Ted Belman. Phillips doesn’t factor in Israel in this article so I will. Clearly Obama has aligned himself with Islamists, including Erdogan, even in Syria. The Islamists represent a threat to the monarchies in the Gulf including Jordan and to Israel. Iran also represents a threat to them and to Israel. The last thing any of them want is for Iran to takeover Iraq. It is extremely important that a Syria develops that isn’t Islamists and is beholding to the Monarchies of her liberation and financial support. In this too, Israel shares their desire. Turkey, like Iran is not an Arab country but it is Islamist.
Obama seems to be wanting Turkey to take a major role leading the Islamists. It would immeasurable aid in this project if Turkey were to take over Syria.
Thus the monarchies and Israel are allies in the real world wanting to stop Iran from getting the bomb and taking over Iraq. They also want to stop Turkey from re-acquiring the Ottoman empire including Syria and Iraq. Once again this need is shared by the Monarchies and Israel. One more thing which will prove to be key. The Kurds will factor in big as a front line force against the expansion by either Turkey or Iran. They represent 20% of Iraq and 15% of Syria. In Iraq they have their own army. Thus, strengthening the Kurds, help keep the Islamists and the Iranians out of Iraq and the new Syria.
By Melanie Phillips, DAILY MAIL
Despite – or perhaps because of – the barbaric repression perpetrated by President Assad of Syria upon his people, with an estimated 3,500 having been killed since the popular uprising there began some eight months ago, the opposition to the regime is getting stronger.
On Wednesday, a group of army defectors called the Free Syrian Army reportedly fired machine-guns and rockets at an air force intelligence base outside Damascus.
Clearly, the fact that the army seems to be splitting in this way is a significant development and suggests that Syria – where Assad remains backed by Russia and China – is now heading inexorably for a civil war and an appalling bloodbath.
Significant development: Syrian army defectors have said they will try to protect civilians and attack Syrian security forces
Why is the army peeling off like this? Maybe, as has been suggested, because it simply cannot stomach the unspeakable atrocities being inflicted upon the population, including upon women and children.
Maybe also it has been galvanised by the behaviour of the Arab League, which has amazed the world by abandoning its habitual passivity in tacit support of the repressive status quo and instead suspending Syria and threatening sanctions if Assad does not allow international monitors into the country.
There are a number of reasons why the Arab League, led by Qatar, has suddenly sprung into life like this. First, the revolutionary energy unleashed by the ‘Arab Spring’ needs to be managed if other regimes are not also to go down like dominoes.
Surprising: The Arab League comprising of Arab league Member states and Turkey met this week in Rabat to discuss a response to the crackdown in Syria
Furthermore, as Amir Taheri explains in the Times today, the League is filling the vacuum left by the collapse of the US under President Obama as a global power broker – most obviously of all in his appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also his failure to deal with the Islamist regime in Turkey which is currently eyeing up Syria as a strategic prize.
The League wants to stop Turkey’s President Erdogan from his apparent wish to dominate the region as a second Ataturk; even more desperately, it wants to halt Iran’s steady march to regional domination through a ‘Shia Crescent’ stretching from the Gulf to the Mediterranean and encompassing Syria and Lebanon.
The conclusion by the Arab states that the US is now a ‘weak horse’ and thus must be circumvented should itself be a source of intense worry for the free world at this self-induced and dangerous marginalisation of its supposed leader.
Not least because this has also pushed a number of relatively quiescent Arab states into cosying up to Iran, on the basis that if no-one is going to defeat the ‘strong horse’ then they have no alternative but to clamber into its saddle instead.
The Arab League initiative highlights in turn the utter uselessness of the UN, where last month the Security Council failed even to pass a resolution that merely hinted at sanctions against Syria.
And it also shows up the perverse grandstanding of the UK, US and France which almost certainly will end up having helped replace the relatively tamed Mubarak of Egypt and Gaddafi of Libya by Islamists committed to war and terror against the west while doing virtually nothing about Assad of Syria, who as Iran’s satrap has long posed a mortal threat to western interests from both terrorism and Syria’s own attempts to build a nuclear weapon.
Indeed, even worse than that the Obama administration has once again been strengthening the Islamists by backing the Syrian National Council which is dominated by Islamic radicals.
Such stupidity is almost beyond belief, since the Syrian opposition is in fact more likely than other ‘Arab Spring’ countries to replace the status quo with a relatively reformist regime rather than an Islamic tyranny.
This is because only some 60 per cent of Syrians are Sunni Muslims, and they are opposed by the Alawite, Christian, Druze, and Kurdish minorities who are deeply suspicious of Muslim rule.
So would the fall of Assad be good for the west? Because of all these complexities and imponderables, that question is very difficult to answer.
Yes, it would weaken Iran and provide the opposition to the regime there with a much needed boost.
Nevertheless there is still a risk that, however terrible Assad is for the west, what follows him may be even worse.
But on balance, since Assad is an undoubted mortal enemy of western interests it cannot be in those interests for him to stay in power.
As ever in the Arab and Muslim world, there are no good outcomes – only less bad ones.
I think it is a sunni shiite war whereby Assad is the allwite ruler of Syria and allied with shiite iran and hezbullah. gulf states are sunni and support sunnis of syria,lebanon and iraq. I believe Turkey is sunni.
Melanie Phillips wrote, “US is now a ‘weak horse’ and thus must be circumvented should itself be a source of intense worry for the free world at this self-induced and dangerous marginalisation of its supposed leader.”
“Free World!” What free world? The EU has circumvented the rights of the people of Europe so many times that they look only marginally different from the old Mubarak regime or the coming Muslim Brotherhood government. While the EU has not jailed individuals who oppose its policies, countries have tried to silence the opposition through court cases that have attempted to jail those who oppose them.
America stands alone as “free”, but Mr. Obama is ruling by fiat and he will need to be replaced if America is to continue its experiment in both private property and individual rights.
As to the machinations and philosophy underlying America’s meddling in the Middle East, it appears that it wants to consolidate the Muslims in a power block that can oppose China and Russia. Individual Muslim countries will not defend themselves against the supposed friendship of these two growing superpowers. Rather, they will accept the gifts that obligate them to subservient positions. A united Islam will not only oppose American influence, but Russian and Chinese as well. That America’s foreign policy wonks cannot foresee the outcome of such manipulations is of course a truism. Therefore, we, who are concerned with the future of Israel, can safely characterize these US policies seeking the conglomeration of Muslim states as falling somewhere on the continuum from crazy to criminal.
Erdogan of Turkey has repeatedly shown interest in occupying Syria; and it’s a foregone conclusion that Iran, if able, will take over Iraq. The latest I read on DEBKA, is that Assad of Syria has allied himself with the Kurdish PKK. The Kurds are in two factions, split along very old family lines. The PKK has been fighting the Turks and the other faction, which collaborated with Saddam Hussein when he was in power, is friendly with the Turks and allows them to make massive incursions into Iraq to hunt down PKK. I read that Israel has meddled in this affair, in which Israel might ironically find themselves on the side of Syria and Iran.
Israel’s part in all this is simple: The Turks have been threatening to attack Israel, even as those same Turks have been massing troops on their border with Syria. Syria, meanwhile, has promised to retalliate “against Turkey”, if attacked, by attacking Israel. The bottom line is that Israel is threatened by attack from both parties. Needless to say, the Iranians have also threatened to attack Israel in a war of genocidal annihilation.
Israel’s only reasonable option is to attack all three, each separately, at the moment most opportune FOR ISRAEL. If it doesn’t, it will have to face all three TOGETHER, at a time of THEIR choosing and advantage.