Syria – Page 2 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Syria: The genocide risk, and no-fly zones

There are so many disturbing aspects to Pres. Obama’s decision to start providing weapons to the Syrian opposition(s) that it is hard to know where to start in commenting thereon. Perhaps, with the completely unclear, unsubstantiated nature of the allegations Obama’s spokesperson made regarding the Asad regime’s use of chemical weapons? Obama’s administration hasn’t even bothered, as Pres G.W. Bush did back in February 2003, to make any public presentation of the ‘evidence’ on which it bases its allegations. Do the president and his team take us all for mindless morons who will follow wherever he leads, or do they think we somehow don’t deserve to see the ‘evidence’ that they claim to have? … Or, do they know that the ‘evidence’ they have is all so flimsy and inconclusive that, once exposed to the light of day, it would do nothing to validate the president’s decision to take a huge step up the escalation ladder regarding Syria?

… Alternatively, should I make the point– that Marc Lynch, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Juan Cole, and others have already made– that we have heard no public exposition of any kind at all from the President or any of his top-level advisers of what the sought-for strategic end-point is for this latest extremely troubling and escalatory step? How, Mr. Obama, can you assure Americans or anyone else that this latest American escalation will not end up leading us all into a quagmire in Syria of exactly the same kind that, seven years ago, you rightly saw as having been the case with the U.S. military action against Iraq?

… Well, other people have made all the above arguments– and many other good ones, too. I want to concentrate here on two other, little-discussed aspects of the Syrian situation: First, the real and mounting risk of genocide in Syria– one that is being advocated, and mobilized around, by numerous hardline factions within in the same ‘opposition’ constellation that Obama now supports. And second, the disutility/absurdity of the whole notion of a ‘safe haven/ no fly zone’ that is now reportedly being discussed and planned for.

Let’s start with the risk of genocide.

On the risk of genocide in Syria.

Both ‘sides’ in Syria have been guilty of committing great violence against the other side and against far too many of the ordinary citizens caught up in the cross-fire. But only one side contains people who are openly engaged in sectarian/religious hate-speech and on occasion actual genocidal actions against members of other targeted groups. These are the takfiris: the hard-line Sunni fundamentalists from Al-Qaeda, Jabhat Al-Nusra, and myriad other loosely allied groups in the opposition who openly call for the killing of Shiites simply because they are Shiites, as well as of Christians, Alawites, and other non-Sunnis.. and even of anyone in their own (Sunni) community who disagrees with their own hardline views of the world.

Takfir, for those readers not familiar with the notion, is the act of denouncing someone else as a non-believer or an apostate. And that denunciation in and of itself, in the takfiri worldview, not only allows but also frequently mandates that the person(s) thus denounced be killed. The term takfiri could be translated as “denouncer”, but that would be too soft a term. The takfiris now in action in broad swathes of Syria are genocidaires-in-waiting, like the genocidaires of Rwanda in the months leading up to April 1994. And like those genocidaires, these takfiris are disseminating their hate propaganda as widely and publicly as they can, trying to ramp up the level of fear and hatred in every way, including of course on the Internet.

Takfirism is a real and present danger wherever the black banners of these hate-filled extremists can be seen. It is what lies behind acts such as the blowing up of a Shiite mosque (and, reportedly, numerous other anti-Shiite actions) in the eastern Syrian village of Hatla last week. Takfirism was behind the shooting of the (Sunni) boy in Aleppo last week, on the mere grounds that he had “taken the name of the Prophet in vain.” Takfirism was behind the desecration of the Mar Elias church in Qusayr by some rebel bands, before the town was retaken by government forces ten days ago. Other examples abound.

I have heard many people here in the United States saying things, over the past few weeks, like “The Shiites and the Sunnis have been fighting each other for ever… Don’t blame America for everything that happens between them.” These kinds of arguments are either woefully ill-informed, or just plain dishonest. Yes, there have been many periods of tension between Shiites and Sunnis in the past (as well as tensions between Muslims and Christians in the Arab world), and these tensions seem to be a steep upswing right now. BUT the following facts also need to be borne in mind:

On many occasions in recent years, our government has indeed taken actions that exacerbated tensions between Sunnis and Shiites in the region. Much of the policy pursued by the U.S. occupation administration in Iraq had the effect (intended or not) of essentializing and deepening the differences between the two groups, and turning politics inside Iraq and far beyond it sharply toward sectarianism and away from ‘national’ or more broadly humanistic forms of identification. Much of the policy pursued by the U.S. regarding Iran has been based even more intentionally on whipping up anti-Shiite fears and hatreds among the Sunni-dominated governments of the Arab side of the Gulf. The United States is not an innocent actor in these matters.
Historically, Sunni-Shiite relations have frequently gone through periods when they are not very acute, or even considered by many Muslims to be very important. The number of Shiite-Sunni marriages in countries that contain both populations has often been fairly high. And even today, inside Syria, a large portion of the country’s Sunni citizens continue to side with the government and fight in the national army. If this was not the case, given the fact that Sunnis make up around 75% of the national population, there is no chance that the regime could have survived this long.
The argument that ‘Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for ever and we can’t do anything about it’ is one that, in the Syrian context, seems to put equal responsibility for sectarian hate-mobilization on both the government and the opposition side. But this is not the case. On the opposition side, there is a clear, visible, and significant portion of the opposition fighting forces that are mobilized and seek to mobilize others overwhelmingly on the basis of inter-sect hatred. On the government side there is no such mobilization (and also, no evidence of hate-based acts like desecrations or genocidal mass killings.)

My understanding of Obama’s Syria policy for the past two years is that the president has been blown about by competing winds– probably starting off with a baseline reluctance to get drawn into a repeat of the Iraq quagmire, but never quite figuring how to do so. This, against stubborn background aspects of Washington policymaking such as:

Nearly thirty years of solid anti-Asad agitation (pere et fils), and the resulting tough anti-Syrian sanctions from Washington.
The campaign that Hillary Clinton successfully waged, back in the summer 2011, to get Obama to declare that ‘Asad has to go’, and to make that– rather than the achievement of a negotiated settlement among Syrians— the top priority of U.S. policy towards Syria.

