Manan Dwivedi

In an ostentatious outrage, US President Donald Trump has bombarded Damascus and nearby regions with tetchy Tomahawk missiles.

The political context model as depicted by Gadi Wolfsfeld sustains the numerous uncertainties and the turpitude of West Asia. It is always the gargantuan State actor which is much well resourced pitted against the weakling non-state actor in a battle royal of gladiatorial proportions, while the Fourth Estate takes a back seat but is the actual organiser of the entire war affront such as in Syria. The spectacle of war returned to the West Asia in 1991 and 2003 as flares lighted the dark skies atop Baghdad and Basra which is akin to the illumined skyline of the besieged city of Damascus and Homs in Syria.

The war in Syria has claimed around six million lives with immense vestiges of collateral damage with perils of aerial bombardment being the mainstay of action in Syria. The early days of a liberal Syrian nation can be characterised by visualisations out of a pool party, wherein, the myriad men and women belonging to Syria and other nations’ consulates stop their pastime din under the threat of explosions heard in the far away taverns lived in by normal mortals. Suddenly, the gentry begins chatting about ways to quit the capital if the violence and instability comes to a passé. The drummer in the band continues his din and act while the spiral of splashes in the pool dwindles to a smaller number.

In another take on the societal health of Damascus, Bashar-Al-Assad’s secret service rounds up rebels who are aimed against the governing regime in Damascus. A girl is literally lifted out of her house, and sued for writing pamphlets for the rebels, later populated by the Al Ansar, ISIS and the Al-Qaeda. She is made to stay in a six feet long and four feet broad casket of a cage, where, she has to stay curled up for all 24 hours in a timeless and endless day. Then when she is released after a year or so by the secret service, she can hardly talk and is afraid of light and people. President Trump went in air blaming the vagaries as perpetrated by the Syrian dictator in a time zone of six years which has had enormous cost for the denizens of Syria. Both President Trump and UK Prime Minister Theresa May likened the Assad Government to a dangerous monster. President Trump tweeted that it is the barbaric and the brutal nature of the regime in Syria which needs to be targeted. And by launching a volley of missiles, Trump is confident, the dictator has been muzzled and “The mission has been accomplished”. The same international criticism followed the American and allied bombing of the city of Baghdad in 2003.

Syrian airstrikes are not a novae attempt at capitulating an adversarial and dictatorial regime. What people might ask is that North Korea got the American reprieve even during the Persian Gulf wars then why only Iraq and Syria have been targeted. This might not lead to a massive or a major escalation between Trump and Putin as both Russia and Iran are sensible global players in the larger international system. The neo cold war which took off after Russian incursions into Crimea and Ukraine might see a revert back with the Americans and the British raining missiles on Damascus which they term as an astute humanitarian response after a slew of bio-chemical attacks by the Assad regime over rebel-held territory. So much so for the Geneva conventions!!!

The Americans, too, do not have much of an option as the Russians and Iranians have erected a federation with Shia and Alawite front. The Washington Post reported, “French, British and American forces launched a salvo of more than 100 missiles against three Syrian regime targets, and US officials claimed the attack significantly degraded the regime’s chemical-weapons programme. Despite rumblings of a more sustained air campaign against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the strike echoed the one-off bombardment Trump ordered one year ago. That attack also followed an alleged chemical-weapons attack, but what was meant to chasten the Assad regime and its allies at the time did nothing of the sort.”

The attack is reminiscent of the past year’s attack but now the Americans can stay calm about the missile spree as the idiom of the new cold war is passé to a certain extent. Kremlin might hate to taint the matter and keep the pot boiling after the spy showdown with Britain, and President Trump might utilise the Syrian action with Russia being on the opposite as a quaint policy to delink his electoral act as candidate Trump with the Russian espionage. Trump made his military intent clear with the tweet that, “The Syrian raid was so perfectly carried out, with such precision, that the only way the Fake News Media could demean was by my use of the term ‘Mission Accomplished.’ I knew they would seize on this but felt it is such a great military term, it should be brought back. Use often!”

The Forbes maintains Assad as being among the ten worst dictators in the larger international polity. Thus, it might be militarism on Syria but what Assad has perpetrated is immense penury and misery for his own innocent citizens and one of the largest exodus to Eastern Europe which has already aggravated as a grave humanitarian crisis. Whatever might have been the earlier equation with the rest of the world, Assad has continued with the violent instruments of terror. He is a sophisticated ophthalmologist and is uniquely different from the gun toting and uniform sporting, Saddam and Gaddafi but when one delves inside the political behaviour of the Syrian leader, a concurrence with Iraq and Libya surfaces. In the international context, the war might take away chances of a rapprochement with Iran for Washington. The talk of a American-Russian cold war is all mumbo jumbo and arcane as Putin realises the idiom of American power and Russian dependence on the European backyard which has more than workable partnerships with a Europe facing dissensions over the Union. For Washington and Moscow, it is a revalidation of the nationalistic fervour which binds the twin leaders and may limit their instincts.

(The writer teaches International Relations at Indian Institute of Public Administration, Delhi)

Courtesy: Pioneer: Saturday, 21 April 2018