On Saturday, Syrian President Bashar Assad was quoted as saying he would press on with a crackdown against anti-government unrest in his country: “I assure you that Syria will not bow down and that it will continue to resist the pressure being imposed on it,” Assad told Britain’s Sunday Times.
The Arab League, which set a deadline of this coming weekend for Syria to comply with a peace initiative requiring a military pullout from cities, has gone so far as to threaten sanctions if Assad fails to halt the violence.
Nevertheless, activists from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights say that forces loyal to Assad continue killing civilians in droves. The United Nations now estimates that more than 3,500 people have been killed during the eight-month crackdown on protests.
As the death toll rises, increasingly strong voices within the Syrian opposition are calling for a Libya-style intervention. Assad himself went so far as to say that the Arab League’s intervention could provide a pretext for Western military action. Such a step, he darkly warned, would create an “earthquake” across the Middle East.
Yet the West seems content to pursue the sanctions route, while propping up Syria’s best-organized, largely Islamist opposition group, the Syrian National Council. With both Turkey and the US seemingly leading efforts to usher in a Sunni Islamist government, it will likely be left to other arties to defend against Syria’s Islamization should Assad eventually be deposed.
SYRIA: NO LONGER REVOLUTION, IT’S A CIVIL WAR
Barry Rubin
Jerusalem Post, November 21, 2011
The only honest answer to the question of what will happen in Syria is that nobody knows. The battle has gone on for eight months, killed more than 3,500 people, and could go on for many more months. There’s no telling who will be ruling Syria when the dust settles. A regime victory is quite possible—perhaps most likely—and its overthrow would not necessarily bring about an Islamist regime.
But what do we know about Syria? Here’s a guide.…
[1]. Turkey isn’t the good guy here
The Islamist regime in Ankara isn’t opposing the Syrian regime out of its love for democracy. Erdogan’s government wants to have a fellow Sunni Islamist dictatorship in Damascus, preferably under its influence. In this situation, Turkey is just as bad as Iran.
[2]. Will the two sides make a deal?
No, this is a war to the death. The regime cannot make a deal and yield power because the elite would lose everything. Moreover, the government elite would face death, exile, or long-term imprisonment if it loses. Similarly, the dominant Alawite community and large portions of the Christian one (together roughly 25 percent of the population) risk massacre if the government falls.…
[3]. Will economic collapse bring down the regime?
No.… Nobody is going to quit because they get hungry. This is a kill-or-be-killed situation.
[4]. Who is the opposition leadership?
…The best-known group is the Syrian National Council (SNC). It has announced its 19-member leadership group which includes 15 Sunni Muslims, two Christians and two Kurds. Note that there are no Alawites.… The SNC has an advantage because it was assembled by the United States using the Islamist regime in Turkey.
Given its Western backing, the SNC is surprisingly dominated by Islamists. Ten of the 19 are identifiable as such (both Muslim Brothers and independent—Salafist?—Islamists) and a couple of those who are nominally Leftists are apparently Islamist puppets.
The fact that US policy is backing an Islamist-dominated group indicates the profound problems with Obama administration policy. It should be stressed, though, that the SNC’s popular support is totally untested. Many oppositionists—especially Kurds—are disgusted by the group’s Islamist coloration and refuse to participate.
The National Coordination Committee (NCC) is a Leftist-dominated alternative. The Antalya Group is liberal. There is also a Salafist council organized by Adnan Arour, a popular religious figure; a Kurdish National Council and a Secular Democratic Coalition (both angry at the SNC’s Islamism).
It is hard to overestimate how disastrous the Obama administration’s policy has been.
Not only has it promoted an Islamist-dominated leadership (which might be pushed into power by monopolizing Western aid) but this mistake has fractured the opposition, ensuring there would be several anti-SNC groups. This strategy has also angered the Kurds and Turkmen minorities who view the SNC as antagonistic to their hopes for some autonomy. As a result, these two groups have reduced their revolutionary activities.…
Again, it should be stressed that in terms of actually directing the rebellion, there is no leadership.
