Holy war in Syria and the course of history

The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk 

By Dmitry Shlapentokh

Washington is clearly displeased with the intransigence of both Beijing and Moscow on dealing with the Syrian crisis and their unwillingness to justify a direct US strike against President Bashar al-Assad with the full authorization of the United Nations. The US representatives to the UN have described vividly the brutality of the Assad regime as an appeal to the moral fiber of the international community and in particular, of course, China and Russia.

The governments of both of those countries are unconvinced, and for a variety of reasons. One is that the moral indignation of Washington hardly stands the test of history. Washington was a good friend of Josef Stalin, Augusto Pinochet and the Shah of Iran. It has demonstrated that it had no prejudice when it comes to dealing with pressing geopolitical programs. It can deal with dictators on both the right and the left. It also has done nothing during genocidal slaughters, from the Jewish Holocaust to the Rwanda massacres.

At the same time, it would not be logical to assume that Washington has no foreign friends in its Syrian venture. One that seems an unlikely ally is Kavkaz Center, the major Internet vehicle of jihadis from the Russian North Caucasus. Recently, Moscow intensified its efforts against the website, but Kavkaz Center successfully dodges the Kremlin efforts and continues to function as a weblog. Its contributors praise the Syrian opposition as kindred souls and implicitly praise their efforts to get rid of the Assad regime. 

This is not an isolated occurrence. Iraqi authorities have informed the world that a steady stream of jihadis has been moving into Syria to join the fight against Assad. They have not just praised US pressure on Assad but actually encouraged direct military involvement of the US in Syrian affairs and, implicitly, direct confrontation with Iran. Indeed, confrontation with Iran would most likely be the end result of such a conflict. But while encouraging its direct involvement, these jihadis are hardly friends of the US. 

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Kavkaz Center published an article by Pavel Kosolapov, a Russian who converted to Islam - or, alternatively, someone who used his name - in which Americans were presented as ugly, immoral infidel zombies who deserved their fate. He stated that not a few thousand but tens if not hundreds of thousand perished, and he praised those who demonstrated how easily a superpower could be almost vanquished by a few smart and selfless heroes of the jihad. 

One could assume that this attitude of the jihadis, including those who are engaged in the conflict in Syria, is not a secret to Washington, and especially not to the conservatives who are so keen to engage in the conflict. Their drive is not, of course, due to a desire to save lives. Indeed, they do their best to destroy "Obamacare", regardless of data showing that many thousands of Americans die annually because of lack of medical treatment. The major goal here is to weaken Iran, the major geopolitical problem for the US in the Middle East. 

But where could such a strange misalliance lead? Smarty-pants Washingtonian analysts - possibly following the dictums of Edward Luttwak, an American military strategist and historian - believe that Washington could outsmart its adversaries in a Byzantine type of game. However, to understand the quite likely result of such a strategy, one should go to the birthplace of modern Byzantinism, Russia, and see how similar events worked out almost a century ago. 

Vladimir Lenin, a radical Marxist who matured politically in the beginning of the last century, was convinced that the contented masses would hardly rise to overthrow the global capitalist order and that the Bolsheviks, his party, were too weak to engage directly with the czarist regime, whose downfall could lead to worldwide revolution where the masses would establish a global, ideal socialist - and later communist - society, which reminds one of the global khalifat, the goal of the jihadis. 
The Bolsheviks, a tiny group in the beginning of the 20th century, could succeed only if the imperialists destroyed or weakened themselves. Hardly the friend of the German kaiser, Lenin nevertheless dreamed of a wholesale confrontation between Moscow and Berlin; in fact, he dreamed of a global war.

Still, no major Europe-wide war was on the horizon; the last wars, those of Napoleon, were almost a hundred years ago. And everything suggested, if one assumed the sanity of the major European leaders, that such a war was unlikely. Weapons had become too destructive; major alliances counterbalanced one another. And Europeans had become so integrated economically and politically that only a madman like Friedrich Nietzsche, who predicted enormous bloodshed in the future, would believe that Europeans would engage in a major continent-wide conflict. 

Lenin understood this and vented his frustration in a letter to Maxim Gorky, the famous Russian radical writer. "Dear Aleksei Maximovich," Lenin wrote in 1912 - using, as is the practice in Russia and other countries, his first name and patronymic - "the great European war would be a great boon for revolution. Yet, unfortunately, neither Niki [Czar Nicholas of Russia] nor Willi [Kaiser Wilhelm] will provide us with such a pleasure." Yet Lenin (and he wasn't the only one) overestimated "Willi" and his advisers. They, similar to Washington neocons, believed that war would be a quick blitzkrieg; and taking their own "September 11", the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, as an excuse, they launched World War I. 

The war did not follow the German scenario, however, and the events were quite similar to those in the Middle East almost a century later. The blitzkrieg turned out to be an ugly war of attrition, and Germany's resources started to dwindle in its own version of the coming US "sequestration" of its military budget. 

While Europeans died in the millions, Lenin was ecstatic, for the huge suffering of the masses reinforced century-old grievances and made revolution in Russia possible. Berlin also noted Lenin and his followers and, similar to present-day Washington, thought it could use these Russian radicals to destabilize the situation in Russia and lead Germany to victory. So Berlin provided Lenin with funds and allowed him and a few other radicals to travel to Russia in "sealed trains" when the liberal Provisional Government that emerged after the February/March revolution of 1917 allowed them to return. The Bolsheviks, indeed, led Russia into a new revolution and opted out of the war in what Lenin called the "obscene treaty" of Brest-Litovsk. 

But Berlin did not enjoy the fruits of its stratagem for long. The germs of the revolution quickly spread to Germany, and the new revolution led to the end of the German monarchy. A few generations later, Lenin's spiritual/political children rolled their tanks into Berlin. 

Of course, history did not repeat itself word for word, but structurally the events had a lot of similarities. Jihadis - from the North Caucasus to the Middle East - believe that the collapse of Assad and, even better, war with Iran would accomplish what the US war with Iraq failed to accomplish: ignite chaos not just in the Middle East but possibly globally. And it is this that would cause the jihadis to thrive. 
Were that to occur, however, the tidal wave of terrorism could hit not just Moscow and Beijing, Washington's enemies, but also Jerusalem. This is the reason Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hardly excited by the spectacle of Assad's sudden collapse. Still, it appears that Washington hardly hears the sober voices from Jerusalem, not only because they could easily dump them as was the case with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak despite all assurances, and not only because they assumed they would not be affected by chaos and waves of terror, but also because of the fundamental changes in US policy. 

As the present economic troubles have become too evident to ignore, the US elite feels that not just economic but geopolitical predominance has started to slip away from its hands with great speed. America is not a woman who ages gracefully to prepare for a future - in this case, a new global order - where her economic standing, standard of living and influence would be much more modest.

US President Barack Obama and the legions of commentators continue to proclaim that the present-day problems are just temporary before a new rise. And for this reason "she" can engage in reckless actions from which not she but her vigorous and charismatic jihadist lover, who is girded for perseverance, long-term planning and sacrifice - qualities hardly of any value in the US - would most likely benefit in the long run. 
And thus history could move in an absolutely different direction, as it did in 1914 when very few knew Lenin and even fewer were aware of Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and practically no one predicted what they would do in the future. 

As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel rightly acknowledged, "the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" - that is, the meaning of events can be understood only retrospectively.