So now, it is Hillary’s husband who, using the crudest kinds of appeals to a version of Obama’s ‘manhood’, has pushed Obama over the precipice of promising direct U.S. military support for the Syria rebels. This is a position from which he will now find it hard to back down, even if he wants to. Make no mistake, this escalation of the climate of confrontation and tension in and regarding Syria has set in train consequences that are extremely hard to predict… but none of them will be good. Violence, as we all know (or surely, should know by now?), only begets more violence. And Obama’s decision to pour U.S. weapons into Syria is definitely an act of escalation and violence. Escalation, that is, over and above the previous policy of merely colluding with and quietly aiding Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Jordan as those powers worked together to funnel weapons and foreign fighters into Syria.

By not standing up firmly against escalation, and by not committing himself fully and robustly to pursuit of a negotiated settlement, Obama has made himself almost a prisoner of the forces urging more violence. There are people in the Syrian opposition who have never wanted violence. There are others who got tempted by it a while back, but who now express a strong desire to see the conflict and its resulting destruction brought to an end. The voices and political strength of all these Syrians would have been bolstered if Obama had come out foursquare in favor of a negotiated settlement. As it is, his most recent decision has left them sidelined, and has given considerable new momentum to the men of violence– all of them, on both of the ‘sides’ in Syria.

On the anti-government side, I know that the stated policy of the CIA and its buddies in the Special Ops command has been to try to find non-extremist fighting forces in the Syrian opposition and try to strengthen them (in good part by promising them better capabilities, now including arms), thereby– or so the argument goes– reducing the power of the real takfiris. This is a fool’s game. Even after many months of the CIA and its buddies working in Turkey and Jordan to try to figure out the ever-shifting who’s who in the Syrian opposition, and to unify the allegedly non-extreme portions of the ‘Free Syrian Army’, it is clear that that effort has failed. The takfiris are stronger than ever. No-one in Washington (or in Incirlik or Amman) can be sure that arms funneled in to the Syrian opposition over the next few months won’t end up in takfiri hands.

Moreover, by succumbing to the first round of the FSA people’s blackmail (“You have to give us weapons, otherwise the takfiris will stay stronger than us!”), the stage has only been set for the next round of FSA blackmail, and the ones coming after that, too. No amount or types of weapons will ever be sufficient for these people’s demands. (And they have already been shown to have had their own supply, in some places, of CW agents like sarin. So what else can they possibly want?)

Indeed, what they most likely want is for the United States and NATO to enter the fighting directly and win their war for them, which is what the oppositionists in Libya back in 2011 achieved so brilliantly, and with such disastrous effects both for the people of Libya and for the safety and security of a broad swathe of Africa.

… Which is why we need to come, very soon, to a serious consideration of this whole business of a ‘no-fly zone’. But before I get to that, just a couple more points about the risk of genocide.

Firstly, we now know that there is a very present risk of genocide inside Syria, as has already been foreshadowed by the wide and systematic dissemination of hate-propaganda, and by the commission of numerous actual acts of hate-based violence that have stemmed from that propaganda (and that have, in turn, been actively glorified by many of those same propaganda organs.)

Secondly, we know that whenever widespread genocides have occurred in recent history, this has always happened in the midst of war and armed conflict. War and armed conflict provide the circumstances of massive social upheaval in which killing your neighbors just because of who they are, rather than because of anything they have done, can come to seem ‘normal’, or even admirable. In normal, peaceful countries, there may be individual hatemongers, or even broad networks of them. But the hatemongers cannot get a whole population caught up with their propaganda except in circumstances of continuing and destructive conflict.

Thus, if we want to prevent the eruption of a full-blown genocide in Syria, the best way to achieve this is by working 24 hours a day to de-escalate tensions, to conclude local ceasefires wherever and whenever possible, and to work with all parties for a negotiated, longterm peace.

On ‘no-fly zones’:

Of Washington’s three experiences with the imposition of a no-fly zone, the two that occurred in the Middle East are the ones with which I’m most familiar. That is, the pair of NFZ’s that the George H.W. Bush administration imposed on Iraq in the immediate aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, in early 1991, and the one that some NATO powers imposed on Libya in March 2011.

The Iraqi NFZ’s were established with a clear and somewhat persuasive purpose: To deny the Saddam regime the ability to use airpower against the two opposition movements that had arisen in the north and south of the country in the very last days of Desert Storm– in response, it needs to be noted, to the explicit call that Pres. Bush broadcast, to “the people and army of Iraq” that they should rise up and overthrow their president. Briefly, what happened was that in the north and south of the country, large-scale insurrections did almost immediately result. As soon as it was able, the Saddam regime moved in to crush them, which it did without mercy. But the armed forces of the same U.S. president who had called for the insurrection, which were poised on the southern borders of Iraq, never lifted a finger to help the besieged insurrectionists. They stayed south of the border because of decisions made in Washington (and also, at the advice of their hosts in Saudi Arabia.) The best that Washington felt it could do was try to deny to the Iraqi military the right to use airpower in their bloody putting-down of the insurrections. Washington claimed that Security Council resolution 688, which expressed grave concern about Saddam’s anti-insurrection moves, gave it a mandate to impose the no-fly zones. But anyway, back in 1991 the Soviet Union was in the throes of falling apart, and China was still much weaker than it is today; so no effective challenge was mounted to the US’s imposition of the NFZ’s.

The one in Northern Iraq was more far-reaching than the one in the south. In the south, the Iraqi air force was still allowed to use helicopters. In the north, both choppers and fixed-wing aircraft were prohibited. In both zones, maintaining the NFZ involved the US (and its ever-willing junior partner the UK) using a significant amount of offensive force against Iraqi air-defense installations. The wielding of the NFZ weapon against the Saddam regime went hand-in-hand, throughout the 1990s and right until 2003, with the imposition of ever-tougher economic sanctions against the country. The sanctions were tied to the allegations about Iraq’s development and possession of various forms of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; and they had a devastating effect on nearly all Iraqis– except for those within the northern NFZ, who were exempted from many portions of the sanctions and who were able to (re)build some fairly robust social institutions throughout the Kurdish-populated parts of the north.

