No doubt Syria will try to bamboozle the League. But rumors are swirling that Gulf states are financing Syrian military deserters setting up a safe haven inside Turkey. For better or worse, Saudi Arabia, the small Gulf state of Qatar and Turkey have decided to champion fellow Sunni Muslims in Syria against Assad's Alawite (Shiite) regime.
I tell this story not because I know how far the Arab League, the Turks, and the Gulfis will go against Assad, but because their tough stand shows how dramatically the Middle East has changed.
Gone are the days when major Mideast developments were orchestrated by Western powers. The Arab Spring was a grassroots upheaval that the West neither planned nor predicted. The Arab autumn has taken on a life of its own in which the United States and the European Union are hardly felt.
The United States is pulling its troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011, and mostly out of Afghanistan by 2014. That vast sucking sound you hear is the evaporation of American influence in the region, hastened by the failure of the Bush and Obama administrations to secure a Palestinian state.
Preoccupied with its own financial problems, the European Union can't fill the vacuum. And China, the world's rising power, doesn't want to. All three superpowers are preoccupied with their own economic problems. This was glaringly evident at a conference I attended last week in Venice aimed at exploring whether China, Europe, and the United States could increase cooperation in economic and security matters.
The conference, sponsored by the Aspen Strategy Group and the Aspen Institute Italia, brought together prominent Americans and Europeans with members of the Central School of the Communist Party, a leadership training center headed by Xi Jinping, China's presidential heir apparent.
