Putin feeding Assad with the blood of Syrians. Protest poster. Photo by Freedom House.
Here's how the Syrian debacle will go:
Not everyone may have noticed that France gave a good whack at Putin's duplicitous and cunning proposal to "put under international control" Assad's nuclear weapon stockpiles. Yes, that France — the same France that fought in Mali recently, did you notice? France insisted that this fakery be made real by a) having some consequences if Assad doesn't cooperate and b) establishing by whom the weapons were used – i.e. making it clear that he is the one who has used the chemical weapons on civilians, not rebels.
Naturally, Russia fought that in the Security Council, and in order to go through this entire charade of given Russia "ownership" of Assad and his CWs (which of course, they've had all along and never used for good), the US capitulated and let them water down the resolution. Now there are no consequences and no ownership of past and ongoing atrocities.
Now, watch as how all the usual UN things happen:
1. Brahimi fact-finding delays and distracts efforts to make the response more robust. I call Brahimi or any other SC fact-finder the "16th member of the Security Council". It's as if they have a veto. Everyone stalls and freezes and waits until Brahimi goes on that fact-finding mission or diplomatic negotiations missions and gets back and reports. This can take weeks as he struggles to line up recalcitrant interlocutors. He can be the best diplomat in the world, but he's dealing with people who want war, not peace, so it's pointless. Let's not forgte that Brahimi has been deployed before many times on peace talks — so as Kofi Annan – and it led nowhere. There is no reason to think it will be different now that the agenda is "CW stockpiles."
2. Assad's crack troops have already scattered the CW stockpiles to 50 locations, according to the Wall Street Journal. No surprise there. This is likely what Hussein did in his day, and with the same Russian help. Their job is to foil UN inspectors. The UN team, if they aren't shot at, will have trouble finding the weapons — and of course, they're hard to do anything with in the first place. Those who have suggested separating the chemicals from the weapons and pouring them in the ground haven't thought through how they plan to keep land from being contaminated then.
3. Syria will drag out "cooperation" as long as possible — and then some — and will keep pretending to be in a process but never be serious. So many people hate the invasion of Iraq (and me, too) that they tend to forget what really made it possible — the endless years of frustration with Saddam playing the UN for a fool, and the UN getting up and getting knocked down again over and over. We will see all this repeat as if there is no historical memory.
4. "Kontrol'" in Russian does not mean "control" as in "have possession of". It means "oversight" or "monitoring". These different meanings always cause havoc at the UN for translators and diplomats and enable the Russians to play fast and loose with meaning. You would think after 50 years of this, it would be different — it is not. Exhausted, the UN will settle for just "monitoring" and not "elimination" and we will see CW get used again, blamed on the rebels again, lather, rinse, repeat.
5. Never any "illegal" bombing. At this point, with a lot at stake in their appearance of weakness-as-strength, i.e. the capitulation to Vlad in the first place as a supposed brilliant and sophisticated maneuver, Obama cannot suddenly say, "Hey, enough of this clap-trap, I'm going to go ahead and bomb them now". He has followed his old DSA line from his hidden college-era paper too long and too far to do that (i.e. the Soviet position for "peace" in the 1980s). He will keep peddling peace well past the sell-by date, Kerry and Hagel will go along with it, and we will constantly be told to give peace a chance.
6. Ambassador Power will be paralyzed. I always said that the purpose of the appointment of her to the UN was for Obama to pretend to look like he cared about humanitarian interventions or RTP as it is now more cleverly called, but to put Samantha in a place where she can do exactly nothing as she will be beset by the p2 vetoes and the e10 third-worlders they drag along. I predict that she will resign after two years in utter frustration citing the need to raise her kids, like Anne Marie Slaughter.
7. While all this is going on, Assad will of course continue to bomb villages and civilians. The CW "kontrol" is a sidebar, and it will be war as usual to bomb the population into submission. This will work, as it did in Chechnya and Egypt.
8. NGOs will continue to take Russia's side. Oxfam and others will continue to make it seem like the US is to blame for Syria and its humanitarian crisis and its refugees, although of course Russia is.
