An isolated Putin holds the fort

A fuming Putin scuttled Obama's attempts to throw out the Syrian leader and battled with Obama’s European allies.

Last week, the G-8 summit was very much in the news; and one got the impression, after watching the BBC and CNN, that this was the most important event to have taken place since Prince William had spotted Kate Middleton in the art history department in St Andrews University in 2001. Now, I have always regarded the G-8 as an arcane organisation and an anachronism from the time it was formed. It’s rather like a golf club with restricted membership; where the rules have been drafted by a clutch of individuals, who were determined to keep out the Chinese, Indians and Brazilians. The fact that China has the world’s second largest economy is irrelevant. China, like India, is still being regarded as a “developing” country, even though both are superpowers. Five of the G-8 members are former colonial powers — which should be enough to condemn them outright. The sixth is a country that doesn’t give visas to Pakistanis, the seventh acts as if Zeus, the king of the gods, appointed it as the world’s policeman and the eighth tries to ensure that the policeman performs his duties within the confines of international law.



The meetings of the G-8 members are a sheer waste of time and taxpayers’ money; and just a pretext to keep alive the spirit of bonhomie that exists among the rich and powerful. No decision ever taken by the Group has had any really positive benefits for the dozens of underdeveloped countries. In fact, I was quite astonished one year when the resolution that was collectively passed, was that something simply must be done on curbing the emissions of harmful gases into the atmosphere. My 12-year-old grandson has been telling me the same thing for the last two years, without being fed shark fin soup, medium rare steaks and foie de gras washed down by Chateau neuf du pape.

But this time round, the two-day G-8 summit hosted by David Cameron in Northern Ireland, was not just different, but quite significant. It had basically a one-point agenda — to get rid of Israel’s only Arab enemy — Syria, now that the tide of civil war had turned in favour of the Syrian Army. It was also seething with atmosphere and portent. President Barack Obama, flushed with partisan polemic, was his usual charming self, quipping about his Irish ancestry, making friends with the people of Belfast and trying to win backing from his European allies for the downfall of Bashar al-Assad. But this time, Obama hit a hidden reef. A fuming Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation scuttled the American’s attempts to throw out the Syrian leader and battled with Obama’s European allies. He also defended Russia’s right to provide arms under legal contracts to a legal, legitimate government.

What Putin had achieved was to obtain a temporary reprieve for the Syrian leader. The joint communique issued at the end spoke of peace talks to resolve the civil war and never even mentioned the name of Bashar al-Assad. Putin had also planted a rather sinister thought into the minds of the European leaders. Arm the rebels and these mercenaries will end up using the same arms against the Europeans. Remember what happened to the Mujahideen when the Americans and the Pakistanis abandoned them after doing their dirty work? This time, Obama didn’t speak of weapons of mass destruction, the kind of mischievous misinformation that resulted in the annihilation of 500,000 people in Iraq — but chemical weapons, which the Russians again say is a lot of hogwash. The war in Syria will continue. The only beneficiaries will be the armament manufacturers.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 23^rd, 2013.

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