Sunni Clerics Calling for Holy War

The sectarian unraveling of the Middle East along a Sunni-Shiite divide is consistently presented in the Western media as the fault of Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian allies and Hezbollah. But this morning's news -- reported in "U.S. to Keep Warplanes in Jordan, Pressing Syria," by Michael R. Gordon and Thom Shanker -- that Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi is severing diplomatic ties with Syria is yet more proof, along with the news from late last week of Sunni clerics in Cairo issuing fatwas calling for jihad against Syria, that the fires of sectarian region-wide warfare are being stoked by Sunni fundamentalists. Morsi, following his usual pattern, is no doubt following orders issued in Saudi Arabia.

As the United States positions Patriot missiles and F-16s in Jordan for the foreseeable future to provide protection for the CIA's ongoing rebel training program, it is hard to see anything but a larger war coming down the pike. Gordon and Shanker note that the Obama administration, despite the constant invocation of a "political settlement," has given up on Geneva II for the time being:

Mr. Kerry flew to Moscow last month and secured Russia’s agreement to hold an international conference that would bring the Assad government and the Syrian opposition to the negotiating table to try to bring an end to the fighting. Since then, however, the Obama administration has become concerned that the advances made by pro-government forces would give Mr. Assad little reason to negotiate a political transition in which he would give up power. 

As a result, White House and State Department officials now favor delaying the talks. Supplying arms to the rebels, officials have said, is partly intended to turn the tide enough to force a real negotiation. Mr. Lavrov, by contrast, argued for moving forward with the international conference on Syria.

For a sober point-by-point refutation of the current bellicose course of United States policy read Ramzy Mardini's opinion piece, "Bad Idea, Mr. President," which appears today in the New York Times Sunday Review:

Interventionists tend to detach their actions from longer-term consequences. This myopia is often coupled with a prevalent misunderstanding of the political and cultural context of where they want to intervene. Both problems are present in the current American approach to Syria.

The Syrian revolution isn’t democratic or secular; the more than 90,000 fatalities are the result of a civil war, not a genocide — and human rights violations have been committed on both sides. 

Moreover, the rebels don’t have the support or trust of a clear majority of the population, and the political opposition is neither credible nor representative. Ethnic cleansing against minorities is more likely to occur under a rebel-led government than under Mr. Assad; likewise, the possibility of chemical weapons’ falling into the hands of terrorist groups only grows as the regime weakens. 

And finally, a rebel victory is more likely to destabilize Iraq and Lebanon, and the inevitable disorder of a post-Assad Syria constitutes a greater threat to Israel than the status quo.

Civil war has returned to Iraq. The death toll has returned to a level not seen since 2008. To answer Mardini, the conclusion one must come to is that war, not long-term strategic interest, is what motivates Western policy makers. A piggish love of war.