In a sense, in Iraq, the imposition of NFZ’s in April 1991 was a fallback position from the other, more aggressive policy that some people urged, of sending the U.S. military marching from Saudi Arabia all the way to Baghdad and toppling the regime there and then. The NFZ applied in Northern Iraq probably did save lives. It is hard to say, of course, how many additional lives might have been saved if Pres. Bush had NOT issued that completely reckless earlier call on the people and army of Iraq to rise against their rulers.

The NFZ regime in Iraq did nothing to provide any longterm resolution of the country’s many remaining problems of grossly abusive governance. But along with the sanctions regime, the Iraqi NFZ’s froze in place a political situation of political dictatorship for another 12 years; and meanwhile, the sanctions killed an estimated 500,000 or more Iraq’s youngest and most vulnerable citizens. Not at all a humane situation.

The NFZ that a portion of NATO applied against Libya in March 2011 also had an ostensible ‘humanitarian’ goal: Namely, the ‘saving’ of the population of Benghazi which, Washington claimed, was in imminent danger of being massacred. As I wrote on this blog at the time, there were alternative mechanisms being actively explored at the time, primarily by the African Union, to negotiate a de-escalation of the tensions around Benghazi; and an African Union delegation was just on its way to Benghazi to launch this negotiation just as NATO announced its decision; and it turned back.

(I wish that now, just two years later and in light of all the terrible violence and social/political breakdown into which Libya has fallen since then, some officials in Washington might wish they had given the African Union delegation a bit more time to do its work? But actually, I don’t think that any American officials from Obama on down have yet shown any sign that they’ve learned anything useful from the tragic experience of Libya.)

In Libya, as we know, the U.S. and its allies took hold of the original, limited Security Council resolution (1973) calling for “all necessary means” to be used to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas from attack by the Qaddafi regime and pushed their implementation of it way beyond its original wording and intent, to undertake airborne military actions in support of the opposition as the opposition gathered around Tripoli and overthrew the regime. (This was seen as yet another great victory for, and vindication of, airpower. Of course, since the only people with boots on the ground were the ill-disciplined, internally competing Libyan militias, they are the forces that have been controlling the country ever since.)

The leaderships in China and Russia both felt they had been seriously misled by the western powers when they agreed to the terms of resolution 1973. They are not about to repeat that mistake. (And they are also both much more significant players on the world scene today than they were back in 1991.) The chances that these two governments would sign off on any kind of NFZ resolution regarding Syria are zero. If the United States and the dwindling number of governments that remain in its so-called ‘Friends of Syria’ group of countries want to establish an NFZ inside Syria, absent any enabling resolution from the Security Council, this will be– and will be treated as– an act of war. And if, as the recent reports in the WSJ had it, the plan is for the NFZ to be established just north of Syria’s southern border with Jordan, then evidently the military power of neighboring Israel will be a factor in the situation…

And then, what would be the strategic goal or end-game of any US-backed NFZ in Syria– whether in the north or the south? Would it, as in Libya, be simply a hasty way-station or act of political legerdemain on the way to supporting the rebels in a campaign to capture Damascus? Or would the creation of an NFZ be intended as a less overtly ‘strategic’ move, but one that would create a kind of buffer zone within Syria in which the opposition forces could– along with their families, rest and regroup?

If it’s the latter, then the external forces protecting that ‘safe haven’ with their airpower would have some hard questions to answer. primarily, these two:

What kind of opposition forces would be protected within the havens (see ‘takfiris‘, above)?
How, by acting solely from the air, would the U.S. or its allies police the haven and ensure that takfiris or other men of violence would not terrorize the population inside the haven and/or continue their campaign to topple the regime in Damascus (and then, perhaps, continue on to ‘liberate’ Golan, and then Palestine)?

The idea of creating safe havens inside Syria in which the much-abused remnants of the country’s civilian population can be ‘protected’ by the actions of well-meaning foreigners may sound very appealing. The political realities of any such project are horrendous. Let’s hope that just as much thought is being put into the complex politics of any such move before it is undertaken, as is reportedly being put into doing the logistical planning for it.

The Hizbullah factor in the Syrian conflict

Practically all westerners looking at the influence that Hizbullah’s entry into the Syrian conflict has been having on the conflict have focused wholly on the military role that Hizbullah’s very well-trained and highly motivated fighters have played on the battlefield, especially in helping bring about the Syrian government’s reassertion of authority on Tuesday night, in Qusayr. But having studied Hizbullah’s development and SOP’s in Lebanon over the course of many years (see e.g. here and here), I suspect that the main impact its involvement has on events in Syria could well be in civilian affairs– that is, if the Baath Party and its allies are open to receiving coaching from Hizbullah’s civilian-affairs cadres on how to organize and build resilience in traumatized communities in times of war, then that could make all the difference.

During both of Hizbullah’s “definitive” battles against the (militarily very much stronger) IDF, in 1996 and 2006, it was the strength of the party’s civilian mass organizing that allowed it to “win”: In both cases, the Israeli government’s key war aim was to inflict such terrible losses on all Lebanese citizens that they would turn against Hizbullah; and in both cases, the effectiveness of the civilian mass base and the network of strategic alliances that Hizbullah had previously built up ensured that those bullying– one could even say openly terroristic– tactics pursued by the Israeli leaders were completely ineffective (even, very counter-productive) at the political level. In both cases, Hizbullah emerged from the Israeli assault politically stronger than it had been prior to the assault, and with its core military infrastructure unbroken.