[5]. So who do we want to win?
Despite the threat of a Sunni Islamist regime, I hope that Assad will be overthrown.
Why? If the regime survives we know it will continue to be a ferociously repressive dictatorship, allied with Iran and dedicated to the destruction of US and Western interests, the imperialist domination of Lebanon, wiping Israel off the map and subverting Jordan.
With a revolution, there is a chance—especially if US policy doesn’t mess it up—for a real democracy that is higher than in Egypt. In Syria only 60% of the population is Sunni Muslim Islamist. The minorities—Alawite, Christian, Druse and Kurdish—don’t want an Arab Sunni Islamist regime. As for the Sunnis themselves, they are proportionately more urban, more middle class and more moderate than in Egypt. Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular have never been as strong in Syria as in Egypt. In Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, the Islamists face what is largely a political vacuum; in Syria they have real, determined opposition.
Today, the Syrian people have two major enemies blocking the way to a moderate, stable democracy. One is the regime itself; the other is the US-Turkish policy that is determined—naively for the former; deviously deceitful from the latter—to force a new repressive Islamist regime on the Syrians.
(Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) center
and Middle East editor at Pajamas Media.)
TO STOP THE SLAUGHTER
Amir Taheri
NY Post, November 21, 2011
Whichever way one looks at it, the revolution in Syria is a classic example of an event that should prompt the United Nations into action. Every day, large numbers of Syrians take to the streets to call for the departure of Bashar al-Assad, the despot who has ruled them for 12 years. Each time, the despot’s henchmen fire on unarmed civilians with the publicly stated intention to kill.
Over the last eight months, thousands have been killed and thousands more thrown into prison. Many more have been forced into exile.… The Syrian “situation” (as forked-tongued diplomats like to call this tragedy) is also threatening regional peace, providing yet another justification for UN intervention.
Claiming hot pursuit of army deserters, Assad’s forces have violated Lebanon’s territorial integrity several times. Also in Lebanon, the despot’s secret services have organized the kidnapping of Syrian dissidents with help from Hezbollah and its Iranian masters, often under the nose of the Lebanese police. Assad has also renewed terrorist attacks against selected targets in Turkey, often using remnants of the Kurdistan Workers Party, a Marxist guerrilla outfit. Syrian propaganda publicly threatens Turkey with a “bloodbath worse than Afghanistan.” And Iraqi government spokesman Muwaffaq al-Rubaie has warned against the “crisis” spilling into Iraq, more than hinting that Assad is trying to foment armed clashes in the Jazirah, an area straddling the Syria-Iraq border. Assad has also ordered a military buildup near the border with Jordan, threatening to plunge the Hauran upland, shared by the two countries, into chaos.
Yet another development gives the Syrian tragedy an international dimension.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is reportedly expanding its presence in Syria to supervise a dramatic increase in the shipment of weapons to Damascus from Tehran. The Guard’s “military assistance” project is headed by a rising star of the Iranian military, Gen. Reza Zahedi. As the official Syrian army is weakened by desertions and demoralization from Assad’s policy of rule by massacre, Zahedi’s elite force enhances its position as a bigger player in Syrian politics.
Against such a background, the Arab League’s desperate efforts to persuade Assad to stop the killing may seem derisory.… The trouble is that, as a grouping of weak countries bedeviled by their own contradictions, the league can’t do much on its own. Only intervention by the major powers, with the United Nations as an umbrella, could prevent a much bigger tragedy.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague took a first step in that direction the other day, when he announced the establishment of official contact with the pro-democracy opposition in Syria. The European Union is expected to follow the British lead. France has already announced a coming meeting between Foreign Minister Alain Juppe and the Syrian National Council, the umbrella group of the pro-democracy uprising.
Yet the Assad clan is still encouraged by the fact that the Obama administration appears undecided on a course of action. While the State Department seems sympathetic to the Syrian revolution, the White House is sending mixed signals.
