Opportunity and Catastrophe

Opportunity and Catastrophe

These days, there are a heavy condensation of intensely contradictory signals regarding the Syrian situation. On the one hand, the escalation is continuing, the sanctions are continuing, the economic, political and military pressures are continuing and growing, too, and the extreme behavior of those who reject the solution from Syrians and non-Syrians is taking more direct and clear forms.

On the other hand, we see a cooling of the temperature of tension between Moscow and Washington, and even a clear statement that fruitful understandings have been made regarding the Syrian crisis, in parallel with the continuation of the joint tripartite work of Astana, and the dismantling of the mines laid in its path, one by one.

The two directions, resolution and escalation, are two real direction that work in parallel and at the same time. If in the previous stages they appear as alternating shifts between escalation and resolution, this is due to the fact that the degree of maturity of the Syrian issue and a number of crises on the international scene have not been sufficient to be finished and move forward.

What is new now is that the susceptibility of various crises to solution is greater than ever before. All this is anchored on the continuing American-Western regression and the internal divisions that have resulted from it, and in particular the growing decline of the fascist current within the West, whose only choice was, and continues to be, escalation and further escalation, up to explosion wherever and whenever he managed to do so.

This characterization, i.e., the maturity of the crisis towards the solution, and the accompanying intensification of escalation in parallel with the progress of the understandings, is not only applicable to Syria; the Iranian nuclear file can be seen by the same logic, as well as the Turkish S400 file.

To return to Syria, the degree of maturity we are talking about also means that the degree of pressure has reached a qualitative tipping point; either the international understandings and decisions will prevail, that is, the political solution wins and the country emerges from the bottleneck it has reached, or otherwise this bottleneck will break! with all the risks involved in deepening the current phase of the crisis to a new stage that is difficult even to imagine or predict what it might possibly lead to, even though the most likely probability in such a scenario is that Syria itself as one country and one people might became something belonging to the past.

If each of the three previous stages contained three phases (economic crisis, tension with social crisis - political crisis), and if with each new phase, these stages became more severe and cruel, the country in the third current phase has reached a limit so that even the same cycle cannot be repeated; at least it can not be repeated within the same one (geographical - political) zone, that is, within a unified Syria!

If what we described above is a description of the magnitude of the risk that the next few weeks and months will carry, it is at the same time, however, a description of the size of the opportunity to the final break with the crisis, and exiting from it with a unified country out of the bottleneck. This is what we see as the strongest and most likely achievable possibility, which requires further closeness between the Syrian patriots, and further isolation of extremists from all sides.

Kassioun Editorial, Issue No. 914, May 20, 2019