G8 must employ radical thinking to secure Syrian peace

We are at the most delicate and dangerous pivot since the end of the cold war. We find ourselves allied to the United States, France, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – to take but four – against Iran and Russia. The cockpit of this collision is the Syrian war.

It started, as it has started before, in the 60-year Assad hegemony.

Like his father before him, Bashar al-Assad set out to suppress peaceful protest by killing his own people. We were not alone in being outraged.

But from these horrific beginnings a complex range of factions from within and without have contributed to a spiral of killing that has claimed some 100,000 lives in just two years.

Confronted with this historic obscenity, we appear to have engineered a position in which we in the west are now at risk of inadvertently spurring the interests of factions whose philosophy is the projection of Wahhabism – a radical and ambitious branch of the Sunni Muslim faith (the branch of Islam in which the 9/11 assault upon America was rooted and funded). It has taken us just 12 years to arrive here.

History will judge

How, then, have we managed in the same time to resurrect the 70-year cold war enmity with Russia to provide a new opponent in our aspirations to end the conflict in Syria? I speak of “we”, as we, the United Kingdom.

Add to this another question. How have we also achieved so fundamental a breach with another country with whom we have enjoyed 300 years of relations, and which was the crucible in which one of the first great energy multinationals British Petroleum (BP) was forged? I speak of Iran, which has played her own role in helping bring about our estrangement.

I write as I report the G8 Summit in Enniskillen, where history will judge that the fullest understanding of our current crisis was codified. Surely for peace to be achieved in Syria – an arena with some of the most vivid competing strands as we have seen since the outbreak of the first world war – we have to address the interests of the competing parties separately.

So let us take Russia. Her interest in Syria is ultimately and very centrally her own strategic well-being. Destroy Assad’s Syria, and Russia loses her influence and her last naval bunkering facilities anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

From Moscow’s perspective the gateway to the Black Sea and the beginnings of her own coastline are exposed.

Let us then take Iran. I blogged yesterday about Iran’s deeply historic Shia links with Damascus. The Syrian Shia are “family”. Attack the family and you attack Iran’s strategic interests.

Thus, in their very different ways, Iran and Russia have concerns in Syria so great that neither can seemingly be detached from the conflict. And the risk is high that both may deepen their military commitment and involvement. But does this have to be?

Britain’s crown jewel

In this age of global change and, for many of us, austerity, Britain holds one of the strategic crown jewels in the Middle East – the significant RAF base on the southern coast of Cyprus. It stands 150 miles west of Syria.

It sits in a portion of the island administered as a British sovereign overseas territory. We have some 4,000 military personnel and their families there. The American military have a base located on this UK owned base.

Of late, Russia’s interests have come to dominate the Cypriot economy, for both good and ill. A million Russian tourists visit the island every year.

Could Russia’s strategic interests be serviced in Akroteri? In an age of shrinking global power, does Britain need Akroteri any more?

We used it to facilitate our war in Iraq and to bomb Gaddafi’s Libya. Neither adventure ended well. Do we wish to be able to do much more of it?

In an age of austerity, can we even afford such a facility? Were we to sell, lease or rent all or part of Akroteri, the UK might even make a significant return for the British Treasury.

These may appear mad questions and equally fanciful answers, but in resolving the most dangerous conflict the immediate Middle East has seen since the wars on Israel and Iraq, perhaps our leaders have to think “out of the box”.

Embracing Iran

Finally, then, there is Iran – which again I have argued shares many of our concerns and interests. We don’t have to share her current obsession with the theocratic state. But we do have to respect her 6,000-year-old civilisation and her status as a regional power, and her potential for counter-balancing the growth of radical expansionist Sunni Islamic power in the Arabian region that she borders to her South.

Peace in Syria and, in the long term, peace across the entire Middle East and Gulf region must surely embrace a dialogue with Iran. For the moment we are invested in, and in hock to, Saudi and allied interests. These are interests wound into the Syrian conflict. Our one-sided involvement in Syria is itself a threat.

As Channel 4 News has reported, we have evidence of some 50 British jihadis already involved in the 750 strong migrant battalion fighting with the Syrian rebels.

Time is short. The need for radical new thinking about this region is urgent indeed. Will history judge that this G8 summit in Northern Ireland inaugurated it? Or will Putin be left to go home insulted and isolated by these Western powers?

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