Will America Accept Its Defeat in Syria? Challenge Russia and China?

Russia introduced China to Syria during the war when the Chinese navy arrived in the Mediterranean and reached the shores of Tartous and Lattakia to send a message to America and its allies that the monolithic dominance of the world was over.

There are thousands of Chinese jihadists who fought with ISIS and al-Qaeda and Beijing was concerned, willing to see all these killed in Syria. Cooperation between the Chinese and the Syrian intelligence services was established. Damascus has a unique and a very rich bank of information about foreign fighters many countries in the world would like to have access to, since over 80 nationalities of foreign fighters were allowed into Syria in a failed attempt to topple the regime and establish an Islamic State.

But Washington is still trying to protect its position, refusing to give up on the crown of world domination it has enjoyed for over a decade and it is ready to fight against the “axis opposing the US” using other means outside Syria. The US establishment and its allies are expelling Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions on China and Iran. The US defeat in Syria is obviously very painful.

What Washington is pretending to ignore is that the world no longer believes in the US’s military muscles and that there are two potential countries, less arrogant and willing to create alliances rather than bullying weaker countries: Russia and China. These are gathering more allies against the US axis.

The US is still living in the era of 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Its strong decline continued until the arrival of President Vladimir Putin to power in 2000. Washington realised there is a new person at the Kremlin in the castle of the Tsars with a determined intention to restore the lost glory. Russia had only nuclear weapons at that time and nothing else but the will was strong for the Russian bear to wakeup from its hibernation.

Putin did not declare war on America but extended his hand and tried to build friendship or at least not enmity. But Washington saw in Moscow the potentiality to recover in a couple of decades and worked on slowing down the process or interrupting it if possible. This is why the US started to pull to its side many countries of the ex-Soviet Union which have declared independence and include these in NATO and in the European Union surrounding Russia.

China, which includes cheap labor and can clone any commercial or military technology, like Russia has perceived America’s fear of its rapid economic development and wealth. Thus, the Chinese-Russian rapprochement was mainly created by the aggressive US policy towards the two countries, and this mainly because the American concentrate exclusively on military muscle when dealing with the World.

Washington has focused its naval control over the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca, bringing back memories of its military presence during the Second World War with the attempt to tighten its pressure on Beijing. The US is aware of their naval superiority and know that China needs the sea for its commerce and for its supply of energy.

China started to protect itself by setting up the Eurasian political and economic Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in June 2001 with the goal also to focus on economic initiatives, increase military and counter terrorism cooperation with intelligence sharing. This Cooperation includes about half of the World’s total population and the states (including five nuclear states) of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan – and rejected Washington’s and Tokyo’s request to be observers only.

China has gone to the countries affected by US policy to establish a rapprochement. Further, it established the “string of Pearls” of states and islands for marine protection and encircled India, Japan and other American allies. The Indian Ocean sees the passage of 60% of the trade in oil from the Middle East, making the Straits of Malacca indispensable for China to protect. Therefore Beijing established relationships with Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, Coco islands, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and a presence in the African coast in Sudan and Kenya.

Moreover, China revived the world’s oldest overland trade route of the Han Dynasty called “the Silk Road”. The modern Chinese Silk Road will provided a link to Beijing with the world for trade expected worth one trillion dollars (for 900 separate projects). The Silk Road reaches 11 cities in Europe and others in Africa by railway and pipeline and is expected to bring together seven Asian countries under the slogan “One Belt, One Way”. It will offer gas and trade to China and will cover 70% of the planet’s population.

China is also part of the BRICS Group, which was established in 2009 and includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which account for about 40 percent of world production.

And last but not least, in 2013, China presented the Asian World Bank (AIIB) that was set up to strike America at the core and bring together 57 countries – including several European states – but excluding the United States and Japan, its staunch ally.

The Asian International Bank – with $100 billion – aims to get rid of American financial control over the world’s economy. Washington considered this move as provocative, aiming at finding alternatives to its control of the world’s economy and financial that the United States has controlled for decades without any rival.

With its superficial but continuous sanctions, Washington believes it is capable of preventing the Eurasia Union (which begins from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, including six large states containing 3/4 of the world’s energy), to trouble Russia and to bother China.

Moreover, the US was thinking of creating a “Middle Eastern NATO” to counter the “Shiite crescent” and the “Iranian threat”. This idea was destroyed following the Saudi Arabia disastrous war on Yemen  and because Middle Eastern countries are unable to unite politically, economically or militarily.

While the US is fighting and losing in Syria, most countries that rejected American hegemony are gathering together in one way or another. There is cooperation between these countries – as we saw above –  to get rid of Washington’s dominance, arrogance and destructive foreign policy.

The US believes in changing regimes and directly – or through proxies – to occupy or control countries and impose a heavy protection fee to avoid toppling Middle Eastern monarchies (like Saudi Arabia as Donald Trump said himself). The US establishment is also manipulating youth and exploiting it under the title “Freedom activists” to guide them towards failing states, allowing extremists (Libya and both Syria and Iraq) to just get away with it).

America is deploying missiles everywhere where its military bases are deployed all over the world and has never thought of using its energy and power to support the economy and peace. It is only focused  on controlling states and the sources of energy regardless of the consequences, because there is no accountability for its doing.

Failure is everywhere: Washington’s plan failed- as General Wesley Clark, retired 4-star U.S. Army general, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the 1999 War on Yugoslavia said – to occupy seven countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan), and its failure in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria because it underestimated the reaction to its foreign policy.

However, it has largely succeeded in planting hate among the Muslim population, turning the objective of al-Qaeda (its goal to target the far enemy, i.e. the US) and replaced it with ISIS (the goal is to target the near enemy, i.e. minorities and other Muslims), reviving an animosity between Muslims that is 1400 years old. Today the majority of the western population believes the war in the Middle East is “between Muslims. Let them kill each other…who cares?”.

While the United States is selling for $110 billions weapons to Saudi Arabia to kill more Yemenis and threaten its neighbours (Qatar, Syria and Iran),  Russia has signed 10 year contracts with China worth 600 billion dollars, and with Iran worth 400 billion dollars. Also, China has signed contracts with Iran worth 400 billion dollars. These contracts are aimed at economic cooperation, energy exchange; they promise an advanced economic future for these countries away from US dominance.

The US believes it can corner Russia, China and Iran: Russia has a 7,000 kilometre border with China, Iran is not Iraq and Syria is not Afghanistan. In Syria, the destiny of a world to be ruled by unilateralism is over. The world is heading toward pluralism.