Continue reading “The Hizbullah factor in the Syrian conflict”

Four important reads on Syria

The first two are excellent, on-the-ground reporting from Aleppo, by the seasoned, native Arabic speaker Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Dec 27 and Dec 28.
The second two are from the Carnegie Endowment: This thoughtful Dec 24 piece by Yezid Sayegh: Can the National Coalition Lead Syria?; and this very well-informed Dec 4 piece by Aron Lund: Aleppo and the Battle for the Syrian Revolution’s Soul.
I have been arguing for more than 18 months now that the Syrian “opposition” (more accurately, “oppositions”) is/are incapable of entering into any meaningful negotiations under their own steam– even should they want to do so; since unlike the Algerian FLN, the ANC in South Africa or all other successful national liberation movements they lack internal unity, political clarity, and internal discipline.
The developments of the past 18 months have surely shown this to be the case.
Of course the Syrian government has made many mistakes– at the strategic, tactical, and moral levels. But so has the opposition. It is past time for all the Western and other international groupies and enablers of the opposition to stop indulging it and to work in a concerted way with the rest of the international community to bring an end to the carnage, fitna, and intense human suffering the conflict has already imposed on Syria’s people, in the only way possible: That is, through the negotiations that UN/AL Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi as been working tirelessly to convene.

Yes, I was right on Syria. (And what now?)

I realize it is unseemly, in the world of international-affairs analysis, for someone to say quite bluntly “I told you so”. I realize, far more importantly, that the situation in which Syria’s 25 million (or so) people find themselves is one of deep and very hard-to-escape crisis– one that, whether Pres. Asad stays or goes, will (as I noted here in early August of this year) continue to plague them for many, many years to come… and any contention among non-Syrian analysts as to who was “right” and who was “wrong” pales in importance to that deeply tragic fact.
But still, looking back, I think I have been fundamentally correct in my evaluations of the situation in Syria– from March 2011 until today. And that, at a time when a large majority of people in the U.S. (and ‘western’) political class had a very different analytical bottom line than my own. Their bottom line was, basically, that the Asad regime was weak, hollow, deeply unpopular, and would crumble “any day now.” And since people holding to this belief– which was nearly always, much more of a belief than an analysis– have been extremely strong inside the Obama administration as well as in the western chattering classes (including among many self-professed “progressives” or liberals), their belief in the imminent collapse of the Asad regime has driven Washington’s policy all along.
Of greatest concern to me has been those people’s rigid adherence to the policy of not negotiating or supporting the idea of anyone else negotiating with the Asad regime. Instead of any idea of negotiations, the overthrow of the regime was their overwhelming and primary goal. Negotiations about the future of Syria could, they said, be held only after the President’s removal.

Continue reading “Yes, I was right on Syria. (And what now?)”

Two observations on the tragedy in Syria

1. War always inflicts grave rights abuses on residents of the war zone. Additionally, its fog allows– and its passions encourage– the commission of a large variety of atrocities such as are very rarely committed in times of peace. Hence, actions tending toward the exacerbation of tensions can never be said to “help” the rights and wellbeing of the numerous human persons who lives in– or or displaced from– the zone of contention… And all efforts undertaken to preserve and protect “human rights” should aim first and foremost at the de-escalation of tensions and a relentless search for negotiated rather than fought-for or imposed means of resolution.
2. In Syria, the situation of the country’s 22 million residents has already been grievously damaged by the past 15 months of tensions that have escalated to the point of an extremely damaging civil war. The social fabric of the country has been very badly eroded– a form of destruction that is even more damaging than the concomitant destruction of physical infrastructure. Whether President Asad goes or stays, it will take Syria many years (and leadership qualities very much stronger than anything we have seen to date from either the government or the extremely fissiparous opposition), in order to recover and heal.
Thus, the key issue now is not, as so many westerners still frame it, “whether Asad goes or stays.” The issue is how Syria’s people can best be helped to pull out of the vortex of sectarian violence into which they are now very rapidly being sucked. Based on all my research and experiences relating to societies mired in, or managing to escape from grievous inter-group violence, it is clear to me that only a pan-Syrian negotiation over forms of government, accountability, and intergroup relations going forward can achieve that.
And to succeed, this negotiation must include, not exclude, the current regime. It was a negotiation of this type that succeeded in South Africa in bringing about a relatively peaceful transition from vicious minority rule to full democracy. In Burma/Myanmar, Sec. Clinton is fully engaged in helping to broker just such a negotiation. The actions of the apartheid government in South Africa and the junta in Burma, were no less brutal than those of the Asad regime in Syria.
In addition, in Syria, it is clear that the opposition is far less committed than, say, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in Burma to the pursuit of a nonviolent path. In South Africa, the ANC did have a military wing. But its acts of violence were few and far between, and inside South Africa they were generally conducted along lines that respected the requirement to attack only military targets. In Syria, by contrast, far too much of the armed opposition has been involved in acts of sectarian violence or other kinds of inhumane violence. There is thus very little “moral” case to be made as between the acts of those men of anti-regime violence, many of them salafis or jihadis, and the acts of the regime– though the regime does command firepower far greater than that available to the oppositionists.

Sarajevo, 1914; Damascus 2012?

