Once It was Anarchists Throwing Bombs …

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In the mid-1970s, Americans searching for missing children sometimes found their way to my office in Beirut. Having tried the American embassy without success, the American Broadcasting Company’s news bureau must have been an obvious next port of call. There wasn’t much I could do.

Hundreds of youngsters had come to the Middle East to become revolutionaries. At that time, idealists were disappearing in General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and young people were committing murder for Baader Meinhof in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and the Red Army Faction in Japan. Those in Lebanon were usually in their late teens or early twenties who joined one of the many Palestinian commando groups. To those who thought of themselves as Marxists, liberated Palestine, like liberated Vietnam, was a step on the path to world revolution.

Most were disaffected from their families and sought meaning in a struggle that had little to do with them. I remember the brother of one woman who spent months searching for his sister through Palestinian contacts he met through me and other western journalists. There were false leads, dashed hopes and frustrating delays for information that turned out to be useless.

Forty years on, a 15-year-old girl, Sharmeena Begum, was confronting a personal crisis when she left Britain for Syria late last year to join ISIL. She felt abandoned after her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage. Her pilgrimage to Syria was a quest for belonging in a world that seemed to exclude her, a trope that resonates with adolescents in Los Angeles who find in street gangs the security and companionship lacking elsewhere. Thousands of young people have made their way in the past few years from the US and Europe to fight or become brides of fighters in countries, Iraq and Syria, they knew nothing about. Iraq and Syria have become the stage on which they act out their traumas, with Syrians and Iraqis their victims.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/27/once-it-was-anarchists-throwing-bombs/

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1. The Middle Eastern balance of power matures

Last week, a coalition of predominantly Sunni Arab countries, primarily from the Arabian Peninsula and organized by Saudi Arabia, launched airstrikes in Yemen that have continued into this week. The airstrikes target Yemeni al-Houthis, a Shiite sect supported by Iran, and their Sunni partners, which include the majority of military forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. What made the strikes particularly interesting was what was lacking: U.S. aircraft. Although the United States provided intelligence and other support, it was a coalition of Arab states that launched the extended air campaign against the al-Houthis.

Three things make this important. First, it shows the United States' new regional strategy in operation. Washington is moving away from the strategy it has followed since the early 2000s — of being the prime military force in regional conflicts — and is shifting the primary burden of fighting to regional powers while playing a secondary role. Second, after years of buying advanced weaponry, the Saudis and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries are capable of carrying out a fairly sophisticated campaign, at least in Yemen. The campaign began by suppressing enemy air defenses — the al-Houthis had acquired surface-to-air missiles from the Yemeni military — and moved on to attacking al-Houthi command-and-control systems. This means that while the regional powers have long been happy to shift the burden of combat to the United States, they are also able to assume the burden if the United States refuses to engage.

Most important, the attacks on the al-Houthis shine the spotlight on a growing situation in the region: a war between the Sunnis and Shiites. In Iraq and Syria, a full-scale war is underway. A battle rages in Tikrit with the Sunni Islamic State and its allies on one side, and a complex combination of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army, Shiite militias, Sunni Arab tribal groups and Sunni Kurdish forces on the other. In Syria, the battle is between the secular government of President Bashar al Assad — nevertheless dominated by Alawites, a Shiite sect — and Sunni groups. However, Sunnis, Druze and Christians have sided with the regime as well. It is not reasonable to refer to the Syrian opposition as a coalition because there is significant internal hostility. Indeed, there is tension not only between the Shiites and Sunnis, but also within the Shiite and Sunni groups. In Yemen, a local power struggle among warring factions has been branded and elevated into a sectarian conflict for the benefit of the regional players. It is much more complex than simply a Shiite-Sunni war. At the same time, it cannot be understood without the Sunni-Shiite component.

Iran's Strategy and the Saudis' Response

One reason this is so important is that it represents a move by Iran to gain a major sphere of influence in the Arab world. This is not a new strategy. Iran has sought greater influence on the Arabian Peninsula since the rule of the Shah. More recently, it has struggled to create a sphere of influence stretching from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. The survival of the al Assad government in Syria and the success of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq would create that Iranian sphere of influence, given the strength of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the ability of al Assad's Syria to project its power.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the-middle-eastern-balance-of-power-matures/15909