The Syrian chemical disarmament is flowing smoothly, but the US is meticulously checking Assad's declaration of stockpiles, suspecting him of hiding sites. Geopolitical historian Mark Almond thinks the US is hunting for a pretext for intervention.
RT:Are there valid indications that Damascus is trying
to keep some of its chemical stockpiles - or is this just
Washington's distrust that's fuelling these rumours?
Mark Almond: Well, the hopes in Washington, people like Susan
Rise, the US ambassador to the United Nations, were bitterly
disappointed by the deal to resolve the chemical weapons question
peacefully. And they are resorting if you like to the tried and
trusted arguments used against Saddam Hussein twelve years ago.
That is to say saying that even though he seems to be going along
with the inspectors, even though inspectors are not finding any
evidence of cheating he must be cheating somehow, because that’s
what a dictator would do. And also you want to use force,
and I think there is a lobby in United States that was bitterly
disappointed that they were not able to bomb because Assad agreed
to renounce any weapons that he had of mass destruction and also
because of course it enabled a country like Russia to play a
role.
And the irony of the current situation is that Obama has around
in his national security team a number of people who are as
unilateralist as ever George Bush was, it’s just that they use
the rhetoric of humanitarianism to justify bombing whereas George
Bush and Dick Cheney essentially said: “America is in a position
to do it so we are going do it to Iraq.” These days’ people say
we are going to do it for humanitarian reasons in Syria. But in
essence it’s really an exercise in brutal power politics dressed
up with the milky human kindness, concern for refugees as well
outrage at alleged use of chemical weapons.
RT:Washington previously praised Syria's disarmament -
why this sudden scepticism?
MA: It is not absolutely impossible but after all this
argument was used about Iraq at the beginning of 2000s. And as
with Saddam Hussein, Assad will be very foolish to try to cheat
because if caught out it would legitimize a massive military
intervention against him in essence. The Security Council has
said that if they were cheated then what the Americans wanted to
do would be justified. So he hasn’t any incentive to cheat. Of
course if we look at what has happened over the last 12-13 years
in the Middle East we might be inclined to say just as observers
if you disarm as Saddam Hussein did and as Muammar Gaddafi did in
Libya then sooner or later the West will attack you because you
have no way of deterring them. That I think is a potential risk
for Syria down the line.
But the immediate risk to Assad’s regime was precisely that if he
refused to disarm, it would have been attacked by United States
and its NATO allies. Which would have been calamitous for the
regime and hence also for Syria.
RT:This happens as Geneva 2 peace talks have been
postponed. Western powers have committed to persuading the
opposition to take part - why has it proven impossible to
deliver?
MA: This is partly because their opposition is deeply
split. There are several oppositions some of whom are more
reasonable than others. But also their sponsors are very unhappy
about any compromise. If there is a compromise then people like
the King of Saudi Arabia, the unlikely proponent of democracy in
Syria, might find that trouble can come to their door. Equally in
the United States and in Britain there are people in the defense
and intelligence world, hard-liners who really don’t want any
kind of peaceful settlement, because the danger is from their
point of view that it won’t produce a government in Syria which
will be subordinate to what they want. And after all we have seen
that Assad has survived, primarily because enough Syrians
continued to support him, but the idea that Assad regime has no
popular basis has I’m afraid been exploited in the conflict in
the last two years. And in fact the only effective way to remove
it if you are not going to compromise with it is to use force. So
the hard-liners who don’t want to admit that their own side does
not have enough support in legitimacy don’t wish to see any kind
of a will discussion because it will not produce the result they
want, they see it as the winner takes it all situation.
RT:So is there still a chance that peace talks will
actually happen?
MA: Well it’s really difficult because very powerful
influential countries with a lot of money like Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, and so on, backing the hardliners in the NATO countries.
On the other hand there are people in the NATO countries
including in Washington who say: ‘The recipe for regime change
that we were sold on Syria hasn’t worked. The costs of trying to
introduce it regardless are too high.’ That after all is in part
why Obama backed down from launching unilateral military action
in the end of August against Syria over the chemical weapons.
So it is possible that there are voices in Washington who may be
able to recover the influence to say: ‘Some kind of negotiations,
some kind of compromise is both from a humane point of view
preferable but also from a practical political point of view the
best way out.’
There are still as I say those people who think that Shia brute
force will produce a kind of regime change they want, because
they see the events in Syria as a kind of precedent for rolling
on to Iran.
So we have in the background the negotiations with Iran over the
nuclear question. And there are those people who would like to
see the Iranian question resolved peacefully and the solution to
the dispute over Iran’s nuclear polices resolved without
violence. But of course there are people who think that they
would like to resolve that by use of force, even though many
people would say it’s not clear what the force required would be,
that would be commensurate with dangers that would result in NATO
military attack on Iran. But we have to see that there are people
who are not just looking at Syria, but are looking at the whole
wave of regime change across the Middle East. And those people
are not totally concerned about the cost to ordinary people in
these countries. But there are people in Washington and even in
London, I think, who recognize that pushing this agenda is a very
cruel pursuit of so-called democratization, where you won’t have
too many people left to enjoy the fruits of it.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.