The West’s half-hearted efforts will not end Syria’s civil war

Dan Trombly 10.23am

The pressure has increased for more forceful intervention in Syria. Despite the presence of international observers, the Assad regime refuses to adhere to a ceasefire demanded by the UN.

Whether it involves arming the rebels or a repeat of the NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995, the ongoing strife in the country calls for further action, and US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry recently urged consideration of both options. Yet despite the frustration of diplomatic efforts, military options seem bleak.

Those who argue that past success in Bosnia could be replicated in Syria both ignore the history of the Bosnian war and its differences with the current conflict. The UN’s attempts to create “safe zones” resulted in the horrific massacres of Srebrenica and elsewhere. The Bosnian war was ultimately won when the numerically superior combined force of Croatian and Bosnian troops launched ground offensives, not when NATO began air strikes.

Similar attempts to implement “safe zones” in Iraq following the first Gulf War required the threat of ground assault in the south of the country, and the tactic failed frequently in the north, such as at Irbil in 1996. Even after the Desert Fox bombing campaign, forces withdrew once a Baghdad supporting faction secured that area. Notably, Saddam Hussein’s rule was not ended until troops fought their way to the capital in 2003, despite “safe zones” having been declared alongside frequent US air patrols and strikes.

In Syria, as in Bosnia and Iraq, neither protection of civilians nor regime change can be assured without superiority on the ground. Even air strikes would require a bombing campaign larger than in Iraq in 2003.

And enormous obstacles stand in the way of arming the Syrian rebels. In Bosnia, for instance, it was Croatia’s invasion that brought about a Serb defeat, not Bosnian forces. In Syria, without a ground invasion of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of troops - from Turkey, the Arab states, or the West - Syria’s rebels will remain woefully outmatched in conventional capabilities. Indeed, Turkey rarely conducts cross-border raids against PKK terrorists without several thousand soldiers.

The Syrian rebels need artillery batteries, armour and air support, not just man-portable anti-tank or anti-aircraft weaponry.

Even with Western air support, the rebels would likely continue to use the guerilla tactics befitting the outmatched force that they are, avoiding pitched battles and ceding territory to draw out hostile forces. While these might be effective tactics in a long-term insurgency, they are unlikely to result in regime change or effective protection of civilians in the short-term. Even the maintenance of a safe haven for rebel forces would need to be done outside Syrian territory, rather than in “safe zones”.

Simply arming rebel forces is more likely to cause a protracted civil war than a quick victory. The United States and others learned this is Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan during the Cold War. But in those cases, there was thought to be some value in attrition, and supporters of proxy groups were relatively indifferent to civilian casualties and the collateral damage of prolonged conflict. In Syria, such outcomes are unjustifiable on humanitarian grounds, nor on strategic aims (seeing Assad depart quickly).

Moreover, an influx of arms leaves lasting consequences. The behaviour of Libyan militias is a case in point.

An authoritarian regime such as Assad’s can hold on until hostile armoured columns roll on Damascus. Therefore the only strategically feasible option for a quick victory in Syria is a full-scale invasion. Yet no Western state is willing to undertake such a mission and a Turkish or Arab effort seems very unlikely.

Ultimately, Syria’s civil war will drag on. In the meantime, Western powers must work with Syria’s neighbours to prevent WMDs and other arms from leaving the country; they must provide aid to refugees that manage to escape Syria; and continue to exercise diplomatic options to the best of their ability.

Unless Western policymakers can convince their own populations and their Middle Eastern allies that an invasion is justifiable, providing military aid or half-hearted intervention can only worsen the consequences of Syria’s conflict - for both that country’s neighbours, and the interests of the West.

Dan Trombly is a student of International Affairs at George Washington University. He blogs at Slouching Towards Columbia.

Demonstrate for human rights in Syria

Alexander Pannett 6.45am

What can you do without freedom? When the world seems silent to your prevails?

The people of Homs, Syria’s third largest city, are currently suffering the seventh day of a brutal and criminal assault from President Assad’s un-repentant thugs.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed by indiscriminate artillery and mortar fire.  This is on top of the 11-month crackdown against protestors who are campaigning for democracy and human rights in Syria that has left thousands dead.

The UN Security Council has shown itself to be impotent in the face of Russia’s machiavellian veto of any resolution condemning the Syrian violence.  The Arab League has so far been unable to pressure the regime into stopping the atrocities.

Whilst many observers believe that Assad’s support is melting away it is clear he will not go until he has trailed his bloody claws across the Syrian people.  Unlike in Libya, the Syrian people cannot expect Western intervention without backing from the international community.  The disaster of Iraq is too fresh in everyone’s memories to countenance unilateral Western action. For now.

