Bashar al-Assad's Syria offers Iran a springboard into the Arab Middle East
President Bashar al-Assad regularly conjures up the spectre of hostile foreign plots and meddling, accusing the US, in particular, of backing "terrorist" forces. Hillary Clinton was scornful last month, saying Assad was "only making excuses, blaming foreign countries [for] vast conspiracies". Sadly, her ridicule was fully justified. For Assad's much slaughtered and abused subjects, there is no decisive western – or other – help at hand.
While there is much loose talk about secret American and British special forces operations inside Syria, about notional Turkish-controlled havens and Nato-patrolled no-fly zones. The Saudis and Qataris are rumoured to be financing rebel forces. Maybe the Free Syrian Army will one day field squadrons of new battle tanks. But that day is a long way off.
The reality is that from Barack Obama down, nobody in the western camp, with honest diplomacy at a standstill, has a clue what to do. They know only what they cannot do – which, primarily, is not get in the middle of another Middle East war.
Not so the rulers of Iran. Closely allied with Damascus since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Tehran remains Assad's main political and diplomatic backer, cheap oil provider, and, maybe, his key nuclear weapons collaborator. According to Clinton, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, the French foreign ministry and anonymous Israeli security sources, Iran is the regime's main arms supplier and financier. And, they say, the flow of weapons, along routes previously used to supply Iranian-funded Hezbollah in Lebanon, has continued unabated in violation of UN sanctions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/assad-syria-iran-middle-east?newsfeed=true
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Awesome!
