When Syria’s WMD facts clash with U.S. policy

“The U.S.-led international community is looking for ways to coexist with the common usage of chemical weapons in Syria. It does not want to face facts and punish the user of chemicals, which are banned genocide weapons after all.”

Also, Lebanese author and political analyst Abdelwahhab Badrakhan writes today in his weekly column for pan-Arab al-Hayat, can anyone recall any international outcry against the shelling of civilian areas with ballistic missiles, such as Scuds, which are classified as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)?

“Of course not -- the world powers gulped down the missiles and are allowing them as a matter of routine.

“You had an American president who fabricated lies about WMDs to invade Iraq. His successor is now belying facts about them to avoid protecting a populace against the barbarity of its regime.”

Badrakhan continues:

When Barack Obama said the use of chemical weapons was a “red line,” he was paving the way for legitimate international intervention, unlike the intervention by Iran and Hezbollah. His ceaseless dithering since will likely squander the inferred legitimacy.

“You also have a stone-deaf Russian president who decided to recoup the glories of a now-defunct superpower at the expense of Syrian corpses. Having grown up despising his people, he does not give a hoot about other peoples and their aspirations. He remains a longtime ally of a ruler duplicating, if not surpassing, his abuses in Chechnya.

“Both Russia and China perceive the Syrian regime as fighting a proxy war on their behalf to show that defeating the people’s will is possible and to prove that rulers are more durable because they have the muscle.”

When he talked his fill on the Syria war to a deputation of Lebanese loyalists on April 21, Assad said, “Russia considers the battle to defend Damascus as a battle to defend the status and interests of Moscow.” He also said, “Americans in the end go along with the winner” – meaning him.

But Assad is not the winner of the Syria war as yet. It’s a war he can’t possibly win, even if he confined it to Damascus, which he is trying to do by surrounding it with a ring of fire.

Assad is meantime pressing the Russians and Iranians to help him tip the military balance in his favor in the countdown to the Obama-Putin meeting on the sidelines of the G8 summit in Northern Ireland in June.

He already told his visiting group of Lebanese loyalists, “We need to impose our rhythm on the summit instead of vice versa. Each of the two presidents will be looking at the facts on the ground in Syria to determine what he does.”

What Assad knows all too well, but did not spell out, is that the arming of opposition forces and the Free Syrian Army has been retrogressing since at least mid-April, presumably because of Jabhat al-Nusra.

Putin and Assad are hedging their bets on the outcome of the battle for Damascus and on Obama remaining “pragmatic” and acknowledging the regime’s strength and steadfastness.

In this case, the U.S. president would choose either (1) to throw his weight behind opposition forces to even the power balance, or (2) to go along with a political solution under regime auspices.

If Obama were to choose the second option, Washington won’t be able to impose it on either the offshore Syrian Opposition Coalition or its onshore counterpart.

Neither can go along with a political solution that repackages the regime without its war crimes, without its crimes against humanity, without its displacement of its people and its destruction of their homes, and without its dabbling with genocide policies.

Even if America cowed both the offshore and onshore oppositions by giving them the hard sell, they cannot deliver the fighters on the ground.

The armed insurgents’ sacrifices were not meant to win them ministerial portfolios and the grace of becoming regime partners.  

Delving into the Muslim’s mind ahead of the next terror wave

File pictures of Homs  (top) and Grozny (below)

This think piece by Jamal Khashoggi -- Saudi Arabia’s analyst, author and kingpin of the impending Al Arab TV news channel -- appears in Arabic in his weekly column for al-Hayat daily

Investigators crowding around Dzhohkar Tsarnaev, the second Boston bombings suspect, would wish to probe his mind.

But they find it hard to question him by the book, as he lies critically wounded in hospital.

They would be looking for an answer to the question puzzling them most. How, they wonder, did an immigrant Muslim teenager fully integrated in American society, who – in the words of one of his friends – “became like anyone of us Americans” and who (as he wrote on one of his social media pages) loved life and money, turn into a terrorist killer of innocents?

Amateur terrorists, who are not affiliated to any organization and who self-recruit through the Internet, are the security analyst’s nightmare.

