Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Stopping Syria (click to view)
Date: February 7, 2012
The diplomatic stalemate over the slaughter in Syria got even staler this week following a joint Russian-Chinese veto of a UN Security Council Resolution that would have called on President Bashir al-Assad to step down. The motion, which was proposed by Morocco, co-sponsored by the League of Arab States, and approved by the Council’s 13 other members, had represented the most significant diplomatic effort to date to address the Syrian government’s multi-month crackdown on its own people — which is soon set to pass a grim one year anniversary.
The strongest Mideast dictator to face an “Arab Spring” style uprising so far, Assad’s regime possesses powerful allies and a degree of strategic importance that was largely absent from earlier deposed tyrannies. In a
must-read article in the Wall Street Journal, Professor Fouad Ajami goes so far as to dub the whole mess the “last battle of the Cold War,” in the sense that it pits an old-fashioned Soviet-era client state against the idealistic insecurities of the western powers. Russia has billions of dollars of outstanding arms contracts with Assad, a decrepit but useful naval base on the country’s Mediterranean coast, and a historic friendship that dates back decades. America has a mushy sense that “something should be done.” As far as interests go, one party has significantly more at stake.
Though no one realistically expects a Russo-American war to break out over Syria, Putin’s intransigence does provide yet more discouragement to anyone hoping the west is gearing up for a rerun of last year’s Libya mission. Experts have warned the country is actually closer to being another Iraq; a nation of furious sectarian division barely held together by a single strongman, with Assad’s weird minority sect of Alawi Islam playing the role of Saddam’s Sunnism. To intervene military would thus almost certainly be an invitation for long-term pain for any occupying power, or, at the very least, merely swap the horrors of dictatorship for the horrors of a religio-ethnic civil war.
Small wonder than that President Obama, despite his increasingly swaggery approach to foreign affairs, has remained mostly cautious in his rhetoric so far, insisting, as usual, that while “all options are on the table,” he’s not seriously considering most of them. Like the Russians, he lamely hopes in public that a “political solution” can be found, even as that most political of institutions, the UN, has just finished proving itself worthless.
In this grim post-American era of ours, the best hope for the Syrians probably remains a form of limited intervention by their Muslim neighbors, who have slowly but surely emerged as some of Assad’s toughest critics. Closely linked with the equally unpopular and ambitious regime in Iran, neither an emboldened nor tottering Syria serves the interests of anyone in the neighborhood, and some observers have suggested an Arab-led intervention, led largely by Turkey to the north and Saudi Arabia to the south, is possible if stability descends much further. It’s already been widely reported that Turkey is covertly running guns to the Syrian rebels (who want more of this sort of thing, frankly) and the Turkish foreign minister is set to visit Washington this week to further strategize.
Should they chose to go all-in, strategic possibilities could include Arab League enforced no-fly zones or “safety zones” in various parts of Syria, or merely in-and-our maneuvers to liberate civilian refugees (ironically, similar to the services Syria itself once offered during Hezbollah's 2006 war with Israel). Relatively band-aid solutions by the imperial "fix-everything-forever" standards of the west, but certainly better than nothing.
My own instinct is to hope for a local solution. In the aftermath of Somalia, Kuwait, Kosovo, Iraq, etc, we’ve gotten so comfortable assuming that all international interventions — humanitarian or otherwise — have to be planned and led from western capitals the notion that Third World coalitions possess the capacity to address some of their own problems seems positively quaint. Yet if the goal is caution, care, precision, and moderation, it may be a proposal worth dusting off.
The question is whether or not both sides are prepared for the out-of-character roles that would be required in the case of a purely local action: the Arab states as military and strategic leaders taking responsibility for human rights violations in their own backyard, and the west as passive observers unable to call the shots.
Crazy, but it just might work.
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Good points! can't rep you for them. But in hindsight, we should also include Hussein in the lesser evils club. Even the 'nice' arab leaders have blood on their hands for trying to maintain order. King hussein of Jordan was behind the so called Black September incident. He was sick and tired of the PLO trying to run his country. We would do well to remember that Jordan is the Palestinian Arab state, with approximately 70% of the people living in Jordan referring to themselves as Palestinian. Jordan actually annexed the West Bank in 1950. The lebanese with israeli assistance finally ended 'Palestinian' interference in their country in a bloody fashion too. Really, if you want to look at in terms of numbers, the Israelis have been a hell of a lot less heavy handed towards the 'Palestinians' than their own fellow arabs have.
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