On the Geo-Politics of Turkish Incursion into Syria

Salman Rafi Sheikh

Despite the fact that Turkey has been defying the US as of recently with regard to its purchase of Russian S-400 missile system, the US president has finally conceded to its NATO partner’s long-standing demand of invading northern Syria and wipe out the Kurdish militias. This is a critical decision since Kurdish militias were the main US ground allies in the war against the Islamic State in Syria. With the US now abandoning its only ground ally in Syria, a policy shift is in the air, a change that might ultimately go to Syria’s benefit. While we shall come to this point later, what is pertinent here to discuss is the factor that led the US to change its erstwhile position vis-à-vis Kurds.

There is hardly any gainsaying that the world is increasingly becoming multipolar, and Turkey being a ‘Middle Kingdom’ between two poles has been making the best use of its geo-strategic position in the emerging world order. As Erdogan said in his recent UNO speech, “the world is bigger than five.” He was referring to the five permanent members of the Security Council: Britain, France, Russia, China, and America. Perhaps he wants his country to be included as a sixth, or that the world has already changed too much for these countries to manage on their own without showing sensitivity to other powers’ interests.

As many reports in the mainstream western media have indicated, Turkey, despite its very explicit strategic ties with Russia, remains important for the US. The fact that the US, despite being so deeply accustomed to running the world unilaterally, has had to change its position reflects the necessary foreign policy and strategic adjustments that even the US is having to make in this increasingly multipolar world where a country, relatively much smaller than the US and lying on the intersection of Asia and Europe, can force a much bigger and powerful country to prioritise a smaller country’s interests.

Two things, as such, stand out. First, Turkey is no longer a pliant and a willing US partner and/or a strong adherent to the dead cold war agenda of ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union, or Russia and China in the contemporary era, although it still continues to provide İncirlik Air Base, a military airport in southeastern Turkey, which hosts fifty tactical nuclear weapons aimed at primarily reinforcing what NATO experts call ‘extended deterrence guarantee’ of their organisation against a Russian invasion of Europe. Secondly, the US, due to deep presence of Russia in the region, is no longer an external hegemon entrenched in the region, practically no longer in a position to force its policies on its partners. This means that Turkey is in a far better position to pursue its interests a lot more independently than was the case few years ago. This is perhaps the reason why Russia, despite knowing that Turkish territory can be used against Russia in any future conflict with the NATO, is still developing its relations in a way never known before to both countries.

This is something that the US cannot control. All it can do is to adjust its position to secure its long-term interests. Its decision to stand aside in the up-coming Turkish On the Geo-Politics of Turkish incursion reflects that adjustment.

On the other hand, Russia and Syria are also very much in the equation. While Syria and Russia may object to a larges scale military presence of Turkey in Syria—and both will reiterate that this presence is uninvited and has no legal basis—this objection will not turn into a practical opposition; for, a Turkish incursion and the US silence that followed together with its abandoning of Kurds might bring the Kurds closer to Syria and Russia.

Russian officials, as of recently, have been speaking of the “maximalist positions” the Kurds have adopted in their dealings with the Syrian government. Therefore, when cornered by the Turks and abandoned by the US, they might turn to the Syrian government for a settlement. This will, of course, provide Syria and Russia with an opportunity to reunify the whole of Syria, an ultimate objective that even Turkey has shown sensitivity to. A recent statement from the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said that Ankara had “supported the territorial integrity of Syria since the beginning of the crisis and will continue to do so” and that by eliminating all ‘terrorist forces’ from that region, Turkey will only “contribute to bringing safety, peace and stability to Syria.”

Also, given that Russia has been eyeing an expansion of cooperation with Turkey beyond Syria, Moscow will not object to Turkish incursion and let Ankara slip out its hands. At the same time, Moscow would want to make sure that no large-scale fighting takes place, giving rouge groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda to resurface and reverse the gains Russia and Syria have made in last two years or so.

Moscow will, therefore, make its own adjustment and prefer to play a mediatory role between the Kurds and the Turks, and Kurds and Damascus in order to solidify Syrian control on all of its territories.

Given this, it is possible that a settlement might emerge out of the storm that Turkey is going to start. Moscow’s mediation might be acceptable to all the parties. Ankara, of course, would want a guarantee from Damascus and Moscow about Kurds being confined to their traditional areas and not engaging in any militant and activities against Ankara, or inciting separatism among the Kurds living in Turkey.

