms to the regime and deploying Russian advisors to oversee military operations.

But Iran and Hezbollah dwarf Russia’s involvement in Syria.

Iran, with Hezbollah in tow, is directly in command of the Syria war, which Tehran is funding fully.

With time, Iran will sink deeper and deeper in the Syria swamp. Unlike Russia, which shells out nothing, she will have to dish out more and more cash as her economy declines because of Western sanctions that are biting deeper than ever.

Had Iran not coughed up some $20 billion to date to shore up the Damascus government, the Syrian regime would have collapsed already.

Where fighters are concerned, there is a good flow of mujahedeen streaming into Syria – exactly as in Afghanistan’s case.

In both instances though the total of native fighters is overwhelming.

The number of rebel groups in Afghanistan was high as well, except that the Arab mujahedeen there did not have a political agenda beyond giving the Afghans a helping hand.

Some mujahedeen in Syria are likely to chew over a particular agenda, but they will find few takers -- unless they are Syrian themselves, not foreign.

Moreover, most of the mujahedeen in Syria are Arab nationals versed in Syrian society. They hail from one nation and share the same ethnicity and language, let alone a common religion.

Much like Pakistan was the mujahedeen’s route to the Afghan war in the 1980s, Turkey is their route today to Syria.

The identities of the mujahedeen’s backers haven’t changed – save for one key distinction. Whereas in the case of Afghanistan the United States and the West had an interest in confronting the Soviet Union, they now have nothing to protect in Syria other than Israel’s safety and wellbeing. This encapsulates America and the West’s stance on the Syria war.

There were ethnic and sectarian differences in Afghanistan: Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara Shiites. All had external offshoots.

There is a comparable ethnic and sectarian diversity in Syria, each with external links too: Shiites with those in Lebanon and Iraq; Kurds with those in Iraq and Turkey; Alawites with those in Turkey; Christians with those in Lebanon; and Sunnis with those throughout the region.

If Shiite Iran has adjunct Shiite minorities in more than one Arab country, the Soviet Union had political add-ons in the form of communist and socialist forces in more than one Arab country as well.

In other words, Iran in Syria emulates the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

The lack of political foresight turned the Afghan stopover into an attrition war that eventually broke up a major empire.

Ditto for Iran in Syria.

Syria: “When doing nothing is a policy”

Of all the transcripts, news and views on Syria I could assess this morning – and they were many – I fancied this opinion by the brilliant Richard Cohen, who writes a weekly political column for the Washington Post that appears on Tuesdays. This week’s is titled “When doing nothing is a policy”.

By Richard Cohen

In the movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” the attempt to unite the Arabs comes apart in Damascus. Lawrence bangs on his desk with the butt of his gun to bring the assembly to order, but to no avail. Chaos erupts. Now something similar is happening in Syria. A mountain of dead (70,000 or so), not to mention an approaching regional bloodbath, suggests that once again things are coming apart. Still, life does not exactly imitate art. Lawrence of Arabia at least tried to do something. Barack of D.C. just sat on his hands.

Actually, he sat on his polling numbers. The president’s refusal to do anything material to end the Syrian civil war is a policy long suspected of having two elements — fear of blowback and fear of the nightly news. Now comes a book from a one-time administration insider who bluntly and altogether convincingly outlines the role domestic political considerations played in the White House’s approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goal of policymakers was “not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion.” Syria, it seems, has been no exception.

The former insider is the resplendently credentialed Vali Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and, most pertinently, former senior adviser to the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In that capacity, Nasr says he saw the almost daily humbling of Holbrooke, a volcano of a diplomat who was forever erupting ideas, plans and strategies — almost always to no avail. In his telling, the White House was some sort of high school cafeteria where Holbrooke was always being shunned and given the silent treatment. He blames “a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers whose turf was strictly politics” for this. Mean Girls, not the Wise Men, made American policy.