A public admission by Washington that Assad has no future could make it easier for the United Nations to put the Syrian dossier back on the table and try to work for a peaceful transition. The debate on direct UN intervention to protect civilians against Assad’s death machine can’t be postponed. The configurations that persuaded Russia and China to veto a resolution on Syria last month no longer hold. Things are changing fast in Syria in favor of the uprising. If a week is a long time in politics, in a revolution a day can be longer still.
THE CASE FOR INTERVENING IN SYRIA
Matthew RJ Brodsky
National Interest, November 16, 2011
With the conclusion of NATO’s military operations in Libya, it is time for the White House to shift focus to the protests in Syria. Since Syrians took to the streets in March, the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has committed a growing list of atrocities in cracking down on peaceful protesters. The regime has maimed and murdered those it has detained and trained sniper fire on unarmed civilians. It seems Assad will stop at nothing to maintain power.
It took half a year and two thousand dead for President Obama to finally call for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to “step aside,” but those words were backed by no concrete plan to realize that goal. According to a United Nations report, the death toll in the Syrian spring has now topped three thousand five hundred, with an additional thirty thousand more detained, tortured or missing. The U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, recently was recalled due to threats against his personal security, and the Assad regime pulled its ambassador, Imad Moustapha, from Washington. Thus, events have rendered this a crucial moment in determining U.S. policy toward Damascus.
Nearly all of the hindrances to American involvement have dissipated over recent months. The original argument against protecting Syrians held that, unlike in Libya, the Syrian opposition was fractured and the majority opposed Western military intervention. But with the recent creation of the 140-member Syrian National Council (SNC) and its call for international protection from the government’s military crackdown, those arguments now hold little weight.…
Moreover, when it came to Libya, those in favor of military assistance pointed to Qaddafi’s loss of high-level officials. Ambassadors abroad resigned from their posts en masse, and, inside the country, many ministers and soldiers also defected. In Syria, the pace in which officers and soldiers are turning away from the regime is quickening, and it would hasten further if people believed Assad could fall. Until August, Turkey was hesitant to abandon the Assad regime and sent its foreign minister to Damascus to discuss concrete steps to bring the violence to an end. Today, Ankara has played a role in the creation of the Syrian National Council by protecting Syrian refugees and dissidents and allowing the council to form on Turkish soil, where it continues to meet. They are also hosting the Free Syrian Army, a militia composed of defectors from the Syrian armed forces.
In terms of humanitarian considerations, there are now more than three times the number of dead Syrians than Libyans murdered by Qaddafi when NATO decided to intervene in mid-March. But unlike Libya—a country that was a previous but not current thorn in America’s side—the Assad regime continues to undermine and attack U.S. interests with impunity. Syria is Iran’s only Arab ally, and it ships weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it serves as a permanent threat to Lebanon’s sovereignty and stability. Syria has also served as the primary gateway for foreign jihadists entering Iraq to kill coalition forces. And while it is assumed that Syria’s nuclear program was destroyed by a 2007 Israeli air strike, the IAEA has been stonewalled by the regime at every turn.
Perhaps most compelling is that as autumn turns to winter, the result of U.S. engagement in the so-called “Arab Spring” has so far empowered the Muslim Brotherhood in countries relatively friendly to Washington—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and beyond. Meanwhile, Washington has proved ineffective in getting Iran and Syria to respond to U.S. interests. Taking a pass on Syria now could give Tehran domination over the Shia crescent—from Iran to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon—which it has pursued since its 1979 revolution. The key to any possible gains in the Arab Spring lies in helping the Syrian spring succeed.
The goal of U.S. policy, therefore, should be an end to the violence, the fall of the Assad regime and the creation of conditions for a stable democratic system that protects the rights of the Christian, Kurdish and Alawite minorities. American strategy should aim to weaken those that support the regime within and outside of Syria while encouraging the opposition to demonstrate its goal of a nonsectarian and democratic country.…
(Matthew RJ Brodsky is the director of policy at the Jewish Policy Centerin Washington D.C,
and the editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.)