The killing, in Damascus today, of at least three powerful members of the Baathist regime in Syria, will almost certainly plunge that whole country– and quite likely also much of the rest of the Greater Middle East– into a maelstrom of inter-group violence far worse than any it has seen until now.
Ninety-eight years ago, on June 28, 1914, a small group of Serbian nationalists executed a similar kind of violent coup, killing the presumptive heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie, during an official visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia. Though the original assassination plan was botched, conspirator Gavrilo Princip was able to shoot the Archduke and his wife dead a short while later.
The process of political/diplomatic breakdown thereby set in process unspooled with amazing speed– in a context in which major European powers had already, for some years, been arming and escalating tension and distrust among themselves. Within just one month, World War I had erupted– a confrontation that, though centered in Europe, soon engulfed the whole world, leaving tens of millions dead and tens of millions more displaced, dishonored, starving, and extremely vulnerable to disease.
The killing of President Asad’s powerful brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, along with Syria’s ministers of defense and interior, certainly escalates the internal tensions and the stakes of the conflict within Syria, a country of 19 million souls in which sectarian tensions and inter-sect violence have already been rising to a high degree over the past 16 months.
Each side to the fierce political battle underway in Syria today accuses the other of having (a) fomented the sectarianism, and (b) launched and escalated the violence; and there is considerable substance to these accusations on both sides. Assad, Shawkat, and most of the important figures in the regime’s security apparatus are members of the country’s Alawite Muslim minority. The Alawites, who are a branch of Shiism, make up around 12% of the country’s population. The opposition forces are almost completely dominated by Sunni Islamist movements. The Sunnis make up around 75% of the country’s Arab population. (The remainder are, mainly, Christians. The country also has sizeable populations of non-Arabs, including Kurds, Armenians, and Turkoman; and a very large and vulnerable population of stateless Palestinians.)
Today’s killings in Damascus mark the death-knell for the diplomatic initiative that former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been pursuing. He has, extremely laudably, been trying to find a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria– one that would include all the major political forces inside the country, along with concerned and influential other governments.
Among Syrians, there have been raucous sounds of jubilation among the oppositionists in exile, and some signs of jubilation among in-country oppositionists– though it is currently extremely hard to get any news at all out of the country. Until now, there has been no word from President Asad. The Reuters report linked to above said that the armed forces chief of staff, Fahad Jassim al-Freij, “quickly took over as defense minister to avoid giving any impression of official paralysis.”
Back in spring 2011, Mona Yacoubian, then an analyst with the (rather poorly named) U.S. Institute of Peace, laid out a plan for “controlled regime change” in Syria. Though she noted that this would not necessarily be an easy feat to achieve, she did nonetheless judge it to be achievable. I questioned her judgment on this point at the time. The events of the intervening 15 months have clearly brought home the lesson (that was clear to me back at the moment she offered her plan) that an action as deepseated and momentous as “regime change” cannot be “controlled”, unless there is clear buy-in to the process from the existing status-quo power— as there was, for example, from the National Party in South Africa in 1992; and as Hillary Clinton is (laudably) hoping to achieve from the Burmese junta today.
A regime that is subjected to the kinds of attacks that Damascus has seen today will have its back to the wall, and that hears from its opponents only the most gruesome and oft-repeated threats of what will happen to its leaders and supporters once they are vanquished, can certainly be expected to retaliate with great violence. The violence inside Syria will get worse; and there will almost certainly be a huge increase in calls for western military intervention…
Meantime, in Israel, here is what the rabidly rightwing analyst Barry Rubin had to say yesterday about the whole phenomenon of the Arab Spring:

“Every Arabic-speaking country is likely to be wracked with internal violence, conflict, disorder and slow socio-economic progress for years, even decades, to come… “

“the big Middle East conflict of the future is not the Arab-Israeli but the Sunni-Shia one… [A] series of conflicts have broken out all along the Sunni-Shia borderland as the two blocs vie for control of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain.

In addition, the Syrian civil war is wrecking that country and will continue to paralyze it for some time to come. When the dust settles, any new government is going to have to take a while to manage the wreckage, handle the quarreling, diverse ethnic-religious groups, and rebuild its military…”

And that was yesterday!
Of course, all this while– as throughout the whole of the past 44 years– Israel’s colonial land-grab of the land and resources of Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and Golan has continued. As has its acquisition of ever more capable and lethal military powers… As has its maintenance of Gaza as an extremely tightly policed open-air-prison for 1.6 million people.
The violence in Syria does not just, as U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today, threaten to “spin out of control”. It also threatens to draw powers from near and far into a conflict of still unimaginable proportions and extent. (And the fact that the U.S. has a presidential election this year makes the geopolitics of “controlling” this process much harder to plan.) I imagine that there are plenty of members of Israel’s current rightwing and expansionist elite who are hoping and planning that, as this conflict winds down– whatever its eventual dimensions– their command over the entire territory of the mashreq (the Arab East) will be far stronger than it is today.
For them, the whole “Iran threat” that their acolytes have hyped to such great effect in the west and much of the rest of the (western dominated) “international community” has always been something of a sideshow… a way, mainly, to divert attention from the colonialist facts they’ve been busy creating on the ground in the West Bank for the whole of the past 44 years. In regional political terms, Syria was always one of their main targets. It was clearly identified as such in the “Clean Break” document of 1996. And now, they don’t even have to lift a finger of their own, in order to see the country being torn apart… with the help of, it has to be said, many cynical sectarian forces from outside– including from those notably anti-democratic regimes, Saudi Arabia and Qatar…
Can the now-threatening collapse into a tsunami of sectarian violence that may well engulf the whole Middle East be prevented? Yes, it can, if enough people inside and outside the region, seeing both the human tragedy and the geopolitical instability that would ensue, can act together to use all the available tools of diplomacy and human reasonableness that will be needed to avert it.
It is, certainly, harder to see how it can be done in a year when that 5% of humanity who happen to be U.S. citizens are caught up in their (our) own periodic form of money-driven insanity known as a presidential election. But the good of the Syrian people– all of the Syrian people– must be the first priority. Determining what that is, and who can legitimately represent the aspirations of the country’s people is, of course, a central part of the current conundrum. Saving Syria’s people– and the people of the broader region– from the kind of sectarian breakdown and violence that we all saw occurring in Iraq over the past seven years… and that I had lived through, first hand, when I was in Lebanon in the late 1970s.. must be the top priority. That requires– now, as always– negotiations, including negotiations that draw in and involve the leaders on all sides who have committed some terrible deeds. There are pitifully few angels or innocents in Syria; and none of them are at head of either the current regime, or the opposition. But they are the ones who must be drawn into the negotiation.
That, it seems to me, is the only alternative to a 1914-type explosion of all-out war. And war, remember, inflicts severe harm on everyone who happens to live in the war-zone, with the most vulnerable members of society being (as we have seen in Iraq, and elsewhere) those who suffer the most. From that perspective, avoiding war is a supreme priority for all those concerned with the human rights of actual living people.
* * *
Update, 9:07 pm:
David Ignatius, as well informed as ever, writes this:

The CIA has been working with the Syrian opposition for several weeks under a non-lethal directive that allows the United States to evaluate groups and assist them with command and control. Scores of Israeli intelligence officers are also operating along Syria’s border, though they are keeping a low profile.

