Blick zurück
Manchmal hilft ein Blick zurück.
Was etwa konnte man über Syrien, den Iran und die Bedeutung des Aufstandes dort im Fürhahr 2011 wissen? Was wurde geschrieben, wovor gewarnt, was erhofft?
Zwei Beispiele:
Bashar Assad’s regime is anti-American to the core and is tied at the hip to Iran. It has supported elements of al-Qaeda; preaches radical Islam despite its secular governance; is a major backer of Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and has the blood of countless U.S. soldiers and Iraqis on its hands. The Iraqi government even tried to build support for a UN tribunal to prosecute Syrian officials for destabilizing Iraq in 2009. You’d be hard-pressed to find an uprising more worthy of the West’s support, at least politically.
The only argument that exists to oppose U.S. support for the uprising is that it could benefit Islamists. After all, Hafez al-Assad had to carry out a massacre at Hama in 1982 to crush the Muslim Brotherhood. At the same time, it is unlikely that the Islamists will be the sole leaders of a post-Assad Syria. They will have to share power with secular democratic forces, and it must be remembered that Assad already vigorously supports the terrorist groups that, it is feared, an Islamist-governed Syria would.
Assad is well-aware of this fear and uses it to his advantage. For example, he did not arrest the late Abu Qaqa, an anti-American cleric who called for establishing Sharia law. While secular demonstrations for freedom were prohibited, Qaqa was allowed to hold anti-American rallies for Western consumption.
It is time for the West to begin supporting the uprising by pressuring Assad. The release of political prisoners should be demanded and their stories recited to the world. The assets of those behind the violence should be frozen and they should be warned of prosecution. The Arab League and other international bodies can be pressured to address the violence and even if they do not, the resulting attention will help energize the opposition.
When and if the Assad regime falls, the collapse of Iranian hegemony across the region may not be far behind. The Arab Sunni world will rejoice that wayward Syria has been separated from the Tehran Shiite-dominated axis. Losing its strategic hinterland and ideological benefactor, Hezbollah too will suffer a blow which will catalyze re-arranging power relations in the forlorn land of the cedars.
Freedom in Damascus will contribute to the recovery of freedom in Beirut. I believe, in rejecting the fossilized Israeli establishment view, that the end of Syrian domination of Lebanon is absolutely the moral and reasonable political interest for Israel.
A regime change in Damascus opens up the possibility of various domestic options: a Sunni fundamentalist state, a liberal polity, maybe a federated entity based on the geo-ethnic pluralism of the country. Despite turbulence in Syrian streets and politics, Israel’s military might assures her safety as she possesses both deterrent and offensive capabilities that will challenge Syria in the days ahead, regardless of the outcome of the revolutionary changes that now and will confront her.
We can now well appreciate the wisdom in the traditional Israeli stance since 1967 of settlement, development, and territorial retention of the Golan Heights. This obvious strategic resource adorned with manifest values of topography and water, a terrain decked with Jewish history and demographic tranquility, would be abandoned only in a fit of mental infirmity.