Secretary of State John Kerry will host Nixon-era Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for a meeting Wednesday, just one day before he is due to lock horns with the Russian foreign minister over the Syria crisis.
Asking an old Nixon hand for advice? Strange days indeed.
Not surprisingly, Kissinger has an interesting take on Syria and makes an important point about what Syria really is:
'First of all, Syria is not a historic state,' Kissinger recalled during a summer gathering this year at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
'It was created in its present shape in 1920, and it was given that shape in order to facilitate the control of the country by France.'
Those danged French again.
He described the armed conflict there as 'a civil war between sectarian groups.'
Syria, Kissinger cautioned, is 'divided into many ethnic groups, a multiplicity of ethnic groups, and that means that an election doesn’t give you the same results as in the United States because every ethnic group votes for its own people. ... Moreover, these ethnic groups are very antagonistic to each other. You have Kurds, Druzes, Alawites, Sunnis and 10 to 12 Christian ethnic groups.'
The idea of cooperation in a coalition government, Kissinger said, is 'inconceivable,' a Financial Post columnist wrote in August.
This is an important point. I've heard it said and seen it written dozens of times -- Syrian President Bashar Assad is "killing his own people." Well, not really. Assad is an Alawite, from a sect that is in some ways closer to the Shia branch of Islam. As such, it's not surprising that Hezbollah and Iran operate freely in Syria. And it's also not surprising that the people who died in the gas attack are primarily Sunni. These folks have been at each other's throats for centuries.
Syria is, in its own way, as much of a historical fiction as Yugoslavia was. And the Syrian endgame may well turn out to be similar; you could see this artificial nation become a variety of states.
3 comments:
I've wondered exactly how the Syrian Civil War ends. The Yugoslavian comparison is an interested potential end game, if extremely problematic as we'll almost certainly end up with several small failed-states that will become training centers for al-Qaeda & assorted extremists.
The Yugoslavian model unfortunately also works as a current comparison as, despite everyone's best efforts to ignore what was happening in Yugoslavia, the West was slowly sucked into the conflict (first with Bosnia, then Kosovo). The difference being that putting NATO/US/UN/Whomever's troops on the ground won't separate the warring sides.
I still think the most likely result of the conflict (for now), is Assad regaining control over what remains of the country...and likely being done in by a coup sometime not long after that.
The patchwork quilt nature of Syria points to the reason that Israel gets blamed for all that is bad in evil in the Moslem world. Without a black hat to scapegoat, the infighting would revert back to tribalism. The bigger question is how do you solve a problem like Syria? I think that there may be song somewhere in there!!!
The challenge of making a pot melt rather than separate is likely the reason that Russia is an ally of Syria. They, perhaps more than any other country, have their own problems with minority ethnic groups. It's little wonder that Asaad has found a sympathetic ear from Putin.
I'm surprised Henry Kissinger didn't convey the philosophy he espoused back during the Iran-Iraq conflict: "It's a shame they *both* can't lose."
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