Politics, not war, solution to crisis
Syria is a huge mess with big potential consequences — a cauldron for World War III. All the major powers — Russians, Chinese, Americans, Iranians, Arabs, Turks and Europeans — have vested interests in the region and will be drawn into any effort to resolve the conflict violently. Because of the Armageddon-like firepower of the available weapons technology, a political, or nonviolent, solution must be reached.
Three issues need addressing to resolve the barbarous conflict:
Redrawing the region’s borders.
Securing chemical weapons.
Fairly dividing the oil and natural gas interests — including the pivotal pipeline and ship transit corridors.
After they overthrew the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the major powers imposed unnatural and unsustainable borders across the region. The current borders of Syria and indeed the entire eastern Mediterranean were created arbitrarily by a lines-on-a-map approach, resulting today in countries that simply cannot be stably governed — including Iraq and Afghanistan.
To reach a sustainable political resolution to the conflicts, the borders need to be redrawn based on natural ethno-linguistic groupings that include the Alawites, the Kurds, the Arabs and a multicultural group that includes Druze, Christians and Jews. The ancestral Alawite homeland stretches from northern Lebanon to the Hatay Peninsula in Turkey, west of the Orontes River. Leave Syrian President Bashar Assad in office, if that is what his people want: It is for them to decide. Part of this arrangement presumably would include the Alawites’ allowing the Russians to keep their military base at Tartus.
The rest of the country should be divided to leave northeast Syria to the Kurds, Damascus and southeast Syria to the Arabs, and Aleppo to an internationally protected multicultural group of the Jews, Druze, Christians, Kurds and others. Aleppo, like Jerusalem, has a history of habitation by many different groups, and given international protection, could be safe, multicultural and tolerant once again.
Securing chemical and other weapons will require a U.N.-led international effort and swift action.
Figuring how to divide up Syria’s vast proven oil-andgas reserves will be more difficult than dividing up the physical territory itself.
The bulk of Syria’s oil is split between Hassakeh, a province in the far northeast of the country where the Kurds are a majority, and Deir Ezzor, farther south. The recent discovery of an enormous natural gas field off the eastern Mediterranean coast puts Syria and its neighbors like Israel in the natural gas business. Syria is also the likely place to run pipelines to Europe and Russia. All the major players will go to the mat on these issues.
Most of Syria’s oil until recently had been exported to Europe. China is actively involved in Syria’s oil industry, and is Syria’s major trading partner. Assad recently made an agreement with Russia to control Syria’s natural gas resources, including transit pipelines, in exchange for continued Russian military support in resisting the insurgency
Leave Syrian President Bashar Assad in office, if that is what his people want: It is for them to decide.
against his regime. The Arab “rebels” collaborate with the big Western oil companies, and their backers, the United States, the European Union and the Arab Sunni governments like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Because the license for the exploitation of mineral deposits has been reserved for Syrian government agencies, reorganizing the governmental structure profoundly affects oil, gas and pipeline interests. The rights to the deposits should go with the land as newly divided — including the Russians’ access, via the Alawite state — to the newly discovered gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea.
Strategically important is the control of energy corridors, through Turkey and other pathways, to the European Union and Russia. Control of the internal pipeline has been key to the Syrian war to date — it has been sabotaged by the rebels in several places, especially near Homs, the location of one of the two refineries in the country.
The regional war of pipelines has been ongoing — the Afghanistan war has been about the construction of a trans-Afghanistan natural gas pipeline carrying fuel from Turkmenistan, and during its invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States destroyed the Kirkuk-Banias pipeline carrying Iraqi oil to Syria. In May 2011, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran agreed to the construction of a gas pipeline through Iraq to transport Iranian natural gas to Syria and from there to foreign markets.
The mineral deposits and the pipeline and other transit corridors are ground zero in the Syrian conflict, as they are as well in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and the other west Asian and North African countries.
This issue has to reach a fair resolution, arriving at a political settlement rather than solving the problem with violence. The proposed Geneva conference should put forth the idea of cooperative pipeline infrastructure across the region that is available to all parties for a fee — held in common rather than owned by individual interests. Combined with new borders and secured chemical weapons, it can be the basis of regional peace.
The alternative is unthinkable.