The best peaceful alternative to direct intervention is to apply increasing diplomatic and economic coercion on Syria until the regime breaks.

The European Union has just declared that it will impose harsher sanctions against Assad to encourage his fall.  The Arab League ministers are also meeting this weekend to discuss what further actions they can take against Assad.  It will be a further opportunity to build international pressure on the Syrian government and other governments who are supporting it.

In the UK, human rights organisations have been mobilising to raise awareness. Amnesty International are urging authorities across the Middle East and North Africa to:

“Uphold the right to peaceful protest and to freedom of expression, association, assembly and information.

Investigate deaths, injuries, and detentions ensuring those responsible are brought to account.

Immediately begin human rights reforms including giving people the right to participate fully in the political process.”

You too can play your part this weekend in expressing your support for the voiceless.  Amnesty International are holding a demonstration in Trafalgar Square on Saturday from 12 noon until 2pm to raise awareness of the human rights abuses. See here for further details.

Attend and show your anger at those who would suppress the fight against injustice and the human rights revolution.

Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, once said that “the sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.”

Well. It is time to make up our minds. And shout about it.

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Russia’s Syrian hypocrisy

Alexander Pannett 10.38am

Yesterday, diplomats at the UN Security Council were engaged in a concerted attempt to pass a resolution calling for President Bashar al-Assad to hand over power, which is a key part of an Arab League plan.

This is a welcome move as bloody government reprisals against the protesters have led to more than 7,000 civilian deaths as Syria slides into civil war.

The text, however, had to be dropped due to Russian objections that it amounted to “regime change”, which was a threat to the principles of national sovereignty as protected under the UN charter.

This is contrary to the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, which was recognised as a concept by all countries (Russia and China included) at the UN World Leader’s Summit in 2005.

Responsibility to Protect is a concept for intervention in a state by the international community for the prevention of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass killings and human rights violations taking place, in a country which is unwilling (or unable) to stop it. In the event of any such acts occurring, the wider international community has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary to prevent it.

Both the Russians and the Chinese, whose modern history has been dominated by bloody foreign interventions, are understandably reticent about any development of liberal interventionism that protects a people from the violent abuses of its government.  Considering the poor human rights records in both these countries, it is unsurprising that they will be wary of a liberal doctrine that legitimises external interference along the grounds of human rights.

However, it is callous in the extreme for the Russians to cite the UN charter’s protection of national sovereignty as the rationale for its support for the Assad government.  Or for the Russians to justify their current intransigence with a resolution against Syria by suggesting that the UN resolution that allowed for “all necessary means” to protect the Libyan people went too far in toppling the brutal dictatorship of Gaddafi.

The Russians were quite happy to cite the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine with their invasion of Georgia in 2008 or use interventionism with their ongoing suppression of “terrorist” separatist groups in the Northern Caucuses or recent use of energy blackmail to interfere with Ukrainian elections.

The real hypocrisy of Russia lies however with the realpolitik of their global strategic ambitions.

At Tartus, Syria’s second largest port city, lies one of only two Russian naval bases outside Russia that Russian capital ships can dock at for re-supply. With the other naval base outside Russia at Sevastopol only on a 25-year lease and subject to the whims of a Ukrainian government with lukewarm relations towards Russia, Tartus is crucial to the Russians’ plans to re-establish themselves as a world military power.

The Syrian government recently agreed to transfer the naval base permanently into Russian hands and the Russians have since been pouring billions into the base to allow it to host a new Mediterranean fleet. To re-affirm Russia’s interests in Syria and its support for the Assad regime, a flotilla of Russian ships, including the Russian flagship, were deployed to the Tartus naval base in November 2011.

Without Tartus, Russia’s plans to project its power around the globe would be severely curtailed, especially in the nearby oil-rich Middle East, an area of vital strategic importance.  It is this concern that is dictating Russia’s morally bankrupt actions at the UN rather than any simulacrum of UN protections of national sovereignty.

As Aaron Ellis has pointed out on these pages, the West is currently undergoing a crisis of confidence about what it stands for in the world. While hard questions are rightly being asked about the Western economic model, we must not forget that our political and liberal values helped shape the present structure of international relations.

Our voice is needed to help prevent the oppression of the weak and dispossessed and to uphold the goals of the UN which sought to prevent massacres such as those that are occurring in Syria.

The West has certainly made terrible foreign policy errors that have resulted in the deaths of innocents. But we should not forget the far worse, dystopian machinations of those to whom our current angst would cede the leadership of the world.

