The Syria problem between Kerry and Obama

The turmoil and state of war in Syria is about to complete its sixth year. We are facing an event in which the human drama, in which more than five million people have had to abandon their homes and take refuge in neighboring countries and millions more have been forced to live displaced within Syria, grows heavier by the day. The situation need not have become this grave; even after the crisis in Syria acquired an international character, it could somehow have been resolved or eased. But the US, in the position of the most important actor of the global system, did not take, or did not want to take, the steps necessary to end this crisis. Moreover, with the ambivalent policy it has displayed from the outset, it played the principal role in the crisis deepening further with each passing day.

In the beginning it displayed such strong anti-Assad rhetoric that those who saw and heard thought a US intervention against Assad was imminent, but over time, for the sake of another target, DAESH, in place of Assad, it even went as far as cooperating with Assad.

Yet it was Assad himself who produced both DAESH and other terrorist organizations, and while concentrating on fighting these organizations, the source that gave birth to them continued to be fed as well.

Of course the US is not able to control the entire system on its own. Perhaps it has such a desire, but it is balanced by means of a number of mechanisms and crises within the system. Sometimes it expends extraordinary effort in order to be balanced. When a dispute emerges among states over ensuring international peace and security, the meetings of the UN Security Council, which is not equipped with sufficient deterrent power to develop a solution before the dispute worsens and deepens, in the role of wise men that its members have attributed to themselves, have turned into tea-party chatter.

The parties accuse one another, bringing up the bringing up of a draft resolution, and when one or several of the five permanent members of the Security Council play the veto card against a draft that is still only a draft, the cookies are left on the table and everyone gets up.

The US, which after the end of the Cold War made the UN Security Council function as it wished through various kinds of blackmail, saw its power erode from the 2000s on, and this made the weaknesses of the system far more clearly visible and more deeply felt. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's phrase "The world is bigger than five", which has now become a maxim for those sections that await justice, should be taken up not as an expression of a search for revision but as an expression of the need for reform of the system.

From the mid-1990s, especially in the period of Kofi Annan, who served as UN Secretary-General, it was being voiced that the UN needed to be adapted to the changing world and that for this reason the system needed to be reformed. Kofi Annan, taking this need into account, also prepared a number of reform proposals, and thought in particular that the US could use its surplus of power at that time in reforming the system. The US, however, because it was not experiencing very serious problems in the Security Council, the UN's executive organ, at that time, or because it believed it could solve the problems it did experience, turned a deaf ear to such talk of reform. It was claimed that, with a number of small-scale changes, the UN had been prepared for the post-Cold War order.

In any case, according to a group within the Republican Party known especially as neo-cons, the US no longer even needed an organization like the UN after the Cold War. We saw the clearest application of this conviction in the Iraq War.

The US invaded Iraq without any UN decision, and apart from a number of moral debates, no political reaction took shape.

But what happened from the breakup of Yugoslavia to the second phase of the Iraq War also revealed the capacity of US power and a number of systemic pathologies.

The Obama doctrine, better known as "smart power", which uncontrollably withdrew American military power after the Bush doctrine that had expanded American military power without limit in geographical terms, shattered the accepted notions about excess and deficiency.

The Obama doctrine created regional power vacuums. It is a known fact that the thing the universe likes least is a vacuum. The vacuums the US left were filled by states in locations where organized political structures, especially states, were strong.

And in places where states were not weak or inadequate, by non-state actors. DAESH, which emerged in Iraq and Syria, is the most striking example of this situation.

The recording of Kerry's voice leaked to

the New York Times,

one of the important newspapers of the US, will greatly intensify the debates on the course of US foreign policy that we have tried to summarize briefly above. It is a known situation that Obama has been likened, especially by conservatives, to

Gorbachev

and compared with

Chamberlain,

the architect of the policy of appeasement. Kerry brings these debates back onto the agenda through his complaint that American military power does not support diplomacy. We understand from the recording that

there is a deep disagreement between Kerry and Obama on foreign policy

.

So why has this disagreement emerged now? That, while Kerry has been conducting Obama's foreign affairs policies for four years,

it has somehow been leaked to the press right on the eve of the US presidential elections is found rather significant.

The Syria issue is at the focus of these debates too. But it can be said that the debates are being conducted not for the purpose of solving the problem but for the purpose of instrumentalizing the problem. In other words,

the Syria issue has unfortunately turned into an area of political rent for the US in this picture, and this has perhaps become yet another factor ensuring that the problem drags on further.

It can also be said that Kerry, by leaving the bill for the Syrian crisis to Obama, is preparing for a US presidential candidacy in the next term.

TURKEY, WHICH SPOILS THE GAME IN IRAQ, IS NOT WANTED

Meanwhile we saw that the Iraqi government brought to the agenda of the UN Security Council, whose sorry state we tried to express above, a draft resolution complaining about Turkey. Setting aside the inherent irony of bringing this problem to the agenda of the UN, which has no potential to solve any problem in the world,

Turkey is in Iraq as the only country that is not there to occupy Iraq and is there, in the true sense of the word, solely for the benefit of the Iraqi people.

While all the others are in the region in the name of fighting DAESH in a way that will result in more destruction of Iraq and more deportation and massacre of the Iraqi people, Turkey is in Iraq to watch over a program of struggle that will leave Mosul solely to its own people, its own inhabitants, for a lasting solution in the region.

With hardly a country left in Iraq that is not in the position of an occupier, the Iraqi government's objecting only to Turkey's presence of course had an important mean

ing. First of all, among the powers there that have so far ruined Iraq, are now dividing it up, and are partners in the greatest corruption recorded by history there, there is not a single Turkey.

Turkey is there within the scope of its own right of self-defense against the security threat arising against itself from these lands; and also to prevent those who want to occupy Mosul through foreign elements and then make it live through the tyranny of a Savior as well.

Its own sons can easily liberate Mosul from the hands of DAESH. There is no need for either the PYD or Shia Militias as saviors; in fact, what they would do would not be liberation but occupation, and since this would produce a threat to Turkey in the first degree, it gives rise to the right of self-defense.

Moreover, Turkey's presence has come about depending on, indeed at the request of, the Iraqi government's approval above all. These objections made at this hour stem from the steps Turkey has taken against the games played in the region being found too spoiling of the game.

Because Turkey is "the only party that will finish the game by spoiling it", and it will play this role sooner or later.