If it was truly about Syria or defeating the ISIS, the mess that we see in the region today would have been solved relatively easier. The unfolding of recent events, including the US strategic bombing to ‘save’ human lives, is a classic Cold War era style of politics and continuation of proxy wars all over again. We have seen this too many times before, during the Cold War in Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam and Latin America.
What started as a movement for democracy in Syria back in 2011 became entangled into regional power politics between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel on one end, against Iran, Assad regime and Hezbollah on the other. Fast forward to 2017, the global superpowers, the US, Europe and Russia, are all densely involved in backing their proxies.
If it was about defeating ISIS, how long would it have taken for these global powers and Nato, with a military budget worth trillions of dollars, to wipe off untrained and ill-equipped ISIS fighters? The problem is not defeating ISIS, the global powers are locked down into an impasse over post-ISIS power structure in the region, meanwhile allowing time to ISIS to gain momentum, conduct propaganda, recruit militants and attack Western cities.
crisy is such that under the label of ‘fighting’ ISIS, regional powers have been putting their own interests first. Turkey, for instance, has been more inclined on bombing Kurdish forces instead of targeting ISIS fighters. Saudis have been aiding ISIS indirectly to thwart off growing Iranian influence in the region. Americans, on the other hand, are supposedly fighting against ISIS, yet supporting the Saudis at the same time.
The security emergency that the threat of ISIS has provided is helping both regional and global powers to reframe the post-ISIS power structure in their own favour. The tragedy for Syria and its people is that it is a country where global superpowers have unfortunately come in direct confrontation to one another over their ‘national interests’.
The events in Syria reveal a lot about the global power structure and the international order. First, they demonstrate that despite all the advancement and progress of human society, the global South continues to remain under the hegemony of the North. Despite the entire rhetoric over decolonisation since the last Great War, the fact is that the Middle East and numerous other former colonies have remained under the shadow of superpowers’ ‘national interests’.
Post-WWII, the superpowers didn’t have colonies, instead just their ‘national interests’ in regions as far as Afghanistan or Syria. Naturally, any movement for self-determination or against the foreign-sponsored rulers in those regions in the 21st century will be a direct threat to the ‘national security’ of such powers. The war as we see in Syria is, thus, really the war of foreign ‘national interests’ colliding with one another.
Second, the continued crisis in Syria reveals that the priority of global powers isn’t to defeat the ISIS but to ensure that the ‘right’ power setup is arranged during the post-ISIS regional order. This securitisation of foreign policy has allowed swift increase in military and defence spending under the label of ‘threat from the ISIS’. The innocent taxpayers have little clue that it’s not their ‘security’ that is at risk but the security of ‘national interest’ somewhere in the rural Middle East that is under threat.
Third and very important is the obvious lesson that must be learnt, weakening down of institutions and governance setup through foreign occupation, bombing and destruction allows space to breed terrorist organisations. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and now Syria all represent how the recklessness of superpowers have destroyed institutional structures, giving space for militant organisations, such as the ISIS to seize control.
As long as the crisis in Syria is not separated from thick Cold War politics, priorities not settled and ‘national interests’ of the foreign powers continue to dominate the strategy and discourse, Syria is going to tread the path of destruction, and on its way may even trigger a wider war that may not just be fought in the Middle East, but also on the streets of developed countries as we saw in Paris.
