M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Russia is throwing in the towel on Syria after an almost two-year long blaze of Cold War-era rhetoric. It dug in tenaciously at the United Nations Security Council holding its veto card to block a Western intervention in Syria but has been outmaneuvered on the ground and is being presented with a fait accompli that the regime it supported in Damascus is fast becoming a thing of the past.
The Kremlin’s special envoy for Syria, Mikhail Bogdanov, admitted for the first time on Thursday that the rebels are on a winning spree and the momentum may coast them to outright victory over the government’s forces. Bogdanov contemplated a rebel victory. Without mincing words, he said, “One must look facts in the face. Unfortunately, the victory of the Syrian opposition cannot be ruled out.”
This candid statement all but echoed the triumphant remark by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – also on Thursday – that “the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse”.
Bogdanov’s glasnost comes hardly within three days of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s ominous warning that Russia “will not allow the Libyan experience to be reproduced in Syria”.
Arguably, Lavrov still has a point insofar as there has indeed been no direct Western intervention until now in Syria, and it seems extremely unlikely that there will be one; in fact, there may be no need for a Libya-like intervention. The pattern could be similar to Afghanistan in 2001, when the Northern Alliance toppled the Taliban regime and thereafter the Western boots appeared on the ground in the Hindu Kush to take command of the successor regime.
Quintessentially, however, it is Libya all over again. Yet another Middle Eastern regime that showed strategic defiance of the Western world is being overthrown and the world community is being presented with no option but to acquiesce with it. Period.
One can endlessly quibble over the morality of it all or its legitimacy under international law or even as to what happens in such a world order to the Westphalian system (which was also, ironically, born out of Europe’s blood-soaked history), but all that matters is that it is happening all the time.
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