O pinion
‘Sand and Death,’ or Opportunity Knocks? Dorsey
BY BEN COHEN
“SAND AND DEATH.” With
a phrase that sounded strangely
poetic, U.S. President Donald
Trump prophesied what lies
ahead for the armed forces of the
United States should this country
maintain a military presence in
Syria indefinitely. Given Trump’s
past utterances on the same sub-
ject, these off-the-cuff remarks in
the White House Cabinet Room
on Jan. 2 were hardly shocking,
but what came right after was,
shall we say, unexpected.

Iran’s experience of sending
its troops into Syria had left the
Tehran regime with a similarly
bleak perception of its neigh-
bor, Trump suggested.

“Iran is no longer the same
country. Iran is pulling peo-
ple out of Syria,” the president
said. “They can do what they
want there, frankly, but they’re
pulling people out, they’re
pulling people out of Yemen.

Iran wants to survive now.”
That last point should not be
dismissed as out of hand, even
if it was as part of a stream of
consciousness on foreign pol-
icy that also contained prepos-
terous claims (e.g., that the
Soviet Union, which invaded
Afghanistan in 1979 to prop
up the Communist regime in
Kabul, did so “because terror-
ists were going into Russia.”)
Trump is correct — as he
made sure to remind us —
that Iran’s economy has suf-
fered severely since he became
president. The re-imposition
of tough sanctions has come
at the same time that Tehran
has invested massively in its
regional proxies stretching
from Yemen to Lebanon, and
cutting through Iraq and Syria.

Iran’s regime has also been
experiencing the only push-
back it really understands in
the form of frequent Israeli air-
strikes on its military convoys
and facilities in Syria.

In terms of its relationship
with their subjects, Iran’s rulers
are also experiencing a degree
18 JANUARY 17, 2019
of turmoil. When Trump said
there were “riots every week in
every country,” he likely meant
the student-led anti-regime
demonstrations that ebbed
and peaked in 2018, and which
picked up again following a
horrible bus crash in which 10
students from Azad University
were killed and 27 injured.

And even within the regime,
there are some clerics who are
talking up the notion that Iran
is in the midst of a “crisis.”
Arguably, the most interest-
ing of these figures is Hassan
Khomeini — grandson of the
Islamic Republic’s founder,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
— who spoke on Dec. 29 of
the “continuous fragmentation
of society” under the Islamist
regime, “spreading hatred,
grudges, hypocrisy, double
standards and dishonesty.”
Hassan Khomeini’s anxiety
is based on his fealty to the
governing concept of velayat-
e-faqih (“guardianship of the
jurists”) introduced by his
grandfather. At the same time,
given that his family has been
marginalized under the pres-
ent ruling clique, Khomeini
Jr. is also engaging in polit-
ical maneuvering, so it may
suit him to present the Islamic
Republic as facing collapse. But
as far as the Iranian regime
itself is concerned, where oth-
ers see “sand and death” and
imminent collapse, they also
see opportunity knocking.

In a speech in Tehran on
Jan. 3, Iran’s foreign minis-
ter, Mohammad Javad Zarif,
painted a rosy picture of a mul-
tipolar world in which “it is a
big mistake to think that there
are superpowers.”
As a real-world exam-
ple, Zarif boasted of Iran’s
enhanced status in Syria,
alongside Russia and Turkey.

But he also cast a broader eye
over the opportunities pre-
sented by a world composed
of multiple powers, advocating
the efficacy of propaganda as a
means of inspiring “resistance”
among one’s rivals.

“The factor that brings
about victory is creating public
hatred of the invaders,” noted
Zarif in a nod to the trusted
method of propaganda mer-
chants since Josef Goebbels.

That is a clear message that
even if we assume Iran is pres-
ently retreating, it’s not going
to do so quietly. And once the
United States is out of the way,
it is quite conceivable that the
surge of power that Tehran has
enjoyed over the past decade
will be reinvigorated.

That’s the inherent prob-
lem with dividing the world (as
both Trump and Zarif do) into
zones of influence based on geo-
graphic proximity. As is depress-
ingly usual in the Middle East,
the Kurds will again be the first
victims of this new shift in the
power balance; in order to ward
off a threatened genocide at the
hands of Turkey, Syrian Kurds
may have to turn to Russia, to
the Assad regime in Damascus,
and ultimately, to the Iranians for
military and political assistance.