The question remains: Is Washington prepared to accept its defeat and acknowledge that it has lost control of the world and pull out of Syria?

Elijah J. Magnier is a Senior Political Risk Analyst with over 32 years’ experience covering Europe & the Middle East. Acquiring in-depth experience, robust contacts and political knowledge in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Syria. Specialized in political assessments, strategic planning and thorough insight in political networks.

Proof read by: Maurice Brasher

The original source of this article is EJMagnier

Copyright © Elijah J. Magnier, EJMagnier, 2018

From Global Research

Eminent Economist Prabhat Patnaik write on The Refugee Crisis in Europe

WHAT is new about the “refugee crisis” which appears to have engulfed Europe is that for the first time in history the consequences of the tragedies inflicted by imperialism upon the people in the “outlying regions” are visiting the metropolis itself in the guise of “refugees”. The US conquest of the Philippines in the early years of the twentieth century which claimed a quarter of a million lives in that country, or the earlier colonial conquests throughout the world by Britain, France and Holland, or even the more recent Korean and Vietnam wars, had not produced a flood of “refugees” or “asylum seekers” on the shores of metropolitan countries. Those who did not merely embrace in silence the death, destitution or famines inflicted upon the “outlying regions” by imperialist intervention, escaped no doubt as refugees, but only to the neighbouring countries within the “outlying regions”, not to the metropolis. The fact that they are doing so now is a new development.

TWO STREAMS
OF MIGRATION
Indeed, imperialism has always been very particular in ensuring that the movement of population from the “outlying regions” into the metropolis was carefully controlled. Throughout the nineteenth century, while fifty million Europeans migrated to other temperate regions of the world to establish settlements there by grabbing land from the indigenous population, and fifty million tropical and sub-tropical workers from countries like India and China were shifted to other tropical or sub-tropical regions as coolies or “indentured labourers” (this figure excludes the slaves taken from Africa to work on mines and plantations), the latter were never free to move either into Europe or into the temperate regions of white settlement.
The two streams of migration in other words were kept strictly separate, which remains true to this day even during the period of contemporary “globalisation”. Indeed the carte blanche enjoyed by imperialism to intervene where it likes, to impose whatever order it wishes to do over the world, and hence upon the third world, presupposes that the devastations that may result from such intervention would remain confined to the third world itself, causing disruptions in the neighbourhood at the most, but without upsetting the demographic, social, and political equilibrium, such as it was, within the metropolis. At the present moment, even though restrictions on immigration still remain in force, this supposition has come under attack.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, some of the main theatres of destabilisation created by imperialism in the most recent years have been in close proximity to Europe, if not within Europe itself. The break-up of Yugoslavia, a country within Europe itself, was promoted by German imperialism, and, not surprisingly, quite a few of the refugees are from the Balkans, from the mess that the region has been thrown into. Syria, the country from which the maximum number of refugees come and which had witnessed Western intervention against the Assad regime, belongs to what used to be called the “near east”, as does Iraq, the other major source of refugees, which has experienced actual imperialist aggression. Libya, where again Western intervention against the Gaddafi regime generated the chaos that has driven thousands of refugees into Europe, is not too far from that continent; nor for that matter is Afghanistan which was subjected to Western intervention, and massive destabilisation as a consequence, and which too has sent large numbers of refugees to Europe.
The theatres of recent imperialist destabilisation in short have been relatively closer to Europe. And the movement of refugees from these regions into Europe also has had a “multiplier effect” on other regions in their close proximity, which, even though they have not experienced direct imperialist intervention in the recent past, are part of the “failed State” syndrome that the current imperialist order indirectly generates in the third world, by unleashing upon it the processes of deflation via fiscal austerity, and of primitive accumulation of capital, and the associated spread of divisive politics along ethnic, religious or tribal lines.
This latter group that comes under what I have called the “multiplier effect” of the exodus from neighbouring regions where imperialism has intervened directly, includes countries which have extremely repressive regimes, such as Eritrea, or are passing through civil war-like situations, such as Nigeria (with its Boko Haram). Refugees from both these countries have been streaming into Europe, making use of the routes “opened up” by other refugees from nearby countries.
The second reason why there is now an exodus to the metropolis unlike earlier has to do with the logic of globalisation, which has not only brought the world geographically closer together by making cross-border movement by people technically easier, but has also encouraged rampant commoditisation. Like everything else, this “service sector activity”, of ferrying refugees, has now become a “vendible” commodity. Not surprisingly, taking advantage of people’s miserable conditions from which they wish to flee, has now become a highly lucrative and rapidly expanding business.
Even today however it still remains the case that the refugee exodus from theatres of imperialist intervention is mainly to other third world countries. In other words, the basic structure of imperialism, where the consequences of imperialist intervention are absorbed within the third world itself, still remains intact. The only difference is that in addition to such absorption which is the main feature, there is also now an exodus at the margin to the metropolis itself which never occurred earlier.
For instance, while over half of the Syrian population has reportedly left its home in the course of the on-going war, the majority of them are still within their own borders. And the bulk of those who have moved to other countries, have taken shelter in Lebanon. In fact, even though Lebanon itself has a total population of merely 4.5 million, it currently houses as many as 1.2 million Syrian refugees. By contrast the total number of refugees who had arrived in Europe this year by early August (see The Guardian, August 10), was just 200,000, which constitutes 0.027 percent of Europe’s population. Comparing the scale of the influx of refugees into Europe with that into Lebanon, The Guardian (August 10) commented: “...a country that is more than 100 times smaller than the EU has already taken in more than 50 times as many refugees as the EU will even consider resettling in the future. Lebanon has a refugee crisis. Europe-and, in particular, Britain- does not.”
Such however is the domination of the metropolis even upon our consciousness that nobody talks of the “refugee crisis” facing Lebanon, while the world’s attention is riveted upon the “refugee crisis” of Europe. Even the standard description of the crisis as the worst since the Second World War betrays a remarkable Euro-centricity. In our own neighbourhood, the millions of people reduced to the status of refugees owing to the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the millions again who were uprooted from their homes and came to India as refugees during the Bangladesh war of 1971, represent human exoduses far exceeding in scale what Europe currently faces; but they are not even counted when statements are made about the current one being the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War. “Refugees” in short become a “crisis” only when they knock on the doors of the metropolis.
              