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Iran against New Imperialism

by Izeth Hussain

The world needs to get a sophisticated understanding of the problem of Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. It has figured so steadfastly in the media for weeks, months, and years, that it has become understandable that the Israeli President Shimon Peres should say "Iran today is really a world problem, maybe the number one problem of the world." (London Telegraph interview reproduced in the Island of October 21). According to him, the West as a whole, and all the Afro-Asians whose thinking is determined by the Western media, the problem is that Iran is determined to become a nuclear weapons power, and is working secretly and relentlessly towards that end. Its objective, allegedly, is to remove Israel from the map, subjecting its population to mass extermination.

Contrariwise to what Peres is saying I hold that he, not Iran, is the world’s number one problem. More precisely, I hold that what Peres and the likes of him represent is the world’s number one problem, and what they represent is the New Imperialism. There seems to be a dangerous lunacy underlying the drive towards the New Imperialism, and it is only in terms of that lunacy that the insensate charge that Iran wants to bomb out Israel can be understood. Anyone with even a meager quantum of commonsense should surely be able to understand that should Iran do so, it will itself be wiped off the face of the earth within minutes. Why suppose that Iran is mad enough to want that? Behind that supposition is the lunatic racist stereotype about the irresponsibility and irrationality of the Orientals. My point about underlying lunacy can also be illustrated by a detail in the Peres interview. He says that Israel has never declared that it wants to have nuclear bombs and ads "But on the other hand if you can achieve deterrence by suspicion it’s not a bad situation." Fair enough maybe, but in that case why should not Iran also achieve deterrence against being attacked by creating the suspicion that it has nuclear bombs? The answer has to have behind it some kind of racist lunacy: the Israeli bomb is the weapon of white Israelis, while the Iranian bomb is the weapon of colored Iranians who like other Orientals are by nature irresponsible and irrational.

Orientalism – the Western drive both conscious and subconscious to perceive the Orientals in negative terms – was useful in providing supposed legitimacy for the exercise of Western power over Afro-Asians. At the core of Western imperialism was the notion that the Western whites were engaged in much toil and trouble all for the good of the lesser breeds. The Orientalist lunacy could figure also in the New Imperialism, - about which I must now give a very brief account. Right through history powerful nations have usually wanted to establish some sort of order around them, an order over which they reigned supreme and others were accorded varying degrees of inferior status. After the Second World War a bipolar order was established with two super-powers – actually a misleading description because it did not account for the Non-Aligned who numbered over a hundred states. After 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union it was thought that a unipolar world had come into being with the US as the sole super-power. The Gulf War quickly knocked out that notion because it was shown that the US alone could not cope with it, and the prospect seemed to point to a totally orderless world. By now it is clear enough that a multipolar world is taking shape with the US, the EU, Russia, China, and India as power-centers. At present the Islamic world, Black Africa, and Latin America, have no power-centers, but they could emerge later. Huntington seems to have been right in thinking in the first half of the ‘nineties that the new world order would be based essentially on civilisational unities. There will therefore be room in the new world order for negative views of other civilizations, which can take the form of Orientalist lunacy.



The new world order can of course be seen in positive terms as it would be better than an anarchic world in which the strong can keep on pouncing on the weak with total impunity. But it can also be horribly destructive and amount to a New Imperialism, as shown by the case of Iraq. Its people were peacefully going about their quotidian tasks without harming or threatening any foreign country until the US and Britain pretended that they were practically certain there were weapons of mass destruction there, after which they pounced causing the deaths of around a million innocent Iraqis. It was among the most horrible crimes against humanity ever perpetrated. The Western leaders who perpetrated it have not been hanged. It seems hardly necessary to labor the point that the New World Order can turn out to be – perhaps to a very considerable extent – a New Imperialism. Instead I will now focus on a point of crucial importance for the purposes of this article: the nature of the weapons required to maintain a New Imperialism.

In the imperialisms of the past the strong conquered the weak and imposed their will on them, the determinant being the might of weapons. As a consequence of revolutionary changes taking place across the globe during the last century, an entirely novel and historically unprecedented situation came about. As shown by the cases of Vietnam and then Afghanistan, the might of weapons no longer sufficed to make the will of the strong prevail over the weak. The people count as never before in history, and the people resent the conqueror. The peaceful imperial order of the past – based on conquest, the subjugation of the people, and thereafter their peaceful exploitation – is no longer possible. But whether it is to be called the New World Order or the New Imperialism, the power centers have to impose their will on the weak to maintain peace and order. That cannot be done by conquest and subjugation as in the past. It can only be done – so it seems – through the threat or use of weapons of mass destruction.

The history of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is very significant in that connection. When the draft was presented by the US Embassy to the Colombo Foreign Office in 1968 I had the official responsibility of making an in-depth study of it. I quickly came to the conclusion that its objective was certainly to prevent proliferation, but nuclear disarmament was no part of its real objective. In other words, it was meant to keep the powerless powerless, and the very powerful still very powerful with a monopoly of nuclear weapons. Subsequent decades have shown that surmise to be correct, though with one modification. The nuclear weapons powers realized that it would be impossible to prevent proliferation altogether, so that the sensible strategy would be to allow some new nuclear weapons powers in addition to the old ones. All of them – the happy few! in Stendhal’s famous phrase – would come to constitute the core states of the new multipolar world. That precisely is what we are witnessing at the moment.