The analyst is unable to find leads to track them down and expose them before they commit their crimes.

Two such cases came to light last week in Canada and France. In both instances, two young men mirrored the case of the two Tsarnaev brothers suspected of the Boston marathon bombings.

The phenomenon, best described as “the case of the two Tsarnaev brothers,” might trigger a new wave of Islamophobia.

Surely, someone must now be asking on rightwing American TV channels or printed media pages, “How can I make sure my Muslim neighbor, who seems gentlemanly, amiable and no less American than anyone of us, won’t suddenly turn out to be a terrorist?”

Though it sounds awkward to Muslim and Arab ears, the question is justified.

It reminds me of the words of my friend Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, head of Alarabiya News Channel.

Rashed came in for a lot of flak when he coined his famed phrase, “Not all Muslims are terrorists; sadly though, most terrorists in the world are Muslim.”

To help investigators striving to probe the mind of Dzhohkar Tsarnaev, let me map for them information from the brain waves of an angry Muslim.

I am already aware that an American or Western politician would automatically dismiss as “justification for terrorism” any attempt to dwell on reasons for a Muslim’s wrath.

The politician realizes that discussing anger motives inevitably leads to revisiting old files that better remain closed and the apportionment of blame.

Oblivious of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key role in the Chechnya massacres, some congressmen are urging greater security cooperation between Washington and Moscow instead of setting up a congressional fact-finding panel, for example.

As world politicians are transfixed by global counter-terrorism cooperation, they would do well to brace themselves for the next wave of “Islamic” terror.

I anticipate such a wave by virtue of a “pattern” set by its antecedents.

The first wave in the mid-nineties was a reaction to the incidents in Bosnia and Algeria.

The next wave, in the early years of the second millennium, revolved around Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya.

The third wave will surge as a sequel to the massacres in Syria, now the fountainhead of Muslim ire.

The ire is fed by incessant images of injustice, desecration and abuses.

Angry Muslim youths are exposed to a daily flood of video clips showing Syrian regime forces torturing to death and killing civilians or cutting their victims’ limbs.

TV news channels bar such images, but they are for show on YouTube, when their rightful place should be the International Criminal Court instead of the social media platforms.

Contrasting the revolting clips from Syria are those emerging from Burma. They show opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi receiving her Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and Burmese gloating over newfound freedoms. But they recount little about the abhorrent persecution, hate, killing, burning and rape of Muslims in Myanmar.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzhohkar might have watched such video clips, which could have reignited their indignation as ethnic Chechens.

They must have also seen loads of images showing the suffering of their countrymen and co-religionists. They could have come across images of Russian soldiers laughing as their officer uses a small Swiss knife to bleed a Chechen fighter to death.

Here again, the place for such images should be the International Criminal Court, though no Chechnya referrals as yet.

What Bashar al-Assad is now doing in Syria is what Putin did in Chechnya before. Pictures don’t lie. They show Syrian cities biting the dust, much like Grozny.

Today’s irate Muslim mind sees that the guardian angel of Assad and his regime is the same man who pulverized Grozny and killed more than 100,000 Chechens.

The irate Muslim mind pays no heed to things like the international situation or the balance of interests.

It’s an incensed mind turning thoughtless.

Had the Tsarnaev brothers been thinking straight, they would not have targeted the marathon in Boston, the compassionate city that embraced them.

The aftereffects of film recordings on the fuming Muslim mind are massive. They magnify in the Muslim’s mindset:

• A sense of injustice
• The feeling of belonging to a targeted minority
• Suspicions that Americans are supporting Assad on the quiet and remain closemouthed on Putin’s crime and the Burmese opposition leader’s hypocrisy, and
• A belief that Muslims have been on the receiving end of the nastiest crimes in the previous century and to date -- the two exceptions being the Jews’ suffering at the hands of the Nazis and the Armenians’ suffering at the Ottomans’ hands. But whereas Jews and Armenians received global apologies and reparations, there was nothing of the kind for Muslims.

In context, no one should underestimate the hurt the Palestinian Nakba etched on the Muslim Arab memory. No population was uprooted from its native land such as the Palestinian population. Yet no one is prepared to offer Palestinians an apology. And who would even dare launch a museum in New York commemorating the Nakba?