DEALING WITH
THE CRISIS
The question arises: how is Europe going to deal with its “crisis”? Progressive opinion in Europe has been remarkably sympathetic to the refugees, remarkably welcoming towards them, with the Left arguing that the refugee problem itself is the result of metropolitan interventions in the countries of their origin. So widespread has this welcoming attitude been among the population at large in countries like Germany, which have comparatively low levels of unemployment (though not in countries of Eastern Europe which are afflicted with extraordinarily high unemployment rates), that it appeared for a while that Germany and France would officially open their arms to the refugees and even persuade other EU countries to do the same. Indeed Angela Merkel from whom one normally expects right-wing twaddle of the sort one got during the negotiations over Greek debt, made remarkably sympathetic utterances towards the refugees.
But, welcoming refugees fleeing from theatres of war and devastations in the third world, is not the way of metropolitan capitalism. And, predictably, Germany instituted border controls on September 13 soon after Merkel’s expressions of sympathy on September 4. Though the spin put on this volte face was that it was only a routine border check, a matter of procedure, and not a volte face at all, even The Economist (September 19), which can hardly be accused of any Left-wing sympathies, saw the move for what it was, namely a going back on her word by the German leader.
If Europe had welcomed refugees and spent whatever was necessary upon their rehabilitation, without cutting on other State expenditures, then that would actually have given a boost to the European economies. Far from becoming a “burden” on the EU, as the right-wing argues, the refugees would have contributed towards pulling Europe out of its current crisis. They would have done so with immediate effect, via the State expenditure upon them boosting aggregate demand, and not just, as often argued, by providing youthful manpower in countries with ageing populations.
But if the EU accepted this argument, then it would have no excuse for the intransigent position it took on Greek debt, or, more generally, for the measures of “austerity” it has been imposing upon its member-States. Finance capital in short can no more tolerate a humane response to the “refugee crisis”, and the expenditure that such a response would entail, than it would tolerate a humane capitalism that is not shackled by “austerity”.
To be sure if the Left launched a popular movement in defence of accepting the refugees, then finance capital may be forced to concede ground. But such a movement cannot base itself only on the need to be “nice” to the refugees. It would have to involve a critique of the political economy being expounded by finance capital, and present to the people an alternative political economy showing that their interests and those of the refugees are not antagonistic to one another; they appear conflicting only in an irrational world that talks of the virtues of “austerity” in the midst of a crisis of aggregate demand. The struggle in defence of the refugees must also in other words be a struggle against this irrational world.

Reuters report on agreement on security issues in Baghdad between Russia, Iran, Syria .

Iraq has said its military officials are engaged in intelligence and security cooperation in Baghdad with Russia, Iran and Syria to counter the threat from the Islamic State (IS) militant group, a pact that could raise concerns in Washington.

A statement from the Iraqi military’s joint operations command on Saturday said the cooperation had come “with increased Russian concern about the presence of thousands of terrorists from Russia undertaking criminal acts with Daesh [IS].”

Giving more sway to Russia

The move could give Moscow more sway in the Middle-East. It has stepped up its military involvement in Syria in recent weeks while pressing for Damascus to be included in international efforts to fight the IS, a demand Washington rejects.

Russia’s engagement in Iraq could mean increased competition for Washington from a Cold War rival as long-time enemy Iran increases its influence through Shi’ite militia allies just four years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Coordination centre

Russian news agency Interfax quoted a military diplomatic source in Moscow as saying the Baghdad coordination centre would be led on a rotating basis by officers of the four countries, starting with Iraq.

The source added that a committee might be created in Baghdad to plan military operations and control armed forces units in the fight against the IS. The Russian Defence Ministry declined comment.

By raising the stakes in Syria’s four-year-old civil war, Moscow has prompted Washington to expand diplomatic channels with it.

Kerry to launch new effort

Western officials have said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry wants to launch a new effort at the U.N. General Assembly this week to try and find a political solution to the Syrian conflict.

Diplomacy has taken on a new urgency in the light of Russia’s military build-up in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and a refugee crisis that has spilled into Europe.

Obama asked to be more decisive

Critics have urged U.S. President Barack Obama to be more decisive in the Middle-East, particularly towards the Syrian conflict, and say lack of a clear American policy has given the IS opportunities to expand.

A Russian Foreign Ministry official told Interfax on Friday that Moscow could “theoretically” join the U.S.-led coalition against the IS if Damascus were included in international efforts to combat the dreaded outfit and any international military operation in Syria had a United Nations mandate.

Iraq denies reports

Iraqi officials on Friday had denied reports of a coordination cell in Baghdad set up by Russian, Syrian and Iranian military commanders aimed at working with Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias in Iraq.

The armed groups, some of which have fought alongside troops loyal to Mr. Assad, are seen as a critical weapon in Baghdad’s battle against the radical Sunni militants of the IS.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said in New York on Friday that his country had not received any Russian military advisers to help its forces but called for the U.S.-led coalition to bomb more IS targets in Iraq.

Collapse of Iraq army

Despite more than $20 billion in U.S. aid and training, Iraq’s army has nearly collapsed twice in the last year in the face of advances by the IS, which controls large swathes of territory in the north and west of the OPEC oil producer.

US Helped Build ISIS – Provide Weapons from U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya

Photo: Hillary Clinton with the “Libyan rebels”.

During an appearance on Fox News, General Thomas McInerney acknowledged that the United States “helped build ISIS” as a result of the group obtaining weapons from the Benghazi consulate in Libya which was attacked by jihadists in September 2012.

Asked what he thought of the idea of arming so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels after FSA militants kidnapped UN peacekeepers in the Golan Heights, McInerney said the policy had been a failure.

“We backed I believe in some cases, some of the wrong people and not in the right part of the Free Syrian Army and that’s a little confusing to people, so I’ve always maintained….that we were backing the wrong types.”

Then made reference to a Bret Baier Fox News special set to air on Friday which will, “show some of those weapons from Benghazi ended up in the hands of ISIS – so we helped build ISIS,” said

In May last year, Senator Rand Paul was one of the first to speculate that the truth behind Benghazi was linked to an illicit arms smuggling program that saw weapons being trafficked to terrorists in Syria as part of the United States’ proxy war against the Assad regime.

“I’ve actually always suspected that, although I have no evidence, that maybe we were facilitating arms leaving Libya going through Turkey into Syria,” Paul told CNN, adding that he “never….quite understood the cover-up — if it was intentional or incompetence”.

At the same time it emerged that the U.S. State Department had hired an Al-Qaeda offshoot organization, the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, to “defend” the Benghazi Mission months before the attack.

