"The various manifestations of Iran's Islamic stance amounted to a single policy: the West and its friends were the enemies of Islam and their hegemony over the Middle East and the Muslim world should be brought to an end"-  Said K. Aburish, 'The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of The House of Saud', page 137.

The attention of the world is currently focused on the tragic developments unfolding in Syria involving the unprecedented struggle between the Bashar al Assad regime and pro-democracy activists.

But what is little remarked about is the capacity of events in Syria to suck much of the world into a bloody and destructive confrontation.

Syria occupies a special place in the affairs not just of the Middle East, but the world as well. Whoever captures Syria as an outcome of the current turmoil in that country, will end up winning the battle for the whole Middle East

The stakes of global players over Syria were best defined by C. Ernest Dawn, who wrote in "Diplomacy In The Middle East", (edited by L. Carl Brown), that "the creation of a sovereign Syria with fixed boundaries did not eliminate the practice of alliances by Syrian factions with non-Syrian political elements against their Syrian rivals".

No wonder that the current unfolding events in Syria have also become a contest by proxy between Western powers and Israel, on the one hand, and Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, on the other hand, over the future strategic shape and trajectory of the Middle East.

The other layer of international intrigue involves the battle for hegemony over the Islamic world and the Middle East between Saudi Arabia, which seeks to project itself as the guarantor and protector of Syria's majority Sunnis, and Iran, which views itself as the guarantor and protector of Syria's Allawite governing minority.

Turkey is following the developments in Syria with great interest because it would not want the collapse of the Syrian regime to result in the emergence of yet another autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Syria, which may link with Iraq's Kurdistan and Turkey's own restive Kurdish population.

To complicate matters further it is conceivable that powerful security elements within the Shia-dominated pro-Iranian government of Nuri al Maliki in Iraq would sympathise with the Allawite-led Syrian government in its violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists.

What is not in dispute is that since the first Arab Spring revolution in Tunisia in December 2010, there has been a massive, overall and sustained deterioration - internally, regionally and internationally - in the geo-political and geo-strategic outlook of the Bashar al Assad regime in Damascus.

Not since before the military coup that brought Bashar's father to power in the early 1970s has Syria been so ripe for international intrigue and manipulation by outside forces, working in cahoots with their allied Syrian factions, that seek to cut to size Syria's disproportionate influence over Middle Eastern affairs.

This current desperate regional and international position of Syria is a pathetic shadow of its regional and international significance and influence during the Bill Clinton Presidency in the USA in the 1990s. In the short period between 1993-1996 Warren Christopher, Clinton's first Secretary of State, paid no less than twenty two official diplomatic visits to Syria, in perhaps a dismal, miscalculated and delusional imitation of Henry Kissinger's famous shuttle diplomacy to China and Southern Africa in the early and mid 1970s.

These visits of Warren Christopher resulted neither in a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, nor in a modification, for the better, of the nature and behaviour of the Syrian regime.

But the Syrian regime's sense of itself as an indispensable and powerful pivot in the affairs of the wider Middle East was reinforced, and its own sense of brittle state ego was enlarged and buttressed by these ill-considered visits by Christopher.

The contribution to the current bloody crisis in Syria of this huge USA diplomatic miscalculation should never be underestimated for a second.

(By contrast, Christopher paid no more than five visits to all of Africa, with all its mineral and energy wealth and larger combined continental population, during his entire term as Secretary of State between 1993-1996).

When Bashar al Assad assumed the leadership of Syria in 2000, following the death of his father, Hafiz, there was much hope in the West that this British-educated young leader, who had studied medicine in England and was married to a British citizen, Would turn out to be the Arab Syrian Gorbaschev.

In his important book, "Inheriting Syria - Bashar's Trial By Fire", Flynt Leverett captures this hope of the West about Bashar al Assad when he writes:

"Thus there is considerable evidence, from his own statements and the development of his personal network, that Bashar is committed to a certain set of reformist ideas. Ascribing priority to improving Syria's economic performance and standard of living, Bashar judges that reform, particularly in the economic arena, should proceed in a gradual manner to avoid social disequilibrium. And Bashar obviously favors what some desctribe as the Chinese model of reform, putting initial emphasis on economic reform and moving slowly on political reform until a foundation of increased prosperity has been laid".

But two critical global events happened that informed the trajectory of the present Syrian events.

Firstly, there was the George W Bush Presidency in America in 2000, followed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the USA, and the the USA's illegal invasion of Syria's eastern neighbour, Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

To compound matters further for the Syrian regome, Bush tightened the screws on Iran, Syria's close ally and strategic partner in the Middle East. At around the same time Israel launched a vicious retaliatory war on Lebanon's Hezbollah, another close ally, and strategic partner, of Syria to its south-west.

To provide a conceptual framework to the new confrontational posture of the Bush Administration towards countries such as Syria at the turn of the new century, Madeline Albright, President Bill Clinton's second and then former Secretary of State, said the following on 04 September 2001, in a Question and Answer Conversation at the Hobart and William Smith:

"The third group (of countries) have been called various things - rogues, or as we later called them ‘states of concern'. Countries that are not only not part of the system, but a lot about their very existence is to be outside the system, and to try to do everything to destroy it in some form or another - they are basically countries that have no structure at all, that are figuratively and literally eating their seed grain"

Thirdly, the Syrian regime was dealt a near mortal body-blow when the Cedar Revolution erupted in Lebanon and finally broke the Syrian stranglehold over that country, following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri on 14 February 2005.