Also, who would dare call for an official Russian apology to the 1.5 million Chechens evicted from their homes and forcibly dispersed across the former Soviet Union, where tens of thousands of them succumbed to disease and starvation?

When Chechen survivors revolted in their quest for independence, they were met by Russia’s fire and brimstone as the world looked away.

One can imagine how stories of the horrors and crimes committed in Chechnya dulled the rationale of an angry Muslim’s mind, turning a civil young man into a dangerous terrorist.

Some will read into my think piece a justification for terrorism. It is not.

No one can justify terrorism. But the only way to eradicate it is to address its causes.

Someone needs to have the courage to stand up and tell the West in the face: Your double standards are causing the rage breeding terror.

Syria bishops’ kidnap linked to Boston Chechens?

Bishops Paul Yazigi (left) and Yohanna Ibrahim

Syria’s state-run media say armed rebels in the northern province of Aleppo kidnapped two prominent Syrian bishops on Monday.

SANA news agency said the Syriac Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Archbishops of Aleppo, Yohanna Ibrahim and Paul Yazigi, were seized by "a terrorist group" in the village of Kfar Dael as they were “carrying out humanitarian work.”

Activists blame regime militias for the kidnapping.

The independent Beirut daily an-Nahar today says Ibrahim had gone in his chauffeur-driven car to collect Yazigi from the rebel-held Bab al-Hawa crossing with Turkey.

The two bishops were being driven to Aleppo when they were abducted.

“The kidnappers killed the driver, who is Chechen…

“Preliminary reports last night suggested the armed men who killed the driver were Chechens themselves. There were whispers linking the incident to the stateside Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent killing of a Chechen suspect and the arrest of his wounded brother.”

The newspaper pointed to a newswire dispatch claiming the “Noureddin Zanki Brigade,” which is active in Aleppo’s western rural areas, comprises Chechen fighters.

George Sabra, a Christian who has now replaced Moaz el-Khatib as leader of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, is reportedly working to secure the bishops’ release after receiving a telephone call from Greek foreign minister Dimitris Avramopoulos.

Interestingly, Weasel Zipper wrote earlier this week:

The revelation that the main suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings were two Russian citizens of half-Chechen, half-Avar (Dagestani) ethnicity has prompted Kremlin leaders to dust off a longstanding argument that the U.S. should listen to Moscow’s warnings about extreme Islamist terrorists, whether they hail from Chechnya, or Syria, or anywhere else.

The Russians say the US should turn away from its current path of criticizing Russia on human rights issues and embrace greater anti-terrorist cooperation in the name of common civilizational values.

President Vladimir Putin made that pitch explicitly in a Saturday telephone conversation with Barack Obama. A brief statement posted on the Kremlin website noted, “Both sides emphasized their interest in increasing coordination between Russian and American intelligence services in the fight against international terrorism.”

“I would like to remind you that since the early 2000s, when there was a war going on in the northern Caucasus, Putin has said more than once that there can’t be domestic and foreign terrorists, and you can’t flirt with them,” Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told journalists Saturday. “They can’t be differentiated. You can’t deal with some of them, and not others. They all equally deserve non-acceptance.”

This brings to mind Putin’s response to criticism from a French journalist about the war in Chechnya at the Russia-EU summit Brussels in 2002. It went like this:

FRENCH JOURNALIST:  ...Don't you think that by trying to eradicate terrorism in Chechnya you are going to eradicate the civilian population of Chechnya?

VLADIMIR PUTIN: If you want to become an Islamic fundamentalist and be circumcised, come to Moscow. We are multi-confessional. We have very good specialists. I can recommend one of them for the operation. He'll make sure nothing grows back.

Editorially, Tariq Alhomayed, writing today for the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, is mystified by the international community’s prejudice in typecasting terrorist groups:

I am puzzled by the chicanery of the international community when it condemns Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, forcing everybody else to outlaw it, but stays tight-lipped watching Hezbollah fight alongside Bashar al-Assad’s forces, specifically in Qusayr.

