Category Archives: Syrian Opposition

Who are the Alawites?

By Aymeric Chauprade

Extracted and translated from a conference in french given in Funglode, Saint Domingue,  27th  november 2012:  “Où vont la Syrie et le Moyen-Orient ?”

http://www.realpolitik.tv/2012/11/aymeric-chauprade-ou-vont-la-syrie-et-le-moyen-orient/

…. “there is a need to understand who are the Alawites. This is a community issued, in the tenth century, in the borders of the Arab Empire and the Byzantine Empire, from a distant split of Shi’ism, and that practices a syncretism with elements of Shi’ism, Hellenistic pantheism of Persian Zoroastrianism and Byzantine Christianity. It is very important for our analysis to know that the Alawites are considered by Sunni Islam as the worst of heretics. The fourteenth century jurist Ibn Taymiyya Salafi, ancestor of the Wahhabi and a current important reference for Islamists worldwide, issued a fatwa calling for their systematic persecution and genocide.

This fatwa is still current among Salafis, Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood, that is to say, all those the Alawite power is facing right now!

Before the coup Hafez el-Assad in 1970, the Alawites have known persecution from mainstream Islam, Sunnism.

You still need to know that until 1970, the Sunni bourgeoisie were still buying, under a notarized contract, young Alawite slaves.

Things got better with the installation of the Baathist nationalist ideology in 1963, which is Arabism precedence over all other considerations, and especially 1970.

” In summary, today’s war is the new episode of bloody war supporters of Ibn Taymiyya against heretics Alawites, a war that has lasted since the fourteenth century! This fatwa is in my opinion a new source of potential genocide (similar to that of Rwanda) if the plan is to fall. This is an essential that Westerners are trying to ignore.

Hunted and persecuted for centuries, the Alawis had to take refuge in the coastal mountains arid between Lebanon and Turkey present while giving to their belief an hermetic and esoteric side, allowing themselves lies and concealment (the famous Taqqiya) to escape their tormentors.

But then you wonder what the Alawites have done to come to power?

Subject to foreign military occupations for centuries, the bourgeoisie Sunni Syria (a similar process occurred in Lebanon) committed the usual mistake of the rich after the country’s independence in 1943. The profession of arms was relegated to the poor and not the son of “good family.” The army was constituted by minorities: a majority of Alawites, but also Christians, Ismailis, Druze, Shia.

Hafez al-Assad came from one of these poor families of the Alawite community. He first became Chief of the Air Force and defense minister prior to seize power by force in order to give the community its revenge on History (with its allies Druze and Christians) .

So you understand immediately that the regime backed by 2 million Alawites, probably 2 to 3 million other minorities, but also a part of the Sunni bourgeoisie including Damascus, whose economic interests are now closely linked to dictatorship has no choice but to fight to the death.
When I say fight to the death, I mean to distinguish the regime from Bashar al-Assad. The regime is more powerful than Bashar and can get rid of  him if it considers that it is in its survival. But getting rid of possibly does not mean putting a democracy that would see inevitably (mathematically) the triumph of the Islamists, as in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen …

Christians in Syria have seen what happened to the Christians of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. They see what happens to the Copts in Egypt, after the victory of the Islamists. Druze also know that they are, as the Alawites, considered heretics  to be destroyed by the Salafi and the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is absolutely unrealistic to think, as we think in the West, that the Alawites will accept democratic reforms that would lead mechanically Salafists in power.

I repeat the mistake of thinking that the country went into civil war in 2011. It was already in 1980 when a commando Muslim Brotherhood  introduced itself into the school Cadet Air Force Aleppo, set aside cadets Sunnis and Alawites and massacred 80 Alawite cadets under the fatwa of Ibn Taymiyya. The Muslim Brotherhood have paid dearly in 1982 in Hama, a stronghold of the Brotherhood, the uncle of the current President exterminated  by making perhaps 20,000 dead. Sectarian violence have never really stopped but that does not interest the West because there was at that time no oil and gas agenda for Syria, or any agenda against Iran.

It is said that the regime is brutal and it is obviously incredibly brutal, but it is not  brutal by itself. Syria has risen from the Ottoman occupation and its methods of skinning alive, the French Mandate from 1920 to 1943, former Nazi refugees from 1945 who became advisers and counselors and then the KGB. It is obvious that there is nothing to expect from this regime in human rights, democratic reforms … But there is nothing to expect either from Islamist rebels who want to take power and who have a fatwa allowing them to  organize the genocide of the Alawites.   And elsewhere are we expecting something of Saudi Arabia in terms of Human Rights?

This Is Not a Revolution

The New-york review of books|

November 8, 2012
Hussein Agha
and Robert Malley|

All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

—Paul Simon

Darkness descends upon the Arab world. Waste, death, and destruction attend a fight for a better life. Outsiders compete for influence and settle accounts. The peaceful demonstrations with which this began, the lofty values that inspired them, become distant memories. Elections are festive occasions where political visions are an afterthought. The only consistent program is religious and is stirred by the past. A scramble for power is unleashed, without clear rules, values, or endpoint. It will not stop with regime change or survival. History does not move forward. It slips sideways.

Games occur within games: battles against autocratic regimes, a Sunni–Shiite confessional clash, a regional power struggle, a newly minted cold war. Nations divide, minorities awaken, sensing a chance to step out of the state’s confining restrictions. The picture is blurred. These are but fleeting fragments of a landscape still coming into its own, with only scrappy hints of an ultimate destination. The changes that are now believed to be essential are liable to be disregarded as mere anecdotes on an extended journey.

New or newly invigorated actors rush to the fore: the ill-defined “street,” prompt to mobilize, just as quick to disband; young protesters, central activists during the uprising, roadkill in its wake. The Muslim Brothers yesterday dismissed by the West as dangerous extremists are now embraced and feted as sensible, businesslike pragmatists. The more traditionalist Salafis, once allergic to all forms of politics, are now eager to compete in elections. There are shadowy armed groups and militias of dubious allegiance and unknown benefactors as well as gangs, criminals, highwaymen, and kidnappers.

Alliances are topsy-turvy, defy logic, are unfamiliar and shifting. Theocratic regimes back secularists; tyrannies promote democracy; the US forms partnerships with Islamists; Islamists support Western military intervention. Arab nationalists side with regimes they have long combated; liberals side with Islamists with whom they then come to blows. Saudi Arabia backs secularists against the Muslim Brothers and Salafis against secularists. The US is allied with Iraq, which is allied with Iran, which supports the Syrian regime, which the US hopes to help topple. The US is also allied with Qatar, which subsidizes Hamas, and with Saudi Arabia, which funds the Salafis who inspire jihadists who kill Americans wherever they can.

In record time, Turkey evolved from having zero problems with its neighbors to nothing but problems with them. It has alienated Iran, angered Iraq, and had a row with Israel. It virtually is at war with Syria. Iraqi Kurds are now Ankara’s allies, even as it wages war against its own Kurds and even as its policies in Iraq and Syria embolden secessionist tendencies in Turkey itself.

For years, Iran opposed Arab regimes, cultivating ties with Islamists with whose religious outlook it felt it could make common cause. As soon as they take power, the Islamists seek to reassure their former Saudi and Western foes and distance themselves from Tehran despite Iran’s courting. The Iranian regime will feel obliged to diversify its alliances, reach out to non-Islamists who feel abandoned by the nascent order and appalled by the budding partnership between Islamists and the US. Iran has experience in such matters: for the past three decades, it has allied itself with secular Syria even as Damascus suppressed its Islamists.

When goals converge, motivations differ. The US cooperated with Gulf Arab monarchies and sheikhdoms in deposing Qaddafi yesterday and in opposing Assad today. It says it must be on the right side of history. Yet those regimes do not respect at home the rights they piously pursue abroad. Their purpose is neither democracy nor open societies. They are engaged in a struggle for regional domination. What, other than treasure, can proponents of a self-styled democratic uprising find in countries whose own system of governance is anathema to the democratic project they allegedly promote?

The new system of alliances hinges on too many false assumptions and masks too many deep incongruities. It is not healthy because it cannot be real. Something is wrong. Something is unnatural. It cannot end well.

