Who? Who?“Why has the little nation of Qatar spent 3 billion dollars to support the rebels in Syria? Could it be because Qatar is the largest exporter of liquid natural gas in the world and Assad won't let them build a natural gas pipeline through Syria? Of course. Qatar wants to install a puppet regime in Syria that will allow them to build a pipeline which will enable them to sell lots and lots of natural gas to Europe. Why is Saudi Arabia spending huge amounts of money to help the rebels and why has Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan been “jetting from covert command centers near the Syrian front lines to the Élysée Palace in Paris and the Kremlin in Moscow, seeking to undermine the Assad regime”? Well, it turns out that Saudi Arabia intends to install their own puppet government in Syria which will allow the Saudis to control the flow of energy through the region.
On the other side, Russia very much prefers the Assad regime for a whole bunch of reasons. One of those reasons is that Assad is helping to block the flow of natural gas out of the Persian Gulf into Europe, thus ensuring higher profits for Gazprom. Now the United States is getting directly involved in the conflict. If the U.S. is successful in getting rid of the Assad regime, it will be good for either the Saudis or Qatar (and possibly for both), and it will be really bad for Russia. This is a strategic geopolitical conflict about natural resources, religion and money, and it really has nothing to do with chemical weapons at all.”
…there were two proposed routes for the pipeline. Unfortunately for Qatar, Saudi Arabia said no to the first route and Syria said no to the second route. The following is from an absolutely outstanding article in the Guardian…
This is a critical time for U.S. efforts in the war in Afghanistan. In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama announced that the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan would draw down by an additional 34,000 troops, to about 33,000, by February 2014, and that by the end of 2014 “our war in Afghanistan will be over.” Further decision-making regarding the U.S. force presence in Afghanistan, including after the end of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission at the end of 2014, is expected later this year. Yet while troop levels tend to steal the headlines, far more fundamentally at stake is what it would take to ensure the long-term protection of U.S. interests in Afghanistan and the region.
Iran-US-Iraq: The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets reported on Thursday that the US intercepted an order from an Iranian official to militants in Iraq to attack US interests in Iraq in the event of a US attack against Syria.
Below is a thoughtful essay by Ambassador Chas Freeman. He describes how the United States has painted itself into a corner on the Syrian Question. Many see this problem in terms of President Obama's missteps, but Freeman shows it goes far beyond one man's grand-strategic foibles.
While Freeman does not express the evolution of grand strategy wrt Syria Question in the following terms, the core issue is, I believe, the increasingly dysfunctional moral design for grand strategy evolved by the United States since the end of the Cold War. Abstractly, this dysfunction takes the form of a growing web of policy-induced mismatches among (a) the codes of conduct and standards of behaviour the United States professes to uphold and others expect the U.S. to uphold, (b) those standards of behaviour we actually adhere to, as demonstrated by our actions, and (c) the conditions in the world we have to contend with. The hypocrisy implicit in this web of mismatches, in abstract terms, is the moral heart of our growing foreign policy crisis and our state of perpetual war.
The crucial importance of having a moral design for grand strategy is described by the late American strategist Col. John Boyd in his seminal Discourse on Winning and Losing. In fact, this notion is the capstone grand strategic ideal synthesizing the tactical, operational, strategic, and philosophical threads of Boyd's entire Discourse. And while the idea is expressed in highly compressed terms on Slides 54-58 of his briefing Strategic Game of ? and ?, one must study the entire Discourse to appreciate both the elegance of his compression, as well as the central importance of forging a grand strategy that is consistent with his ideal.
Exorcising those mismatches from the body politic can start with Syria, but it goes far beyond Syria to our dealings with Middle East, Iran, Russia, China, and indeed the whole world. Nor will it be be easy; extremely powerful domestic factions in the US are profiting from these mismatches, and their corollary state of perpetual war (as I explained here). Ridding ourselves of these mismatches is now the foreign policy challenge of our generation
Ambassador Freeman's thoughtful assembly of the facts associated with our patterns of post-cold war behaviour is worthy of careful study and comparison with Boyd's ideals, because without intending to, he reveals how far the United States has strayed from these ideas. In effect, Freeman has issued a call for an injection of common sense into American foreign policy, and Syria is the place to start working the problem.