Tragedies of liberal interventionist thinking in Syria and elsewhere

Where to start? Maybe with this piece by Le Monde Diplo’s Alain Gresh today (or anyway, recently.) In it, he writes:

The opposition cannot bring down the government, and the government cannot put down an uprising that has a surprising determination and courage…

I was writing the exact same thing more than a year ago.
Who listened then? And here we are, one year later. And yes, there is still deadlock.
In the intervening twelve months, there have been several periods when the well-rewarded people sitting in comfy think-tanks in Washington DC, and their allies, were absolutely convinced that Pres. Bashar al-Asad was “just on the point of leaving office.” I recall one phone call three months or so ago with someone who’d recently left Thinktankistan for (equally nicely paid) “service” in the U.S. government when he said, “Yes, we in [this branch of the US government] have all been amazed that Bashar did not do as we thought he would, and take this opportunity to take Asma and the children on a lovely long vacation somewhere.”
(As though the departure of Pres. Asad would somehow have “solved” anything?)
But really, that was the entire gameplan of Hillary Clinton’s State department; and it was based on a completely faulty understanding of the situation inside Syria.
Back to Alain Gresh, whom I have met once or twice and is generally fairly smart about developments in the Mashreq. It is, however, his point of departure in this latest piece that puzzles me. He writes:

Should we do nothing? There are other options than military intervention. Economic pressure on Syria has already made some middle-class government supporters reconsider, and this could be increased, as long as it targeted the leaders and not the population… ”

Who is the “we” in whose name he is writing there? That is the puzzle for me. Truly.
Are French (or one-generation-on, French-naturalized) intellectuals like Alain Gresh easily able to identify themselves with the policies of their national government, which would be one version of the “we” he is speaking of here? Or is it the kind of airy-fairy, untethered, liberal-universalistic “we” whom he is claiming to represent?
But really, why should anyone who is not a Syrian claim to have any kind of a right to speak about what should happen in that beleaguered country– now, or at any other point?
Maybe I’m just jaded about the claims of “liberal” universalism these days because so many of my liberal-universalist friends have found themselves so easily seduced by the claims of the militarists– in re Syria, as Libya, and elsewhere.
* * *
But I truly do not understand how liberal universalists in the west, whose views, representations, and analyses of what is happening in Myanmar/Burma in these months are so uniformly calm and supportive of the wrenchingly negotiated transition to greater democracy there absolutely never stop to ask whether a similar process may not also be the best thing for Syria today (as it was for South Africa, 20 years ago.)
Why is Syria’s current government uniquely picked out by these so-called liberals as worthy of their rage, anger, and militarized “intervention” when those other authoritarian regimes, actually, committed far worse abuses against their citizens over the course of many decades?
Why the racism that is deeply embedded in these kinds of judgments?
And yes, “Avaaz”, I am speaking about you, too.
* * *
This intense partisanship and Asad-hatred of the liberals in the west have had real conseuqneces, too. Among other things, they have helped strengthen the hand of the really nasty, neoconservative and neo-colonial interventionists within our respective western societies. And they have held out false hopes of significant western-government and western-society support to those among the oppositionists in Syria who have been open to the idea of exploiting western backing (including military backing) for their own gain.
As I tweeted a few weeks back: This has many of the same aspects of tragedy as Hungary 1956 and Basra 1991. Almost criminally irresponsible, I would say.
* * *
It’s been hard, sitting on the relative sidelines over recent months, seeing so many of my longstanding warnings go unheeded– regarding Syria, as regarding Palestine, Iraq, U.S. militarism in general, and a number of other issues. But I fought the good (rhetorical) fight here at JWN and in other forums of public discourse, for so many years. Completely, I should note, unpaid by anyone; but that’s okay. Now, I am more in a phase of building up this institution that is my publishing company, Just World Books. It’s a different set of challenges, but also over the long haul extremely worthwhile and, I hope, transformative of the discourse. I am, it should go without saying, really proud of the publishing we’ve done so far, and excited about the projects we have immediately ahead.
(I really appreciate all support JWN readers can give to the publishing house. Check out our list of great titles– and buy profligately from among them!– at the JWB webstore, here.)
So here, anyway is a thought for Easter/Passover. Let’s work for a lot less militarism and lot fewer calls for “liberal interventionism” (which only too often ends up meaning only war), from everyone in the disproportionately powerful west… And let’s have a lot more focusing on how conflicts can be resolved in ways other than escalation and war; in ways, that is, that aim specifically at the de-escalation of tensions, an end to finger-pointing, and the knowingly partisan treatment of claims about each side’s commission of atrocities. Let’s remember that Syria is a complex, sizeable country that is the homeland of its own people. It is not, and should not be turned into, a playground for other countries’ grudge matches and competitions (as happened, only too tragically, to the citizenries of Lebanon and Iraq.) Let’s look at other examples around the world where peoples won expanded rights and empowerment through negotiated transitions. And let’s, honestly, forget all this misguided and misapplied business about outsiders having any pre-ordained “responsibility” or even, heaven forbid, “duty” to intervene.
I’m sorry, Alain Gresh. I don’t mean to take after you in person. I know you’re a smart, sensitive, and concerned analyst. But there was just something about that “we” you used in that article that seemed badly out of place…

The use of web-based disinformation by the ‘west’

Patrick Cockburn has an extremely important piece at the Independent today, in which he takes to task the major organs of the ‘western’ media– including, crucially, today’s Al-Jazeera– for the extremely uncritical and often openly inflammatory use they make of unsubstantiated or highly exaggerated “news reports” coming out of, in particular, Syria and Iran.
He writes,

But today there is an overwhelming consensus in the foreign media that the rebels are right and existing governments wrong. For institutions such as the BBC, highly unbalanced coverage becomes acceptable.

Then he comes to the nub of why all this is important

Hence the fog of disinformation pumped out through the internet.