Nasr set down his views in a book called “The Dispensable Nation.” It will be published in April, but samizdat copies of it are already being circulated. In a sense, the book only confirms the general impression that Obama is a man without a foreign policy. He had naive aspirations — a world to be changed by the transformative power of a good speech — but no clear path to achieve anything. Nasr describes his dismay when the surge in Afghanistan was announced in tandem with a pullout date. In his head, Secretary of State John Kerry, the new implementer of Obama’s contradictory policy, must now hear a reprise of the question he once asked about his own war: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?”

Nasr’s regional specialty was Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the thrust of what he says supports the view that Obama shied from intervening in Syria out of domestic political considerations. A president who was campaigning as the peace candidate — out of Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan, too — could not risk anything bold in Syria. The country fell into the margin of error. “It is not going too far to say that American foreign policy has become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations,” Nasr writes.

Boldness is what the situation in Syria demanded. A civil war that could have been contained has instead become a sprawling, regionwide bar fight. Arms could have been shipped to the insurgents; a no-fly zone could have been imposed. Much could have been done. Instead, Obama merely called for Bashar al-Assad to go and, for some reason he, like Rep. Eric Cantor or somebody, remains immovable.

The stakes here are enormous. Lebanon teeters, swamped with refugees. Jordan, too, is overwhelmed. The Kurds in Syria’s north may, as they have in nearby Iraq, establish an autonomous zone — and Turkey will not be pleased. The jihadists are on the move, hungry for Syria’s vast store of chemical weapons. Israel watches, nervously. What if Hezbollah gets its hands on chemical weapons? An Obama administration, afraid of blowback, may well have allowed the Middle East to blow apart.

The battle for Damascus is now engaged. The war next month enters its third year, a humanitarian crisis that has been permitted to fester under the rubric of foreign policy realism. But another realism is now apparent: Inaction has bred the manufacture of orphans — a carnage, a horror, a reprimand to inaction. Life imitates art. Damascus is where it all came apart in “Lawrence of Arabia.” Damascus is where it is coming apart in reality.

Afghan ills in the Syrian revolution

By Jamal Khashoggi

The author is a leading Saudi media figure who served as media aide to Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud while he was ambassador to the United Kingdom and to the United States. He was named by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud to head his upcoming AlArab TV news channel. Khashoggi wrote this think piece in Arabic for today’s edition of pan-Arab al-Hayat.

By Syrian artist Wissam Al Jazairy

Gloom regarding the Syria crisis is justified. Preparing for the worse is also warranted.

When international troubleshooter for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi chooses to forsake his main peacemaking task to visit refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, it means he has no idea what to do.

He wants to seem active until God wills the predestined.

Likewise, when Saudi Arabia stays away from the foreign ministers’ meeting of the regional quartet (composed of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran) that was proposed by Egypt to solve the Syria crisis, it means the kingdom has lost hope.

If the quartet’s objective is to change Iran’s stance, chances of this happening are nil.

Iran is in Bashar’s boat, even at the price of sinking with him.

If the quartet’s purpose is to find a solution to the Syria crisis, how can Iran deliver a humdinger that escaped the 100-nation Friends of Syria, the Arab League and the United Nations?

The mere existence of this quartet is cause for pessimism.

The Egyptians and Turks now know the quartet is doomed, not because Saudi Arabia opted out but because of Iran’s shenanigans.

For instance, the commander-in-chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said members of his elite force are in Syria to provide non-military assistance. He also said Iran won’t intervene militarily in Syria to help the regime.

An official Iranian spokesperson later denied the remarks, saying Tehran would not allow the so-called “axis of resistance” – of which Syria is an essential pillar – to fall.

Basically, you don’t know what the Iranians are denying or confirming.

They insolently announced in Cairo a Syria ceasefire. They made it conditional on cutting off assistance to the opposition and launching a dialogue leading to “reform and consolidation of democracy” in Syria.

So long as we are unto a long-lasting battle, it is worthwhile to draw some parallels between the situation in Syria and the Afghan jihad.

The situation in Syria and the Afghan jihad are becoming ever more comparable by the day.

The Syrians hate such a comparison for obvious reasons.

They dread the “Afghanization” of their country and their struggle.