A media war that started in Egypt reaches its zenith in Syria. Each side shows only its own, amplifies the numbers, disregards the rest. In Bahrain, the opposite is true. No matter how many opponents of the regime turn up, few take notice. It does not register on the attention scale. Not long ago, footage from Libya glorified motley fighters with colorful bandanas and triumphant spiel. The real battles, bloody and often from the skies, raged elsewhere. Casualties were invisible.

Throngs gather in Tahrir Square. The camera zooms in on protesters. What about the unseen millions who stayed at home? Did they rejoice at Mubarak’s overthrow or quietly lament his departure? How do Egyptians feel about the current disorder, unrest, economic collapse, and political uncertainty? In the elections that ensued, 50 percent did not vote. Of those who did, half voted for the representative of the old order. Who will look after those who lie on the other side of the right side of history?

Most Syrians fight neither to defend the regime nor to support the opposition. They are at the receiving end of this vicious confrontation, their wishes unnoticed, their voices unheard, their fates forgotten. The camera becomes an integral part of the unrest, a tool of mobilization, propaganda, and incitement. The military imbalance favors the old regimes but is often more than compensated for by the media imbalance that favors the new forces. The former Libyan regime had Qaddafi’s bizarre rhetoric; Assad’s Syria relies on its discredited state-run media. It’s hardly a contest. In the battle for public sympathy, in the age of news-laundering, the old orders never stood a chance.

In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain, no unifying figure of stature has emerged with the capacity to shape a new path. There is scant leadership. Where there is leadership, it tends to be by committee. Where there are committees, they emerge mysteriously to assume authority no one has granted them. More often than not, legitimacy is bestowed from abroad: the West provides respectability and exposure; Gulf Arab states supply resources and support; international organizations offer validity and succor.

Those in charge often lack the strength that comes from a clear and loyal domestic constituency; they need foreign approval and so they must be cautious, adjust their positions to what outsiders accept. Past revolutionary leaders were not driven by such considerations. For better or for worse, they were stubbornly independent and took pride in rebuffing foreign interference.

Not unlike the rulers they helped depose, Islamists placate the West. Not unlike those they replaced, who used the Islamists as scarecrows to keep the West by their side, the Muslim Brotherhood waves the specter of what might come next should it fail now: the Salafis who, for their part and not unlike the Brothers of yore, are torn between fealty to their traditions and the taste of power.

It’s a game of musical chairs. In Egypt, Salafis play the part once played by the Muslim Brotherhood; the Brotherhood plays the part once played by the Mubarak regime. In Palestine, Islamic Jihad is the new Hamas, firing rockets to embarrass Gaza’s rulers; Hamas, the new Fatah, claiming to be a resistance movement while clamping down on those who dare resist; Fatah, a version of the old Arab autocracies it once lambasted. How far off is the day when Salafis present themselves to the world as the preferable alternative to jihadists?

Egyptian politics are wedged between the triumphant mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, more hard-line Salafis, anxious non-Islamists, and remnants of the old order. As the victorious Brotherhood tries to reach an arrangement with the rest, the political future is a blur. The speed and elegance with which the new president, Mohamed Morsi, retired or sidelined the old military leaders and the quiet with which this daring move was greeted suggest that the Islamists’ confidence has grown, that they are willing to move at a faster pace.

Tunisia is a mixed tale. The transition has been largely peaceful; the an-Nahda party, which won the elections last October, offers a pragmatic, moderate face of Islamism. But its efforts to consolidate power are a source of nervousness. Mistrust between secularists and Islamists is growing; socioeconomic protests at times become violent. Salafis lurk in the wings, assailing symbols of modern society, free speech, and gender equality.

In Yemen, former president Saleh is out of power but not offstage. One war brews in the north, another in the south. Jihadists flex their muscles. The young revolutionaries who dreamed of a complete change can only watch as different factions of the same old elite rearrange the deck. Saudis, Iranians, and Qataris sponsor their own factions. Minor clashes could escalate into major confrontations. Meanwhile, US drones eliminate al-Qaeda operatives and whoever happens to be in their vicinity.

Day by day, the civil war in Syria takes on an uglier, more sectarian hue. The country has become an arena for a regional proxy war. The opposition is an eclectic assortment of Muslim Brothers, Salafis, peaceful protesters, armed militants, Kurds, soldiers who have defected, tribal elements, and foreign fighters. There is little that either the regime or the opposition won’t contemplate in their desperation to triumph. The state, society, and an ancient culture collapse. The conflict engulfs the region.

The battle in Syria also is a battle for Iraq. Sunni Arab states have not accepted the loss of Baghdad to Shiites and, in their eyes, to Safavid Iranians. A Sunni takeover in Syria will revive their colleagues’ fortunes in Iraq. Militant Iraqi Sunnis are emboldened and al-Qaeda is revitalized. A war for Iraq’s reconquest will be joined by its neighbors. The region cares about Syria. It obsesses about Iraq.

Islamists in the region await the outcome in Syria. They do not wish to bite off more than they can chew. If patience is the Islamist first principle, consolidation of gains is the second. Should Syria fall, Jordan could be next. Its peculiar demography—a Palestinian majority ruled over by a trans-Jordanian minority—has been a boon to the regime: the two communities bear deep grievances against the Hashemite rulers yet distrust each other more. That could change in the face of the unifying power of Islam for which ethnicity, in theory at least, is of little consequence.

Weaker entities may follow. In northern Lebanon, Islamist and Salafi groups actively support the Syrian opposition, with whom they may have more in common than with Lebanese Shiites and Christians. From the outset a fragile contraption, Lebanon is pulled in competing directions: some would look to a new Sunni-dominated Syria with envy, perhaps a yearning to join. Others would look to it with fright and despair.

In Bahrain, a Sunni monarchy intent on retaining power and privilege violently suppresses the majority Shiites. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states come to their ally’s rescue. The West, so loud elsewhere, is mute. When Libya holds elections, Islamists do not fare well; their opponents believe they finally achieved their one victory in a country that has no tradition of political openness, lacks a state, and is sated with armed militias that regularly engage in deadly clashes. An octogenarian leadership in Saudi Arabia struggles with a looming transition, lives in fear of Iran and its own population, doles out cash to fend off dissatisfaction. How long can all this last?

Mohamed Morsi; drawing by John Springs

In some countries, regimes will be toppled, in others they will survive. Forces that have been defeated are unlikely to have been crushed. They will regroup and try to fight back. The balance of power is not clear-cut. Victory does not necessarily strengthen the victor.

Those in power occupy the state, but it is an asset that might prove of limited value. Inherently weak and with meager legitimacy, Arab states tend to be viewed by their citizens with suspicion, extraneous bodies superimposed on more deeply rooted, familiar social structures with long, continuous histories. They enjoy neither the acceptability nor the authority of their counterparts elsewhere. Where uprisings occur, the ability of these states to function weakens further as their coercive power erodes.

To be in the seat of power need not mean to exercise power. In Lebanon, the pro-West March 14 coalition, invigorated while in opposition, was deflated after it formed the cabinet in 2005. Hezbollah has never been more on the defensive or enjoyed less moral authority than since it became the major force behind the government. Those out of power face fewer constraints. They have the luxury to denounce their rulers’ failings, the freedom that comes with the absence of responsibility. In a porous, polarized Middle East, they enjoy access to readily available outside support.

To be in charge, to operate along formal, official, state channels, can encumber as much as empower. Syria’s military withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005 did not curb its influence; Damascus simply exerted it more surreptitiously, without public glare and accountability. Tomorrow, a similar pattern might hold in Syria itself. The regime’s collapse would be a significant blow to Iran and Hezbollah, but one can wonder how devastating. The day after such a long and violent conflict is more likely to witness chaos than stability, a scramble for power rather than a strong central government. Defeated and excluded political forces will seek help from any source and solicit foreign patrons regardless of their identity. To exploit disorder is a practice in which Iran and Hezbollah are far better versed than their foes. Without a Syrian regime whose interests they need to take into account and whose constraints they need to abide by, they might be able to act more freely.