I completely agree with Patrick’s analysis on this point. As I agree, too, with As’ad Abou Khalil’s broad view of events in Syria that, though the government is highly repressive and often criminally stupid, in the ranks of the opposition there are also many very anti-democratic and violence-loving elements and others who are working hard to trigger a western intervention in the country. (Hence my judgment that if you want to follow what’s happening in and toward Syria, Asad’s Angry Arab blog is one of the very best, and best-informed, sources to do that.)
In my view, the Syrian opposition consists of a number of elements, some of them extremely contradictory with each other. There is a genuine, in-country network of activists who seek real democratic reform and who’re working for it using mass nonviolent organizing. But there are also all kinds of opportunistic networks piggybacking on that movement, most of them based in or directed from outside the country… Among them are the openly violence-using people of the Free Syria Army. And though some people in the exile-based Syrian National Council claim that the role of the FSA is merely to “station armed people around mass demonstrations in order to protect the demonstrations”, that has never been a tactic endorsed by any genuine nonviolent mass movement. Indeed it is tactic that’s almost guaranteed to escalate the situation and cause far more casualties among the unarmed than if only nonviolent moral suasion/reproach is brought to bear on the regime’s forces.
We should not kid ourselves by imagining that there is no opportunistic exploitation of the Syrian situation underway, being undertaken by a whole range of anti-Damascus forces– some sectarian (as in the case of Qatar or Saudi Arabia; also, quite possibly, Turkey), and some pro-Zionist, or anyway easily exploited by Syria’s longterm opponents in the Zionist movement in Israel and in the ‘west’.
So how do those many western ‘liberals’ who seem to be so deeply invested in supporting the Syrian ‘revolutionaries’ fit into this scheme? To me, this is another key part of the puzzle, along with the enlistment by the ‘revolutionaries’ of so much of the western media, as documented by Patrick Cockburn.
Okay, I understand that the Syrian government has a really lousy human rights record. I have worked long enough (38 years) in and on the affairs of the mashreq to understand that better than probably 95% of the people in the human rights movement who currently present themselves as “experts” on Syria. But is getting out there to advocate a “Libya-style” overthrow of the regime (i.e. with the aid of outside forces) really a good way to bring rights abuses to an end?
No it is not! Wars and civil conflicts everywhere and always involve a mass-scale assault on the rights of civilian residents of the war-zones, with the most vulnerable residents being the ones whose rights (including the right to life) get abused the worst.
That is everywhere and always the case. No exceptions. That is why I am always really dismayed and upset when I see rights activists who claim to understand what they are talking about taking actions that escalate the tensions toward outright civil conflict and war… Remember that in the case of most rights activists who live in comfortable, secure western countries: These people have never had direct experience of living in a war zone. They are bombarded (by the military-industrial complex) with arguments that modern warfare can be a “precision”, “surgical” business… and most recently, in Libya, we saw the emergence of the keffiyah-ed warrior racing through the sand as a figure of popular heroism and adulation. (Lawrence of Arabia, anyone?).
I have lived in a war zone. I lived in Lebanon from 1974 through 1981. In six of those years the country was plagued by civil war. I lived within Lebanese society, being married to a Lebanese citizen. I was not a “visiting fireman”, as many western journos were– parachuting in to stay a few days or weeks in a relatively comfortable hotel from time to time. Everyone involved in fighting the Lebanese civil war, from all the multiple “sides” that were engaged in it, was convinced of the justice of his (or sometimes her) cause. Each one was fighting what he knew to be a “just” war… But the war and its associated atrocities ground on and on and on.
Another thing the western rights activists too often forget: Mass-scale atrocities– as opposed to a rampage by a lone, psychotic gunman– are nearly always, or always, committed only in the context of an ongoing civil conflict or war. Conflicts provide the heightened degree of threat and the dehumanization of the opponent that are essential ingredients in the organized commission of atrocities. They also, in the past, provided plenty of the “fog of war” in which those acts can be shrouded.
Thus, if you want to avoid the commission of atrocities: avoid war! Do everything you can to explore and enlarge the space for de-escalation and the negotiated resolution of grievances!
It is true that modern communications technology makes the shrouding of atrocities much harder (though not impossible) to achieve. That is, obviously, a very good thing! But this same technology also enables the fighting parties of all sides to do much more than they could previously, to frame and disseminate their own “stories” of what’s happening… Rights activists in other countries need to be very aware that this is not only a possibility– it is actually happening. And in the case of Syria, in particular, these reports are being used to whip up western (and worldwide) support for a ‘western’-led military campaign aimed at bringing forced regime change to Syria.
Colonialists have, throughout history, always tried to cloak their campaigns of military intervention, domination, and control in the lingo of “rights”, “progress”, and liberalism. Even the Belgians and their supporters, when they entered Congo in the late 1800s to initiate an era of control that was marked throughout by mass killings, mass enslavement, and outright genocide that within 23 years took the lives of some ten million persons indigenous to the area… did so in the name of a campaign sold tothe European publics as being one aimed at “liberating” the people of Congo from other (in truth, much less maleficent) Arab slave-traders.
We liberals need to be very careful indeed that we do not have our admirable sentiments of human solidarity abused by today’s architects of ‘western’ colonial invasion, control, and domination.
The situation that Syria’s people are living through today is extremely difficult. There are no easy answers. Both the regime and the opposition have demonstrated their resilience, and neither looks as though it is about to “win” the current contest any time soon. Given the degree of tension that now exists in Syrian society (due to the actions of the regime, of some portions of the opposition, and of several outside actors), it is hard to see how to simply ramp those tensions down and open up the space for the inter-Syrian dialogue and reform process that the people of Syria so desperately need…
But what kind of future do those of us who are westerners or other kinds of non-Syrians want to see for our friends in Syria? A future like that of today’s Libya– or even, heaven forfend, another “result” of western military action: today’s Iraq? Or would we want them to follow a negotiated-transition path like that taken by the people of South Africa, 1990-94… or the negotiated-transition path that the people of Myanmar/Burma now seem to be taking? Few of those western liberals and rights activists who are baying for “no-fly zones” or other forms of foreign military intervention seem to have ever thought about this question, so convinced are they of their own righteousness and the infallibility of their own judgments, however scantily informed these judgments may be in an era of instant You-Tube uploads of videos of, as Patrick Cockburn noted, often extremely sketchy provenance or representativity.

