Centuries of violence underlie the civil war that has so far killed over a hundred thousand Syrians, driven out two million refugees, and displaced six and a half million internally, and it is just part of a war where we and other powers are fighting for our own conflicting aims.

Syria is where agriculture and cattle breeding began in Mesopotamia around 10,000 BC.  It has been under empires of Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Turkey.  It was held a thousand years ago by French, English, Italian and German Crusaders.  After WW1 when Iraq was taken by the British, it fell under France.  Britain later offered not to establish a Jewish state in Palestine in return for hegemony over a Greater Syrian state but France retained control until 1946.  Independent Syria made a chaotic start and was stable for only forty years.

Syria’s population includes Arabs, Greeks, Kurds, Turks and others.  Roughly three quarters of Syrians are Sunni Muslims, including Kurds who make up 9% of the overall population.  Shia Alawites (12%) and Christians (10%) make up the rest along with small numbers of Druze and others.

Although Sunni Arabs are by far the majority, Syria is ruled by Shia Alawites from the narrow coastal region that is separated by a mountain range from a semiarid steppe zone that covers three-quarters of the country and which is bisected by the Euphrates valley where cereals and cotton thrive.  The east is desert.  In the extreme northeast there is oil and natural gas.

Newly independent Syria had military coups, twenty different cabinets and four constitutions in its first decade.  Martial law was in place for more than half a century after Israeli, British and French forces invaded Egypt in 1956 to regain the Suez Canal.  Syria signed a pact with the USSR when they were forced to withdraw then united with socialist pan-Arab Egypt from 1958-61.  The Arab Republic of Syria came into being in 1963 in a Ba’ath Party coup emulating one just before that in Iraq.

The Ba’ath Party was established in 1947 by a Christian, a Sunni Muslim and an Alawite Shia Muslim, anti-imperialists who aimed to replace religion with socialism and social reform.

In 1966 traditional Ba’athists were overthrown by Alawite army leaders.  In 1970, air force leader Hafez al-Assad seized control and ruled Syria as a strongman until his death in 2000.  He was succeeded by the present ruler, his son Bashar al-Assad.

In 1967 Syria lost half the Golan Heights when Israel also captured Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. After losing more of the Golan Heights in 1973 when Syria and Egypt invaded Israel, Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 and remained there until 2005 supporting proxies like Hezbollah to prevent Israel from taking southern Lebanon.  Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982.

Syria’s current Ba’athist Alawite regime is based in what was an Alawite State when Syria was ruled by France.  Under the Ottomans, the head of each ethno-religious group — Arab Shia, Arab Sunni, Greek Christian, Assyrian Christian, etc —  administered the laws of his community.  France defined Lebanon’s borders to put Sunni Muslims under Christians who were allied with France, and divided Syria into the State of Damascus at the heartland of the Sunni Arab majority, the State of Aleppo at the trading center of Kurds, Arab Christians, Armenians, and others who felt closer to Baghdad than Damascus, and the Druze and Alawite States where people are “sort of” Shia.

Alawites celebrate many Christian festivals, use bread and wine in their ceremonies, and believe they originated as divine light but were cast out of heaven for disobedience and must expiate their sin over many lifetimes.  Their God has three emanations that manifest in human form, most recently as father of the Shia faith, Ali, the prophet Muhammed and Salman the Persian who was born into a Zoroastrian priestly family, converted to Christianity, heard of the coming of another prophet and found Muhammed.  Salman was the first Persian convert to Islam and the first translator of the Quran.

For political reasons, the Alawites have been recognized as true Shias by Iran’s supreme leader.

The US view of Syria has changed greatly since the civil war began in 2011.  In the early years of our War on Terror we were quite approving.  The Dept of State’s 2006 International Religious Freedom Report noted that Syria’s Government “suppresses extremist forms of Islam [and] made affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death [in] 1980.”

We thought Bashar al-Assad was, like his father, keeping his people under firm control: “The generally amicable relationship among religious groups in society contributed to religious freedom; however, there were occasional reports of minor tensions between religious groups mainly attributable to economic rivalries rather than religious affiliation.”

But when Saudi Arabia recognized the Syrian National Coalition formed in Qatar in 2012 as “the legitimate representative” of the Syrian people and France and Turkey declared it the “only representative of the Syrian people” our State Dept issued a press release saying: “We look forward to supporting the National Coalition as it charts a course toward the end of Assad’s bloody rule and the start of the peaceful, just, democratic future that all the people of Syria deserve.”

The State Dept’s 2013 Human Rights Reports: Syria said: “Syria is a republic ruled by the authoritarian regime of President Bashar Asad … The Asad regime continued to use indiscriminate and deadly force to quell protests and conducted air and ground-based military assaults on cities, residential areas, and civilian infrastructures, including schools and hospitals throughout the country.”

