Demon unleashed in Syria cannot be ignored
There’s no happy ending to this. Assad will be toppled, but Syria will be left bitterly divided, adding to the Middle East’s instability, says Richard Spencer.
THERE is something rather idyllic about the border territories of Syria. In the west, a rolling landscape of apricot and orange orchards, divided by poplar-lined country roads, is overlooked by the hills and snowcapped mountains of the Bekaa in neighbouring Lebanon. To the east spreads the desert all the way to Iraq, and to the south, gently undulating farmland gives way to the Golan Heights where Syria, Jordan and Israel meet: from the top, a majestic vision unfolds, sweeping down towards Lake Galilee and the surrounding plain, beloved of the religious, of tourists and of its Israeli Arab occupants.
The border territories are also ideal for smugglers, which plied the farmers’ herding routes over the hills long before Syria’s rural Sunni majority took up arms against the Assads, their Alawite overlords, last year. They have continued to operate since, bringing in mortar bombs and AK-47s instead of drugs and other contraband, as well as taking out the wounded of the conflict, and will continue to do so whoever runs the country.
As Bashar al-Assad has found, this is difficult territory to defend and control.
It is time to start wondering how easy it will be for whoever, eventually, takes over from him.
If all were for the best in the best of all possible worlds – and there can be few who cannot find it in their hearts to hope that the disappearance of Assad will make for a better world – the following will now happen in Syria.
After the loss of three of his closest lieutenants, military figures whose ties to the Assad family go back to the days of his father, Hafez, Bashar al-Assad will now realise the game is up and begin negotiating his exit. A transitional government will be put in place by the United Nations Secur- ity Council containing members of the Syrian National Council, one or two of the internal Leftist opposition to placate the Russians, and some token relics of the regime to reassure Syria’s Alawite, Christian and other pro-Assad minorities that they are not about to be subject to vicious retribution.
The Russians and Iranians, humiliated in the face of world opinion, will acquiesce in the arrival of Western ‘‘expert advisers’’, perhaps behind a front of Arab League peacekeepers, to secure Syria’s chemical and other weapons stocks.
The Free Syrian Army will rejoice in a victory that will never match its dreams but which would have seemed beyond its expectations a year ago. It will form the nucleus of a new, pragmatic military that will form a good security relationship with Jordan and Turkey. Its Islamist elements will, as they have largely done in Libya, be content to press their political agenda within a Western-backed democratic process.
Perhaps this will happen; it would fit with the ambitions expressed in 90 per cent of the conversations I have had with Syrians inside and outside the country during the past year and a half. Yet it seems now as impossibly remote as the very idea of Assad’s fall would have done two years ago.
Whatever they say they want, many of those same Syrians fear a demon has been unleashed. It is not for nothing that even many of those who have fought for the regime’s overthrow say they would not have started it if they had known what was going to happen.
Assad will at some point in the next few months leave Damascus for good, even if he has not already done so. That much seems certain.
There is no place for him or his cohorts now in Syria’s Sunnimajority heartlands. But if he has taken up residence in his palace near his ancestral home near the city of Latakia, he may have a goal in mind other than a peaceful handover of power. This is Alawite country – a region homogeneous enough for its former French colonial masters to have given it its own state. The French alliance with the militarily tough but economically poor Alawites in a Sunni region seeking its own national identity after World War I is the prism through which the Syrian crisis must still, regrettably, be seen today.
A partition of Syria starting from this base might seem at first superficially attractive. The Alawites would feel secure; the Sunnis would get their country back; there might even be semi-autonomous space for the Kurds, who have been marginalised and to some extent have also marginalised themselves from this revolution, in their own interest. It would be the ultimate Balkanisation of a country whose vicious fighting has already reminded many of the Yugoslav wars of the 90s; and there, new states are now slowly rebuilding themselves. But Syria is not the same. Whatever the current state of the European Union financially, its superstructure has been a security blanket for nearly all the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, whether they have joined or only seek to do so. The superstructure of the Levant is a continued angling for sectarian advantage, where emotions and fears, even of a majority that would dearly love to forget all about differences of religion, are easily stirred.
Syria’s role model is not Czechoslovakia but Iraq, where Sunni and Shia can exercise power over each other but are unwilling to share it; or even Israel and the Palestinian territories, where the Jewish engagement with Arabs seems to be based around an as- sumption of permanent semi-conflict.
In short, the division of Syria would be a recipe for permanent instability, in which the West, Russia, Iran and a variety of Islamist sub-groups would be constantly manoeuvring to press their ends, and in which, as in the Occupied Territories, war and diplomacy are simply extensions of each other.
In the meantime, every nuance would be exported – arms into Lebanon, militancy into the evernervous Jordan. Israelis and Jews everywhere would live in fear of distraction terror; Iran and its nuclear programme would be an intractable problem.
But the division would at least be a negotiated solution. With neither negotiation nor an Alawite, Russian and Iranian acceptance of defeat, there will only be war. It might be a war with a notional Sunni-led, even democratically organised, multi-sect government of the sort envisaged by the spokesmen of the Syrian National Council, but how far would their writ run?
In Libya, where Gaddafi had few mourners, the consequences of civil war are already alarming. The al Qaeda takeover of northern Mali was achieved by Gaddafi arms, stolen from unsecured stockpiles as his regime fell.
Syria’s arms are more numerous, more modern, and bettermaintained; Lebanon, the West Bank, Israel and Iraq are nearer.
You do not even need the spectre of al Qaeda and Islamist terror to make that a frightening prospect. The best minds in the Foreign Office, the US State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA – and for all the criticism sometimes heaped on them, these minds are not stupid – are focused on these possibilities.
But there is no popular demand for intervention, as there was over Bosnia, Kosovo and even arguably Libya, no money, and no political capital for inexperienced national leaders whose opponents are poised with the knife to the back but no coherent proposals of their own. America, still the world’s policeman, is focused on its election and the economy, not on another Middle Eastern mess.
Sooner or later, the US and its European allies are going to have to decide what to do about Syria’s arms, and those who carry them. Now is not the time, but on any analysis the time is fast approaching, and it will accommodate noone’s electoral cycle.