DAVID GARDNER
Russia and Iran have turned two ‘de-escalation zones’ into the seventh circle of hell
Financial Times, Feb. 27, 2018 – To judge by the shrill rhetoric of US, Israeli and Saudi leaders, the expansion of Iran’s power across the Middle East has replaced Isis as the greatest danger to the region and even global security.
Yet this trio’s drive against the influence of Tehran, which moved up a gear this month, is not wholly convincing. Israel ordered air strikes on Iranian targets as the US and Saudi Arabia cheered from the sidelines. They agreed Israel was within its rights to blitz a dozen targets, after anti-aircraft batteries inside Syria shot down an Israeli jet, in action after an Iranian drone apparently crossed from Syrian into Israeli airspace. Yet the trio do not appear to be totally in sync.
Israel, for example, says it will go to war against Iran and its partners, in particular Hizbollah, the Lebanese paramilitary movement, to stop them consolidating their position inside Syria and opening a new front close to Israel’s borders, or from increasing their arsenal of missiles in Lebanon.
The US, for all President Donald Trump’s blustering tweets, is in a more ambiguous position. It is providing financial, diplomatic and material support to Lebanon and Iraq, the two Arab countries in which Iran’s influence is greatest. In May, both hold elections that could see the triumph of Tehran-backed paramilitaries: Hizbollah in Lebanon; the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) in Iraq.
In a region littered with the debris of failed states, the US, along with France, the UK and the EU, is trying to shore up fragile countries such as Lebanon and Iraq by strengthening state institutions including the army. Whether they thereby help Iran’s allies is a real quandary.
This disarray stands in contrast to the simple and cynical clarity of Russia and Iran, patrons of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. Together they have turned two of the four “de-escalation zones” Moscow pushed for last year — eastern Ghouta next to Damascus and Idlib in the north-west — into the seventh circle of hell. These zones, chosen by Russia but subsequently endorsed by the US, were in areas where the Assad regime still faced serious challenge from rebels. As many suspected at the time, the freeze or pause in fighting in these areas — like so many previous ceasefires — created a breathing space for the minority Assad regime, which was and is desperately short of manpower.
The Assad loyalist camp, with Moscow and Tehran as its ultimate backers, weaponized diplomacy — alongside the Russian air force and Iranian-supplied foot soldiers — to expand its rump state. The de-escalation zones are now starting to resemble Aleppo, the last urban stronghold of the rebellion, reduced to rubble before its fall at the end of 2016. For the de-escalation zones to be different, western powers needed to insist on no-fly zones and the lifting of sieges to protect civilians. They did not. Instead, the Assads and their backers are raining fire on eastern Ghouta.
They have, to repeat, clear aims. The Assads want to recover all Syria and total power. Russia wants to return to the top table as a great power, outflanking the US in a region it hitherto dominated and building military bases in the east Mediterranean. Iran is creating an arc of power from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, with Shia Arab paramilitary building blocks in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Whether they succeed in the end, or end up trapped in the coils of sectarianism, is open to question. But for now they are successfully exploiting the serial errors of their adversaries.
Russia wants to return to the top table as a great power, outflanking the US . . . Iran is creating an arc of power from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean
Hizbollah and the PMF, a coalition of Iraqi Shia militias, are the progeny of two catastrophic errors: Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982; and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards created Hizbollah to fight (and eventually end) Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. Iran simultaneously created the first Iraqi militia — the Badr Brigade — during the 1980-88 war with Saddam Hussein, but massively expanded this paramilitary capacity during the post-2003 Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. The PMF was the main beneficiary of the land-grab in Iraqi Kurdistan last September, after Washington sided with Tehran and Baghdad against Kurdish secession.
Saudi Arabia has separately contributed to the evolution and credibility of the Houthi political movement in Yemen, which is now embraced by Iran and seen as part of its paramilitary drive. In six campaigns from 2004 to 2014, the Saudis backed Ali Abdullah Saleh, the corrupt Yemeni strongman, in failed efforts to suppress the heterodox Zaydi Shia movement. The Saudis started an air war in Yemen after Saleh switched sides to the Houthi, but the effort came badly unstuck when the Saudis got him back, only to see him killed within days. The kingdom is in a quagmire.
Such baleful precedents might give pause to anyone before starting another war — in this instance, mainly Israel versus Iran — but probably will not. If the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia continue to think it is possible to bomb the way to a better future, why should Russia and Iran play it differently — even as they outplay their opponents, at least for now?
All parties to the Syrian tragedy and regional mayhem are culpable in the failure to prevent the daily mass destruction of civilian lives. But it is beyond shame to see that the single diplomatic “advance” in recent years — devised by Russia but accepted by all — was the de-escalation zones now being drowned in blood.
