by Seth Kaplan | Nov 22, 2011 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Many Western leaders have called for regime change in Syria. As Barack Obama said in August:
We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.
Both the United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions. Turkey and the Arab League are likely to follow.
Many, including Richard Gowan of GD, bemoan the inability of the United Nations to act more resolutely.
But what exactly are all the leaders, analysts, and pundits promoting change in Syria actually expecting to happen? The Assad regime to simply hand over power and walk away after four decades?
This is highly unlikely. No other group has willingly given up power during the Arab Spring so far. In Libya, it took an eight-month civil war to topple the government. In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh continues to hang on, if precariously.
Moreover, the Assads have much more going for them then any of these other rulers. Despite some desertions, Syria’s military and internal security apparatus remains a cohesive force unlikely to disintegrate anytime soon. The economic and political elites are more cohesive, and supportive then those elsewhere—and more fearful of what change might bring. Despite growing hardship, few in Aleppo and Damascus, the country’s two largest cities, have defected. Iran is providing support for its closest ally. Western powers are unlikely to intervene, at least in any way similar to what happened in Libya.
Therefore, the regime is likely to hang on much longer then anyone now forecasts. And if it begins to buckle or actually falls, what follows is unlikely to be pretty. This is especially true given that the Syrian opposition is badly divided:
Seven months into the uprisings, the Syrian opposition has yet to develop a united voice and platform. Unless these disparate groups unite and present a credible and viable alternative to the Assad regime, both Syria’s fearful majority and the international community will find it difficult to effectively push for meaningful change in Damascus.
There are two particularly bad yet highly plausible scenarios for the country’s future if the pressure on the regime continues long enough.
In one, the government grows increasingly anxious about its hold on power, and unleashes an even more brutal crackdown
then what is now occurring, possibly on the scale of what it perpetrated in 1982 in Hama, when over 25,000 people were murdered.
In the second scenario, the government loses control over at least some of its territory, unleashing a sectarian civil war with ugly parallels to what occurred in Iraq in 2006-08 and Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. As Ed Husain of the Council on Foreign
Relations, one of the few people in the West repeatedly warning against the perils of pushing for regime change, wrote a few months ago:
The numbers being killed now will wither in comparison with a possible future civil war, if an increasingly sectarian Syria splinters between the ruling Alawites, the elite and urban Christians, the majority Sunnis, the Kurds, Druze and others. There is no civil society to engineer a peaceful transition, while Syria could plausibly become another Lebanon, acting as a proxy battleground for regional powers.
Unfortunately, there is some evidence that this is beginning to happen in Homs, Syria’s third largest city. As the New York Times reported over the weekend:
As it descends into sectarian hatred, Homs has emerged as a chilling window on what civil war in Syria could look like, just as some of Syria’s closest allies say the country appears to be heading in that direction. A spokesman for the Syrian opposition last week called the killings and kidnappings on both sides “a perilous threat to the revolution.” An American official called the strife in Homs “reminiscent of the former Yugoslavia,” where the very term “ethnic cleansing” originated in the 1990s. . . .
Here it is not so much a fight between armed defectors and government security forces, or protesters defying a crackdown. Rather, the struggle in Homs has dragged the communities themselves into a battle that residents fear, even as they accuse the government of trying to incite it as a way to divide and rule the diverse country.
The risks involved at least partly explain why Turkey, the country with perhaps the most leverage over Syria, has been so reluctant to act more forcefully. They are also a perfectly legitimate reason for Russia and China and some developing countries to oppose a UN resolution (there may be other self-interested reasons involved too of course). As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned last week, “This is all looking very much like a civil war.”
Given this context, it is worth reminding ourselves of a John Maynard Keynes dictum:
We should be very chary of sacrificing large numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end, however advantageous that may appear…. We can never know enough to make the chance worth taking… It is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the
transition…
by Richard Gowan | Nov 16, 2011 | Africa, Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
Syria is slipping further into chaos. It’s sad to think that the Security Council has been debating the situation there for almost half a year to no effect. Or, to be more accurate, the only effect has been to make lots of diplomats very unhappy, as I explain in the new edition of Pragati:
It’s hard to find a happy diplomat at the United Nations Security Council these days. Western officials grumble about the difficulty of negotiating with India, Brazil and South Africa (the IBSA countries) over the Syrian crisis, to say nothing of China and Russia. The non-Western powers, they suspect, are all plotting to frustrate the U.S. and Europe.
Piffle, reply the supposed plotters. The bleak mood in the Council is a result of the West’s distortion of the UN mandate to protect civilians in Libya. If NATO hadn’t used that as a basis for regime change, there might be real cooperation over Syria. Even the unhappiest European officials accept that other powers’ anger over Libya is genuine.