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Iran might be many things, but it is not the Soviet Union

Aaron Ellis 9.30am

Some of the worst decisions in history have been influenced by bad historical analogies. In an essay on the part played by such analogies in American foreign policy, Robert Dallek dubbed their malign influence “the tyranny of metaphor”.

“For all their pretensions to shaping history, U.S. presidents are more often its prisoners.”

The tyranny of metaphor is especially strong in this perennial debate over the Iran Problem. Those who want to attack the country often justify their position by comparing its regime to the Nazis.

One commentator noted recently:

“No other historical episode gets mentioned as often by pundits and policy makers in arguing that some menace or supposed menace needs to be confronted firmly. What is drawn from the Nazi analogy is an adage that a threat must be stopped forcefully now to avoid a bigger and costlier fight later.”

The comparison is ridiculous for any number of reasons, but it serves an important purpose: it is an easy-to-grasp analogy that helps coax those unsure about the use of force.

Yesterday in the House of Commons, in an urgent question to William Hague (video), Robert Halfon boldly described Iran as “the new Soviet Union of the Middle East”. Though his subsequent description of Iranian behaviour did not explain the comparison, there are two ways one can interpret it.

A generous interpretation would be that Mr Halfon believes the regime in Tehran is so crooked, contradictory, and such an aberration of Persian history that its eventual collapse is inevitable. It was this prophetic insight about Communism that led to George F Kennan devising the idea of containment, which won the Cold War. If we just applied continuous but restrained pressure, the Soviet regime would either yield to the West or be overthrown by the Russians and other subjected populations themselves. Going to war with the Soviet Union would not only be disastrous, but also unnecessary.

The more likely interpretation is that Mr Halfon genuinely believes that Iran poses the same degree of threat as the Soviet Union did, which is as absurd as thinking it poses the same threat as Nazi Germany.

Both Israel and the United States dwarf Iran militarily, whereas the Soviet Union’s conventional forces dwarfed those of the West years before the Russians successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1949.

Iran has only one friend in the Middle East - Syria - and it is unlikely that friendship will continue if the Assad regime falls. Until the final years of the Cold War, Moscow had almost all of Eastern Europe under its thumb and, until the 1960s, the important support of Mao’s China.

If Iran is like the Soviet Union in any way, it is the Soviet Union of 1991, a basket case. The influential commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote earlier this month:

“The real story on the ground is that Iran is weak and getting weaker. Sanctions have pushed the economy into a nose-dive. The political system is fractured and fragmenting.”

I wrote yesterday that the only way we can come to an informed decision about Iran is by raising the standard of the debate. Nik also wrote that a debate of such direct import must take place in the House of Commons before any substantive military move. Thankfully, Parliament was granted a preliminary murmur later yesterday afternoon.

Those who claim to have a solution to the problems posed by Tehran and its nuclear programme should furnish us with a coherent strategy, as well as explaining how to offset the trade-offs and indirect consequences of their preferred policies.

And yesterday highlighted another problem, which perhaps we shall never escape: the use and abuse of history.

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The end of the universal Enlightenment?

Alexander Pannett 6.45am

The rising in Libya is reaching its conclusion.  The rebels have all but taken Tripoli and Gaddafi has seemingly fled to ignominy.  The Arab Spring has claimed another triumph against an autocratic regime.  However, it is not Western liberal values that the people on the street are calling for.  A desire for some form of democracy is evident but it will be a democracy that reflects the customs and values of Middle Eastern culture.  Far from being the sign of a teleological march of Western liberal democracy towards a universal civilisation based on Western liberal values, the Arab Spring has shown that the world is becoming increasingly divergent in how its many cultures seek to express themselves both politically and morally.

The Arab Spring has not been an uprising in support of Western values but instead a rejection of the West.  The autocratic regimes that controlled the Middle East were stooges of the West.  Their leaders were propped up with Western money, their children were educated in Western schools and their governments were modelled along Western secular concepts of the state.  Far from being a demonstration of Western influence and power, the risings in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt have exposed the fallacy of Western moral, political and cultural ascendancy.

Events in Libya are concomitant with the increasingly bloody suppression of protests in Syria.  The West has been powerless to prevent such acts of repression by a moderately powerful state.  The West is too war weary and economically humbled to countenance yet another armed conflict.  NATO could barely muster enough military resources to topple Gaddafi, a deeply unpopular leader in a nation of only six million.  Far from being the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama once famously decreed, the post-Cold War world has seen an increasingly divergent multiplicity of political structures and cultures.  The Syrian regime’s hubris looks much more like Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, at a time of fracturing world politics, than the thwarting of Serbia’s designs in Kosovo in the more uni-polar world of the 1990s.  

