Run-up to proxy war over Syria

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/NB07Ad01.html

f a date needs to fixed marking the end of "post-Soviet era" in world politics, it might fall on February 4, 2012. Russia and China's double veto of the Arab League resolution on Syria in the United Nations Security Council constitutes a watershed event.

Curiously, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Anders Fogh Rasmussen chose the same day as the veto in New York to snub Russia; saying that that the alliance would have the first elements of the US's missile defense system (ABM) up and running in Europe by the alliance's summit in May in Chicago, no matter Moscow's objections.

The first double veto by Russia and China on the Syrian issue in



the United Nations Security Council last October was a coordinated move that sought to scuttle a resolution that might be seized by the Western alliance to mount a military operation in Syria. But the repeat double veto on a motion pressing Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to abandon power conveys a much bigger meaning.

Makings of proxy war
The Syrian situation has evolved since October and has surged as a geopolitical struggle over the future of the Iranian regime, control of the Middle East's oil and the perpetuation of the West's preponderant influence in that region. Russia and China sense that they could be booted out of the Middle East.