Syria: Smoke, mirrors and suffering

Perhaps the only certainty in what has turned into an international political game with much smoke and many mirrors, is that one day can make a lot of difference. 

On Monday it seemed that the world was barreling into its biggest crisis in years: an American attack on Syria loomed, one that could trigger the first major showdown between Washington and Moscow since the Cold War. Fighting in Syria could engulf the entire region, fuel prices would go through the roof, we would all feel some pain. 


By Tuesday morning everything had changed. A proposal, apparently from Russia, for Syria to submit its chemical stockpile for international control was accepted by the Syrian foreign minister. In the US the Senate vote on Obama’s planned strikes on Syria was put on hold. 


The world paused for a moment and wondered if Russian Premier Vladimir Putin had not, in an astonishing powerplay, outmanoeuvred US President Barack Obama and was starting to pull from his grasp America’s pole position as superpower. 


But Obama was not to be outdone so easily. Demonstrating a lot more mettle than his detractors would have us believe him capable of, he opted to give diplomacy a chance, with the proviso that if the Syrians and Russians did not act in good faith he would schedule a congressional vote to endorse his decision to use force. 

By “threatening to threaten,” says Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, Obama retained “leverage to keep the Syrians and Russians focused on implementing any agreement – but without having to test Congress’s real willingness to let him fulfill that threat”. 


Of course, the pain and suffering of Syrians being reduced to armwrestling by men in white collars in boardrooms is all very interesting for those who watch from a safe distance. As is the understandable fact that nobody in the US, the UK or Europe, wants to get caught in an intractable war. But the question remains, what is the fate of ordinary people caught in the crossfire in Syrian to be?

And with the focus on Bashar alAssad and his chemical weapons, what exactly are the rebels, possibly with chemicals of their own, getting up to? 


According to Friedman, thousands of Muslim youths have gathered from as far away as Australia to join the rebel jihadist militias fighting to create, not a multisectarian, pluralistic, democratic state, but one that is orthodox Sunni Islamist. This adds to the terror of residents in the Christian and Druze suburbs of Damascus already cowering at the threat of persecution from extremist al-Qaeda-affiliated rebels who have moved into their area. 


Whichever you look at things there are no good outcomes. 


This week a UK doctor working in Syria offered to pay for Labour leader Ed Miliband to spend a week in that country to see the suffering of people. Certainly the plight of civilians should concern anyone who likes to call themselves humanitarian, as should the situation overall, which is not on the backburner and could still result in the biggest showdown since the Cold War. Tomorrow may make all the difference but then it could mean nothing at all. 

Editorial opinion, Daily Dispatch, 12 September 2013