DAYTONA BEACH SHORES -- The Syrian civil war has raged on for several months now with the conflict shifting from its beginning in regional towns to the large city of Aleppo and the capital of Damascus.
The level of violence increases as outside powers like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United States provide arms to the rebels and Iran gives weapons and fighting men to the Syrian army, which brings ever greater amounts of Russian-provided armament to bear.
Western nations call for sanctions to hasten the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad but the Russians and Chinese block those efforts in the UN Security Council. Government control of Syria is badly weakened but still the fighting continues, with thousands dead and many more wounded.
Meanwhile the great powers and interested regional states decline to intervene directly while sparring with one another indirectly and from a safe distance.
Why? Who cares what happens there?
The answer is that Syria is of no great importance in and of itself. It is important for what it is or can become to others.
Consider first the position of Israel. Syria is the hegemon of Lebanon and both countries border Israel on the north. The Syrian armed forces are well equipped and trained. They nearly broke through Israeli lines on the Golan Heights in the 1973 War. Since then Israel has enjoyed a tentative agreement with the al-Assad family in Damascus but, with the death of the father, Hafiz al-Assad, and the assumption of power by his son Bashar, Iranian influence has grown in Damascus, as has the potential risk to Israel.
With once friendly Egypt slipping ever more under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, Israel really does not want growing hostility on its northern frontier. Israel has to be concerned, whichever side wins in Syria.
What is important to Israel is, or ought to be, important to the United States.
Now consider Iran, the regional player most strongly affected by the chaos in Syria and by the possible replacement of the present Alawite government by one controlled by Sunni Muslims.
So far, Iran has been the primary beneficiary of the American conquest of and subsequent withdrawal from Iraq. The majority of the Iraqi population is, like the Iranians, of the Shia sect of Islam. The Shia currently rule in Baghdad and feel that they can reply on the growing power and influence of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran to help them maintain control over their former Sunni masters and perhaps even over their quarrelsome Kurds.
However the Iraqi Arabs are not Persians, like the Iranians. Baghdad may accept Tehran’s predominance as long as Iran is perceived to be a rising power but, should the Iranian-backed Alawites fall in Damascus, to be replaced by a Sunni government, Baghdad will reassess.
Syria’s Alawites are a sort of tangential offshoot of Shia Islam, with lesser elements of other faiths thrown in. They are a small minority of the Syrian population, which is also majority Sunni.
Should the Sunni come to power, and in light of the bloody-handed control exercised by the Alawites over the Sunni for more than 50 years, it is likely both that al-Assad would lose his head (literally) and the new government would turn away from Iranian influence. Thus Iran has both religious and geopolitical reasons for its support of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
Tehran provides weapons and fighting men from its Revolutionary Guards units. As this is written an Iranian cargo vessel is passing through the Suez Canal toward Syria, reportedly carrying fresh arms and ammunition for al-Assad. The Egyptians have refused a request to stop and inspect the vessel.
Both Tehran and al-Assad are well aware that, without Iranian aid, he will fall much the sooner. His fall will also cost Iran its channel to Hezballah, a Shia terrorist group and al-Qaeda ally which inhabits southern Lebanon and which is the primary terrorist threat to Israel from the north.
Clearly Iran’s regional ambitions would suffer badly if a Sunni government comes to power in Damascus and this explains the involvement of Sunni nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Both of these countries fear a regionally powerful and nuclear-armed Iran, and with good reason. They count on the United States, rightly or not, to prevent Iran from getting the Bomb and they are using their vast financial resources to pay for the arms delivered through Turkey to the Syrian rebels. I assume that most of these arms come from our own storehouses of Soviet-era weaponry but that is merely an assumption.
The last of the regional powers to consider is Turkey. They are a NATO power, with the best armed and trained, most powerful armed forces in the region other than those of Israel. And the Turks are ferocious fighting men.
Boasting the area’s largest and most advanced economy, Turkey is interested in expanding its influence to the east, where there are large Turanic populations. Inevitably this will reinvigorate the old rivalries between Turkey and Iran.
Other than with the Kurds, the Turks have no interest in military involvement at this time but they would be delighted to use the Syrian imbroglio to weaken the rising Iranian power.
And so Turkey serves as a channel for equipment and supplies to the rebels, as a refuge for those fleeing the violence and, one would suppose, a site for camps to provide military training to the rebel fighters.
Normally Syria would be expected to object but, in light of Turkey’s strength and the demands of civil conflict, al-Assad wants no part of a dispute with Turkey.
That leaves the Great Powers.
For decades Syria has been first a Soviet and then a Russian client state. Damascus still provides the Russian navy use of the warm water port of Tarsus, though the Russians have begun evacuating it due to the nationwide civil strife.
Moscow will not intervene militarily nor will it even risk international opprobrium (as when it reneged on delivery to Syria of combat helicopters) but it will support its man al-Assad diplomatically whenever it can.
The same is true for China, which has no direct interest in Syria, but shares a significant indirect interest with Russia.
That interest is their strong desire to keep the United States deeply engaged in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, in trying to adapt to the so-called “Arab Spring” and in working toward a solution in Syria.
As a result of years of fiscal mismanagement and cuts to our military capacities, America no longer has the ability to enforce its will in several hotspots at once. Moscow and Beijing appear to have a better understanding of this than does Washington. To the degree that they can keep us focused on Syria and on other MidEast crises, we are less able to respond to Russian or Chinese actions to extend their influence elsewhere.
All of this places the Obama administration in a real quandary. Issues involving Israeli security and Iranian nuclear potential are too important to walk away from, though he will continue to attempt to ignore them until after the November elections.
Right now his strategy in Syria seems to be to fight to the last Syrian and pray that the struggle resolves itself without spreading. Recent sectarian fighting in Lebanon suggests that that is probably a fond hope. In any event, no decisions should be expected from Washington until next year at the earliest.
So, Syria is quite important, as a field on which regional and global players strive to advance their interests. The nature and policies of any future Syrian government cannot be predicted. Assad might even retain power, though that does not seem probable. All that can be said with certainty is that the same set of players will continue to work against one another to gain influence with the new rulers in Damascus.