Our media said nothing about the issues, just demonized Bashar al-Assad, the same playbook they used for Nicaragua’s Ortega, Panama’s Noriega and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

The State Dept report continued: “on August 21, the regime used sarin gas and artillery to target […] suburbs of Damascus, and killed over 1,000 persons.”  President Obama asked Congress to approve the use of military force “to deter, disrupt, prevent and degrade the potential for future uses of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.”

But just as there was no evidence for the “weapons of mass destruction” President Bush used to justify invading Iraq, there is no evidence that al-Assad’s regime was responsible for the sarin gas atrocity or has any weapons of mass destruction.

We did supply sarin gas that Saddam Hussein used on Iraq’s Kurds, but the gas used in Syria was not weapons-grade.  It appears to have been used by rebels who hoped to provoke us into helping them topple al-Assad’s government.

Now, four years into the civil war, Syria looks much as it did under the French Mandate except that the government still at this time controls a large part of what was the State of Damascus as well as the Alawite and Druze States.  Most of what was the State of Aleppo is now controlled by the Islamic State while the northeast is held by Rojavan forces.

The Rojavan, aka Western Kurdistan, manifesto says: “The democratic confederalism of Kurdistan is not a State system, it is the democratic system of a people without a State… It takes its power from the people.”  Kurds want Kurdistan to include parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran, too.  Kurds following Ottoman policy in the early 20th century massacred Christians throughout that area and were rewarded with their land.  More than half Syria’s poor are of Kurdish origin.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) which controls territory in Iraq as well as Syria began operating under a different name in Jordan in 1999.  When we invaded Iraq in 2003 they attacked our forces, made suicide attacks on civilan targets and beheaded hostages.  They pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004 with the intent: “to free Iraq’s Sunnis from Shia and foreign oppression, and to further the name of Allah and restore Islam to glory.”  Early in 2014 al-Queda disavowed loose-cannon ISIL.

The al-Nusra Front is an al-Queda branch formed in Syria and Lebanon in 2012 that aims to overthrow the al-Assad government and replace it with a fundamentalist Sunni state.  They are focused on that alone and have warned against Western intervention.  ISIL announced its merger with al-Nusra in mid-2013 but fighting broke out between them a year later.

ISIL now controls much of Syria and Iraq while Syrian and Iraqi Kurds dominate the northeast.

I will delve deeper into Iraq, Kurdistan and the Islamic State which in mid-2014 claimed religious, political and military authority over all Muslims worldwide.

So… our air strikes are now leading the battle against the Islamic State, but we destroyed Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist regime in Iraq and say we will also end Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria, which clears the path toward a fundamentalist Sunni regime like the Islamic State.

Does what we’re doing make sense?  Our military can destroy, but will we like what comes next?

This 1993 article by Robert Kaplan is excellent.

Yemen, a crossroad of cultures where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean, was always important for trade between Europe, Africa, India and further east.  Shipping along its coasts is among the world’s most active and strategic.  It has been ruled by sun worshipers, all three Abrahamic religions — Jews, Christians and Muslims, its location has several times enabled its rulers to control most of the Arabian Peninsula, and it has forever been bedeviled by tribal rivalry.

Only 2% of Yemen is arable land.  Its mountainous interior is ringed by narrow coastal plains and in the north and east by desert.  The western highlands reach 10,000 feet, have relatively fertile soil and get enough rain for sorghum, coffee, bananas and such (coffee is first known to have been cultivated in 15th century Sufi monasteries in north Yemen.)  The central plateau gets enough rain for wheat and barley in wet years.  The northeastern desert gets little to no rain at any time.

Yemen’s sun god worshiping rulers for a thousand years were conquered around 270 AD by the Himyarite whose king a century later converted to Judaism, seemingly to maintain good relations with both Roman Christian and Persian Zoroastrian empires.  The Himyarites were defeated in 525 by Aksumites from Ethiopia whose king converted to Christianity around 350 when the Roman emperor also began trying to convert Yemen to Christianity.  Fighting between Jewish and Christian warlords continued for centuries, then in 630 Mohammed introduced Islam in the person of his cousin, Ali.

Ali is considered by Sunnis nothing more than the fourth of Mohammed’s elected successors as leader of all Muslims.  Shias, however, consider him Mohammed’s rightful successor.  That disagreement plunged the Muslim community into violent conflict that still persists 1,400 years later.

Muslim Yemen was ruled by a Shia dynasty founded in the north around 1040, then Sunni ones of Kurdish origin that invaded from the south.

When Portuguese merchant ships arrived in the early 16th century, the governor of Egypt began conquering Yemen to protect the Ottoman trade route with India.

Then the British entered three centuries later wanting a base to stop pirate attacks on their trade with India.  They were in 1838 granted by a local Sultan 75 acres around the ocean port of Aden.  After the Suez Canal was opened in 1869 cutting 4,300 miles off the sea voyage between Europe and India, Aden became a coaling station. and Britain expanded inland from there.