The Muslim Brotherhood prevails. The newly elected Egyptian president comes from their ranks. They rule in Tunisia. They control Gaza. They have gained in Morocco. In Syria and Jordan too, their time might come.

The Muslim Brotherhood prevails: those are weighty and, not long ago, unthinkable, unutterable words. The Brothers survived eighty years in the underground and the trenches, hounded, tortured, and killed, forced to compromise and bide their time. The fight between Islamism and Arab nationalism has been long, tortuous, and bloody. Might the end be near?

World War I and the ensuing European imperial ascent halted four centuries of Islamic Ottoman rule. With fits and starts, the next century would be that of Arab nationalism. To many, this was an alien, unnatural, inauthentic Western import—a deviation that begged to be rectified. Forced to adjust their views, the Islamists acknowledged the confines of the nation-state and irreligious rule. But their targets remained the nationalist leaders and their disfigured successors.

Last year, they helped topple the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, the pale successors of the original nationalists. The Islamists had more worthy and dangerous adversaries in mind. They struck at Ben Ali and Mubarak, but the founding fathers—Habib Bourguiba and Gamal Abdel Nasser—were in their sights. They reckon they have corrected history. They have revived the era of musulmans sans frontières.

What will all this mean? The Islamists are loath either to share power achieved at high cost or to squander gains so patiently acquired. They must balance among their own restive rank-and-file, a nervous larger society, and an undecided international community. The temptation to strike fast pulls in one direction; the desire to reassure tugs in another. In general, they will prefer to eschew coercion, awaken the people to their dormant Islamic nature rather than foist it upon them. They will try to do it all: rule, enact social transformations incrementally, and be true to themselves without becoming a menace to others.

The Islamists propose a bargain. In exchange for economic aid and political support, they will not threaten what they believe are core Western interests: regional stability, Israel, the fight against terror, energy flow. No danger to Western security. No commercial war. The showdown with the Jewish state can wait. The focus will be on the slow, steady shaping of Islamic societies. The US and Europe may voice concern, even indignation at such a domestic makeover. But they’ll get over it. Just as they got over the austere fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia. Bartering—as in, we’ll take care of your needs, let us take care of ours—Islamists feel, will do the trick. Looking at history, who can blame them?

Mubarak was toppled in part because he was viewed as excessively subservient to the West, yet the Islamists who succeed him might offer the West a sweeter because more sustainable deal. They think they can get away with what he could not. Stripped of his nationalist mantle, Mubarak had little to fall back on; he was a naked autocrat. The Muslim Brothers by comparison have a much broader program—moral, social, cultural. Islamists feel they can still follow their convictions, even if they are not faithfully anti-Western. They can moderate, dilute, defer.

Unlike the close allies of the West they have replaced, Islamists are heard calling for NATO military intervention in Libya yesterday, Syria today, wherever they entertain the hope to take over tomorrow. One can use the distant infidels, who will not stay around for long, to jettison local infidels, who have hounded them for decades. Rejection of foreign interference, once a centerpiece of the post-independence outlook, is no longer the order of the day. It is castigated as counterrevolutionary.

What the US sought to obtain over decades through meddling and imposition, it might now obtain via acquiescence: Arab regimes that will not challenge Western interests. Little wonder that many in the region are persuaded that America was complicit in the Islamists’ rise, a quiet partner in what has been happening.

Everywhere, Israel faces the rise of Islam, of militancy, of radicalism. Former allies are gone; erstwhile foes reign supreme. But the Islamists have different and broader objectives. They wish to promote their Islamic project, which means consolidating their rule where they can, refraining from alienating the West, and avoiding perilous and precocious clashes with Israel. In this scheme, the presence of a Jewish state is and will remain intolerable, but it is probably the last piece of a larger puzzle that may never be fully assembled.

The quest to establish an independent, sovereign Palestinian state was never at the heart of the Islamist project. Hamas, the Palestinian chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, harbors grander, less territorially confined but also less immediately achievable designs. Despite Hamas’s circumlocutions and notwithstanding its political evolution, it never truly deviated from its original view—the Jewish state is illegitimate and all the land of historic Palestine is inherently Islamic. If the current balance of power is not in your favor, wait and do what you can to take care of the disparity. The rest is tactics.

The Palestinian question has been the preserve of the Palestinian national movement. As of the late 1980s, its declared goal became a sovereign state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Alternatives, whether interim or temporary, have been flatly rejected. The Islamists’ plan may be more ambitious and grandiose but more flexible and elastic. For them, a diminutive, amputated state, hemmed in by Israel, dependent on its goodwill, predicated on its recognition, and entailing an end to the conflict, is not worth fighting for.

They can live with a range of transient arrangements: an interim agreement; a long-term truce, or hudna; a possible West Bank confederation with Jordan, with Gaza moving toward Egypt. All will advance the further Islamization of Palestinian society. All permit Hamas to turn to its social, cultural, and religious agenda, its true calling. All allow Hamas to maintain the conflict with Israel without having to wage it. None violates Hamas’s core tenets. It can put its ultimate goal on hold. Someday, the time for Palestine, for Jerusalem may come. Not now.

In the age of Arab Islamism, Israel may find Hamas’s purported intransigence more malleable than Fatah’s ostensible moderation. Israel fears the Islamic awakening. But the more immediate threat could be to the Palestinian national movement. There is no energy left in the independence project; associated with the old politics and long-worn-out leaderships, it has expended itself. Fatah and the PLO will have no place in the new world. The two-state solution is no one’s primary concern. It might expire not because of violence, settlements, or America’s inexpert role. It might perish of indifference…..

Read More: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/08/not-revolution/?pagination=false

Is the Glass Half Full for Syria’s Assad?

He may no longer control huge swathes of Syrian territory, but his forces appear nowhere near collapse. Over the past 18 months, at least, the dictator has beaten the odds
By Tony Karon | @tonykaron | October 11, 2012 | 1

Winter is coming, and with it the near certainty that the lot of millions of suffering Syrians will get substantially worse. Some 335,000 and counting find themselves in refugee camps in neighboring Turkey and Jordan, the lucky among them in pre-fabricated structures provided in some of the Turkish camps, the vast majority huddled in tents. But for millions more back home, the brutal ravages of an 18-month civil war that has claimed as many as 30,000 lives must now be endured under the growing privations of a siege economy imposed by war and sanctions, the winter chill and shortages of everything from fuel to medicines and foodstuffs raising the specter of disease and hunger along with the threat of instant death from rockets and bombs.

But one group of Syrians may be greeting the oncoming winter with a grim sense of satisfaction: As bad as things may be, President Bashar al-Assad and his entourage — and those who are willing to fight and die to keep in power — know that for them, things could be a whole lot worse. Sure, the regime has lost control of vast swathes of territory that appear to be intractably under the control of insurgents. But if the rebels are able to control much of the countryside, they remain hopelessly outgunned in the head-to-head fight for the major cities, with no sign of any heavy weapons deliveries from their allies abroad, much less a NATO cavalry riding to the rescue as it had done in Libya. The rebels continue to be plagued by divisions, and Western powers are increasingly anxious over the influence of salafist extremists within the armed insurgency.

The expected collapse of Assad’s armed forces has failed to materialize, and defections to the rebel side have slowed to a trickle. Instead of signaling an imminent denouement, the incremental gains and losses of each side along the shifting front-lines suggests a strategic stalemate, in which neither side is capable of delivering the other a knockout blow. Against that backdrop, the latest developments on Syria’s borders with Turkey and Jordan in recent days and weeks appear to be symptoms of that stalemate, rather than signs of imminent outside intervention. ”If this continues we will respond with greater force,” said Turkey’s military chief, General Necdet Özel, Wednesday, during a visit to the Turkish border town of Akçakale, which had suffered six days of artillery fire from Syria. Turkey had responded in kind to the shelling that began last week, and on Wednesday it intercepted and inspected (and later released, after confiscating communication equipment) a Syria-bound civilian airliner on suspicion of carrying weapons from Moscow.