When you realize that assis-
tance would come from a power
that, even now, is repressing its
own Kurdish minority of more
than 6 six million people, you
get some sense of the political
price America’s Kurdish allies
will have to pay for yet another
abandonment. It’s often said that Jews
are a civilizational equivalent
of the proverbial canary in a
coal mine, and that is true of
the Kurds as well. In a region
that has seen the periodic mass
slaughter of thousands of Kurds
during the last 30 years — from
Saddam Hussein to ISIS — their
fate is intimately tied to that of
the region as whole. The trem-
ors of Trump’s decisions now, if
they are actually implemented,
will be felt long after he has
departed the White House. l
Ben Cohen writes a column on
Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern
politics for JNS.org, where this first
appeared. JEWISH EXPONENT
Continued from Page 18
relations is to refrain from com-
menting on anything to do with
another country’s domestic
issues — even though some 200
small Pakistani businessmen
have been campaigning for the
release of their Uyghur spouses
from Chinese camps, or for the
lifting of travel bans on their
children, or for permission to
visit them.

Turkey, too, despite its
ethnic and cultural links to
China’s Turkic Muslims and
past support for Uyghur aspi-
rations, has adopted a similar
attitude as Chinese investment
and financial aid expands.

With the exception of a few
protests in Bangladesh and
India, and some critical state-
ments by Malaysian leaders,
Muslims across the globe have
largely refrained from pressur-
ing their governments to speak
out about developments in
Xinjiang. Nabeel Shariff, founder of
U.K.-based halal holiday com-
pany Serendipity Tailormade,
struggled with the ethical
aspects of promoting Muslim
tourism to China, but con-
cluded that “in a way, it makes
sure the Uyghur community
are not forgotten.”
Shariff’s justification not-
withstanding, there is little evi-
dence that the plight of China’s
Turkic Muslims remains in the
Muslim public eye.

For one thing, the crack-
down in Xinjiang is expanding
to the Hui, China’s non-Tur-
kic Muslims. The autonomous
region of Ningxia Hui recently
signed a cooperation agree-
ment on anti-terrorism with
Xinjiang in a bid to learn from
the crackdown on the Turkic
Muslims, or, in the words of the
Global Times, a Communist
Party organ, “to learn from
Xinjiang’s experiences in pro-
moting social stability.”
Mounting Western criti-
cism of the crackdown, which
is toughest on Muslims but also
targets other religious groups,
including evangelists, puts
Muslim nations on the spot. The
criticism may lead to Western
companies boycotting products
made in Xinjiang by re-education
camp inmates.

A recent Associated Press
investigation tracked the ship-
ment of sportswear from a
factory linked to the camps
to Badger Sportswear in the
United States. “We will volun-
tarily halt sourcing and will
move production elsewhere
while we investigate the mat-
ters raised,” Badger CEO John
Anton said.

New Jersey Republican Rep.

Chris Smith called on the Trump
administration to ban imports
from Chinese companies associ-
ated with detention camps.

A potential black swan is
anti-Chinese sentiment in
a number of Muslim coun-
tries, some of which have eth-
nic links to China’s Turkic
Muslims. This could be a result
of perceptions that Chinese
commercial terms for project
finance and loans associated
with the People’s Republic’s
infrastructure-driven Belt and
Road Initiative are debt traps.

In an illustration of the risk,
Kunaysh Sultanov, a member
of the Kazakh parliament,
took issue with the govern-
ment’s attempt to balance its
relations with China with its
need to stand up for the rights
of Kazakhs.

“There should be talks tak-
ing place with the Chinese del-
egates. Every delegation that
goes there should be bringing
this topic up,” Sultanov said
after an escaped Chinese camp
worker of Kazakh descent tes-
tified in court about what she
had witnessed. l
James M. Dorsey, a non-resident
senior associate at the BESA
Center, is a senior fellow at the S.

Rajaratnam School of International
Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang
Technological University and
co-director of the University
of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan
Culture. This article was provided
by JNS.org.

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