Failure everywhere in western Asia

US President Barack Obama’s latest request to Congress to provide $500 million in equipment and training to “appropriately vetted” moderate Syrian opposition forces will provoke a lively debate on two issues: on whether this is too little, too late to influence events inside Syria, and on what exactly defines a “moderate” opposition force.

These are both valid questions related to how non-Syrian powers work to bolster or topple Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, and also how everyone deals with the growing threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

One of the important recent developments in our region has seen the lingering, and very broadly Saudi-Iranian-led, ideological battle that has defined the Middle East for some years now transform into a single military battleground that stretches from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Iran. The Iran-Syria-Hizbollah alliance — aligned with Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki in Iraq — has emerged victorious in recent years, which is why the Assad government remains firmly in place, if only in about one-third of the country.

That alliance is under pressure today, as Iran’s three partners in Arab western Asia all face challenging new realities.

Assad continues to hold onto power only by bombing and destroying parts of his country, Maliki’s incumbency in Iraq is in deep trouble and unlikely to persist, and Hizbollah is fighting inside Syria and may have to go to the aid of the Iraqi prime minister, creating new logistical and political challenges to a formidable organisation that forged its credibility, legitimacy and power by defending Lebanon from Israeli aggression, not by fighting in other Arab countries.

All these three Arab parties depend heavily on Iran for logistical, financial and political support, and all four of them face new vulnerabilities now that did not exist a year ago — or even three months ago when considering the challenge to them all by the ISIL.

The sudden renewal in the past week of American military assistance to the Iraqi government and the anti-Assad Syrian rebels will do what foreign military interventions in Arab west Asia have done for millennia — they will exacerbate the political equation and intensify military action all around, leaving the region more scarred and brittle than it was before the fighting started, without resolving the underlying problems of incompetent and criminal governance that generated conflict in the first place.

Neither the US nor Iran and their allies can control foreign lands for very long by relying primarily on military power.

And despite their determination and large armies, neither of them can prevent the rise of militant fanatics like ISIL when prevailing governance and living conditions follow the pattern we have seen in recent decades across much of the Arab world.

Every power has learned this lesson over and over again, including Syria in Lebanon and the US and Iran in Iraq.

The US, Iran, Syria, Hizbollah, and the Iraqi and other Arab governments will now effectively work together militarily to contain and push back ISIL troops while simultaneously working politically to weaken each other.

The weakness in the policies of both regional ideological camps is their misguided conviction that local actors in places like Tripoli, Lebanon or Deir ez-Zor, Syria, or Fallujah, Iraq, define themselves and respond politically to the same impulses that shape identities and interests in places like Qom and Kansas City.

When Hizbollah and Iran move quickly to support their friends in Syria, and the US and its allies move slowly, the result is what we have seen in Syria: Assad regime’s consolidation, but in ever-smaller territorial parts of the country, along with the birth of new and more dangerous fighting groups such as ISIL.

Syria is not a victory that Iran and Hizbollah can brag about very loudly.

The critical criterion for success lays in the second issue I mentioned above, which is, from the US’ perspective, how to define a “moderate” opposition group to support. This is a truly childish approach to waging ideological and military battle abroad, and guarantees failure, as we have seen in the recent trends in Syria-Iraq during the last three years.

The critical criterion for supporting a foreign group of fighters or politicians is local legitimacy, not “moderation” defined in distant lands. But legitimacy is an issue that the US, Iran, Arab powers and all foreign armies ignore as they march into battles in foreign lands.

This is why they leave behind such ravages and chaos when they march home a few years later, staggered and bewildered at the fury they encountered and the sandstorms and cultural forces that momentarily blinded them.

Moving decisively to bolster legitimate local forces breeds success; moving gingerly to identify people who will friend you on Facebook is really stupid.