But for all Turkey’s bluster — and NATO’s obligatory vows “to protect and defend Turkey if necessary” — the fact that the provocative shelling from the Syrian side continued for six days suggests that Assad is calling the bluff of his old friend, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A majority of the Turkish public opposes sending troops into Syria; the war has already imposed an economic burden on Turkey through the cutoff of trade and the refugee crisis, and it has also boosted the fortunes of the separatist PKK insurgency among Turkey’s Kurds as well as raising tensions with its Alawite and Alevi minorities. The Western powers without whose active involvement most analysts concur Turkey might find its capabilities stretched by a solo Syria intervention show no appetite for that option.

Alarmed by the sense that Washington is preparing for a scenario in which the Syria war drags on for many months yet, some of Turkey’s recent moves may point to a growing urgency in Ankara about quickly resolving the Syria crisis, rather than living with the consequences of a long war.  Foreign minister Ahmed Davutoglu last weekend publicly nominated Assad’s deputy president, Farouk al-Sharaa, as an acceptable figure to head a transitional government, a suggestion quickly rejected by rebel groups.

Even the reported deployment of some 150 U.S. soldiers in neighboring Jordan to help that country plan for various Syria contingencies is unlikely to unduly trouble Damascus. Reports of the deployment suggests its purpose is to help “insulate” a key regional ally from the fallout on its own terrain from Syria’s civil war, and perhaps to prepare for an emergency contingency of securing Syria’s stock of chemical weapons should the regime be in danger of losing control of them. The political consensus in Washington opposes direct military intervention in Syria, even if there are differences over the question of facilitating arms transfers to the rebels.

Insulating Jordan could even be a two-way street, not only preventing the Syrian military from conducting cross-border operations but also preventing anti-Assad insurgents using it as a sanctuary from which to stage attacks: The salafist current in the Syrian insurgency would, in the long-term, pose as much threat to the Hashemite monarchy as to the Assad dictatorship, and Jordan hardly wants jihadists operating on its own soil, even if their immediate target is in Damascus. It may also want to avoid the sort of artillery barrages that raged across the Turkey-Syria border last week, which are likely to have begun because the border territory on the Syrian side is in rebel hands, and Turkey has been allowing the rebels to operate from its territory. Unable to directly retake that ground, Assad’s forces have instead resorted to shelling rebel held border areas, and apparently deliberately firing into Turkey, too.

Things are hardly looking good for Assad at this point.  His prospects for defeating the rebellion and restoring control over all of Syria appear remote. He governs by naked force and fear of the alternative, and even then, over a shrinking domain. Still, he’s far from beaten, and if anything, the more immediate danger may be that Syria itself is breaking up into warring fiefdoms along the lines seen in neighboring Lebanon from the 1970s until 1992.

Assad’s opponents, of course, had hoped that he would, by now, have been removed from the scene, either by exile, imprisonment or death.  But the regime itself appears to have either chosen, or stumbled onto,  the terrain of sectarian civil war — the “Milosevic Option” we dubbed it last January – stirring fears of an extremist-led Sunni rebellion to rally his own Alawite sect and other minorities, and even the urban Sunni bourgeoisie, and then making that a self-fulfilling prophecy by violently suppressing peaceful protests. Assad also coolly assessed the regional and international strategic balance and concluded that he could count on strong backing from Iran and Russia against any attempt to dispatch him a la Gaddafi.

Milosevic, of course,  eventually got his comeuppance at the hands of his own people, and died in a prison cell at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It may well be that a similar fate eventually awaits Assad. But Milosevic was ousted eight years after the beginning of the wars that ended Yugoslavia, and in the interim, the Serbian strongman had succeeded in making himself indispensable to the process ending the very wars he’d played a major role in starting. That moment came when ending the war became a greater priority in the minds of the global power brokers than changing the power arrangements. Assad if far from achieving that goal, and he may never do so. But with the second anniversary of the Syrian rebellion just over four months away, he may have more reason for satisfaction over the course of events, at this point,  than do his adversaries.
Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/10/11/is-the-glass-half-full-for-syrias-assad/#ixzz28zoLNjxO

On Syria and way beyond, an interview with Guenter Meyer

On Syria and way beyond
By Lars Schall

One of Europe’s most outstanding experts on the Middle East, Professor Guenter Meyer, addresses in this exclusive in-depth interview for Asia Times Online the Syrian civil war and its international dimensions.

Professor Dr Guenter Meyer has for almost 40 years carried out empirical research on the social, economic and political development in Arab countries and has published more than 150 books and articles, especially on Syria, Egypt, Yemen and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. He directs the Center for Research on the Arab World at the Johannes Gutenberg

University in Mainz, Germany, which is one of the world’s leading information centers for the dissemination of news and research on the Middle East. Professor Meyer is chairman of the German Middle East Studies Association (DAVO), president of the European Association for Middle Eastern Studies (EURAMES), and chairman of the International Advisory Council of the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES).

Lars Schall: Professor Meyer, since our perceptions are framed by the media, how do you feel about the coverage of the conflict in Syria in the Western media?

Guenter Meyer: My perceptions are not only framed by the media, but also by my own experience in Syria and by contact with Syrians, other Arab experts and political activists of the Arab spring. The information I receive from these sources and also from Arab news media covers a much wider range of views and assessments than the rather one-sided reporting in the majority of the Western media.

LS: What kind of things do you have to criticize in particular?

GM: Until recently mainstream reporting in most Western media was clearly biased. It focused mainly on the distinction between the “bad” Syrian regime, which has to be toppled, and the “good” opposition, which has to be supported because it is fighting against a corrupt, authoritarian and brutal government. This perception has changed gradually during the past few months. More and more media are reporting about the conflicting interests of the highly fragmented oppositional groups as well as about the atrocities of the rebel groups and their crimes committed against the civilian population, especially against Alawites but also against Christians.

The influx of Salafis, jihadis and followers of al-Qaeda and the expectation that radical Sunni Islamists will control Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad are disturbing themes that are now also reported in Western media. After a long delay, the news coverage of the development in Syria does no longer focus only on spreading the political view of the “Friends of Syria”, but has started to provide a more comprehensive picture about the highly complex situation in Syria.

Nevertheless, there is still a bias when it comes to the reporting of massacres. The majority of Western media – and also Western governments – tend to take the information offered by oppositional sources for granted that government forces, in particular the Shabiha militia, are responsible for the cruel killings of civilians, many of them women and children. At the same time, evidences of a systematic “massacre marketing strategy” [1] by the rebels are rejected as propaganda of the Assad regime. It is obvious that in many cases, especially in the massacres with the highest number of victims at Houla [2] and Daraya [3] oppositional forces committed brutal crimes against civilians in order just to blame the government for these massacres. Through this strategy they try to manipulate public opinion and influence political decision making against the Syrian regime.

LS: Would you say that those who want to explore the interests that collide in the conflict in Syria would do well to examine the geopolitical importance of Syria for the Eurasian energy chessboard? I mean, ultimately Syria is a main transport hub for future oil and gas pipelines, right?

GM: Whenever you try to analyze political conflicts in the Middle East and get to the bottom you are likely to find oil or gas. The present conflict has been linked to Syria’s role as transit country for Iranian gas export. Last year, a contract was signed between Iran, Iraq and Syria to build a natural gas pipeline by 2016 from Iran’s giant South Pars field to the Syrian Mediterranean coast in order to supply Lebanon and Europa with gas. As a result Turkey would loose her highly profitable and political important position as the dominant transit country for gas from Russia and the Caspian Basin. [4]

Could this expected competition have been a reason for the Turkish government to give up its good relations with the Syrian regime and support the opposition? This is rather unlikely. During the last few years, Iran has signed numerous Memoranda of Understanding and contracts with foreign governments and companies to exploit Iranian gas and oil fields and to build pipelines. None of these schemes has been executed, as a result of the US embargo against Iran. Therefore, it has to be supposed that the contract to build a pipeline to Syria was signed mainly for domestic political reasons of the Iranian government. One has also to question the economic viability of this project. Why should gas from Southern Iran be exported to Europe when the highest demand for Iranian gas comes from neighboring Pakistan and India?

