ELIE PODEH/In post-nuclear agreement Middle East, It’s Syria, stupid/Assad in a position of strength after Vienna deal with Iran. Tehran revitalizes his depleted army

Analysis: In post-nuclear agreement Middle East, ‘It’s Syria, stupid!’
By ELIE PODEH /J.Post/07/27/2015
Informed commentaries have stressed, somewhat justifiably, Iran’s benefits from the nuclear agreement with the P5+1 powers. Yet the agreement is, in many ways, formal confirmation of regional developments that have occurred since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Arab Spring. These changes have not only transformed Iran into a legitimate player in the regional system, but also into a potential partner in the international campaign against Islamic State (IS) and other jihadist Sunni organizations such as al-Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra and others. Also, concerns over the emergence of a Shi’ite Crescent in the Middle East extending from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the Shi’ites in Iraq and the Alawites in Syria, are not new: King Abdullah of Jordan voiced such concerns as early as 2004.

The issue of Iranian influence involves two elements, one unknown and one hidden. The real extent of Iran’s influence on Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sana’a is not known. We can only speculate that intelligence circles have much more credible information than do social networks or the media. What is important to remember is that many players on both sides of this field are invested in portraying an image of Iran’s role in the region that accords with their own interests. Israel and Saudi Arabia have strategic, geographic and ideological interests in magnifying the threat of a nuclear Iran, while the United States (undoubtedly joined in this by Russia and China, and possibly by the Gulf States bordering on Iran, such as Oman) has the opposite interest of downplaying this threat.

History is familiar with the analogy of the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain and the West capitulated to Hitler but failed to prevent World War II. Yet history is also familiar with efforts to demonize the enemy that were subsequently understood to be exaggerated, if not outright baseless. For example, Israel and the West turned Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s into the Hitler of the Arab world, and according to Israeli intelligence and media sources of the period, the influence of Egypt and Nasser’s pan-Arabism pervaded the entire Arab world, including Iraq, Syria and distant Yemen. Subsequent historiography of the period shows that Nasser’s capabilities were much more limited than the grandiose powers ascribed to him. An assessment of Iran’s true power and regional influence must surely be sober rather than demagogic.

The latent dimension of Iran’s regional influence involves the future of Syria. The keystone of Iran’s strategy in the Arab Middle East is its capacity to support Bashar Assad’s regime. The Iranian-Syrian alliance, which has been in place for over three decades (with a brief interruption during the Gulf War), has become a major axis of regional politics. This is not a “natural” alliance in the respect that it is based on Iran’s cooperation with an Alawite minority regime rather than a broad Shi’ite social foundation. Syria’s significance stems from its geo-strategic location in the heart of the regional system, rather than from any economic resources that it offers. “Whoever would lead the Middle East must control Syria,” wrote esteemed journalist and historian Patrick Seale in the 1960s.

Indeed, harking back to 1950s when Syria became the focus of global and Arab Cold War struggles, at least five powers have competed for control over Syria since the outbreak of the civil war there in 2011: Iran and Russia (through the Alawite regime), the West (through the Free Syria Army), and two jihadi Sunni organizations – IS and Jabhat al-Nusra. In view of the highly unreliable information from the field, it is difficult to predict what will happen in Syria, or whether it will maintain its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Clearly, Iran’s success in preserving Syria’s Alawite government would be a significant accomplishment and reinforcement of the radical Shi’ite alliance in the region. Assad’s fall, on the other hand, would be a fatal blow to Iran’s regional influence by creating a vacuum in the Shi’ite Crescent, and would also weaken Hezbollah as well as Iran’s influence in Iraq. We can borrow from then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s famous 1992 phrase “It’s the economy, stupid,” and state with equal gusto that in post-nuclear-agreement Middle East, “It’s Syria, stupid!”
Since the Western alternative in Syria now appears to be less probable, the West, including Israel, faces a dilemma regarding whether to support Syria – backed by the demonized Iran – or to bet on an alternative regime, with the risk of chaos, anarchy and even territorial changes. Turkey and Saudi Arabia would prefer to get rid of Assad at all costs, while Egypt has decided to prop up the Assad regime. Indeed, one may wonder whether the potential rise of IS or another radical Islamic entity in Syria might be an even more destructive scenario than the Iranian “threat.”**The author is a professor in the Department of Islam and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a board member of Mitvim – The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies.

