Foreign policy driven by the increasingly bloody Syrian civil war could jump to top priority just before the US Presidential poll unless all sides heed UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s call for a respite to the shooting to open a window for peace. This does not seem likely but there is no alternative aside from a wider conflagration involving Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
Events are escalating so quickly in Syria that flare-up on the borders with Turkey and Jordan could cause the war to force itself upon the November poll. Some think that the quickest way to bring down Bashar al-Assad may be to push him to send his army to face wider border skirmishes with Turkey and Jordan, thus making it harder for him to defeat the anti-government fighters.
Others fear that a wider war would allow foreign fighters in Syria inspired by Al Qaeda to gain influence rather than indigenous Syrian rebels, causing the civil war to turn into a long war of attrition inside Syria. Worse, it would turn into another terrain for uncontrollable sanctuaries for anti-American terrorist.
Ban’s calls for ceasefire and peace sound plaintive given his organization’s lack of influence on any of the war’s participants and supporters at this time. But the escalation is so fast and bloody as to rule out almost any other conduit for peace. The Al Qaeda threat makes it still more important to use diplomacy to obtain a cooling off period between al-Assad and his opponents, if only to weed out the foreign terrorists who have no love for Syrians on any side of the conflict. They are tough Sunni believers who would like to establish Sharia law, rather than find a way to depose al-Assad to make room for a democratic and prosperous nation.
The most destabilizing influence so far for regional peace stems from Ankara’s sabre rattling, which is mounting by the day. Today, Turkey forced a Syrian commercial airliner to land in Ankara to check whether it was ferrying arms to Damascus from Moscow. Local media reports said authorities confiscated missile components but this may be just a rumor.
Preparations for war with Syria seem to be underway in Turkey with a general threatening attack on Syrian territory and the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen declaring that the Western alliance has “all necessary plans in place to protect and defend Turkey if necessary.” Small miscalculations can carry big consequences in such tense situations, when jingoism and national pride tend to overrule caution.
The US is already directly involved and any spillover of the war across Syria’s borders will throw the ball in Washington’s court. In addition to military advisors in Turkey, the US has sent over 150 advisers to Jordan in case cross border firing widens into extensive violence between the two countries. Contingency plans include setting up a buffer zone along the border enforced by Jordan with US support.
The aim is to prepare for the possibility that Syria will lose control of its chemical weapons as its civil war worsens, especially if fundamentalist Al Qaeda fighters prevent the Syrian army or its local opponents from taking even the smallest steps towards peace. American military advisers are also keeping an eye on the nearly 200,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey and some 350,000 in Jordan. However, the main danger for theft of Syrian chemical weapons comes from the chaotic conditions within the country where nearly one million people are displaced internally and numerous groups, including the Syrian army, have killed some 25,000.
On Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned Turkey not to blow-up its differences with Syria and drag NATO into the conflict. “Turkey is being presumptuous, as if it were taking responsibility for solving the Syrian conflict instead of the Syrian people and wants to impose its own solution. For this reason the international community needs to stop Turkey from intervening,” he said.
He made this unusually explicit criticism of Turkey after meetings with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that confirmed purchases of over $4 billion in weapons from Moscow, which is al-Assad’s main ally after Iran. However, stopping Turkey is a vain hope since it is a key provider of weapons, along with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and sanctuaries for Syria’s anti-government fighters. The US is helping the rebels with military advice, logistics and intelligence, mainly through Turkey.
Some of the American military’s worst fears are already coming true in Syria since foreign Al Qaeda fighters are conducting major attacks in Damascus and other cities. The most spectacular was a string of bombings on Tuesday in a compound run by a branch of Syria’s air force intelligence service. The increasingly regularity of lethal terrorist attacks looks like attempts to fuel chaos and grab power by stealth. Al-Assad is awful but chaos driven by Al Qaeda is worse.