There is another project that would make much more sense. In 2009, Qatar had proposed to build a pipeline from the emirate’s giant gas fields via Syria to Turkey to be connected with other pipelines to Europe. [5] Based on this scheme, Assad loyalists had claimed that the unrest in Syria is not an uprising but a Qatari-instigated aggression designed to dominate the country and ensure Qatari access to the Mediterranean Sea for its gas export. However, this argument can be regarded as a conspiracy theory. [6]

LS: Are the discovered energy resources in the Eastern Mediterranean and Levantine Basin also of interest here?

GM: The untapped natural gas finds are extremely important for Israel, which will no longer have to rely on the insecure supply of gas from Egypt. The discovered gas reserves are so huge that Israel can not only achieve energy independence but will also benefit from lucrative export deals. Further gas and even oil reserves are expected to be discovered in the offshore areas of Syria and Lebanon. [7] Nevertheless, the newly discovered resources have no direct impact on the present crisis in Syria.

LS: When it comes to the Western powers, are they especially intended to weaken the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis?

GM: There are numerous statements from the US government which stress the geostrategic importance of the ousting of the Syrian regime so that both Iran and Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon will loose their most important ally. The Iranian and Syrian supply of military equipment to Hezbollah will no longer be possible. The weakening of the military force of this Shiite organization means that its impact on the power structure of Lebanon and especially its ability to attack Israel will dramatically decline. [8] The fall of Bashar Al-Assad will also weaken the influence of Russia and China in the Middle East and strengthen the role of the US and Saudi Arabia in this region.

LS: Are we currently experiencing a “Balkanisation of Syria” or a “Balkanisation of the Middle East” in general?

GM: During the last decades Syria has been a secular state with a strong focus on pan-Arabism. Now the ethnic and religious frictions have become a dominant factor and threaten the unity of the Syrian state. The worst case scenario would indeed be a “Balkanization” for Syria, which means that the country is split into a northeastern Kurdish state providing a safe haven for the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] and a nightmare for Turkey, an Alawite state in the western mountains and the coastal area, a tiny Druze enclave in the south, and a Sunni state in central Syria. Only the last one would probably have sufficient economic potential to exist on the long run.

Other experts suggest a “Lebanonization” scenario that pins down the Syrian army and weakens the central government in Damascus. [9] The model of an “Iraqization” of Syria might also have chances to become reality, with several autonomous or semi-autonomous regions. Similar demands are also raised in the oil-rich east of Libya, where large parts of the population no longer want to be dominated by the center of the political power in Tripolitania, the western region of Libya.

LS: Do we see in Syria a similar situation as earlier in Libya or is it very different?

GM: The situation in Libya was completely different. Gaddafi’s military forces were far too weak to resist the combined military power of NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] which was authorized by the UN Security Council to intervene in Libya. Large parts of the population and almost the entire east of Libya opposed the authoritarian regime so that foreign advisers were able to move freely in this part of the country, support the oppositional fighter groups with heavy weapons and train them how to use the sophisticated military equipment.

Bashar Al-Assad, on the other hand, can rely on the excellently trained and best-equipped Republican Guards and the 4th Armored Division – elite troops who are almost entirely Alawites. The Syrian air force and in particular the air defense force are equipped with the latest Russian military technology. A recent analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came to the conclusion that the Syrian air defense is five times more sophisticated than [former Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi’s. [10]

A military offensive by foreign troops to oust Bashar al-Assad would be an extremely risky and expensive operation. In addition, there is no chance that Russia and China will accept a UN resolution for a military intervention in Syria. Under these circumstances, the US, France and the UK have so far only resorted to training opposition fighters on Turkish territory close to the northwestern border of Syria and to supplying them with communication means and other non-lethal equipment. At the same time, Iran is using civilian aircraft to fly military personnel and large quantities of weapons across Iraqi airspace to help Syria crush the uprising, according to a Western intelligence report seen by Reuters. The Iraqi government, however, denies that such flights are taking place.

LS:We know that forces of al-Qaeda are fighting on Syrian soil. Ed Husain, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote about this:

By and large, Free Syrian Army (FSA) battalions are tired, divided, chaotic, and ineffective. Feeling abandoned by the West, rebel forces are increasingly demoralized … Al-Qaeda fighters, however, may help improve morale. The influx of jihadis brings discipline, religious fervor, battle experience from Iraq, funding from Sunni sympathizers in the Gulf, and most importantly, deadly results. In short, the FSA needs al-Qaeda now. [11]

That’s quite a statement after more than 10 years of the so called “War on Terror”, isn’t it?

GM: Indeed! There are many similar reports – among others from the Eastern Euphrates valley near the Iraqi border – where opposition fighters had for several months tried in vain to take over garrisons from the Syrian army. At last, they asked an al-Qaeda group for support. As a result of their attacks the army withdrew from this base within a few days.

The al-Qaeda fighters and jihadis are not only from Arab countries, especially from Iraq, Libya, the Arabian Peninsula, but also from Pakistan and include even radical Islamists from European countries. Their number is rapidly growing. This is the major reason why the US government has been so reluctant to supply the opposition fighters with surface-to-air missiles, which might end up in the hands of al-Qaeda or Hezbollah. It has only recently been reported that the Free Syrian Army acquired 14 Stinger missiles. So far, however, it has not been confirmed that these weapons were used to attack Syrian fighter planes and helicopter gunships [12].

LS: What kind of importance has it that al-Qaeda is a Sunni terrorist organization?

GM: About 70% of the Syrian population are Sunnis. Many of them regard the ruling Alawites not as real Muslims. The same applies to al-Qaeda, which demands that all Muslims should unite in order to eradicate the Alawite “infidels”. However, this does not mean that al-Qaeda and other foreign jihadis are supported by all Syrian Sunnis. Quite the contrary. The vast majority is rejecting both the extremist views and the intervention of radical foreign Islamists.

LS: It is said that Syria’s ruler, Bashar al-Assad, could use chemical weapons. What is your view on that?

GM: The regime has assured that it will never use chemical or biological weapons. This statement can be regarded as reliable because the use of weapons of mass destruction or even the movement of such weapons would mean “crossing the red line”, as President Obama threatened. A massive military intervention against the Syrian government would be the consequence [13]

However, there are detailed reports that NATO powers in coordination with Saudi Arabia are preparing a fake attack with chemical weapons in southern Syria for which the Assad regime will be blamed in order to justify a massive international invasion. [14]

LS: Do we observe in the Syrian conflict certain developments like under a microscope: the US can no longer afford financially some certain types of adventures and has reached the limits of its influence, while the Russians and the Chinese don’t want to be told what to do in the Middle East?

GM: The financial aspect is very important from the perspective of the US government, but there is also President Obama’s promise “to bring our boys back home”. A new American involvement in another war is extremely unpopular, especially during the present presidential election campaign. Concerning Russia and China, they have important geostrategic interests in Syria. There is no compelling reason why they should give up this comfortable and influential position.

LS: With regard to the external influences, it was written recently that European and Arab states pay high government officials, if they turn away from Assad. [15] Your thoughts on this?

GM: This applies not only to leading representatives of the Syrian regime, but especially to members of the Syrian army. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have publicly announced that they will spend at least US$300 million to pay the salaries of the oppositional fighters and also financial incentives to motivate soldiers from all ranks to defect from the military forces and to join the oppositional troops. Under these circumstances, it is really astounding that only so few officers, generals and leading members of the regime have defected until now. This underlines how stable the power of the government, the military and the security services still is.

LS: How would a European attitude look like be considered worthy of support?

GM: Let me start by explaining why the present European attitude is not worthy of support. The leading governments of the EU have discarded a political solution of the Syrian conflict and opted instead for the – at least indirect – support for a military ousting of the Assad regime. They are co-operating in particular with the Syrian National Council (SNC), which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and which consists mainly of Syrians who have lived for a long time in Western countries, especially in the US. These people want to rule post-Assad Syria, but they are by no means accepted by the majority of the population living in Syria.

In Berlin, for example, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik) in cooperation with the US Institute of Peace arranged the facilities for members of the Syrian opposition and international experts to meet in order to plan for “The Day After”. [16] The result is an agenda to create a new political system in Syria according to Western democratic standards and values after the fall of the present regime.

