skip to main |
skip to sidebar
'The "end game" is commencing in Syria'
[ATimes]
"... Interestingly, the Turkish side has
pointedly refused to take issue with Moscow's
narrative. The Turkish statement was actually evasive and loquacious
- to the effect that Ankara had acted on the basis of "information that the
plane was carrying cargo of a nature that could not possibly be in compliance
with the rules of civil aviation".
Meanwhile,
Ankara and Moscow lost no time to transfer the topic to the diplomatic channel
away from the limelight. Russia's Gazprom has since announced that it will step
up the supply of gas to Turkey to offset the shortfall in the supplies from Iran
through the winter season.
Ankara has also since disclosed, almost eight
weeks in advance, that Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Turkey on
December 3. This is the first point.
Now, the intriguing part is that it was left to
a third party to resort to shrill rhetoric - the United States....Victoria Nuland said: "No responsible country
ought to be aiding and abetting the war machine of the Assad regime,
.... We [US] have no doubt that
this was serious military equipment." Evidently Nuland was under instruction to
go to town on the Syrian plane issue. Why would the US be so overtly keen to
introduce high-class polemics? This is the second point.
The
geopolitics is not difficult to understand. The US has probably been hoping all
along that Syria would be the wedge that forces apart the partnership between
Russia and Turkey, which has witnessed a remarkable upswing through the past
decade, ... Russia has
significantly expanded its energy cooperation with Turkey, meeting
two-thirds of the latter's gas needs. Russia is set up to build Turkey's first
nuclear plant; the US$25 billion project could be a game changer in the overall
relationship. The 63-billion-cubic-meter South Stream gas pipeline is slated to
pass through Turkish waters to feed the European markets.
Evidently,
a high level of interdependency is developing between the two countries, which
would be nothing short of historic given their troubled relationship through the
centuries, and holding the potential to impact profoundly the geopolitics of a
vast region comprising the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian, "Turkic"
Central Asia and the eastern Mediterranean.
Suffice to
say, Moscow and Ankara have done well so far to decouple the Russian-Turkish
bilateral relationship from the Syrian question. However, whether this is achievable in the coming period
remains to be seen, as the "end game" is commencing in
Syria.
The US rhetoric underscores the early warning of
booby traps ahead. This is the third point.
The first booby trap was laid by unknown hands
when Erdogan was in Moscow in late July as he was proceeding for his meeting
with Putin in the Kremlin. The report of the high-profile terrorist strike in
Damascus killing the Syrian defense minister and other top security officials
had just come in, which all but sabotaged Erdogan's mission aimed at bridging
the Turkish-Russian differences over Syria and exploring an acceptable formula
to work together to find a solution to the crisis.
Curiously,
the incident of the Syrian plane being interdicted also coincided with a visit
Putin had planned to Ankara to meet with Erdogan for a follow-up conversation on
the substance of the latter's proposal. Earlier reports had mentioned that Putin
was due to visit Turkey on October 14 and 15.
Putin held
a meeting with the advisory Security Council regarding the Syrian situation on
Friday. Obviously, Moscow realizes that a new criticality is arising in the
Turkish-Syrian standoff, which is also amply evident from the growing
belligerence in Ankara's rhetoric toward Damascus as well as its military
deployments on the border regions in an operational mode.
There are
three or four interlocking vectors here and their interplay is going to be
crucial in the coming weeks. First, much depends on how the situation develops
on the ground. The Guardian newspaper reported that Turkey's eastern
Mediterranean city of Antakya has become a meeting
point for arms dealers from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon and it is
the centre for equipping and arming the rebels in Syria.
As things
stand, Syrian government forces have begun challenging the rebels all over the
country. They have had success in Damascus, but face resistance in Aleppo and
the northern provinces. Thus the fate of the covert war depends heavily on
Turkey. And there are growing indications that hardliners in Ankara are
prevailing. Evidently, Erdogan is
in two minds (which also explains Putin's decision to confer with him). But part
of his posturing is due to his lingering hope that with the nerve-racking
distractions of the election in the US on November 8 behind him, President
Barack Obama will revisit the Syrian question.
But having
said that, Turks are smart enough to hear the drums by now in the Western capitals, beating the retreat from the Syrian
battlefield even before the battle has been truly joined. Westerwelle
made it clear in Istanbul on the weekend that Germany would expect Turkey not to
precipitate the Syrian crisis.To be
sure, North Atlantic Treaty Organization secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen
expresses solidarity with Turkey, but then, he also underlines that it is a mere
"hypothetical" question whether Turkey would invoke Article 5 of the NATO
charter for an intervention in Syria; he then quickly adds that Syria can have
only one solution - a political solution. ...
But in all
fairness, the Obama administration has consistently made it clear that it is not
willing to engage in direct military intervention. ... is having a tough time explaining what happened
really in Benghazi.... the disunity
among the Syrian rebel groups causes genuine despair in Washington. Meanwhile,
Muslim Brothers are on the march in nearby Jordan and anything can happen now in
that country, which is a linchpin in the United States' regional
strategy.
To cap it all, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki visited Moscow to wrap up a $4.3 billion arms deal. Not surprisingly,
the Chinese oil companies have appeared all over the Iraqi oilfields, which were
supposed to be Big Oil's playpen after the US made such huge sacrifices in men
and resources. And Maliki is beckoning the Russian oil companies, too, to pick
up the threads from where they left off in the Saddam Hussein era.
Clearly,
the writing is there on the wall that the Syrian crisis is having a
"spillover"..
Woven into all this intricate Arab Spring
tapestry, another new thread is threatening to dominate the "big picture" - the
division among the Arabs themselves about the crisis in Syria. Differences have
appeared in the stance of, say, Oman and Kuwait on the one hand and Saudi Arabia
and Qatar on the other - or, between Saudi Arabia and Egypt and between Saudi
Arabia and Iraq.
When United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi
visited Riyadh recently, King Abdullah complained to
him as much about Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi as about Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad. No wonder Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is
proceeding to Kuwait this week. Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi just visited
Qatar. The isolation of the Saudis is no longer possible to be ignored. The
prominent pro-Saudi daily Al-Hayat wrote bitterly on
Saturday:
'... The countries of the
GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] do not now have the choice to head to the Arab
League and then to the [UN] Security Council ... This sexpartite bloc perhaps
does not have the option of heading to NATO and asking it to intervene ... In
fact, it may not even be possible to reach unanimous
agreement even among these six countries, due to the differences in
their stances...'
In sum, the United States' regional allies are
waiting expectantly like the pair of men in Samuel Beckett's play vainly for
someone named Godot to arrive any time soon after November 8.... The end game is beginning in
Syria. "
No comments:
Post a Comment