Senator Paul was vindicated less than three months later when it emerged that the CIA had been subjecting its operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an effort to keep a lid on details of the arms smuggling operation being leaked.

CNN subsequently reported that dozens of CIA agents were on the ground in Benghazi during the attack and that the polygraph tests were mandated in order to prevent operatives from talking to Congress or the media about a program that revolved around “secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.” Key Syrian rebel leaders later defected to join ISIS.

In addition to ISIS obtaining weapons from Benghazi, many members of the group were also trained by the United States at a secret base in Jordan in 2012.

Aaron Klein was told by Jordanian officials that, “dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.”

As we have previously documented, many of the United States’ biggest allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey and Qatar, have all bankrolled and armed ISIS militants.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.

Source GlobalResearch

Deaths Saudi officers as Houthi rebels in Yemen attack Saudi border

Houthi rebels in Yemen have fired a mortar round at a Saudi Arabian border post, killing three Saudi officers and wounding two others, Saudi Arabia's Defence Ministry says.
A statement from the ministry on Saturday said that the incident took place the previous day in the Saudi border province of Najran.
The Saudi forces responded with gunfire, the statement said.
The ministry statement also said that since its campaign against the Houthis began last month, 500 Houthi fighters had been killed in clashes along the border.
Earlier this month, three Saudi border guards were killed in separate fighting with the Houthis.
Clashes in Aden
Meanwhile, in Aden, more than two dozen fighters and civilians died in fighting between Houthi rebels and gunmen loyal to President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, as the Saudi-led coalition intensified its air strikes in and around Yemen's capital Sanaa.
The coalition said that it was targeting suspected weapons storage sites used by the Houthis.
The air raids, which hit the Defence Ministry and facilities including al-Hafa military camp, lasted for several hours, Sanaa residents told the Reuters news agency.
The Republican Guard was also targeted in the 17th straight day of coalition air strikes on the country.
The strikes came after fierce clashes in Aden killed at least 25 people, Agence France-Presse news agency reported.
Despite the fighting, planes carrying medical aid desperately needed by civilians have finally been able to land for the first time since the air strikes began more than two weeks ago.
SOURCE Al JAZEERA

U.S and its allies failed to target the epicentres of jihad -- Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

 

The Arabs opposed the Ottomans and sided with the allied powers in the First World War in the hope of getting the right to self determination.

Veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn (65), who has reported from the Middle East since 1979, has three full-length books on Iraq already to his credit. This monograph on the rise of the ultra-jihadist Islamic State builds on his reportage for The Independent and long-form writing for the London Review of Books.

It attributes the birth of IS to the belligerence shown by the West following the 9/11 attacks. It makes clear that it was not 9/11 but the reaction of U.S and its allies to the attacks that made al-Qaeda’s rise and expansion inevitable, giving birth to other splinter groups, including the most recent and the most violent one. Cockburn says that if the West’s war on terror has been a spectacular failure, it is because of its failure to target the epicentres of jihad -- Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Two recent developments that Cockburn says provided fertile breeding ground for the IS are: marginalisation of the Sunnis in Iraq; and the hijacking of the Syrian uprising by jihadists. In both cases, Wahhabi Islam, a puritanical form patronised and exported by the House of Saud, provided the ideological fuel.

It is clear from the pessimism expressed by the book about the future of the region that questions behind the rise of the groups like IS need to go beyond those merely focused on security and stability: they need to take into account colonial ambitions that were instrumental in creation of the nations as such. For, isn’t the rise of non-state actors in the Middle East a product of the way the states were organised there 100 years ago?

The Arabs opposed the Ottomans and sided with the allied powers in the First World War in the hope of getting the right to self determination. However, they were used as strategic bargaining chips by the victors. The application of Sykes-Picot line to divide the region into French and the British spheres of influence was matched in its mendacity only by the Treaty of Versailles signed a few years later. The people of the region were left betrayed.

As written by T.E. Lawrence -- Lawrence of Arabia -- and quoted by Robert Fisk in The Great War For Civilisation, the Arabs did not risk their lives in battle simply to “change masters.” They wanted independence of their own.

Their experiments with puppet administrations started in 1922 when Britain installed King Feisal — neither an Iraqi nor a Shia — in Shia-majority Iraq. Robert Fisk calls this “our first betrayal of the Shias of Iraq.” There were more betrayals in store, resulting in societies, with a glorious record of coexistence, getting split further along sectarian lines. Cockburn foresees balkanisation of the region into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish enclaves where the ‘other’ is targeted. Here, he fears we may see a repeat of the carnage that accompanied India’s partition. However, military interventions in the form of air strikes continue, in the hope of defeating the enemy. Assuming that IS can be defeated by military means, a question that arises is: What could be done to prevent the future emergence of such groups? This book doesn’t provide many answers but the corpus of literature on the region does.

The West needs to attempt a genuine reconciliation with its erstwhile colonies and present-day clients. The next year will mark a century since the Sykes-Picot pact was signed. Serious reflection on what went wrong with the re-organisation of the states in the region needs to take place. This has to involve acceptance of historical blame.

The superpowers need to learn from history that Iraq and Syria are progenies of civilisations which a rich culture of tolerance and state building. The Mesopotamian civilisation, as fabulously documented by Jared Diamond in the rambunctious read, Guns, Germs and Steel, had a centralised state as early as 3500 BC.

The rich Mediterranean climate of Tigris and Euphrates valleys and the emergence of writing and irrigation technologies led to the formation of complex political organisations. What explains the irony that, in a region which has inherited such a sophisticated system of state building, the most popular party is a non-state actor?

The prime reason is the encumbrances thrown in the path of nationalist movements, first by colonial powers like Ottoman Turkey and Britain and later by post-colonial ones like U.S. and Soviet Union, which prevented the rise of modern institutions. Alas, U.S. and its allies show collective amnesia when it comes to history. The IS has numerous enemies but, as Cockburn says, they are disunited and have varying ideologies. IS is neither Islamic nor a state but to “degrade and ultimately destroy” it, as President Barack Obama put it, the West has to allow the organic evolution of genuine states, where Islam and democracy can both be allowed to play a role and where national aspirations, not external interests, provide the binding force.

The United States is supplying intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition now steps up arms for Saudi campaign in Yemen

 

The United States is supplying intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition bombing rebel positions in Yemen and will expedite arms supplies to the alliance, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken has said.

Blinken told reporters in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Tuesday that Saudi Arabia was sending a "strong message to the Houthis and their allies that they cannot overrun Yemen by force".