This plan was designed without any knowledge about the future distribution of power among the various forces that might be involved in the toppling of the government, and with only a little participation of the numerous oppositional groups inside Syria. It is not surprising that such a plan was rejected by members of the inner Syrian opposition as an “academic exercise” with no relevance at a time when the outcome of the Syrian crisis is still completely open. The same applies to various government-sponsored committees planning the Syrian future in Paris, Rome, Istanbul and Cairo.

The frequent demands that the extremely heterogeneous opposition should unite have turned out to be futile. This applies also to the latest attempt of the French President Francois Hollande, who also offered to recognize a new Syrian government-in-exile. The proposal was immediately rejected by the US government as untimely due to the lack of unity among the opposition groups.

Much more relevant for the present development of the crisis is the proposal to establish a safe haven for Syrian refugees. This was first demanded by the Turkish government and was recently supported by the French president. At present, more than 80,000 Syrians have arrived in refugee camps in Turkey; 100,000 have been declared by the Erdogan government as the maximum number of refugees to be accepted on Turkish territory. Additional refugees have to be accommodated in a safe buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey. The same has been proposed along the Jordanian border.

At first sight such a demand might appear to be rather harmless and unproblematic, involving only a limited military intervention. However, the establishment of a safe buffer zone in Syria can only be achieved by a full-scale war of NATO and allied troops from Arab countries against the strong Syrian armed forces. To protect the refugees in the safe haven, a no-fly zone has to be established, which can only be controlled after NATO has gained air superiority over the total Syrian territory.

This would involve the destruction of the Syrian air force with about 400 fighter planes and the huge arsenal of highly sophisticated anti-air craft missiles. The size, expenditure and duration of such an intervention would be tremendous as the MIT analysis showed. [10].

One has also to keep in mind that in legal terms such an attack could be carried out under the rather controversial international norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). But its application has to be approved by a resolution of the UN Security Council, where a veto from Russia and China can be taken for granted.

Coming back to the question about the position which should be supported: the most sensible position and the only one that would allow a peaceful solution is still the [Kofi] Annan plan [proposed by the former United Nations secretary general] involving not only the opposition and their supporters, but also the governments in Damascus and Teheran in the negotiation about the future development of Syria. However, there is no chance that this proposal will be accepted by the opposition in exile and its supporters in the US, the Arab League, Turkey and the EU.

LS: What do you think about the helping hand that the Bundesnachrichtendienst [BND – Germany’s foreign intelligence agency] is giving to the rebels?

GM: The German newspaper Bild had revealed that members of the BND stationed on ships near the Syrian and Lebanese coast and at the NATO base near Adana collect intelligence on the movement of Syrian government troops and share this information with the forces of the Free Syrian Army. [17] The same applies to agents of the British intelligence service based in Cyprus and also to the activities of US intelligence agents and spy satellites.

more …

Turkey is gearing down in Syria

Mehmet Ali Birand |

Turkey is hitting the brakes on the issue of Syria, some news reports claim. As a matter of fact, the voice of the government is not as loud as it used to be. It looks as if the tempo has slowed down. I think Turkey is doing the right thing.

At the beginning, mostly with the agitation of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, we set off as a large group headed by Washington and Europe. For the sake of humanity, despite Russia and Iran, the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship should have been brought to an end. If need be, there would be embargoes imposed and no-fly buffer zones formed, leaving al-Assad with no breathing space.

And it was our roaring voice that was heard the most.

We yelled and cried a lot and have been dragging him through the mud until now. We gave him five- or six-month deadlines. It didn’t happen. We raised our voice more. We thought he would not be able to resist too long and would leave in a few months; it didn’t happen. We postponed the deadline to one to two years; again, it didn’t happen.

We opened our doors; we accepted Syrian refugees. We said we would be able to handle them until their numbers reach 50,000. Now, they are reaching 100,000. But, they are still flowing in; the costs are reaching $400 million. Nobody seems to be willing to contribute either.

We provided facilities for the Syrian opposition in our lands. Not knowing most of the details, we did what we could. Then we saw that their power was not sufficient. On top of that, all of a sudden, we found ourselves being accused of “arming the Syrian opposition, providing bases for them.”

Frankly, we jumped into dangerous waters first, thinking we were leading other nations that we assumed would jump together; however, we looked back and saw that no one was behind us. We have been left all alone. Moreover, the Washington that set off together with us is now holding us back. It wanted us to calm down. It urged us not to conduct a military intervention.

Well, why? Why did the calculations not come out as we expected?

First, the presidential elections in the United States are close. U.S. President Barack Obama does not want to take any risks. There is no guarantee after the elections either. Regardless of who sits in the White House, nobody is in favor of a military intervention. Because the American public does not want to send its children to wars in Middle Eastern deserts and spend trillions of dollars anymore. It is fed up with continuous casualties and losses. The Iraq and Afghanistan experiences have hurt everyone.

Another reason why the West took the government change in Syria so slowly is the worries over the Christians living in the country, and more importantly, the questions of Israel on who will rule Syria after al-Assad.

When questions such as “What if after al-Assad, Islamic fundamentalists take over power and end secularism?” started being asked, this time both the United States and Europe hit the brakes.

Turkey raised its voice, it cried; it said, “Help the Syrian people for the sake of humanity.” It cried, “You are committing crime against humanity;” nobody listened.

It did not serve anybody’s interest to upset the equilibrium Syria had set up.

Especially when Iran stood behind al-Assad with all its power, the Baath government nowadays has been able to breathe again. It is indefinite how long this will last.

Ankara used to issue a statement almost every week. When the situation is like this, voices are hushed. It was said that the number of Syrian refugees was not to increase at this pace. The Syrian opposition has said it has moved its headquarters from Turkish soil to the liberated zones in Syria.

We will now proceed in a lower gear as we now have to make a turn after speeding excessively in the beginning.

September/27/2012

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-is-gearing-down-in-syria.aspx?pageID=449&nID=31056&NewsCatID=405

Egypt’s Morsi resets ties with US

By M K Bhadrakumar | 25 September 2012

The confusion in the American mind about Egypt ended this past weekend, a mere nine days since President Barack Obama made the famous remark in a television interview that he wasn’t sure of post-Hosni Mubarak Egypt being the United States’ ally.

The confusion actually arose when US National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor scrambled to clarify that “ally” is a “legal term of art”, whereas Egypt is a “long-standing and close partner” of the United States, and, thereupon, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland butted in to contradict both Obama and Vietor by insisting Egypt was indeed a “major non-NATO ally”.

In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday, Egyptian
President Mohamed Morsi offered to clear up the confusion. Asked whether Egypt was an ally, Morsi smilingly remarked: “It depends on your definition of an ally.” He then helpfully suggested that the two countries were “real friends”.

Growing up with the Brothers
Now, as Morsi probably intended, the thing about “real friends” is that they don’t expect either side to fawn, as a poodle might do by wagging its tail. Thus when he travels to the US to address the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Morsi doesn’t have to meet with Obama. Yet they will remain “real friends” – although they’ve never met.

According to The New York Times, Obama cold-shouldered Morsi’s request for a meeting. Cairo maintains that it is all a scheduling problem and the planning of a visit by Morsi to Washington was work in progress. Meanwhile, Morsi has “quite a busy schedule” in New York and Obama too happens to have a “tight schedule” – this according to Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr.

In fact, Morsi’s only meeting with US officials during this week’s visit to that country may be at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (which, by the way, Obama also is attending).

There is hardly any excuse left now for the American mind to remain confused about the bitter harvest of the Arab Spring on Tahrir Square. The spin doctors who prophesied that Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood would ipso facto pursue the Mubarak track on foreign policies have scurried away.

This is especially so after watching Morsi’s astounding televised interview on Saturday, his first to the Egyptian state TV since his election in June. He spoke at some length on the Iran question, which has somehow come to be the litmus test to estimate where exactly Egypt stands as a regional power.

Morsi affirmed that it is important for Egypt to have a “strong relationship” with Iran. He described Iran as “a major player in the region that could have an active and supportive role in solving the Syrian problem”. Morsi explained his decision to include Iran in the four-member contact group that Egypt has formed – along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia – on the Syrian crisis.

