Pittsburgh_Patrika_July_2015

The Pittsburgh Patrika, Vol. 20, No. 4, July, 2015
Proxy War... ... continued from Page 8
mutated into a proxy war between the great powers.
The Russians have been arming Bashar al Assad’s regime and the West
is arming the rebels. The Saudis and the Persian Gulf countries are funneling
weapons straight to the Sunnis. The arms are trickling across the
Syria’s borders with Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. The CIA has been
channeling the weapons to the “right” people away from al-Qaeda, but
who the right people are anybody’s guess. A rag tag of village insurgents
and army defectors is coming together as a fighting force. The regime
and its opponents are now fighting with special savagery.
While the savagery is going on, the Syrian exile leaders are frittering
away time sitting outside, where they discussed their plans in Cairo to get
their act together. Divisions along the lines of clan, tribe, ethnicity and
Islamic sects would make a united front difficult to achieve. It appears
that the Assads, father and son, were more skillful than Libya’s Muammar
Qadaffi in keeping their opposition weak and divided.
So the Great powers are facing off in the most volatile region on
Earth, which may have a destabilizing effect in the neighboring
countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, and even beyond. Russians and
Americans are restrained because of the dangerous standoff over the
neighboring Iran.
Russia helped build Iran’s nuclear program, China needs Iranian oil and
both are willing to support Iran’s defense of the region’s Shias, including
Syria’s Alawites. The US and Saudis are lined up behind the Sunnis.
But while Russia and the US want to keep the confrontation at low ebb,
their proxies — Iran and Syria on one side, and Israel and Saudi Arabia
on other — will seek to drag them deeper. Both Russia and China see the
Syrian issue through their own political lenses. They understand Assad
well and support the dictator.
In this complex world of fighting by proxies, now U.S is finding itself
caught in the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
References.
Making sense of proxy wars, by Michael Innes.
The world deployed by Scot L Bills.
World History, by Jonathan Drsner. Pittsburgh State University.
The New York review of Books. How Syria divided the world,
by Michael Ignatiff
Caught in the cross fire, by Massimo Calabresi, in Time Magazine.
April 2015,
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