Does anyone gain anything from the stalemate? Russia arguably does. Earlier in the year it failed to halt Western interventions in not only Libya but also Côte d’Ivoire. As Russia’s main claim to leverage at the UN is its willingness to act as a spoiler, these set-backs made it look a shadow of itself. On Syria, its blocking power returned as it resisted – and in October vetoed – EU and US efforts to pass a resolution sanctioning Syria.
For China, the benefits have been less clear, as it prefers to look pragmatic on the Security Council. Nonetheless it felt obliged to side with Russia over Syria. But the real losers have been the IBSA countries, which have often looked trapped between the West and the Russo-Chinese axis as they have tried to respond to events in the Middle East.
But at least IBSA has emerged as a semi-credible diplomatic force in UN affairs, right? I’m not so sure:
The fact that IBSA voted as a bloc can be interpreted as a success – it is generally recognised that the trio of powers have been significant swing voters in the Security Council this year. But this may only be a temporary phenomenon. Brazil is approaching the end of its two-year term on the Council, and South Africa continues to have a greater stake in acting as the leader of the African bloc than in aligning with India. IBSA’s brief moment of importance in the Council could soon be forgotten, and India’s leverage duly reduced.
by David Steven | Nov 15, 2011 | UK
Over the weekend, Will Hutton offered a ‘modest proposal’ so bizarre that it must have left his colleagues at the Observer fearing for his sanity.
David Cameron, he suggested, should…
… travel to Germany and make a speech in German – however embarrassing – spelling out the choices. If Germany is unprepared to accept them, he should argue that the least bad option is not for Greece to leave the euro – but for Germany, whose economy is strong enough to take the shock, to do so.
He should say that while it was right for Britain not to join the single currency as it was previously constructed, if Germany were to act responsibly, Britain would peg sterling to a reformed euro and in the long run even consider joining the regime. Moreover, Britain would do this either way, he could argue – eventually joining a single currency in which Germany accepted its responsibilities or a single currency without Germany.
Now the idea that Cameron should offer to swap places with Angela Merkel at the heart of the Euro meltdown is, without doubt, genius. The Germans, I am told, feel cursed to stagger on endlessly chained to the corpses of weaker European nations. So… why not help out? Strap them to the UK instead!
But it’s Hutton’s tactics I worry about. Year after year, with consummate skill, he’s been inching [sorry, centimetring] Britain towards Euro membership.
Who can forget his moving plea from ’99 that the UK adopt the single currency because “we read the same bible, drink the same wine, haunt the same discos, play in the same Champions League” as our European neighbours?
Or his reassurances from 2002 that fears the Euro could crack were ‘scaremongering’ and ‘wishful thinking’? Or his masterful solution for the problem of one-size-fits-all interest rates (in a crisis, European countries survive by running up bigger deficits!)?
Or from November 2008, his Cassandra-like insight that only through immediate Euro entry – now, this minute – could the UK avoid ‘national bankruptcy’ and the ‘clutches of the IMF’?
Or perhaps most prophetic of all, his essay from just a fortnight ago, hailing European leaders for taking an ‘inspiring leap’ towards financial stability, by creating “a self-help club” in which every European country could be both strong and free?
But it’s the language thing that makes me fear Hutton is losing his marbles. Our PM may not be able to speak a word of yer’actual German, but he can do a hilarious German accent (this is taught to all boys as part of the British national curriculum). He even whipped it out on the campaign trail:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp4nwcBgx0A[/youtube]
What’s more, he’s almost certain to push things too far by borrowing a costume from Prince Harry to make his big day in Berlin memorable for all concerned. The likelihood of embarrassment is overwhelming! He’s sure to come across more John Cleese than JFK.
No – what Cameron should do, obviously, is resign forthwith and allow Nick Clegg a fluent German speaker to take over. Clegg could then appoint a government of technocrats to prep the UK for Euro membership. I nominate one Hutton, W as our next Finanzminister….
by David Steven | Nov 15, 2011 | Economics and development
Quote for the day:
The world has been slow to realize that we are living this year in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history. But now that the man in the street has become aware of what is happening, he, not knowing the why and wherefore, is as full to-day of what may prove excessive fears as, previously, when the trouble was first coming on, he was lacking in what would have been a reasonable anxiety. He begins to doubt the future. Is he now awakening from a pleasant dream to face the darkness of facts? Or dropping off into a nightmare which will pass away?
He need not be doubtful. The other was not a dream. This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men’s devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life—high, I mean, compared with, say, twenty years ago—and will soon learn to afford a standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time—perhaps for a long time.
John Maynard Keynes – The Great Slump of 1930.