"As part of that effort, we have expedited weapons deliveries, we have increased our intelligence sharing, and we have established a joint coordination planning cell in the Saudi operation centre," Blinken said. 

At the Pentagon in Washington, Colonel Steve Warren, spokesperson, said the US was looking to deliver munitions to its allies, including by accelerating pre-existing orders.
"It's a combination of pre-existing orders made by our partner nations and some new requirements as they expend munitions," Warren said, asked about Blinken's remarks.

The Houthi rebels swept into the Yemeni capital Sanaa in September and have since tried to expand their control across the country. In February, they placed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi under house arrest before he fled to his power base in the southern city of Aden and then to Saudi Arabia. 

Yemen's humanitarian crisis worsens as aid delayed.

Blinken's comments came hours after the International Committee of the Red Cross flew medical personnel for the first time into Yemen amid delays that have worsened the humanitarian situation in Aden.

Fierce fighting between militias loyal to Hadi and and the Houthis has been raging in the port city for days.
Russia has presented a draft resolution at the UN Security Council seeking "humanitarian pauses" in the air strikes against the rebels.
'Catastrophic' situation 
The Red Cross warned on Tuesday of a "catastrophic" situation in Aden, as the rebels and their allies made a new push on a port in the central Mualla district of the city but were forced back by Hadi loyalists, witnesses said.
Naval forces of the Saudi-led coalition, which launched air strikes on March 26 in support of Hadi's beleaguered government, shelled rebel positions across the city, witnesses added.
Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the UN, Abdullah al-Mouallimi told Al Jazeera that the Houthis were responsible for civilian casualties.
"We have a situation where Houti militia are operating from heavily populated areas...most of the casualties that we know are happening in civilian areas that are being shelled by the Houthis and their allies. As far as we are concerned we are doing everything possible to make sure medical supplies are being delivered," he said
More than a 100,000 people have fled their homes after the Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes in Yemen, according to UNICEF, the UN agency responsible for children welfare.
A spokesman from the agency, Rajat Madhok, told Al Jazeera that most of those who have been displaced are women and children.
"Most displacements have taken place from and within al-Dhale, Abyan, Amran, Saada, Hajja. The displaced persons are mostly being hosted with relatives," Madhok said.

In a statement published on Tuesday, UNICEF said 74 children caught up in fighting had been killed and another 44 maimed since March 26.
"These are conservative figures and UNICEF believes that the total number of children killed is much higher," the statement read.
The agency's Yemen representative, Julien Harneis, said children were paying an "intolerable" price, and said more needed to be done to protect them.
"These children should be immediately afforded special respect and protection by all parties to the conflict, in line with international humanitarian law," Harneis said.
Source Al jazeera

Yemen's Shiite rebels capture presidential palace in Aden

 

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Yemeni security officials say Shiite rebels and their allies have captured the presidential palace in Aden following heavy clashes in the commercial center of this southern coastal city.
Thursday's capture came despite week-long airstrikes in Yemen by a Saudi-led coalition trying to halt the advance of the rebels known as Houthis.
Aden's Maasheeq palace is a cluster of colonial-era villas perched atop a rocky hill that juts into the Arabian Sea. The palace was President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi's last seat of power before he fled to Saudi Arabia last month amid the Houthi advance.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
AP

18,000 Palestinian refugees traped by IS militants at Yarmouk in Syria

Islamic State (IS) militants have entered the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk in Damascus, activists and Palestinian officials say.

Clashes erupted between the militants and groups inside the camp, with IS seizing control of large parts of the camp, reports said.
The UN says about 18,000 Palestinian refugees are inside the camp.
IS militants have seized large swathes of territory in eastern Syria and across northern and western Iraq.
Yarmouk residents told BBC Arabic that members of Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis, a group formed by Palestinian militiamen opposed to the Syrian government, were leading the fight against the IS militants, along with some Free Syrian Army fighters.
IS fighters had seized control of large parts of the camp, an official with the Palestine Liberation Organisation based in Damascus, and the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said.
There has been no official statement from IS about the move.
Members of the self-proclaimed Islamic State stormed into the southern side of Yarmouk camp in the early hours of the morning and clashed with the Palestinian brigade, Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis.
Reports suggest they came in from the area of Hajar al-Aswad in the south of the capital. There has been no evidence in the past that IS had any foothold in Damascus.
The Palestinian Ambassador to Damascus, Anwar Abdulhadi, told the BBC that the group had seized the area of the camp near the Palestine Hospital.
Most information is coming from Palestinian officials in areas under government control.
The attack comes days before a deal to ease the humanitarian situation for civilians in the camp was set to come into operation.

Extreme hardship'

First built for Palestinians fleeing the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Yarmouk was once considered by many to be the de facto capital of the Palestinian refugee diaspora.
Prior to the Syrian civil war, it had more than 150,000 refugees living there, and its own mosques, schools and public buildings.
However, the camp has been besieged by fighting between government troops and rebel forces since 2012.
Unrwa, a UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, says about 18,000 refugees remain trapped in the camp, with inadequate access to food supplies, clean water and electricity.
In March, Unrwa said: "The extreme hardship faced by Palestine refugees in Yarmouk, but also in other locations in Syria as a result of the armed conflict is, from a human point of view, unacceptable."

War on Terror, War on Muslims?

US President Barack Obama is vowing to "degrade, and ultimately destroy" a terrorist group destabilising the Middle East he says could threaten Americans at home.
Sound familiar? George W Bush made a similar vow, yet more than a decade after launching the so-called War on Terror, both the war and the terror are still raging.
Obama says the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will be different than the two wars started by Bush. But Muslims looked at with suspicion around the world are wondering, how different will their treatment be?
What is the impact of increasing surveillance of Muslim communities, banning Islamic dress and equating a religion with a threat? Do the counter-terror measures adopted by the US, Britain and France erode the very democratic principles considered the pillars of a "free" society?
Marwan Bishara asks what happens when the War on Terror turns inward, and prolonged military action abroad turns into a culture of fear at home.