I say “chicanery” because Jabhat al-Nusra is less, not more, dangerous than “Jabhat Hassan Nasrallah,” which is defending the region’s most criminal regime for sectarian reasons.

Whoever wants to shut out Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaeda from Syria has to shut out “Jabhat Hassan Nasrallah” first.

What the West fails to perceive is that Jabhat al-Nusra is the symptom of a disease. The disease proper, which is being disseminated by Assad and Iran, is called “Jabhat Hassan Nasrallah.”

The West is also refusing to recognize that withholding help to the Syrian rebels to rein in Hezbollah will make Afghanistan of the 1980s and its aftermath look like a promenade compared to the sectarian bloodbath brewing in Syria.

It’s all sectarian doom and gloom in today’s Lebanese press as well.

Ibrahim al-Amin, co-founder and editor-in-chief of al-Akhbar, which speaks for the Assad-Hezbollah-Iran triumvirate, raises the “specter of a comprehensive war”:

Of course, Hezbollah’s participation in the Syria war does not sit well with a good number of Resistance partisans in Lebanon and the Arab world.

It is incumbent on Hezbollah leaders to come up with convincing explanations and justifications.

To its mind, however, Hezbollah views the Syria crisis as a run-up to a blitz on the Axis of Resistance stretching from Iran to Palestine via Iraq and Lebanon.

Persistence of the incitement against Hezbollah -- by Lebanese sides allegedly wanting to defend the Syrian insurgency or by a Saudi-sponsored move to set up a fait accompli Lebanese government – means we’re heading to a showdown. Hezbollah will be driven to fend for itself on three fronts: internal, Syrian and Israeli.

All this would translate into an all-out war, which is already in the making.

Political analyst Rosanna Boumounsef, writing for al-Nahar, says most political circles in Lebanon are worried:

Hezbollah has put the premier-designate, the president of the Republic and the whole of Lebanon before a fait accompli they cannot come to terms with – in that it killed and buried the official policy of dissociation from the Syria crisis.

This effectively means that the flames of the Syria war have spread and Lebanon has been thrust into the broader regional inferno.

From Tehran to Grozny to Damascus

I was disheartened to read what a Syrian activist wrote today in Arabic on his Twitter page, which translates as:

“Don’t read a word of the Arabs’ scripts. Their warfare is hearsay. Their sword is timber-made. Their love is betrayal. And their pledge is a lie.”

But reading shortly after an overnight Agence France Presse (AFP) dispatch filed by Dominique Soguel from Aleppo soothed my heartache.

The dispatch, which is very widely quoted today in the regional media, reads:

ALEPPO, Syria — Veteran war surgeon Jacques Bérès has his own compelling reasons for urging that a no-fly zone be imposed over Syria -- one bomb dropped by the regime leaves more wounded than doctors can fix in a day.

Working under cover in the northern city of Aleppo, which has been pounded for weeks as President Bashar al-Assad’s forces seek to overrun rebel bastions, Bérès insists the death toll in the Syrian conflict is higher than what is reported.

“At least 50,000 people have been killed without counting the disappeared,” Bérès, a French surgeon who daily patches up dozens of people in a hospital near the frontlines of Aleppo, told AFP in an interview.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists on the ground across Syria, has given a latest toll of at least 26,283 people killed in Syria since the revolt began in March last year -- 18,695 civilians, 1,079 defectors and 6,509 troops.

But Bérès said watchdogs such as the Britain-based Observatory are unable to paint a full picture of the losses because many deaths are documented “only with ink and paper.”

“I am sure that the dead that I have here are not tallied in London,” said Bérès.

In the past two weeks, he said, he has treated a daily average of 20 to 45 wounded people, the majority of them fighters with the opposition Free Syria Army, including “quite a few jihadists.”

Fatalities in rebel ranks range between two and six each day, he said.

But those are just the figures collected in one small hospital within a massive commercial city, which is now almost evenly divided between rebel and army-controlled areas.

Many grey zones lie between both camps and the security situation remains fluid: shops open and pedestrian traffic has resumed in some neighborhoods while tank shells and mortar hit others.

