a bit of perspective on the Mideast from an “armchair geopolitician”

In the same way blogging gave way to so-called “war bloggers” (Mike Hudack FTW) in the aftermath of 2001, Facebook is now replete with armchair geopolitical analysts, among which I proudly count myself.

On the morning of a Russian warplane shot down by Turkish forces, let’s recap a bit how we got here and the subtext of all these moving parts:

• Charlie Wilson’s war in the late 1970s saw the US support and arm radical islamists, including Osama Bin Laden, against the USSR.

• 9/11/01 marked a wakeup call to the West that the same arab-muslim radicals active in Afghanistan, regrouped under Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda (the Base) were now exporting their wars through terror attacks.
• although the entire world supported a US-led coalition intervening in Afghanistan, the US overreached and invaded Iraq in 2003, with the state goal of exporting democracy via warfare. The bungled occupation, with the infamous disbanding of the Iraqi army, signaled to the minority Sunnis that they would have to fend for themselves. The vacuum created by the twin interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq put Iran back in a dominant position, and Iraq’s Shia regions became a de facto protectorate of Tehran.
• Sparked by a “ras le bol” of populations oppressed for decades of Western-backed dictators, the so-called Arab Spring topples Tunisia’s strongman Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarak, Libya’s Kadhafi but stops at Assad, a dictator, son of a dictator backed by the minority Alawite (Shia) clan.

• Backed into a corner but supported by Iran and Russia, Assad proceeded in 2011 to launch a de facto civil war. It has been argued that the popular uprising was itself fueled by an internal population displacement from the countryside into the cities, due to successive droughts. The West bungles its response, supporting Al Qaeda inspired fighters such as Al Nosra and sending arms and munitions into a battlefield without much supervision. After Assad launched chemical attacks in 2013, France and the US were hours away from intervening but Obama backs down at the last minute.

• Saddam loyalists and other Sunni factions band together into what becomes the purported Daesh/Islamic State, which declares the caliphate and in essence war against the West. Daesh inspires/finances attacks throughout the region and infamously the Nov 13 attacks in Paris.
• All this while, the Saudis, with the US looking the other way, wage a proxy war in Yemen to support the Sunnis against the minority Shia. The US, France, the UK et al proceeded to mount an air campaign with conventional planes and drones against Daesh.
• Clearly everyone forgot to read a map and severely discounted the importance of the Russian naval installations in Syria, one its key access points to the Mediterranean.
• Russia, feeling the sting of sanctions due to its intervention in Crimea, very ably reinserted itself at the center of the game, in essence filling the void created by the US military absence.

Vladimir Putin’s objectives are, in my opinion, the following:

1. reassert Russia as a global power able to project force beyond its Euro-Asian sphere of influence. Putin’s visit to Tehran on Monday seeks to re-establish Russia as a major player. The US’s pivot to Asia now that energy independence via fracking is on the horizon leaves a HUGE vacuum to be filled and Putin is standing by.

1. throw a wrench within NATO, which this morning’s incident clearly puts in a corner. NATO’s article 5 could be invoked by Turkey and then what ? Putin, rightly so, has been angry at NATO’s advances towards his borders. In his place, what would the US do ? Probably the same thing. Turkey has been acting anything but like an ally, using the Syrian conflict to bomb the Kurdish positions, when the Kurds have been proven the only effective anti-Daesh force on the ground. Erdogan’s too close for comfort alliance with the Saudis is also proving to be a grave mistake and Russia wants Turkey to be isolated.
2. destroy Saudi Arabia’s credibility and role in OPEC, by pointing out that the Saudis have been actively financing Daesh. The bulk of Russia’s GDP is linked to oil&gas, the Saudi’s strategy of cheap oil, at the expense of their own cash reserves, has been severely detrimental to Russia. Putin therefore aims to strike at the Saudis using the anti-Daesh coalition as a means to an end.

What’s next for the region ? More chaos until everyone comes to their senses and the UN convenes a regional conference to redraw the Sykes Picot borders which have outlived their purpose.