Source: Al Jazeera

After refugee camp, now Yemen factory workers killed in Hodaida air strike

 

An air strike on Yemen's Red Sea port of Hodaida has killed 23 workers at a dairy factory, medical sources said, in what appears to be one of the biggest cases of civilian deaths in a Saudi-led campaign against Houthi rebels.
Residents near the Hodaida dairy factory said it was located near an army camp loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, while medical sources in the city said the casualties had all been workers at the plant. The strike on Tuesday night had also destroyed a fuel store, the residents told Reuters news agency.
The incident is believed to have been part of an aerial campaign by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim states to stop Houthi fighters and former president winning control of the country and reinstating Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
However, after seven nights of bombings targeting both the Houthis and forces loyal to Saleh, the coalition has not managed to secure Hadi's control over his last remaining enclave of rule in the southern port of Aden, a key aim of the campaign.
The sound of gunfire and several large blasts were heard in Aden throughout the night, the Reuters news agency reported. Videos posted online, which could not be immediately confirmed, appeared to show fighting at an army base loyal to Saleh in the northeast of the city.
A raid at a coastal defence station at Maidi port in Hajja province north of Hodaida killed six soldiers, workers there said, while further strikes hit an army camp in Sanaa and a government facility in Saadeh in the north of Yemen.
In New York, the UN said late on Tuesday that at least 62 children had been killed and 30 wounded in fighting over the past week, and that an attack on a refugee camp in northern Yemen, which medics blamed on an air strike, broke international law.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein warned the country was "on the verge of total collapse".
Indians evacuated
Meanwhile, an Indian naval patrol boat picked up nearly 350 Indian nationals from the port of Aden on Tuesday night, and was expected to arrive in Djibouti during the day, a spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs said.
More than 4,000 Indians are believed to have been in Yemen when Saudi Arabia launched air strikes last week.
Negotiations are under way to allow evacuation flights into Sanaa, where the Indian community is concentrated, and receive permission to evacuate more from Hodaida, the spokesman said.
Reuters

What they won't admit at the Arab Summit

About the Author

Marwan Bishara

Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.


Rhetoric and reality
The Arab League Summit has convened just as the region reached the summit of instability, division and violence as a result of the actions of many of those and other Middle Eastern leaders. But don't expect Arab leaders to take responsibility for the dreadful situation they helped bring about - absolutely not.
Instead, much of the blame was directed at "external" forces and the extremists and the terrorists who, in the words of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, exploited certain "shortcomings" of Arab governance (i.e. repressive authoritarianism) to try and gain control.

Sisi: Arab nations to create joint military force

It's no wonder the leaders went on to speak of the importance of unity, stability and dialogue, while emphasizing mostly military solutions.
Arab military force
The one concrete conclusion of the Arab Summit is the call for the establishment of a joint Arab military force even though the whole region is suffering from an excess of violence that's affecting and even destroying the lives of countless people.
How will this force be assembled; who will finance it and what are its objectives is not clear in the absence of any blueprints. But what is clear is that there's no precedence for such a joint force, and the Arabs don't have the means, experience or expertise to put in motion the kind of sophisticated logistical and operational plans that allow different militaries to work jointly.
And since this force is not expected to confront Israel or Iran on the battlefield, one assumes it's meant to fight the kind of asymmetrical wars as in Syria or more specifically, Yemen where the Saudis intervened, or Libya where Egypt is so keen to intervene. That is sure to plunge the region into an ever more protracted war.
'Happy Yemen'
Although violence continues to spiral out of control in Syria, Iraq and Libya, it's Yemen that has dominated the Arab League discussion following the Saudi military intervention there. Long known in the Arab world as "al-Yemen as-Said" - or Happy Yemen - the country is a terribly unhappy place as it's transformed, once again, into a battlefield for external and internal forces.

Long known in the Arab world as 'al-Yemen as-Said' - or Happy Yemen - the country is a terribly unhappy place as it's transformed, once again, into a battlefield for external and internal forces.

The Arab Summit has lent its support to Saudi Arabia in its declared effort to stem the tide of the Iranian supported Houthis that endanger national Saudi and Arab security, according to the League.
But how will the Arab nations react if or when the situation in Yemen continues to deteriorate and the Houthis, supported by Tehran, put up major resistance?
Well, already, Iran's allies in Iraq and elsewhere have expressed opposition to foreign military intervention in Yemen or other nations, which is rather puzzling, considering the present Iraqi government has welcomed military intervention in its own country.
It remains to be seen whether the League's attempt at establishing a new Arab order passes the test of Yemen.
Saudi gamble
The fact that it's Saudi Arabia that has shaken off the passivity and defensiveness of the Arabs vis-a-vis Iran's rising influence is both telling and surprising.
It's telling because of the way it exposed what has been known for so many years, notably that Saudi Arabia and Iran have been locked in a Middle Eastern cold war that involved supporting clients and allies in proxy conflicts and wars that destabilised the region.
And it's surprising because the Saudis, who generally outsourced their missions to others, including to the Americans, are for the first time leading a major war with unknown consequences to national and regional stability.
This Saudi gamble seems to turn the tables against Iran, at least in its initial phase, and it has put Riyadh in a much more comfortable strategic position than it was in only a few days ago when the Iranians were gaining all but direct control in Yemen and access to the Red Sea.
Iranian overreach
Most of those present at the Arab League Summit believe that Iran has been overzealous in the way it has intervened in various Arab nations including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and more recently, Yemen. Tehran has been gaining strategic confidence and regional momentum thanks to George W Bush's failures in Iraq since 2003, and Barack Obama's attempt at reaching a nuclear deal and eventually political rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.
But the Ayatollahs' overreach in Iraq and Syria and their boasting of a new Iranian dominated regional order have sent shock waves across the region and united both Arab and non-Arab states against them. Turkish and Pakistani support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen is sure to weaken Iran's position in the region regardless of whether it reaches a deal with the United States. Well, at least for the time being.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Riad Yassin [AP]

Although quite pragmatic, it remains to be seen how the Iranians will react to the Saudi intervention over the longer run.
The missing elephant
Unlike most other summits over the last half a century, when the Arabs obsessed about the United States, Washington was largely missing from the deliberations and plans of the summiteers.
Indeed, much of the discussion about Yemen, Libya and Syria were driven by the lack of US dependability and the need for the Arabs to act on their own first, rather than wait for US initiatives.
For the first time since their independence, the Arabs are acting not as friends or foes of the United States, and are not taking instructions from Washington regarding their next moves. Instead, the US seems to lend a hand to those who act on their own and in coordination with others to establish order or stability that is conducive to US interests. This might encourage the Iranians to act more vigorously against ISIL in Iraq, nudge the Egyptians to act in Libya, and encourage the Turks to act in Syria.
Forgotten Palestine
Despite Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's terribly pessimistic review of the situation in Palestine and his emphasis on losing Jerusalem for good, the summiteers have repeated the same tired cliches about Palestine and peace as if either are possible to attain in negotiations with the Netanyahu government (with the exception of the Emir of Qatar or proposed abandoning unworkable initiatives in return for serious international pressure to lift the siege on Gaza and force Israel to recognise the Palestinian State).
Palestine that has long spearheaded all Arab summits has taken the backseat because of the Arabs' preoccupation with countless disasters and challenges on their hands. But more importantly, because of their incompetence and lack of seriousness towards Palestine. And of course towards Syria.
Invisible Arabs
As the summiteers focused their attention on the mostly self-generated regional instability and violence, they did pay some lip service to the important issues of everyday Arabs, including development, justice and freedoms.
Indeed, much of the lofty talk about an Arab military force, combatting terrorism and attaining stability is the antithesis to the peoples' yearning for liberty, dignity and human rights.
Alas, by emphasizing the security issues, most of those present at the Arab League Summit were mostly eager to turn the page on the Arab Spring and its calls for democracy.

