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    Revisiting the win-win-win-win outcome in Syria Archived Message

    Posted by Tomski on October 24, 2019, 12:41 am, in reply to "Lavrov and Shoygu Hold Press Conference Over New Syria Deal"

    An excellent analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses of all actors in the Syrian conflict.

    https://thesaker.is/revisiting-the-win-win-win-win-outcome-in-syria/

    In his recent article “The Road to Damascus: How the Syria War Was Won” Pepe Escobar summarized the outcome of the war in Syria in the following way:

    “It’s a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.”

    This otherwise excellent summary overlooks two out of three members of the “Axis of Kindness”, including Israel and the KSA. Of course, later in his analysis Pepe does address these actors, and also includes Kuwait. Furthermore, a thorough discussion of what took place would have to also include China, Hezbollah, Yemen and the EU (well, the ones that matter, the UK and France. The rest are just voiceless colonies of the USA).

    Most of the analyses of what just took place focused on the “what”. I will try to look into the “why” and the “how” of what just happened in Syria. Still, I don’t propose to make such a detailed analysis, but I do want to re-classify the actors in a somewhat different way: by their relative strength.

    Strength Table (not easy to copy)

    Of course, and just like any other taxonomy, this one is necessarily somewhat subjective and others might use different criteria or categories. Now let’s look at what I believe is the key to the control of the entire region: the ability to place “boots on the ground” or the lack of such an ability:

    Boots on the ground Table (not easy to copy)

    Now let’s sum this up. This is how the relative strength of these regional actors has changed since the initiation of the AngloZionist aggression against Syria:

    Strength evolution Table (not easy to copy)

    It is now time to try to make sense of all this and try answer the question of why one group of relatively strong actors had so much bad luck as to become weaker and weaker, while the weaker became stronger and stronger.

    The first thing we need to agree upon is that irrespective of the public posturing, everybody is, and has been, talking to everybody else. This “conversation” could be official and public, or behind closed doors, or even by means of intermediaries and, last but not least, a state version of “body language”: by means of actions which send a message to the other party or parties. Still, while this is certainly true, it is the quality of the communications between the various parties which made all the difference. When, say, Netanyahu or Trump publicly proclaim they they don’t give a damn about anything at all (including international law) and that they reserve the right to threaten or even attack anybody, at any time, for any reason whatsoever, this is a very clear message to, say, the Iranians. But what is that message, really? It says a couple of things:

    Resistance is futile because we are so much stronger than you and therefore
    We don’t give a damn about you or your national interests and therefore
    We are not interested in negotiating with you (or anybody else for that matter). Your only solution is to submit to us
    This is really crucial. The USA and Israel have proclaimed their total superiority over the entire planet and, specifically, over every single actor in the Middle-East. Furthermore, their entire worldview and ideology is predicated on this very strong sense of military superiority. Ask any Israeli or US American what their countries will do if some coalition of local powers is successful in attacking them: they will reply something along the lines of “we will simply nuke all the friggin’ ragheads and sand-######s – f**k them!”. This line is always delivered with a tone of absolute finality, a total certitude and the mental equivalent of “’nuff said!”.

    Alas, for the Axis of Kindness, this is a completely counter-factual belief. Why?

    First, the quick appeal to nukes is an implicit admission that there is something very wrong with the rest of the armed forces of the Axis of Kindness. Furthermore, the real regional powers all understand that it is not in their interest to give the US or Israel a pretext to use nukes. Thus, while, say, the Iranians sure have the means to strike Israel or any one of the many CENTCOM facilities in the Middle-East, they have been very careful to keep their counter-attacks below the dangerous threshold in which the legacy AngloZionist corporate media would be unable to conceal the magnitude of the disaster and demand that nukes be used (yes, if it comes to that, both the Israeli and the US media will demand nuclear strikes just as they cheered for every war of aggression ever committed by the USA and Israel).

    Second, precisely because the US and Israel are unable to have real allies (they only have colonies run by comprador elites), they cannot operate successfully in a multi-lateral kind of relationship with other actors. The contrast between the US/Israel, on one hand, and Russia and Iran, on the other, could not be greater. Both Russia and Iran understand that having real allies is much more advantageous than having puppets. Why? Because in order to convince somebody to become your ally you absolutely have to offer that party something tangible as part of a compromise goal setting. When this is done, the weaker ally feels that it is defending its own interests and not the interests of a patron which might be unreliable or which might even backstab you.

    Third, one of the best US experts on the theory of negotiations, Professor William Zartman, wrote in his seminal book “The Practical Negotiator” that

    One of the eternal paradoxes of negotiations is that it allows the weak to confront the strong and still come away with something which should not be possible if weakness and strength were all that mattered (…). Weaker parties tend to seek more formal negotiating forums and to strengthen their hand through organizations (…). Weak states can afford erratic or irresponsible behavior more easily than stronger parties, particularly when the rules of regularity and responsibility favor the strong (…). Weak states do best by rewarding stronger states’ concessions rather than than by “hanging tough” and by opening high to indicate needs and to facilitate rewards (…). The tactics of toughness and softness vary according to the strength of the parties: under symmetry, toughness tends to lead to toughness and under asymmetry to softness, with weaker parties following the leader of stronger parties.

    There is a lot to unpack here (and there is much more in this book which I highly recommend to everybody!).

    First, let’s compare and contrast the Russia and US approaches to creating negotiation fora. The US cooked up the “Friends of Syria” forum which was most remarkable in two unique ways: first, in spite of calling itself “Friends of Syria” this group only contained a who’s who of Syria’s, Iran’s and Russia’s enemies (just like to “Friends of Libya” was a cornucopia of countries hostile to Libya). Secondly, the self-evident (and not really denied) purpose and function of this group was to bypass the UNSC. There is nothing new here, the US has been trying to replace the UN and its role in upholding international law with all sorts of gimmicks including “coalition of the willing” or appeals for a “rules-based international order”. Needless to say, with the possible exception of a few truly dim propagandists, all these tricks are designed to avoid the already existing international fora, beginning with the United Nations. Russia, in contrast, not only used the UN for all its (admitted limited) worth and succeeded in forcing the USA to accept resolutions on Syria (or the Ukraine for that matter) which the US did not want to agree to, but which they could not veto on political considerations. Not only that, Russia also created the Astana peace process which, unlike the US created fantasies, brought together different parties including parties hostile to each other. The most brilliant move of the Russians was to impose on all parties the notion that “those willing to negotiate are legitimate parties whose interests must be considered while those who refused to sit down are all terrorists“. Of course, the many al-Qaeda franchises tried to play the “rebranding game”, but this did not help: you can change names once every 24 hours if you want, but if you ain’t sitting down at the negotiating table you are a terrorist and, therefore, a legitimate target for Russian/Iranian/Syrian attacks. Once the Empire had to accept these terms, backed by a UNSC resolution, it became locked-in in a process which they could only stop by means of a military victory.

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