An American, Not Syrian, Crisis

On the 28th of last month [March], Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times saying that it was “time to rethink [American] Middle East policy.” British journalist David Hirst, who concentrates on the region, described this policy in the Japan Times as “Israelized” a few months after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Many analysts later began to condemn that which they described as the “militarization” of American foreign policy.

The Israelization, or militarization, of American foreign policy reached its climax during what American media insists on calling the “Arab Spring revolutions,” when we succeeded in adapting the Arab League to build America’s Israelized and militarized priorities in the Middle East. This occurred after the League absorbed 10 of NATO’s “partner” states, transforming the organization to such an extent as to make it an Arab front for America’s regional strategy. This is clear in NATO’s war in Libya, as well as its role today in the Syrian crisis, where the Arab League was merely a working partner in the shadows of the second American invasion and occupation of Iraq.

But the results were contrary to the Israelization of America’s foreign and military policy. The heated conflict between international and regional administrations to win the greater regional prize of [establishing] this policy in Syria is clear, and it is evident that, in this context, the policy has reached its apex and begun to regress.

The old, renewable crisis attributed to Syria is in fact a defeat for American foreign policy, resulting from its Israelization and militarization. Arabs are paying the price in blood, today in Syria, yesterday in Libya and Iraq, and before that in Palestine.

The separation between Syria and Iran is no longer a secret. It occurred in order that Syria might be accommodated in the strategy of Arab-Israeli “peace,” under the tutelage of the United States. This is the declared goal of the Israeli occupation. The president, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his ministers succeeded in reducing the preconditions to resume what is called the “peace process,” and in imposing the priorities of the United States in the region above all else. In the Israelization of American foreign policy, the American president, Barack Obama, forced the decreasing importance of the settlements as a Palestinian-Israeli policy priority. Just as he announced at the onset of his term, Obama would succeed in his role in “urging a greater Arab and European role in pressuring the regime” in Syria to adopt America’s Israelized foreign policy in the region as a priority. This is just as Jeffrey D. Feltman, Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in the American State Department, said in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In his testimony on November 9, 2011, Feltman confirmed what we all knew, admitting that “[o]ne thing I have learned from the events of the Arab world in the past year is humility regarding my own ability to predict the outcomes or timelines of these convulsive and transformational processes” in the region. It is now clear that Syria has shot down all forecasts. All indications point to an outcome contrary to American policies that view Syria as an engineer of “near eastern affairs,” and the American foreign minister represents a miserable failure deserving of dismissal.

Feltman was deceptive and misleading to the American people and their congressional representatives in everything else stated in his testimony. He referred to reports of gangs in Syria engaged in terrorism and sabotage as “blatant propaganda” from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, despite documented evidence. Observers from the Arab League, as well as from states with veto power in the UN Security Council, like Russia and China, have said that “protesters are going out into the streets all across Syria every day,” and that these protests “have spread to every city and every major town in the country.” They claim that “a coalition including secularists, Christians, Islamists, Druze, Alawis, Kurds and other groups from both inside and outside Syria […] have joined together to form a united front against the Assad regime,” and that “the Syrian National Council” represents “a united coalition” of opposition that refuses to accept the renewed use of violence by the ruling regime. According to these reports, “tanks and artillery continue to fire into residential areas,” but popular “pressure has begun to exhaust the [Syrian] army.” Feltman concluded by saying that they (that is, the Obama administration) “do not seek further militarization of this conflict” because they “still believe that violent resistance is counterproductive.”

The clear target of his deception was the American people themselves. Feltman and his administration realize that the Syrians will not be fooled by his testimony’s fallacies and dishonesty because they are living in the land that he was talking about. [The American public] are also the target of media lies that are similar to those of the government, conveyed by the tongue of Feltman himself in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In 1957, there was another “Syrian crisis,” one that the older generation remembers very well. The current Syrian crisis is almost a replay of that one in its reasons and the political parties involved, and all evidence suggests that the result of this new 21st-century crisis will also be repeated — the 1957 crisis ended with a victory for Syria and the opposite for America. In the last century, it resulted in Washington undertaking bombings in the region.

America’s defeat in the first Syrian crisis was based on Syria’s role in the region, which the United States is trying today to overturn after failing for the last 55 years. America’s expected defeat in the current crisis will enhance this role in the future.

David Lesch, Professor of Middle East History at Trinity College in the U.S., has published a book about the 1957 crisis called “Syria and the United States: Eisenhower’s Cold War in the Middle East,” a time before the revolution in Iran, the arrival of the Ba’ath party and the al-Assad rule in Syria. Just as with today, the 1957 crisis, which was an attempt to combine Syria and Iraq in the Baghdad Pact against the Soviets, and the revolution of Gamal Abd el-Nasser in Egypt, was an attempt to unite the Arab countries in an American-Israeli-Arab pact against Iran.

William Quandt, a member of the American National Security Council during the Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter era, published a review of Lesch’s book. In this review, he agreed with Lesch’s assessment of American policy against Syria at the time as ‘counterproductive,” saying, “now it is clear that the United States was drawn into a plan to destabilize the Syrian government, in league with Britain, Iraq and Turkey.” In today’s crisis, Qatar and Saudi Arabia take the place of Iraq during the previous one. This had the “counterproductive result of driving the Syrians in to the arms of the Soviets and later toward unity with Egypt.” The Soviet Union and Egypt in that crisis are replaced by Iran, Russia and Iraq today. “[Lesch’s book] helps to explain why Syrians have long been suspicious of American policy toward their country,” Quandt concluded.

It is clear that American policy has not changed in the time between the two Syrian crises. The interval between them was in fact an extension of a prolonged crisis in the American-Syrian relationship, as illustrated by American law taking Syria to task and the American-Israeli war — Israel’s relentless battle to oust the Syrian Arab soldiers from Lebanon. The liquidation of Syrian influence there works to turn Lebanon into a buffer region between the Israeli occupying nation and the one Arab country that is still in a state of war with it. This is supported by evidence that America encouraged the occupying state not to withdraw from the Syrian-occupied Golan Heights, despite Syria’s delinquency in peace talks.