Dismissing the Western opposition to engaging Iran, he said: “I don’t see the presence of Iran in this quartet as a problem, but it is a part of solving the [Syrian] problem.” He said Iran’s close proximity to Syria and Tehran’s strong ties Damascus made it “vital” in resolving the Syrian crisis.

Morsi added: “And we [Egypt] do not have a significant problem with Iran, it [Egypt-Iran relationship] is normal like with the rest of the world’s states.”

Equally, Morsi spoke defiantly in his interview with The New York Times regarding Egypt’s ties with the US and the latter’s relations with the Arab world. The overpowering message is that Cairo will no longer be bullied by Washington. He said:

  • “I grew up with the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned my principles in the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned how to love my country with the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned politics with the Brotherhood. I was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
  • “Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region.”
  • It was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance with Egypt.
  • The United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.
  • “If you [US] want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment. When the Egyptians decide something, probably it is not appropriate for the US. When the Americans decide something, this, of course, is not appropriate for Egypt.”
  • The Arabs and Americans have “a shared objective, each to live free in their own land, according to their customs and values, in a fair and democratic fashion … [in] a harmonious, peaceful co-existence”.
  • Americans “have a special responsibility” for the Palestinians because the United States signed the 1978 Camp David accord. “As long as peace and justice are not fulfilled for the Palestinians, then the treaty remains unfulfilled.”
  • If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. The last bit in particular is ominous. Morsi could be hinting that Egypt intends to seek changes to the 1978 peace treaty. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman hurried to declare on Sunday that there was not the “slightest possibility” that Israel would accept any such changes. “We will not accept any modification of the Camp David Accords,” Lieberman said.

A ‘fast-forward’
The refrain by Western experts used to be that Egypt’s Brothers depended on US and Saudi generosity to run their government in Cairo. More important, Washington spread an impression that it enjoyed a larger-than-life influence over the New Egypt. The US was supposed to have acted as a mediator between the Egyptian military and the Brothers.

But Morsi scattered the thesis. “No, no, it is not that they [military leadership] ‘decided’ to do it [stepping down]. This is the will of the Egyptian people through the elected president, right? The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed forces. Full stop … We are behaving according to the Egyptian people’s choice and will, nothing else – is it clear?” he asked the New York Times editors.

The picture that emerges from Morsi’s stunning interview is that the US has suffered a huge setback to its regional strategy in the Middle East. The fact that Obama has shied away from meeting with Morsi this week underscores the gravity of the deep chill in the US-Egyptian ties. And Obama’s snub comes after he took the initiative to invite Morsi to visit the US and insisted it should be an early visit, even sending Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to deliver the invitation letter and thereafter following up with visits by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to Cairo.

Morsi has taken a series of steps since he took over in July, which, in retrospect, had the principal objective of conveying to Washington that he resented the US diktat and intended to follow an independent foreign policy. His decision to visit China and Iran was a calculated one, intended to signal his empathy with countries that challenged US hegemony in the Middle East and to underscore that he hoped to reduce Egypt’s dependence on the United States. But Washington kept pretending that it didn’t take notice.

However, there has been a “fast-forward” in the past 10 days, since the anti-Islam American film, the killing of the US ambassador in Benghazi and the storming of the US Embassy in Cairo by Egyptian protesters. Morsi didn’t react to the storming of the embassy for a full 36 hours. Simply put, he could sense the Arab street heaving with fury toward the US and he decided that it would be politically injudicious for him to do anything other than let the popular anger play out.

Morsi’s deafening silence or inertia provoked Obama to call him up to admonish him (according to leaked US accounts), but all that Morsi would do was to send police reinforcements to protect the embassy compound. He never condemned the storming of the embassy as such.

Living with yesterday’s tyrant
Things can never be the same again in the US-Egypt relationship. A 33-year slice of diplomatic history through which Cairo used to be Washington’s dependable ally is breaking loose and drifting to the horizon. Uncharted waters lie ahead for the US diplomacy in the Middle East. Clearly, the axis that is pivotal to the US regional strategy in the Middle East – comprising Israel and the so-called “moderate” Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, etc – cannot hold together without Egypt, and the strategy itself is in peril.

In immediate terms, the fallout is going to be serious in Syria. A Western intervention in Syria now can be virtually ruled out. On the other hand, without an intervention, a regime change will be a long haul. In turn, Turkey is going to be in a fix, having bitten more than it could chew and with the US in no mood to step in to expedite the Arab Spring in Damascus. (Obama called up Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan last week to extend moral support.)

The good thing is that the US and its allies may now be open to the idea of a national dialogue involving the Syrian government. In fact, the most recent Russian statements on Syria hint at an air of nascent expectations. On the contrary, nervousness with a touch of bitterness is already apparent in the comment by the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper on the weekend, while taking stock of the United States’ growing difficulties with Egypt’s Brothers:

Will the US president allow his legacy to bear the headline of having kept Bashar al-Assad in power? It would be a terrible legacy to leave behind, no matter how much it could be justified by such arguments as the wisdom of living with yesterday’s tyrant because today’s tyrant could be worse – and what is meant here is not just the tyrant of unruly mobs, but also the tyrants of Muslim extremism and its relations with moderate Islamism in power.

Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia stayed away from the meeting of the quartet on Syria that Cairo hosted last Monday, without offering any explanation.

Simply put, Riyadh is unable to come to terms with Egypt’s return to the centre stage of Arab politics after a full three decades of absence during which the Saudi regime appropriated for itself Cairo’s traditional role as the throbbing heart of Arabism. Riyadh will find it painful to vacate the role as the leader of the Arab world that it got used to enjoying. Almost every single day, Saudi media connected with the regime pour calumnies on Egypt’s Brothers, even alleging lately that they are the twin brothers of al-Qaeda.

Uncontrollable anger
Again, the elaborate charade that the Saudis stage-managed – propagating the Muslim sectarian discords as the core issue on the Middle East’s political arena – is not sticking anymore, now that the two biggest Sunni and Shi’ite countries in the region – Egypt and Iran – are holding each other’s hands, demonstrating goodwill and displaying willingness to work together to address key regional issues. The worst-case scenario for the Saudi regime will be if in the coming months the Arab Spring begins its fateful journey toward Riyadh and the Arabian Peninsula, where the Brothers have been active for decades, welcomes it as a long-awaited spring.

The heart of the matter is that on a regional plane, the Iranian viewpoint that the Arab Spring is quintessentially “Islamic” stands vindicated. In an interview with the Financial Times last week, the Speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani, made the stunning disclosure that Iranian diplomats had met members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria as well as the Salafis (who are being financed by the Saudis) to encourage them to accept “democratic reforms through peaceful behavior, not violence”. This made complete mockery of the Syrian logarithm as per the Saudi (and Turkish and US) estimation – Sunni militancy as the antidote to (Shi’ite) Iran’s influence in the region.

In sum, Morsi’s friendly remarks about Iran point toward a regional strategic realignment on an epic scale subsuming the contrived air of sectarian schisms, which practically no Western (or Turkish) experts could have foreseen. It is a matter of time now before Egypt-Iran relations are fully restored, putting an end to the three-decade-old rupture.

The biggest beneficiary of this paradigm shift in Middle Eastern politics is going to be Iran. Arguably, we are probably already past the point of an Israeli attack on Iran, no matter Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tilting at the windmill. In the prevailing surcharged atmosphere, the Muslim Middle East would explode into uncontrollable violence in the event of an Israeli (or US) attack on Iran.

In the event of such an attack, Egypt’s Brothers would most probably annul the peace treaty with Israel – and Jordan would be compelled to follow suit; Egypt and Jordan might sever diplomatic ties with Israel. Baghdad is seething with fury that the US and Turkey are encouraging Kurdistan to secede; Lebanon’s Hezbollah has been threatening retribution if Iran is attacked.