If democracy does come to the Middle East it will be an Islamic interpretation and it will be malleable to the prejudices and hopes of Middle Eastern culture.  These are not the same prejudices and hopes that dominate Western political thought. In the West, secular reason dominates above all else and its origins lie in the utopian ideals of the Age of Enlightenment.  The Enlightenment assumed that its values were universal.  However, the Enlightenment values of equality and freedom have not been accepted by emerging powers such as China, India and Russia.  The Arab Street has not called for Western freedoms but for freedom from a tyranny draped in secular Western ideals.  The world is not moving to one, universal civilisation based on Western values.  It is evolving along separate value systems.

The end of the Western project to “civilise” the world along Enlightenment lines should not be presaged with foreboding.  The imposition of Western moral and political values on cultures whose traditions were incompatible with such values has caused untold suffering and destruction.  From colonialism through to Marxism, Western ideas have deracinated traditional cultures across the world, all in the name of modernity.  It could be argued that the Enlightenment apotheosis of man above nature has led to severe environmental consequences.  With climate change and ecological disaster remaining an ever present danger, it would benefit the West to learn from cultures around the world whose value systems have allowed them to live in more environmentally sustainable ways.

Far from being a travesty, the relative decline of Western power will allow for new opportunities and ideas to emerge on how to tackle the world’s pressing ecological and political issues.  Now that divergent value systems are once again emerging, it will be far more likely that humans will communicate to each other in the context of understanding rather than from a procrustean view of the world.  With the global population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, this new development could not have come sooner.

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Assad’s grip on power is faltering

Alexander Pannett 7.15am

On Thursday U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on Syria’s president to stop the bloodshed in his country and engage in dialogue before it is too late.  It is estimated that almost 1,400 protesters have already been killed by Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown against his own people.  His regime is unravelling but, if Libya is any example, Assad will not be prised off the reigns of power without first inflicting widespread suffering.  More pressure must be brought by the international community to prevent further civilian casualties.

Assad’s regime relies on three principal strengths to keep it in power: the army, the economy and the Alawite community.  But these traditional foundations are weakening. 

The army is beginning to see desertions.  Whilst the army is led by Alawite officers, Shia in religious beliefs, the officer core is largely Sunni.  As Sunnis account for 65% of the population and Alawites 10%, it is unsurprising that the Assads have never truly trusted the armed forces.  The most loyal regiments, the revolutionary guard and the Fourth Armoured Division, do not have the resources to quell all dissent around the country.

The economy has suffered from the protests.  Bank deposits have been emptied as capital has moved out of the country to safer locations.  After years of central planning, there are few genuinely competitive industries and unemployment has soared to around 8%.  Foreign investment has been deterred by bureaucratic red tape, inefficiency and political interference.  Syria is ranked 144 out of 183 in the World Bank’s latest Ease of Business report, while the CIA World Factbook calculates that it requires 26 procedures to build a warehouse in the country.  If the worsening economy means soldiers are not paid, this could pose a serious challenge for Assad.

The Assad family are supported by the Alawite community for now.  But it is not clear that this support will continue as public opinion turns against the regime.  Comprising only 10% of the population, the Alawites will be reluctant to be tarnished with the atrocities that Assad is carrying out.  Fear of reprisals from Syria’s more numerous Sunni and Christian groups will cause splits amongst the ruling sectarian group as Assad’s position further deteriorates.

Weakened Assad may be, but he has certainly not been chastened by international condemnation.  The West must do more to secure a UN resolution condemning the attacks on civilians.  Support must be given to the Syrian opposition, both political and financial, as it has been given to the rebels in Libya. 

However, pragmatism and international law must underpin the West’s approach.  Bogged down in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq and with a stumbling economic recovery, the West does not have the resources or political will to commit to yet another war.  The deafening silence of Western hard power outside that of the USA, France and UK has exposed deep fissures within NATO.  Military intervention in Syria could prove the final breaking point for the Western Alliance and, after Iraq, unilateral military action without a UN resolution would be both unpalatable and unwise.

As protests in Syria grow and casualties mount it is unclear what will rise from the current medley of chaos.  Assad may survive, nevertheless his regime has been seriously weakened and it is unclear how he could re-unite the country with his image as a political and economic reformer in tatters.  Alternatively, Assad may fall which could lead to either a benign democratic future or a descent into sectarian strife.  What is certain, is that events have moved beyond any one group’s control.  As the Arab Spring moves into Summer, temperatures are rising. 

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