Assad in a position of strength after Vienna deal with Iran. Tehran revitalizes his depleted army
DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis/July 27, 2015
Syrian President Bashar Assad, in his first public speech in a year, could afford Sunday, July 26, to admit that his overstretched army had been forced to give up “critical areas” in a civil war that was dragging into its fifth year at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, because he was confident that he is on a winning streak. This confidence he gained from three recent developments:

1. The nuclear accord Iran signed with the six world powers led by the Unite States on July 14 has granted him and extra lease of life. The Syrian dictator, Tehran’s senior ally, can now count himself safe from US efforts to depose him – never mind if he cheated on his chemical weapons stocks and continues to use them in battle – after the Obama administration effectively anointing Iran leading Middle East power and strategic partner.

In his speech, Assad congratulated his best friend in Tehran for pulling off this feat in Vienna and commended the “positive changes in western attitudes to the {Syrian] conflict.” He noted that the “US and its allies now understood they shared an interest” with his regime “in defeating ISIS-style jihad terrorism.”
From the early days of the Syrian war, Assad claimed he was fighting Islamic terrorism and, if the world failed to understand this point, they too would be attacked.

2. He now feels vindicated by Turkey’s entry to the civil war over the weekend in cooperation with the US. The two powers have declared war on the Islamic State and the Kurdish military amalgam of the Syrian YPG and outlawed Turkish PKK. Since these are the two most powerful fighting forces imperiling his regime in Damascus, this outside intervention in the Syrian war is welcome for taking some of the heavy lifting off the shoulders of the Syrian army.

Furthermore, Washington has promised Tehran to withhold from the third element fighting the Assad regime, the Syrian rebel movements, weapons powerful enough to tilt the scales of the civil war in their favor

Sunday night, July 26, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu informed Turkish media editors: “Turkey has no plans to send ground troops into Syria, but has agreed with the United States that air cover should be provided for moderate rebels fighting Islamic State forces there.”
The Syrian ruler and Tehran can therefore stop worrying. The Syrian insurgents, some of which were backed by the US for years in their fight against Assad, will now have to be satisfied with air cover alone – and even then, only if they stop fighting Assad and turn their guns on the Islamists.

3. With the new lease of life given his regime by these radical shifts in the strategic landscape of the long Syrian war, Assad could afford to talk down his regime’s surrender of territory, “as a question of priorities. It was necessary to specify critical areas for our armed forces to hang onto,” while voicing gratitude for the “important and effective assistance” rendered by Iran and Hizballah for enabling him to adopt this tactic.
As to his most acute problem, the flagging powers of his armed forces: “The problem facing the military,” he explained coolly, “is not related to planning but to fatigue. It is normal than an army gets tired, but there’s a difference between fatigue and defeat.”

But he dodged any mention of the mass desertions and defections to the enemy which have shrunk his army. Neither did he reveal how he proposes to remedy this problem.

However, debkafile’s military and intelligence source are able to fill this gap: Shortly before the speech he delivered in Damascus, Assad was presented by Tehran with a new rehabilitation plan for his army, updated to the latest events. Instead divisions and brigades, it would reorganized with the assistance of Iranian and Hizballah officers into three armored commando super-divisions, one each for the northern, southern and Damascus fronts.

The 4th Division, which is the Republican Guard, would continue to defend Damascus. The 14th Division, which is made up of Special Forces, would have its “tired” officers replaced by younger, fresher commanders fighting under superior Iranian officers. The immediate consequence of the Vienna nuclear accord on the ground has therefore been to revitalize the Assad regime in Damascus, rejuvenate his army and bring Iranian military forces closer than ever before to the borders of Israel and Jordan.