The British leftist creation Oxfam follows the line of old pro-Soviet thinking in its past. Perfect example: it condemned Obama's cancelation of the Moscow summit as somehow a missed opportunity for peace — if we believe in Vlad's peace proposal – and I don't — the moral of THAT story is that he only understands force, like cancelling a summit, before he will come up with something. Even so, Oxfam and others on the old pro-Moscow networks — the Quakers, the Presbyterians, etc. will join others in making it seem like the West is to blame for these refugees and aren't paying enough for them. As with Darfur, the entire story will be converted into one in which the rich world doesn't help the poor world, rather than one in which that old cunning master of Third World revolutions — Moscow — has provided $1 billion in armaments and political cover to its Third World protege, Assad. There will be endless We Are the World sort of campaigns in which America will be blamed but meanwhile, rebels will continue to get rest and relaxation in the camps as they do everywhere.
9. But Jordan is long past the breaking point and so is Turkey, and it just may be that they will constitute a form of pressure on the US to start calling the Russian bluff over the endless delays, as indeed the OIC to some extend has in the entire Syrian saga. It won't work, and in the end, they will accept a return of Assad's unassailable power just to stop the refugee pain for themselves.
10. Some members of the OIC or the Arab League, i.e. Saudia Arabia and Qatar will go on arming the rebels they like which will be more Islamist. This will enable Russia to point out awfulness and bring the West around to Assad.
11. Meanwhile, the peace movement, having nothing to do now that no bombs are going to fly, will focus on ending aid to moderate rebels. They will do everything in their power to discredit those who advocate support of moderate rebels (as they did in focusing on Liz O'Bagy and ruining her career, which sadly, she had made herself vulnerable to). They will turn out Code Pink to every occasion to make it seem like a failure to induce an arms embargo (which will only get enforced in one direction) is what is preventing Assad from really cooperating with those CWs. Congress, which already has pressure from the Ron Paul libertarians and Breitbart to stop "arming Al Qaeda", will see their point.
12. No serious control of CWs will ever be allowed by those in good-faith. You know who is good at cleaning up poisonous weapon sites? NATO. They've even done this in the evil Soviet empire with consent of even Central Asian tyrants. Russia has already pre-bitched about that by implying that if NATO comes in, this could be a stealth-way of taking over.
Putin hates monitors and foreign missions. In his book First Person (which I translated) published in 2000, he explains why he will never, ever allow monitors in Chechnya — because when monitors came into Kosovo, the next thing you knew, they got independence. So that's how he understands "the international community" — a wedge to defeat Russian hegemony. That's why as with the war in Georgia, he will thwart every single effort to observe "Russian peace-keepers" (an oxymoron in Georgia as it will be in Syria) that anyone from the UN to the OSCE to the Council of Europe might propose. And that's how it will be with Syria. It would be great if at least the OIC would stand up to this. They won't. The votes just aren't there in the Security Council.
To better think about how this will go in the next year, in addition to the permanent 5 of US, France, UK, Russia and China, look at the "e-10" or elected ten current membership of the Security Council and their expiration dates:
- Argentina (2014)
- Australia (2014)
- Azerbaijan (2013)
- Guatemala (2013)
- Luxembourg (2014)
- Morocco (2013)
- Pakistan (2013)
- Republic of Korea (2014)
- Rwanda (2014)
- Togo (2013)
So if you have to figure out a vote of "the West against the Rest" — you have to concede that it will go like this, most likely:
West (7):
US
France
UK
Argentina
Australia
Luxembourg
South Korea
Rest: (8)
China
Russia
Azerbaijan
Guatemala
Morocco
Pakistan
Rwanda
Togo
Now, I could be wrong about some of the African or Latin Americans, but I don't think so, and in any event, they could solve the problem of intense Russian pressure they will experience with an "abstain".
Yes, John Schindler is right, we live in that "multi-polar world" so long sought by Russia, and welcome to it — I always said, whenever the Kremlin fellow travellers whined about the lack of a multi-polar world, that when it came, it wouldn't have Paris as the other pole, but Moscow. Happy now?
I deliberately used the old Britishism "West against the Rest" to show that "the Rest" — as often the case — is now outnumbering the West.
Russia can always count on its immediate allies like Azerbaijan to vote with it (that one time when they didn't and turned in an abstain it might as well have been a "yes" with Russia), and old Soviet allies and leaders of the G77 and third world like Pakistan, which has a very strong UN presence and is very seasoned in getting its way. African countries, especially if they had a Soviet history, tend to vote the "third world" way that Russia still dominates.
I've put Argentina with the West here, but all it takes is one Glenn Greenwald article claiming Snowden found that the US spied on the Argentinian government the way it did on the Brazilian government, and that could change. In fact, that Snowden active measure had things like that in mind in the "multi-polar" quest.
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