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF ASSAD
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, November 28, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 11
Bashar al-Assad is finished. The Arab League has condemned him, as have former allies Qatar and Turkey. One time Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal says Assad’s exit is inevitable. Perhaps most significantly, King Abdullah II of Jordan felt sufficiently confident of Assad’s fall to call for the president of Syria, the Hashemite Kingdom’s historical nemesis, to step down.
In the past, a more vigorous Syrian regime would have lashed out against its critics and rivals by unleashing its terrorist assets. But to date, Hezbollah has kept its head down, balancing its support of Damascus with the recognition that the regional Sunni majority has come to detest a regime that has so far slaughtered upward of 3,500 people, most of them Sunni. Hamas is doing its best to distance itself from Assad and is looking to relocate—maybe to Qatar, or even to Islamist-friendly Tunisia. It’s true that Assad hasn’t played all his cards yet: He’s still threatening to destabilize Turkey, but attacks on embassies in Damascus—including those of France, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Morocco, and others—rather than terrorist operations abroad suggest the regime is hemmed in.
The domestic front is no better for Assad. The Syrian economy is in free fall. Businessmen are betting against his survival by holding on to dollars and euros and devaluing the local currency. The last few weeks have seen more and more defections from the Syrian military and armed operations against security and military outposts. Assad has the Russians in his corner, for the time being, but soon he may have only Iran standing with him.
Meanwhile, as Assad is running out of time, the Obama administration’s Iran policy is running out of options.
The peace process that was supposed to galvanize a coalition of pro-American Arab states to take on the Islamic Republic is moribund. Moreover, some of those allied regimes no longer look the way they did when Obama came to office. Egypt, for instance, is too consumed with its domestic upheavals to align its foreign policy with the foreign powers whom the loudest voices in post-Mubarak politics perceive to be the real enemy—not Iran but Israel and the United States.
Obama’s engagement with Tehran also proved fruitless. The prospect of reaching an accommodation so clouded the president’s judgment that when the Green Movement took to the streets in June 2009, he missed a huge opportunity to back the regime’s internal opposition.…
Obama has a big move left on the board, but it will require the president to turn his worldview on its head. He came to office with the idea that Syria was central, and as it turns out it is—but not for the reasons he imagined three years ago.…
Before the Alawites came to power, Syria was ruled by a succession of Sunni governments that fell in coups and countercoups, some engineered by outside forces, others merely the natural result of domestic rivalry between various centers of Sunni power. That is to say, while Islamists are undoubtedly going to have a role in a post-Assad Syria, they are going to have a lot of competition. Among others, there are the military leaders, including those who’ve already defected from the army, as well as the Sunni merchant class, which itself is split into rival branches, most famously between Damascus and Aleppo. Then there are the tribal leaders, who tend to take a dim view of Islamists or those absolutely devoted to a religious faith that specifically challenged the authority of the tribes.
The administration cannot imagine a post-Assad Syria because its vision is obscured by a post-Saddam Iraq. The Obama White House wants to avoid the sectarian bloodshed that split Baghdad. More than anything else, it wants to steer clear of anything that smacks of George W. Bush. Accordingly, the administration has petitioned the opposition to stay peaceful and include minorities in the Sunni-majority movement. A White House wary of Bush-style nation building has taken on the role of opposition building.
It’s too late for that. The opposition already exists on the ground. Administration spokesmen have perversely tried to discourage the opposition from taking up arms. It will only play into the regime’s hands, said a White House spokesman. It will cost the peaceful opposition international support.
It appears that it doesn’t matter to the Syrian opposition that they can only win Washington’s affection by extending their necks willingly to the regime’s executioners. They’re already fighting. A recent report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies explains that the Free Syrian Army, made up of defectors from the Syrian military, estimates that there are already 17,000 men under arms, operating out of Turkey and, of all places, Lebanon, the Damascus regime’s terror lab. According to the report, the FSA’s leaders will call for more defections—as soon as the international community implements a no-fly zone.
That’s the one move the White House has right now. Time to make it.