Syria, Myanmar, South Africa, Libya…

Just a quick note from an airport here… How come that western publics who applauded the negotiated transition to democracy in South Africa and who applaud the current openings in the same direction in Myanmar/Burma, generally seem so unwilling to pursue a similarly negotiated transition in Syria?
Why do so many western rights activists continue instead to give strong support to the forces of the increasingly militarized opposition in Syria? Do they really want a violence-driven outcome there similar to what we have seen in Iraq and now Libya? Or, do they not understand the basic facts of violence: that violence begets more violence and in the modern, heavily armed world the use of violence is highly inconducive to the building of an accountable, rights-respecting social/political order.
The situation in Syria remains complex. There are many elements inside the country’s opposition movement who are sincere democrats. There are others who are vicious sectarians and men of violence. The goal for political leaders inside and outside the country is surely to find a way to engage the former while marginalizing the influence of the latter. Sadly, Pres. Asad seems unable or unwilling to find a way to do this– and most of the numerous outside forces now supporting the Syria opposition seem very unwilling to do it, as well.
By the way, here is the record of the panel I was recently on, on Syria, at the (Turkish-American) SETA Foundation in DC.

Further thoughts on Syria, Turkey, and democracy

This Monday, Nov. 28, I’ll be speaking at a 2pm symposium in Washington DC on the topic “The Future of Syria: Political Turmoil and Prospects of Democracy”. It is organized by SETA-DC, the Washington DC branch of the Ankara-based SETA (Foundation for Economic, Political and Social Research.) Also speaking will be Erol Cebeci, Executive Director of SETA-DC and until recently a parliamentarian for the AKP.
Longtime readers of this blog will be aware that I have followed Turkish-Syrian relations for some time here; and back at the beginning of the current political turmoil in Syria I was arguing that Turkey’s AKP government was uniquely positioned and perhaps uniquely motivated to be the principal power mediating the regime-opposition negotiation in Syria that I saw, and still see, as overwhelmingly the best way out of Syria’s impasse.
Since I started expressing that position publicly, back in May, several important further developments have occurred. Principally, of course– and just as I predicted back in the March-May period– the confrontation between the regime and the opposition in Syria has continued; both sides have demonstrated resiliency; and the casualty toll has continued tragically to grow. There have also been these other developments:

today

So obviously, there will be a lot to discuss with my SETA colleagues next Monday.
One thing that has been much on my mind in recent days is the range of possible effects that the situation in Syria might have on the prospects for democracy not only in Syria but also in Turkey. Of all the Middle Eastern forces currently giving support to a Syrian opposition that claims to pursue the goal of democracy, the only one that any has any credible claim itself to uphold and practice the values of democracy is Turkey. The idea that Saudi Arabia, other GCC countries, Jordan, or the currently military-ruled regime in Egypt has any credibility in saying it seeks the goal of democracy is completely laughable. So it strikes me that sincere supporters of democracy around the world who want to see a democratic and accountable outcome in Syria should pay particular attention to the role that Ankara might yet play there.
It is also the case that for me, one of the bedrocks of any commitment to democracy is a commitment not to use violent means to resolve differences of opinion or politics among fellow-citizens, however deepseated and sensitive these differences may be. Democracy is not really– or perhaps, not only– about elections, which are at best only a technical means to reaching a democratic end. (Elections, remember, can be and are used by all kinds of profoundly rights-abusing regimes.) Democracy is about having a fundamental respect for the equality of all human persons and establishing a set of political mechanisms that allow citizens of one state (and eventually, of the whole world– though we are still a long way from that) to live together peaceably and over the long term while allowing the different communities within that state to live out their own vision of the good life so long as this does not impinge on the rights of others.
Turkey is a country in which many different kinds of social groups live together. These include members of the Sunni-Turkish majority. They also include members of ethnic, religious, and sectarian minorities. They include people who are highly secular and people who are highly pious and for whom “the good life” is necessarily one defined by religious norms. They include highly sophisticated, “Europeanized” urbanites, and people much more rooted to the traditional ways of villages and small towns. Yet somehow, as a result of decisions taken throughout the course of Turkey’s modern history– including both the Kemalist era and the post-Kemalist era– nearly all these different groups have been able to find a way to come together and agree on the (still-evolving) rules of a democratic order for their country.
I have long thought of this as an amazing achievement. Of course, it is still incomplete. But still, Turkey’s people have come so far away from both Ottoman-era theocracy and the intolerant, ethnocratic militarism of Kemalist rule that I think this is an achievement to be acknowledged and celebrated by democrats everywhere.
Turkey’s longest land border is its border with Syria– more than 500 miles long, as I recall. If there is ethnosectarian breakdown in Syria, can Turkey be insulated from that, I wonder? And if so, at what cost?
… Well, the events in Syria are moving fast, and will doubtless continue to do so over the coming three days. So I shan’t complete gathering my thoughts for Monday afternoon’s presentation until that morning.
As a side-note here, I also want to send my (only slightly qualified) congratulations to my friends at the Crisis Group for having once again produced a very sane and timely analysis of the situation in Syria. In the Conclusion to this study, they write:

The report goes to some lengths to spell out the massive risks involved in any non-negotiated resolution in Syria, which is good. And they highlight the extreme political incompetence of the Asad regime, which I also think is something well worth doing. But I think they let the opposition off too lightly; and I really do not see that that the Arab League as such is in any position to negotiate the kind of transition– that is, a negotiation to a truly democratic, rights-respecting and accountable political system– that I see as being the one best able to prevent the outbreak (or continuation) of further internal violence in Syria, going forward.
Throughout my years in Lebanon during the early years of the civil war there, I saw at first hand how an “Arab League peacekeeping mission” there was used all along by all the different Arab powers to pursue their own, often highly divisive agendas and thus became yet another factor that prolonged the fighting and the suffering there. And I have no reason to believe that the Arab League is in any better position today to plan and run a constructive peacekeeping mission in Syria. In addition, as noted above, it is amazing for anyone truly concerned about pursuing a more democratic and accountable Syria going forward to think that the governments now running the Arab League are well positioned or well suited to help realize that goal. Hence I would like to keep alive the possibility of a role for democratic Turkey in spearheading a serious push for negotiations– something that the Crisis Group’s report doesn’t mention.
(On the Arab League, and Qatar’s rapidly shifting political role in regional politics, As’ad AbouKhalil has had four excellent short pieces in Al-Akhbar English in the past couple of weeks. You can access them all via this web-page.)