Middle East Focus: Syria: America from Afghanistan to Damascus, Keeping Charlie Wilson Home……..

Arabia Deserta

Syria: America from Afghanistan to Damascus, Keeping Charlie Wilson Home……..

Rattlesnake Ridge

BFF
“Ronald Reagan spread weapons all around northern Pakistan, and in my view began the destabilization of that country, which now has an endemic problem with armed tribes, militias and gangs. I saw the same thing happen in Lebanon shortly before, during the civil war that threw that country into long term fragility. More recently, we saw a civil war in Algeria (1991-2000) that left 150,000 people dead, which is really no different than what has been going on in Syria except that it was on a much larger scale and the West at that time decided to support the secular generals against the rebelling Muslim fundamentalists.......... And while the war would have been longer in Libya if Qatar and France had not secretly armed the rebels, it likely would have had a similar outcome (what was really important was NATO attrition of Libyan armor). And in that case the problem the country now faces, of militia rule and fragmentation, would have been much less severe. If people don’t think a flood of arms into the hands of Syrian fighters will spill over onto Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel/ Palestine, they are just fooling themselves…….. “

Yes, but it is not the “opposition” in Syria that is the most important in Western calculations. Just like it was not the fate of the wild regressive Islamic Mujahideen and their regressive Arab Salafi allies in Afghanistan that mattered to Reagan in the 1980s.
In Afghanistan the main goal, to needle and possibly defeat the Soviet Union mattered the most: it was uber alles. The Soviets were defeated, Charlie Wilson (Rep.-Texas) was edified with a good Hollywood film, but what came after also defeated the Afghan people and then the West.

In Syria the goal of the West diverges from the goal of the people of Hama and Homs protesting and dying on the streets. The West’s goal is not really Bashar al-Assad or his dictatorship: they are just a tool. The real goal is in Tehran, by way of Beirut and possibly Iraq. Right now getting a Syria that is not an ally of the Iranian mullahs, possibly a Mubarak-style ally of the Saudi princes, is what matters the most for the West. The chain of Iranian influence, it is assumed, will be broken at the Iraqi-Syrian border. In the Saudi calculation, a new fundamentalist Syria can be used to squeeze the Iraqis as well, just like it was used after 2003. In erroneous and shortsighted Saudi thinking, squeezing the Iraqis is the same as squeezing the Iranians. That is the narrow Wahhabi mind not the Arab mind doing the thinking.

Then there is the elephant in the room that American leaders are studiously ignoring: the Golan Heights. A quasi-Islamist regime in Damascus will be under pressure to move closer toward the Hamas solution for the Golan. More tensions along the border, regardless of what Mr. Burhan Ghalioun claims now. No doubt the Israelis are furiously updating the situation in Syria with an eye toward the Golan, perhaps more so than even Lebanon, especially Beirut and the south.
Cheers
mhg

m.h.ghuloum@gmail.com