Counting the 10 years of Afghan jihad against the Soviet occupation, another two years of fighting against the Kabul government left in place by the Soviets and the subsequent years of civil war until this day, you arrive at a total of 33 years of hardships.

The Syrian revolution is only one-and-a-half years old and there seems little hope of it ending soon.

Conflicts among militias can last years. We had a precedent in Lebanon.

We see the Free Syrian Army gaining control of the Salahuddin neighborhood in Aleppo, then losing it, then recapturing it.

That’s how militia wars go.

At the same time, the weight of militia numbers alarms backers, making them deny the militias indispensable weapons.  

For instance, the militias need man-portable air-defense systems or MANPADS to challenge the regime’s air power, which is killing far more civilians than rebels.

U.S. fears of weapons falling into the wrong hands, for instance, hampered delivery to the rebels of some 100 MANPADS contributed by Gulf countries.

The Americans want to see specific controls in place before the weapons get forwarded to the insurgents.

But putting such controls in place is impossible in a country where security has totally collapsed, which is the trademark of all armed revolutions.

Strategists turn naïve or dreamers on occasion. They overlook the merit of past experience. A look at their old files would show the Afghan jihad tribulations that are now manifest in Syria:

### Every attempt to unify the rebels will give rise to a new organization. Some members of the old Free Syrian Army would refuse to integrate with the new Syrian National Army, consequently undermining both organizations and their respective brigades. International backers would then be at a loss as to which of the two is a safe bet.

### Unlike the French, the Syrians can’t agree on a Charles de Gaulle. They are more like the Afghans if not worse. They all think they are leaders.

### Information from inside Syria is consistently contradictor and mostly exaggerated, especially on matters of money and the apportionment of arms.

### A media savvy group is not necessarily the more active on the ground. A group with more video footage on You Tube does not mean it is the strongest.

### Middlemen claiming to know the playing field well do know their contacts thoroughly. But they are totally ignorant of the rest. As a result, they would channel assistance to their contacts, bypassing those they don’t know. The donor country using the middleman is immediately accused of bias and of dividing rebel ranks, if not of conspiring against the revolution.

### The revolution is for honorable men and women and freedom lovers. But it is also an arena for opportunists, dealers, turncoats and even criminals.

### The idea of unifying rebel ranks inside Syria, though overly utopian, should be pursued, since opening a door halfway is better than keeping it shut. At a minimum, coordination would suffice and is achievable thanks to the (non-lethal) equipment (such as encrypted radios and satellite imagery) provided by the Americans and the French. The difficulty in unifying the rebels lies in their variegated provenance. Army defectors come from diverse units at various times. Civilians come from all walks of life and include students, laborers and farmers. Some are religious, others not. Some are politicized, others are not interested in politics, their sole aim being to get rid of the regime. It will always be difficult to group everyone under a single command and control center.

### Don’t believe whoever says the Muslim Brotherhood is the largest faction inside Syria. Don’t believe either whoever says the opposite. The Brotherhood’s political weight can only be known after free and transparent elections are held in Syria. But no state should withhold assistance to the Syrian revolution pending an answer to this $64,000 question.

### “One Address” (with which to coordinate with the Syrian revolution) won’t attract cash and assistance to all sides. Previous experience shows that creation of “One Address” is impossible.

The Syrian revolution has succeeded so far in shutting out al-Qaeda. Even the hard line Salafist groups funded by non-government Gulfites refused to be lured into expressing empathy for al-Qaeda.

At the same time, prolongation of the crisis is exasperating Syrians, as evidenced by their pelting of Brahimi’s motorcade with stones during his visit to a Syrian refugee camp.

After mulling over the regime’s brutality and the free world’s indifference, the Syrian people have come to equate diplomacy with procrastination.

The Syrian people are increasingly convinced that the world has let them down.

Their anger and the aforementioned Afghan ills could open the door to the sort of extremism that outside intelligence and military agencies are trying to forestall.

But their quest has made them reluctant to take action and supply weapons that would settle the battle. In a way, they are shunning something they created by their own hesitation and deferment.