By Simi Mehta
Nearly two years ago, widespread unemployment, high food prices and increasing inflation stirred the conscience of the youth who took to the streets and began their protest against the authoritarian regime. This first happened in Tunisia and then in Egypt. Syria was also not untouched by this wave of revolution or the Arab Spring.
While the purpose was achieved in Tunisia and Egypt, the protestors or rebels, as they are commonly referred to, were met with a heavy hand by the Bashar-al-Assad regime, which went ahead with ordering of mass-killings of the rebels, without any fear of the United Nations or the international law or reference to the Chemical Weapons Convention. While this brutality continued for nearly two years, taking the form of a civil war in the country, Syria came to occupy the center of the worlds attention on August 21st, 2013, when videos showing the use of chemical weapons against innocent civilians and the rebels were released.
The United States, in its larger quest for democracy, has supported the opposition group protesting against tyranny. It has held Assad responsible for the chemical attacks, and President Obama called for a targeted military strike. The purpose of this strike would be to deter Assad from using chemical weapons, to degrade his regimes ability to use them, and to make clear to the world that we will not tolerate their use. On the other hand, Russia being Syria’s most important ally has blocked the United Nations Security Council from passing anything that might hurt the Assad regime. It has rejected the evidence of chemical weapons. Even the agreement that was concluded in Geneva between the US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on a framework for Syria to bring Syrian chemical weapons under international control and destroy all of its chemical weapons was a diplomatic victory for the Putin government, that eliminated all signs of possible threats of military strikes against Syria.
This discussion brings to the fore a cold war type situation on the international arena. With its last naval base in Syria, a major exporter of arms and ammunitions to Syria and its still continuing cold war style nationalistic pride and aversion to Western intervention, Russia has gone all the way to protect Assad. It has shown the coercive side of diplomacy and not the benign face. US on the other hand, despite UN Reports and other evidences showing the use of chemical weapons by the government, is tied up by public opinion and some Congressional dislike to military intervention, reminiscing about the Iraq and Afghanistan failures. The rank and file in the US Congress is much opposed to the military strikes primarily because the Congressional elections are very close, due to which they are not in favour of losing their constituencies.
While Russia favours referring to the UN to discuss the issue, it has blocked any resolution that goes against Syria. It clearly appears determined to protect the Assad regime and is adamant in not giving up its last bastion in the middle-East.
The doctrine of preemptive strike and regime change as in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan and the replacement model as in the instance of Tunisia and Egypt has fostered illiberal Islamic states, which are unable to sustain the new democratic set up. There appears no vanguard for the social engineering and fostering of the nation-building process, and hence it is very much possible that Syria would not fully give up its chemical weapons for destruction, wherein the US ally, and Syrias neighbour, namely, Israel would be drawn into the conflict. Thus, in the situation where Washington and Moscow stand uncompromisingly on the opposite side of the fence, eventually brings up the Cold War type scenario clearly once again.
(The author is a Ph.D scholar in the American Studies Program at the Centre for Canadian, United States and Latin American Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and can be reached at simi@manavdhara.org).