According to my reading, the 1995 review conference on the NPT showed very clearly that a New World Order can slide smoothly into a New Imperialism. I will here quote the views on that conference given in Samuel P. Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations. The key issue was whether the NPT should be renewed for an indefinite period or only for twenty five years. The US led the campaign for permanent extension. I quote, "A wide range of other countries, however, objected to such an extension unless it was accompanied by much more drastic reduction in nuclear arms by the five recognized nuclear powers. In addition, Egypt opposed extension unless Israel signed the treaty and accepted safeguard inspections. In the end, the United States won an overwhelming consensus on indefinite extension through a highly successful strategy of arm-twisting, bribes, and threats. Neither Egypt nor Mexico, for instance, both of whom had been against indefinite extension, could maintain its position in the face of their economic dependence on the United States. While the treaty was extended by consensus the representatives of seven Muslim nations (Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Egypt, and Malaysia) and one African nation (Nigeria) expressed dissenting views in the final debate."

The infamous NPT review conference may retrospectively come to be seen as having had a sinister significance, for there could be seen the principles of a New Imperialism being laid down with the acquiescence of its future victims. Only a few Muslim countries showed some fight, while the rest behaved like placid water-buffaloes. Eventually "arm-twisting, bribes, and threats" – all part of the traditional repertoire of imperialism – sufficed to bring everyone into line, and a glorious "overwhelming consensus"was achieved. Today, notably after Iraq, the New Imperialism has gone much further. It is in terms of the paradigm of the New Imperialism, and not in terms of the Orientalist stereotype of irresponsible and dangerously irrational native boys, that Iran’s nuclear travails have to be understood.

I will now make some observations on the Israeli and Western strategy to try to bring Iran to heel. It is essentially a strategy of demonization. In an interesting article (Island of September 29) Saybhan Samat pointed out that the demonization goes back to October 2005 when a speech made by Ahmadinejad came to be widely misquoted in its mistranslated English form. He was misquoted as saying that Israel should be wiped off the map of the world. What he actually said was that Israel would disappear from the map of the world – which of course is very different from saying that Israel should be wiped out through aggressive action, or that its population should be subjected to genocidal extermination. All that he meant was that there was nothing sacrosanct and eternal about a state, which therefore can disappear after the manner of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia in recent decades. Likewise Israeli in its present Zionist form can also disappear. The clarification has been made umpteen times by the Iranians, but that does not satisfy Shimon Peres who in the interview from which I quoted above said that it’s a shame that the UN does nothing about it when a member-state "calls for the destruction of another member of the UN". The old racist rogue and the West as a whole are determined to project an image of the Iranian leader as a genocidal maniac who is going all out to get nuclear weapons.

The demonization can be seen very clearly also in Obama’s absurd charge that the Iranians had been covering up a secret nuclear facility, which led Hilary Clinton to declare that she was prepared to "obliterate" Iran. I will not go into much detail about this as it will take up too much space. Instead I will refer the interested reader to Scott Ritter’s article in the London Guardian of September 25 and an interview given by him, both of which are available at the Sailan Muslim website (www.sailanmuslim.com). I will cite only a few details from the article of Scott Ritter who was the UN’s weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is therefore the kind of technocrat who can speak authoritatively on Iran’s Qom nuclear facility. He pointed out that it was not detected by outsiders, but was declared to exist voluntarily by Iran itself. He goes into detail to show that in setting up that facility Iran has not violated any agreement into which it has entered. Therefore Obama’s charge that Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow is legally and technically wrong. According to Ritter the Qom facility is part of "an attempt on the part of Iran to provide for strategic depth and survivability of its nuclear program in the face of repeated threats on the part of US and Israel to bomb its nuclear infrastructure." As for the firing of long-range missiles. Ritter holds that it was meant to show that Iran has the inherent right and capacity for self-defense. It is merely saying "If you choose to attack us, we can and will defend ourselves."



What should be done? I believe that there should be an international questioning of the NPT, and a new Non-Aligned Movement taking account of the new multipolar realities, but I cannot go into all that in this article. I will conclude by making the obvious point that there should be international support expressed for Iran. It is a disgrace for the Islamic world that from its ranks only Turkey’s Erdogan is speaking out for Iran these days. It is also a disgrace for the rest of humanity, particularly for the third world which is sleep-walking into the New Imperialism.





Izeth Hussain