“It is shameful that a no-fly zone hasn’t been set up,” said the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, setting aside a cup of tea to review X-rays and offer a Syrian colleague advice on how best to dislodge a bullet from a man's leg.

“It is an incredible massacre. Even if now it is a civil war, it is a very asymmetric conflict: light weapons against tanks and aerial bombardment,” said Bérès, whose experience on the field covers almost every major war from Vietnam in the sixties to Libya last year.

“All this because they asked for a little bit of freedom and said that they had enough of Bashar.”

This is the third humanitarian mission that Bérès has undertaken to Syria this year, backed variously by organizations such as France Syrie Democracie, UAM93, Doctors Without Borders, and AAVS (Association d'Aide aux Victimes en Syrie).

He was in the central city of Homs in February when the neighborhood of Baba Amr was decimated by Assad forces.

In May he roamed around Idlib province where he says pro-regime soldiers destroyed pharmacies and burned a clinic down to the ground.

Bérès, in his seventies, has been smuggling himself into the country at great risk, armed only with the firm belief that he has a “humanitarian duty to heal” even though “in one second a bomb leaves more people wounded than a surgeon can fix in a day.”

Compare the above with:

(1) The futile attempts made last February by a group of Jordanian, Egyptian, Tunisian and Gulf Arab physicians affiliated with the Arab Doctors Union to enter Syria. They gathered at Jordan's northern border with Syria, demanding that they either be allowed inside to treat Syrians wounded or that those injured be permitted to seek medical care outside the country. Damascus turned down their request three times on both counts.

(2) The shocking remark made by Assad last June, when he compared his security forces to surgeons working to save the life of their patients. Speaking before his newly selected parliament, he said: “When a surgeon ... cuts and cleans and amputates, and the wound bleeds, do we say to him your hands are stained with blood? Or do we thank him for saving the patient?”

Separately, prominent Lebanese novelist playwright, critic and public intellectual Elias Khoury comments today on what he describes as the journey “From Tehran to Grozny to Damascus.”

Writing for the London-based pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi, Khoury says the Assad regime’s crackdown on the Syrian opposition “has gone through two stages: the Iranian phase stretching from the onset of the uprising in March 2011 to the blitzing of Baba Amr in March 2012, followed by the second phase that I would call the Chechen phase.”

Khoury continues:

In the first phase, the Assad regime sought to implement the plan Tehran used to stifle the 2009-2010 Green Revolution that erupted in Iran after the so-called “re-election” of Mahmud Ahmadinejad as president.

The Iranian template proved inapplicable in Syria because it was unrelated to Syrian reality.

The Green Revolution had its roots in the major cities, chiefly Tehran. It failed to take off in the rural areas. The latter remained loyal to the concept of Wilayat al Faqih advanced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Moreover, the political legitimacy of the Iranian command derived from its doctrinal and religious legitimacy as enunciated by Khomeini.

The Syrian Revolution in contrast broke out first in cities a long way from the country’s political capital Damascus and its economic heart Aleppo.

Brutal repression of protests in the rural cities incited the Syrian countryside to join the revolution. Suppression of the insurgency by the classical measures used in Iran proved unworkable.

The failed attempt simply triggered defections from army ranks, the rise of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the public’s recourse to arms. Instead of their revolt being stifled, Syria’s rural areas inflamed the insurgency in the two centers of political and economic gravity, Damascus and Aleppo.

This is not to mention also that the Syrian regime draws neither social nor political nor religious legitimacy.

When the Iranian template proved ill suited, the Syrian regime fell back on another mold for its second phase of repression: the Chechnya template featuring the destruction of Grozny.

The Chechnya-Grozny blueprint is the brainchild of “Russian mini tsar Vladimir Putin.” It allowed the Russian Federation to use the massive firepower of its artillery, tanks and warplanes to systematically obliterate Grozny.

The Assad regime’s recourse to the Chechnya model is shortsighted:

1. Because Chechnya has a population of about one million and forms part of the Russian Federation, which surrounds it on all sides. It sought to break away from Russia and become independent. This is nothing like the Syrian Revolution, which is a revolution by a majority of citizens against a tyrant, instead of foreign rule.
2. Because the “mini Tsar sitting in Moscow fought his war against a weak and dispossessed ethnic minority under the banner of protecting Russia. But the “mini Mamlouk” sitting in Damascus is not fighting a small town of 400,000 people like Grozny but all Syrian cities.