Earlier in September 2004 the United Nations Security Council had adopted the USA and France-sponsored resolution 1559, which demanded that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon (into which it had gone in during the civil war in Lebanon 1975-1990) in order to put an end to Syrian interference in internal Lebanese affairs.

A year before the USA Congress had passed the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (2003), which conferred on the USA Executive powers to impose sanctions and restrictions on Syria.

For too long Syria had used the Lebanese financial system and economic (employment) opportunities as its own, without much due regard to the interests of the Lebanese people themselves. So the Cedar Revolution shook the Syrian regime to its very foundation. And now the ripple effects of the Tunisian Arab Spring Revolution are threatening the very survival of the Bashar al Assad regime.

At the moment, it is uncertain which side will triumph. What is clear, however, is that international intrigue over the current Syrian developments carry an acute unintended danger that Damascus may become to the 21st century, what Sarajevo in the Balkans was to Europe at the turn of the 20th century.

There are a number of factors that may unwittingly conspire to result in an international disaster over the current developments in Syria.

The first one relates to the nature of the Bashar al Assad's Syrian regime. In an article that appeared in the USA Foreign Affairs magazine of May/June 2005, under the rubric "An Arab Spring?", Fouad Ajami penned an article headed 'On Syria and Lebanon', in which he characterised the Bashar al Assad regime as follows:

"The nature and makeup of the Syrian regime is not known with confidence. It is part Stalinist, part tribal-sectarian. Fundamentally, it is remarkably similar to the Tikriti edifice built by Saddam. It has the strengths and weaknesses of sectarian control; the secretiveness, the devotion to the clan, the subordination to the leader, and the brittleness at the center of it all." (Page 32, Volume 84, No. 3).

Like North Korea, Syria's Allawite regime has since 1970 really been gearing itself up to meet external military aggression. It was formed and has existed, and prepared itself, for this current moment of its acute domestic and regional crisis. Without declaring it, Syria has followed "the Army First" policy, like its other ally, North Korea.

Secondly, a military miscalculation by an external power in the Syrian internal conflict may quickly suck in Israel and Iran in the conflict, with all the unpredictable and unforeseeable tragic consequences.

Thirdly, it looks like Vladimir Putin's Russia has decided to draw a line in the sand over Syria, in terms of counteracting and firmly opposing the USA and West's hegemonic and strategic influence in the Middle East. And of course Russia's interests in Syria are quite substantial. In an article by Alexander Golts that appeared the other day in the Moscow Times, , entitled "Realpolitik without Realism", the Russian strategic national interests in Syria are outlined, in very frank terms, as being:

"...Syria has been a large loyal buyer of Russian weapons systems since 1970. Syria only recently signed a $500 million contract for the delivery of 36 Yak-130 trainer combat aircrafts. Before that Syria took delivery of Russia's cutting-edge Bastion missile system for defending its coastline along with anti-tank systems, a few of which ended up in the hands of Hezbollah. What's more, Russia is currently fulfilling an order to modernise armoured vehicles it sold to Syria in the 1970s and 1980s. The Assad regime also gave Moscow its only military base in the Mediterranean..."

These are Russia's very broad and fundamental national interests in Syria, which explain its determination to veto any Bashar al Assad-hostile UN Security Council resolution sponsored by the Arab League, working in cahoots with the West. At the moment it looks like Russia is ready to go to the ends of the world to defend the current brutal and internationally isolated Syrian regime.

For its part, the People's Republic of China is, in all probability, sharing Putin's deep unease and suspicion around the whole Arab Spring Revolution which has swept across some parts of the Middle East, knocked over long-standing secular and authoritarian regimes of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and which is now threatening the secular and authoritarian Allawite regime in Damascus.

But of course China, like Russia, would not have failed to notice that this Arab Spring Revolution has been pretty selective and inconsistent in its sweep and reach, by-passing the more brutal and despotic pro-Western Arab monarchies in countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain.

The overall sense Russia and China may be getting is that they are the ultimate targets of colour-coded Western abetted and inspired revolutionary change convulsing Syria now, especially with regard to their own respective restive Moslem under-bellies of their large multinational States.

Fourthly, the Syrian crisis has for the first time demonstrated to the world the possible geo-strategic and geo-political (and even geo-military) implication of the phenomenal rise and rise of Russia and China as global economic, and thus diplomatic and military, global behemoths.

The amazing public joint collaboration and determination of Russia and China to defy, in concert, world opinion over the current tragic events unfolding in Syria, and to place double vetoes on a draft UN Security Council resolution that sought to condemn Bashar al Assad's Syria, is an important milestone in 21st century international relations and diplomacy.

And lastly, it is very important to remember that the current Syrian regime in power in Damascus gained enormous practical combat experience during the long 1975-1990 Lebanese urban-based civil war, directly and indirectly. In a sense, Syria represents militarily the nearest thing to a possible Vietnam-type military quagmire for the USA and the West, if they choose to recklessly get militarily involved in the Syrian crisis.

Syria's very close collaboration with Iran, Al Malaki's Iraq, Lebanon's Hezbollah, and Gaza Strip's Hamas, should provide a cautionary tale to any military adventurists in the USA and Western Europe.

Syria is not Libya. Period.

In fact, the real big question around Syria is whether it will cost Barack Obama a second term, the way 1979 revolutionary Iran cost former President Jimmy Carter a second term.

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director of the Center of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA). He is also a businessman and a former Director for the Levant in RSA's Foreign Affairs Department (2000-2005).

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