Ignore siren calls for deal with Butcher of Damascus
United States President Barack Obama is making a terrible mistake if he falls for the blandishments of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, over Syria, says Roger Boyes.
If Assad’s misrule is allowed to flourish, then expect a jihad, a Sunni revolt on a scale that will make the current scraps in Iraq and Syria look distinctly featherweight.
THE General Assembly of the United Nations is speed-dating for statesmen. And those snatched 20-minute chats on the sidelines in New York are as bad for diplomacy as accelerated matchmaking is for true romance.
This week it has produced a dangerous dud: that Bashar al-Assad, the Butcher of Damascus, has become indispensable in the fight against Islamic State and in stemming the panicked exodus to Europe.
That’s Assad, the man who has presided since 2011 over the killing of 220,000 people in Syria, many of them slaughtered, some even gassed, by his own troops.
This is Assad, the Syrian president, who orders barrels stuffed with explosives to be pushed out of planes on to people queuing for bread.
This is the same leader who orders artillery bombardment of housing estates. And who now wisely avoids visiting two-thirds of the country he still nominally rules lest he be assassinated. Assad, our new friend in need?
It is of course Vladimir Putin – the star date at this year’s General Assembly – who is promoting Assad as a putative ally.
It was a mistake, said the Russian president, to refuse to co-operate with Assad’s forces, ‘‘who are valiantly fighting terrorism face to face’’. Valiantly? Face to face?
Putin and his Syrian chum have both been running their countries since 2000 and Assad’s military and intelligence machine is intimately linked with Moscow.
Now the Kremlin calculates his expensive puppet can expose the indecision at the heart of the West. Putin’s formula – fight Isis first and discuss ‘‘transition’’ in the Syrian Government later – is proving attractive at the UN. It’s the kind of bullet-point simplification Putin loves.
If it wins support, if Assad’s misrule is allowed to flourish, then expect a jihad, a Sunni revolt on a scale that will make the current scraps in Iraq and Syria look distinctly featherweight.
The West cannot decide which evil needs tackling first – Isis or Assad. It was Assad who deliberately released jihadists en masse from his prisons in 2011. He then denounced the moderate opposition as terrorists and declared war on them, ensuring that the Arab Spring would not topple his throne.
His regime traded with Isis. His army struck deals with the jihadists: so long as Isis was eliminating units from the moderate opposition, they would be left in peace. Yet still Europeans buy the Putin pitch of Isis First. In fact, if Putin has his way, Isis will last forever.
As long as Assad’s future is contingent on a supposed global threat from Isis, and as long as they do not attack the Assad heartland, the jihadists will be allowed to blare out their fundamentalist propaganda and decapitate at will.
In New York, Putin called for a broad coalition against Islamic State that includes Russia, Iran and Syria. But his own contribution to the struggle so far has been to supply the Assad regime with missiles that can take out rebel positions in Aleppo.
That is the true meaning of the Russian initiative: Putin, under the cover of grappling with Isis, is killing anyone who could conceivably sit down with Assad in future power-sharing talks.
SHOULD we be helping him do that? I think not. If Putin fails to put himself at the centre of that broad alliance, then he has a back-up plan that diplomats call 4+1. The four being Russia, Syria, Iran and Iraq, the Plus One being the Lebanon-based Hizbollah militia.
There could then be two parallel, competing wars against Islamic State. The US-led coalition would focus on air warfare and a few special forces operations – but fail to land a knock-out blow.
The Russian-led one, however, would achieve limited but significant goals. It would prevent attacks on Shia communities loyal to Assad and install ground-to-air missiles that would block US bombing raids on his palace. The Russian naval base at Tartus would be reinforced too. And Hizbollah would get the strategic strength in depth it thinks it needs for a future war with Israel.
This is not an axis that will be blessed in heaven. At best, it will protect the Alawite community from revenge attacks when the anger against Assad becomes unstoppable.
Neither of these makeshift military alliances will make much of a dent on Isis. And the problem of Assad will not have been addressed. Talk to Syrian refugees turning up in Europe and you will find few who say they are fleeing Isis. Rather it is Assad who has driven them away from their homeland.
Populist parties in Europe claim that the fit young men who seem to dominate the refugee flow could turn out to be radical Islamists.
Most, though, are Sunnis trying to escape conscription in Assad’s murderous army. Their mothers have sent them not to milk Europe’s welfare system but to save their souls.