Never? To Soon To Tell

Submitted by M. Tovey (United States), Mar 11, 2014 at 19:00

It has been a while that an exchange of thoughts in this venue evoked the sense of wanting to respond. What is seen in the Middle East currently, and by a strange bedfellows nexus in the Ukraine, that which many might think unusual is not nearly so. The pattern of one has a close parallel to the other.

Why does anyone think Russian interest in Syria was so palatable when Candidate Obama was unable to broker an intervention for protecting Syrians from gas attacks? But let us go back, way back, to a time many of an older generation remember as if it was yesterday and the issues of a former time have come breaking back into the forefront.

Is the Russian interest in the Middle East a recent infatuation in which we may recall that Russian's have had significant investments in the Middle East; or are there deeper roots that have been relegated to a revisionist's history long since lost to modern thinking. The Russians have a history connecting to the Middle East that is rich, more notably in the nineteenth century with its first Ecclesiastical Mission.

In more recent times, after the holocaust and during the issues of a Jewish resettlement in what was to be the rebirth of Israel, the Soviet government's position was promulgated by the efforts of Ivan Samylovskii, who as an ardent patriot (see Wikipedia for references), provided dialogue that "the Soviet stand on the Palestine question was confirmed, i.e. preferably the establishment of an independent single Jewish-Arab State with equal rights for both the Arab and Jewish populations. The Soviet delegation conceded that in case this plan could not be implemented, and the Jewish and Arab populations could not be reconciled, and only then, should a "second plan be considered, which would provide for the partition of Palestine into two independent single states, one Jewish and one Arab".

Fast forward, and with the musing of Mr. Putin's observation of the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the former Soviet Union, one with certain discernment can see that many of the former Soviet points of interest are in process of being regained; and with The U.S. and the rest of the West in vacillation mode, recaptured in spades. There is the power of the federation; and in the background, the power of energy source control. Does anyone think that competing gas and oil reserves in the Mediterranean have gone unnoticed to gas investor Putin?

From a regional conflict perspective, there is a definitive invested purpose that is being closely watched and the Black Sea port is part of a critical path towards protections of such things. What if Syria implodes; does anyone think tovarich Putin is going to let that prevent him from seeking his and his country's own? Iran ambitions play into that as well; and do not be too surprised when both collide after Syria craters and Israel is fixed upon as the target it has always been.

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