While Britain gained control of south Yemen, the Turkish Ottoman empire retained nominal control in the north although tribal chiefs there made real control impossible.  In 1918 when the Ottomans fell, a kingdom was established as North Yemen that in 1962 became the Yemen Arab Republic.

South Yemen continued to be ruled as part of British India until 1937.  It remained a British protectorate until armed struggles that began in 1963 resulted in its independence in 1967 when Britain was also forced by Egypt to relinquish control of the Suez Canal.

Marxists gained power in South Yemen in 1969, established the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen and formed close ties with the Soviet Union, China, East Germany and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.  The Soviet Union gave them strong support for which in return they got access to South Yemen’s ports.

North and South Yemen united in 1990 with North Yemen’s leader as President.  He outraged our government later that year by opposing military intervention from non-Arab states when Iraq invaded Kuwait.  Saudi Arabia supported us by expelling 800,000 Yemenis.

South Yemen seceded in 1994 with active support from Saudi Arabia but was defeated in a brief civil war.  There is still substantial support in south Yemen for an independent state.

When rebellion by Shia Houthis began in the north in 2004, the weak government tried allying with al Queda in unsuccessful counter attacks.  Then we began drone attacks on al Queda when in 2009 the Saudi Arabian and Yemeni branches merged to form al Quaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) based in Yemen.  Yemen’s government was now trying to defend itself against Shia rebels in the north, separatists and AQAP in the south.

Yemen never had effective government institutions.   Since it was unified, leaders of competing tribal, regional, religious and political groups have collaborated just enough to make it the 164th most corrupt of 182 countries in Transparency International’s 2009 survey, and it was ranked last of 135 countries in the 2012 Global Gender Gap Report for violence against women.

Pagan, Jewish and Christian influences from before Islam’s arrival are long gone.  For a thousand years the former North Yemen has been Shia, the former South Yemen Sunni and the two have been proxies in great empires’ wars to control trade routes.  Yemen’s history of never-ending struggles for power and wealth make it hard to see how a stable, unified, modern form of government can be established.  

The latest development is, a few days ago Yemen’s President Hadi, who replaced the previous leader in a 2011 pro-democracy uprising and was trying to end secessionist and tribal unrest, resigned in frustration.  Al Queda forces already controlled much of the south.  Now Houthi rebels had taken control of the capital, Sana’a.  Warriors from north Yemen always have been formidable and their latest incarnation, the Houthi, were doing better against al Queda than the government forces.  They seemed set to take over. 

So what should our government do? We have spent nearly $1 billion on military, economic and humanitarian assistance in Yemen since 2011.  Who should we support now?  Who are the good guys?  Who, for that matter, are the bad ones?

Can Yemen’s government survive and will its next leader, like ex-President Hadi, support our drone attacks on AQAP?  Or will the next government turn back to AQAP to counter the Houthi?

Who are the local great powers supporting?  Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist regime supports the Sunni in south Yemen, and AQAP is supported by Saudi Arabians.   Iran’s fundamentalist regime supports the Shia Houthi in the north, which borders Saudi Arabia.

We support the Saudi regime and have opposed Iran since its 1979 revolution.  President Bush branded Iran in 2002 part of “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”   We have been placing ever-tighter economic sanctions on Iran.

Echoing President Bush, National Security Adviser Rice said, “Iran’s direct support of regional and global terrorism and its aggressive efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, belie any good intentions it displayed in the days after the world’s worst terrorist attacks in history.”  In 2003, we invaded Iraq on the pretext that it already had weapons of mass destruction.

So should we continue to support Yemen’s weak government, should we instead support the Houthi  who have been more successful than the government against al Queda, or should we join Israel in supporting Saudi Arabia and its proxies who include al Queda in south Yemen?

Our government is deeply divided.  President Obama is engaging in diplomacy with Iran.  Congress just invited Israel’s leader to address them for a third time on why we should support Saudi Arabia and cripple Iran whose leaders support Hezbollah, the Shia force Iran established in 1982 to resist Israeli occupation in Lebanon.

We have no good allies in this part of the world.  The forces in north and south Yemen are on opposite sides of a 1,400 year-long battle that never had much to do with religion, was always about power, and is now amplified by rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia.  Battles for power in the Middle East now are much like those between Protestant and Catholic nations in medieval Europe.

Our military actions in the Middle East lead only to more suffering (as well as dependable sales of weapons.)  Instead of continuing to make war, we should support UN peace-keeping forces.

And what about terrorism?   No matter how horrific and whether committed in the name of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or any other religion, or whether committed in the name of communism, anti-communism, anarchism or any other ideology, terrorism is a crime of violence.  Crime cannot be ended by war.

Crime cannot be ended at all, in fact, but it can be minimized when the rule of law is supported by an effective system of justice and policing.  After exploring more of the Middle East, I will consider how international justice and policing could more effectively counter al Queda and other terrorists.