The Chechen solution for Syria is collapsing, much like the Iranian solution before it, Khoury concludes.

(Interestingly, Russia state news agency RIA Novosti reports today: “Simultaneously with the threat of attacks on civil airports [by the FSA], the Foreign Ministry [in Moscow] advised Russians not to travel to Syria and advised Russians already in Syria to find the safest available routes out of the country.”) 

Why the Russian alliance with Shiite Islam?

An-Nahar file photo of Russia's Vladimir Putin and Iran's Ali Khamenei

This is my paraphrasing of a commendable think piece by Jihad el-Zein, which was penned in Arabic for Lebanon’s independent daily an-Nahar:

Why did Russia get to view fundamentalist Shiism as ideologically toothless, hence a worthwhile ally against fundamentalist Sunnism that has made common cause with Washington?

Despite the Western media and American and European think tanks giving contrasting, if not contradictory, explanations for Russia and China’s solid backing of the Syrian regime, most Westerners, Arabs and Syrian opposition groups are adamant the two countries, particularly Russia, will change their positions “sooner or later.”

They insist the Russian position is “temporary” and bound to change once a “deal” is struck, allowing the Russians to drop the Syrian regime as soon as they bag a “good bargain.”

This misperception did not dissipate when the Russians shockingly vetoed a UN Security Council draft resolution sanctioning military intervention in Syria.

Nor did this “analytical syndrome” evaporate after the second double veto by Russia and China at the Security Council or the downing by Syria of a Turkish fighter jet.

Two factors explain the flawed view of Russia.

One factor is underestimation of the Russian Federation’s political, economic and military clout after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Many find it hard to accommodate Russia’s challenge of U.S. supremacy in its own backyard. The Putin Administration has drawn a clear strategic line delineating this backyard or “vital sphere of influence.” Syria, which is not too far from the Caucasus region where Russia has a military presence in Armenia, falls in this backyard.

The second factor is the reluctance to acknowledge how important and serious fundamentalist Islam is in Russia’s internal calculations. The fact fundamentalist Sunnism envelopes the overwhelming majority of Russian Muslims is a cause for concern for Russia. Ditto China apropos its Chinese Muslims.

While the first factor is understandable and expected, the second is less tangible.

It is extremely hard to find public studies by Russian research centers that shed light on the surge of Islam inside Russia. Most studies address the rise of fundamentalism in other countries.

However, the Russian psyche has been encrusted with the Chechnya experience for more than two decades, eventually catapulting Vladimir Putin to the helm. The experience drove Russia to draw a virtual frontline to stem Turkey and Saudi Arabia’s roles in Chechnya. In the view of Russian’s elite and intelligentsia, the two countries supported Chechen rebels in the Russian Caucasus.

We have to take at face value Russian fears of homegrown Islam being a secessionist force in a country that is still the world’s largest. On top of that, the Americans and Europeans have been aspiring for a “spring” in Moscow that would boot out the Putin Administration since before the onset of the Arab Spring. Their aspiration remains alive and kicking. China has similar internal reasons for echoing Moscow’s reservations.

The aim of this think piece is not to enumerate all the reasons behind the Russian position. Some of them are “classic” and well known, such as the question of strategic security relating to the US deployment of a new ballistic missile defense system in Europe and Turkey or the subject of what remains of Russian military presence on the Mediterranean coastline.

The intention is to shed as much light as possible on how Islamic fundamentalism permeates and perhaps shapes Russia’s political thought.

We’ve come to face today a real life situation whereby a Russian alliance with Shiite Islam is fending off an American partnership with Sunnite Islam.

Obviously, such generalization needs to be qualified.