Houthis of Yemen threaten Saudi Arabia with suicide bombings

Shia fighters threaten to undertake suicide operations in the kingdom if Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen continue.

 

Yemen's Houthi fighters have threatened to undertake suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia if the kingdom continues to launch airstrikes against the group's positions.
Abdel Mon'em Al-Qurashi, a senior member of the Houthis Executive Committee, said on Saturday that the group would destroy the Saudi regime for its "aggressive" policies, Iran's Fars news agency reported.

"If Saudi Arabia continues its aggressions against the oppressed Yemeni people, [Houthi] fighters will pave the way for the Saudi regime's destruction by conducting martyrdom-seeking operations inside Saudi Arabia in the coming hours," Quraishi told Fars.

The threat came as the spokesman for the Arab coalition bombing Houthi targets in Yemen, Brigadier General Ahmed Asiri, said Houthi fighters were mobilising towards the Saudi border.
"Saudi forces are trying to deter the Houthis from mobilising in areas near Jizan and Najran using artillery and apache helicopters," Asiri said.
"We will not allow the Houthis to bring their forces near the southern border of Saudi Arabia."
Saudi-led airstrikes have bombed Houthi targets for three consecutive nights, in what they call Operation Decisive Storm, after assembling a coalition of more than 10 countries, five of them members of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council.
On Saturday, airstrikes hit Sanaa International Airport and the adjoining military airport, causing damage to planes, airport infrastructure and runways.
The airstrikes hit multiple provinces in Yemen, including Houthi strongholds and the bases of army units loyal to the group's main ally, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
In the southern coastal city of Aden, several people were killed on Saturday after a series of blasts rocked an arms depot at the foot of Jabal Hadid mountain overlooking Aden.
The cause was not immediately clear but residents had been looting the arsenal of Soviet-era weapons.
Troops guarding the depot had abandoned their posts earlier this week after their commanders fled.
According to the Houthi-run interior ministry, at least 24 civilians were killed in Friday's strikes, bringing the toll from Thursday and Friday to 45 civilians.
The figures of civilian and combatant casualties could not be independently confirmed, though Amnesty International said at least six children were among those killed in Sanaa on Thursday.
Al Jazeera

Another Human Crisis- The regional war in Yemen

Yet another Arab nation faces a humanitarian crisis following military conflict, as the localised war between various forces in Yemen has taken on a regional dimension. After the besieged Yemeni government requested help, the Gulf Cooperation Council, led by Saudi Arabia, launched air attacks against Houthi rebel positions in Yemen on March 26. The Saudis have deployed a large force with help from Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan and others such as Pakistan and Sudan. This military action — without UN sanction — has also involved logistical help from the United States. The ostensible reason for the Saudi intervention is to temper the rising Iranian influence in its immediate neighbourhood. The U.S. involvement — which seems to have bipartisan support in the U.S. polity — is more of a reflexive reaction to register support for its Saudi allies and for the besieged transitional government in Yemen. Saudi Arabia and its allies who have joined the effort allege that the Houthis are being funded and armed by Iran.

The Houthis are a Zaidi Shia group that had participated in uprisings against former Yemeni President and long-time ruler Abdullah Saleh and who had felt left out from the transitional government that followed Saleh’s rule. It is the failure of the transitional government — which was set up with help from the Gulf Cooperation Council in 2012 — to accommodate the Houthis’ interests that fuelled the insurgency. The Houthis have a large degree of control over many areas of northwestern Yemen, including over the capital, Sana'a. The Houthi-led insurgency is not the only military conflict raging in Yemen. The al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leads another insurgency in the southeast along with the Ansar al-Sharia; this one is a Sunni Islamist rebellion. The regional intervention against the Houthis is bound to strengthen the AQAP. The inability of the ineffectual transitional government to effectively govern a nation that has steadily been divided on sectarian lines, and the weakening of the economy, have helped the various insurgent forces strengthen themselves. The Houthi forces’ consolidation in the south could have presented an opportunity for a new, more inclusive and legitimate government following a ceasefire, but that option is now ruled out as the conflict has been effectively regionalised with the Saudi intervention. Yemen increasingly appears to be heading towards Syria’s fate — a nation torn asunder into enclaves controlled by sectarian and fundamentalist groups and constantly at war among one another. What started as yet another promising chapter of the Arab Spring has now taken a turn that follows events elsewhere in the region — regression into a harsh Arab Winter. 

The Hindu Editorial 

Conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia ---A war of all against all

 

 Hisham Melhem is the bureau chief of Al Arabiya News Channel in Washington, DC.

It has come to pass that in that long arc stretching from North Africa, through the Fertile Crescent and all the way to Yemen all is falling down. States, and non-state actors, sects and tribes, as well as armies, marauding killers, fanatic legionnaires, proxies and millenarians waving swords while hallucinating about the end of time, all are locked in a dizzying free fall with no deliverance in sight. In the past an ‘Arab Cold War’ raged between conservatives monarchies allied with the U.S. and Arab nationalist republics allied with the Soviet Union, there were also limited civil wars, and cross border clashes, and a number of Arab-Israeli wars, and fleeting Western sponsored alliances.

The conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia while it is framed by many as a sectarian one is in fact a political conflict over national security interests and influence.
Hisham Melhem

And while at times the political rhetoric sounded apocalyptic, and some wars like the Iran-Iraq war kept smoldering for years, the regional order did not collapse and those states whose borders were drawn as ‘lines in the sands’ proved resilient. But the current cataclysmic, multiple battlefields within and across borders have led to unprecedented disintegration of the state system and the fragmentation of societies, with the cancer of sectarianism spreading particularly in a very ailing Arab body politics. It shall come to pass also, that since it took decades of political dysfunction, economic and cultural stagnation and repressive governance to bring the Arabs to this nadir and the region to this impasse that it will take decades for these complex struggles to run their courses, and for the sectarian, political, ethnic and regional fault lines to settle into new patterns after the total exhaustion of the warriors.
The sad collapse of Arabia Felix
In the second decade of the twenty first century, the most common form of warfare in the Middle East (and South Asia) has been that of the phenomenon of the non-state actors battling each other’s while fighting and or receiving aid from their state sponsors. Sometimes these non-state actors act independently, (The Islamic State ISIS) but in many cases they act as powerful proxies (Hezbollah in Lebanon) to states unwilling to risk all, in all-out conventional conflicts. The decision by the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) led by Saudi Arabia along with other Arab and Sunni majority states like Pakistan to militarily intervene in Yemen in support of the Yemeni government against the Houthi rebellion supported by Iran, will be seen –regardless of how the military campaign unfolds- as a milestone in the current cataclysmic regional wars, stretching the front of Sunni-Shiite bloodletting from Yemen on the Indian Ocean, through Bahrain, Iraq, Syria and ending in Lebanon on the Mediterranean Sea. This nascent coalition, which was brought about partially by America’s reluctance to check Iran’s regional hegemonic ambitions, represents the first attempt by regional powers, mostly majority Sunni states to check and roll back Iran’s regional gains. While it is true that Iran did not create the so-called ‘Houthi problem’ it is also true that Iran has exploited the Houthis’ political grievances and became their ally.
Yemen’s slow descent towards disintegration has been in the making for years. The long reign of the former dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh has dragged the country to civil strife and near economic collapse. Saleh’s cynical alliance with the Houthis partly explains Yemen’s full descent into civil war. The famed prosperous ancient land the Romans called Arabia Felix (happy Arabia) today is neither whole nor happy, nor prosperous. There are four Arab majority states engulfed in civil wars: Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen. Three of them; Syria, Iraq and Yemen have devolved into proxy wars involving the United States, Iran and many traditional friends and allies of the United States such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.
Into the wild
America’s decisions and alliances in the region of late have been tentative, contradictory, and tactical. The U.S. was quick to declare its support of the Saudi-led anti Houthi and anti-Iranian campaign in Yemen and lending logistical and Intelligence assistance. At the same time in Iraq, the U.S. is using its air power to cover the Shiite-led (and Iranian advised) land campaign to regain Tikrit from ISIS. In Iraq the U.S. is implicitly ‘partnering’ with Iran against ISIS. In Yemen the U.S. is publicly ‘partnering’ with the GCC against the Houthis, Iran’s friends. In Syria, the U.S. co-exists with the Assad regime, even while attacking, verbally of course, the regime’s savage use of barrel bombs and Chlorine gas, without denouncing Iran, the very country that saved the regime from imminent collapse. All the while the U.S. is very eager to reach a historic nuclear deal with Iran which will inevitably raise the ire of Arabs, Turks and Israelis.
The wars in Iraq and Yemen have forced the U.S. to make some surreal and painful decisions, ranging from reluctantly accepting the rising influence of Iraqi Shiite militias in the campaign against ISIS, to trying to destroy the American arsenal that fell into the hands of ISIS in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. President Obama’s words last year that America’s war against Al Qaeda in Yemen has been successful have come to haunt him. If President Obama’s decision not to hasten the fall of President Assad in Syria and to arm and equip the moderate Syrian opposition can explain in part at least his dismal record there, one can say the reverse in Yamen. Washington’s single fixation on combatting Al Qaeda in Yemen, and Obama’s failure to provide fuller and stronger support to Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi blinded the U.S. to the rising threat of the Houthis. In Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the Obama Administration was caught off guard when it failed to see the dangerous rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, or the collapse of the Iraqi army last summer, or the extent of the Houthi rebellion.
The raging civil wars, the emergence of ISIS, and the deepening Sunni-Shiite conflict and the resulting proxy wars of all against all, happened on President Obama’s watch, presenting his administration with a multiplicity of crisis and tough choices. Of course, President Obama is not responsible for the collapse of the regional state system. Arabs, Iranians and others are responsible in the main for their predicament. But president Obama’s deeply flawed decisions on Syria (not to deliver on promises to the opposition or threats to Assad’s regime) and his reluctance to challenge the sectarian policies of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Malaki have contributed to the chaos.
A war of all against all
The conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia while it is framed by many as a sectarian one is in fact a political conflict over national security interests and influence. Sectarianism is a powerful tool for social/political mobilization, and a lethal weapon for demonization. People rarely fight each other over theological disputations, and even when they do that, they should be reminded that at core the conflict is political and can be understood rationally. The sectarian fires have only been stoked in the last few decades, with few milestones contributing to it; the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the conflict between the Islamists in Syria and the Assad dynasty since 1970, and finally the American invasion of Iraq.
Iran has been especially effective in inspiring and helping the Shiite Arabs, many of whom may have felt a sense of political empowerment following the Revolution of 1979. Iran played a crucial role in the creation, funding and training of Hezbollah in Lebanon. In the conflicts of Syria and Iraq, Iran coordinated with Hezbollah in Lebanon and used it as an auxiliary force. Similar relations were developed between Iran and Iraqi Shiite groups. To put it bluntly, Iran can and is fighting its Arab foes by deploying Arab Shiites as auxiliaries as we have seen in Syria and Iraq in the last few years. No Sunni Arab or non-Arab power can make such a claim.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes paints a grim reality of life in the absence of order, a condition he called the state of nature, where the dominant rule is that there are no rules, a situation that leads to a ‘war of all against all’. The fraying or the collapse of the nation-state in the Arab world resulting in civil wars, proxy wars, the emergence of the marauding religious extremists have combined to push the region into a state of ‘war of all against all’. No Deus ex machina (a device employed in Greek tragedy allowing for divine intervention) will intervene to end this Arab tragedy. Civil wars are usually ended by one side winning the fight decisively, or when exhaustion forces a compromise or by foreign intervention. None of the regional sponsors of proxies is powerful enough to establish regional hegemony without serious challenges. There will come a moment in history where Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Israelis, Kurds and others, Sunnis and Shiites, Christian and Jews and atheists will be utterly exhausted before they realize that in a ‘war of all against all’ everyone loses. I shudder when I think that, I will not see that moment of bliss in my lifetime.