Looking at modern history, Russian sensitivity to Muslim fundamentalism originally did not distinguish between Shiism and Sunnism because the ascendancy of the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s gave a shot in the arm to all Sunnite and Shiite fundamentalist currents. At the time, the Iranian Revolution uplifted religious movements throughout the Islamic world. Tehran became a shrine for Arab, Pakistani and other “Muslim Brothers,” particularly that the Khomeini movement embraced the traditional postulations of the Muslim Brotherhood society founded in Egypt in 1928…

The Russians, much like the Soviets before them, were never comfortable with the ascendency of Islam. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan marked the pinnacle of their problem with political Islam led by fundamentalist movements. Khomeini’s Iran challenged the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan alongside fundamentalist Sunnite mujahideen who led the confrontation chiefly from Pakistan.

It was thought-provoking to read in the Indian and Russian print media of the early 1990s articles written by Indian and Russian experts mutually calling for a bilateral alliance to face up to Islamic fundamentalism.

But segregation between Sunnite and Shiite, which was initiated by the Taliban before being violently amplified in post-Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the emergence under Iran’s wing of the first “Shiite” seat of power in Baghdad since the Middle Ages produced a two-ponged reality:

(1) Partial liberation of American policy from its 9/11 obsession and allowed the United States to start dynamic relationships with moderate Islamist political movements. Turkish “Islamists” from Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s generation created the template for such movements. This partial liberation has reached the stage of overlooking al-Qaeda activities serving U.S. national interests such as happened in Iraq, Libya and now Syria.

(2) A tendency by Putin’s Russia and the security establishment he represents to differentiate between Sunnite and Shiite Islamists -- already torn apart by the Saudi-Iranian power struggle -- and to deem the fundamentalist threat as exclusively Sunnite. This happened after Iran lost most of its Sunnite tentacles subsequent to the Arab Spring and the appearance of a solid alliance between Washington and Muslim Brotherhood Arabs now in authority. In this sense, distinction between Sunnite and Shiite not only returned Iran to its minority status in a Sunnite sea but also lost it the ability to be a source of change. Iran, in other words, was stripped of its Islamic fundamentalism credentials and became a force to maintain the status quo in which it has the upper hand in Iraq and Hezbollah-ruled Lebanon.

Turning to the landscape of Syria, you have a defensive “pact” -- comprising Russia (thus China), Iran, Iraq (albeit from Baghdad to Basra), Syria and Hezbollah’s confessional-military base in Lebanon – opposing an American offensive fronted by most of the Arab world.

Baghdad's Arab summit and Syria as playing field

“No one has the right to tell (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad to stand aside or step down” at the Arab summit opening Thursday in Baghdad, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zibari tells Iraq’s satellite TV Alsumaria in an interview airing tonight.

Lebanese political analyst Iyad Abu-Chacra, writing this morning for the leading Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat, lists these telling backgrounds for the impending summit:

1. Iraq, the host country is in a mess. Its prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, wants leaders of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan to hand him over fugitive Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi to face terrorism charges. This is when sectarianism and chaotic security have totally undermined the independence of Iraq’s judiciary.
2. State authority in Maliki’s Iraq today rests on a sectarian coalition founded and sponsored by Iran. Many people suspect some coalition members are accomplices in the Syrian regime’s bloody crackdown on the opposition.
3. Arab heads of state, or their representatives, will be heading to the summit in the shadow of “two Samson-like choices.” One was made by the Assad regime in Damascus, the other by the “new tsarist leadership in Moscow.” Assad is in no position to wash his hands of the blood of tens of thousands of Syrians. Nor are the Russians able to regain the trust of the Islamic world after counseling Assad to go for the “Chechnya option” in populated Syrian areas and avowed their determination to protect the Orient’s Christians from Muslim rule.
4. At the summit, the Arab League will flaunt its impotence after having been castrated already by the double veto of Russia and China at the UN Security Council and the equivocation of the Obama Administration in an election year.
5. Moscow has already poured cold water on Kofi Annan’s Syria mission by continuing to link the freedom of the Syrian people to guarantees for their oppressors and jailers and to equate between the victim and the killer.
6. The clock keeps ticking to the “Friends of the Syrian People” meeting in Turkey, where participants need to come clean on previous commitments to stifle Assad’s “scorched earth” policy.

In light of such summit landscape, can anyone still talk of Syria being a “regional player”? Is it not more accurate to speak of Syria being the “playing field”?