Even more serious than all this put together would be the domino effect of region-wide mayhem on the Arab street on the fate of the oligarchies in the Persian Gulf, which lack legitimacy and are allied with the US – and where the Brothers have been clandestinely operating for decades.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NI25Ak02.html

The Destruction of Syria

By Patrick Seale | September 2012|
Once one of the most solid states in the Middle East and a key pivot of the regional power structure, Syria is now facing wholesale destruction. The consequences of the unfolding drama are likely to be disastrous for Syria’s territorial integrity, for the well-being of its population, for regional peace, and for the interests of external powers deeply involved in the crisis.

The most immediate danger is that the fighting in Syria, together with the current severe pressure being put on Syria’s Iranian ally, will provide the spark for a wider conflagration from which no one will be immune.

How did it come to this? Every actor in the crisis bears a share of responsibility. Syria is the victim of the fears and appetites of its enemies, but also of its own leaders’ mistakes.

With hindsight, it can be seen that President Bashar al-Assad missed the chance to reform the tight security state he inherited in 2000 from his father. Instead of recognizing—and urgently addressing—the thirst for political freedoms, personal dignity and economic opportunity which were the message of the “Damascus Spring” of his first year in power, he screwed the lid down ever more tightly.

Suffocating controls over every aspect of Syrian society were reinforced, and made harder to bear by the blatant corruption and privileges of the few and the hardships suffered by the many. Physical repression became routine. Instead of cleaning up his security apparatus, curbing police brutality and improving prison conditions, he allowed them to remain as gruesome and deplorable as ever.

Above all, over the past decade Bashar al-Assad and his close advisers failed to grasp the revolutionary potential of two key developments—Syria’s population explosion and the long-term drought which the country suffered from 2006 to 2010, the worst in several hundred years. The first produced an army of semi-educated young people unable to find jobs; the second resulted in the forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of farmers from their parched fields to slums around the major cities. Herders in the northeast lost 85 percent of their livestock. It is estimated that by 2011, some two to three million Syrians had been driven into extreme poverty. No doubt climate change was responsible, but government neglect and incompetence contributed to the disaster.

These two factors—youth unemployment and rural disaffection—were the prime motors of the uprising which spread like wildfire, once it was triggered by a brutal incident at Dar’a in March 2011. The foot soldiers of the uprising are unemployed urban youth and impoverished peasants.

Could the regime have done something about it? Yes, it could. As early as 2006-7, it could have alerted the world to the situation, devoted all available resources to urgent job creation, launched a massive relief program for its stricken population and mobilized its citizens for these tasks. No doubt major international aid agencies and rich Gulf countries would have helped had the plans been in place.

Instead, the regime’s gaze was distracted by external threats: by the Lebanese crisis of 2005 following the assassination of Rafiq Hariri; by Israel’s bid to destroy Hezbollah by its invasion of Lebanon in 2006; by its attack on Syria’s nuclear facility in 2007; and by its bid to destroy Hamas in its murderous assault on Gaza in 2008-9.

From the start of Bashar al-Assad’s presidency, Syria has faced relentless efforts by Israel and its complicit American ally to bring down the so-called “resistance axis” of Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah, which dared challenge the regional dominance of Israel and the United States.

Syria had a narrow escape in 2003-4. Led by the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz, the pro-Israeli neocons embedded in President George W. Bush’s administration were determined to reshape the region in Israel’s and America’s interest. Their first target was Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, seen as a potential threat to Israel. Had the United States been successful in Iraq, Syria would have been next. Neither Iraq nor the United States has yet recovered from the catastrophic Iraqi war, of which Wolfowitz was the chief “architect.”

Syria and its Iranian ally are once again under imminent threat. The United States and Israel make no secret of their goal to bring down both the Damascus and Tehran regimes. No doubt some Israeli strategists believe that it would be greatly to their country’s advantage if Syria were dismembered and permanently weakened by the creation of a small Alawi state around the port city of Latakia in the northwest, in much the same way as Iraq was dismembered and permanently weakened by the creation of the Kurdish Regional Government in the north of the country, with its capital at Irbil. It is not easy to be the neighbor of an expansionist and aggressive Jewish state, which believes that its security is best assured, not by making peace with its neighbors, but by subverting, destabilizing and destroying them with the aid of American power.

The United States and Israel are not Syria’s only enemies. The Syrian Muslim Brothers have been dreaming of revenge ever since their attempt 30 years ago to topple Syria’s secular Ba’athist regime by a campaign of terror was crushed by Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s president at the time. Today, the Muslim Brothers are repeating the mistake they made then by resorting to terror with the aid of foreign Salafists, including some al-Qaeda fighters flowing into Syria from Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and other countries further afield. The liberal members of the Syrian opposition in exile, including several worthy academics and veteran opponents, are providing political cover for these more violent elements.

Some Arab Gulf States persist in viewing the region through a sectarian prism. They are worried by Iran’s alleged hegemonic ambitions. They are unhappy that Iraq—once a Sunni power able to hold Iran in check—is now under Shi’i leadership. Talk of an emerging “Shi’i Crescent” appears to threaten Sunni dominance. For these reasons they are funding and arming the Syrian rebels in the hope that bringing down the Syrian regime will sever Iran’s ties with the Arab world. But this policy will simply prolong Syria’s agony, claim the lives of some of its finest men and cause massive material damage.

America, the dominant external power, has made many grievous policy blunders. Over the past several decades it failed to persuade its stubborn Israeli ally to make peace with the Palestinians, leading to peace with the whole Arab world. It embarked on catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It failed to reach a “grand bargain” with Iran which would have dispelled the specter of war in the Gulf and stabilized the volatile region. And it is now quarrelling with Moscow and reviving the Cold War by sabotaging Kofi Annan’s peace plan for Syria.

There can be no military solution to the Syrian crisis. The only way out of the current nightmare is a cease-fire imposed on both sides, followed by a negotiation and the formation of a national government to oversee a transition. Only thus can Syria avoid wholesale destruction, which could take a generation or two to repair.


Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press). Copyright © 2012 Patrick Seale. Distributed by Agence Global.

http://www.wrmea.org/archives/515-washington-report-archives-2011-2015/september-2012/11356-the-destruction-of-syria.html

Why political endeavors to solve Syria’s crisis always fail?

DAMASCUS, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) — Syrian analysts and experts have been divided over finding a main reason behind the continuous faltering of the numerous international and regional endeavors that originally aimed to find peaceful solutions to Syria’s prolonged and intractable crisis.

As some blame the administration of not abiding by its international pledges, others hurl accusations at the fractured opposition for not keeping its end of the bargain, while still some others blame the lack of international consensus of being the major reason.

Several initiatives have been put forward — the foremost of which is the one by the outgoing UN-Arab League joint special envoy Kofi Annan, which has called for a cessation of violence by all parties in a bid to pave the way for a political dialogue to settle the simmering tension.

At the beginning, all parties said they will comply with the plan, which has taken hold for hours before the clashes and the urban fighting kicked off once again. But both sides later assigned blame on one another for the failure of the cease-fire.

Annan’s initiative has been preceded with several Arab proposals in addition to regional and international ones. However, none of them succeeded in curbing the violence or bridging the widening crack between Damascus and the rebels.

Yahya Salaiman, a political researcher, expressed his pessimism toward all the various proposals, pointing out that “all endeavors carried their seeds of failure within them.”

Speaking to Xinhua, Salaiman attributed his disappointment to the “content of each endeavor, because they either lack a clear working mechanism for their implementation or they are disconnected from the fever of the Syrian reality and all its contradictions, or the bias of the countries that are sponsoring those initiatives to a certain party in the conflict.”

He said the partiality of the sponsoring countries lead to the infanticide of the initiatives.

For his side, Ammar Rifai, vice-chairman of the oppositional al- Ansar party, said the proposed initiatives are “theoretically ambitious,” but noted that “it’s practically inapplicable.” He held the Syrian government responsible for the failure of most of the initiatives and accused it of non-complying by the items of the plans that it officially agrees on.

However, Sharif Shahadeh, a Syrian parliamentarian, disagreed with Rifai and contended that the Syrian government has abided and committed to all its pledges, holding the Syrian opposition the responsibility for the whole fiasco, as “it doesn’t accept to lay down the weapons and keeps on applying foreign agendas needless to say that is already scattered and fragmented.”

Shahadeh told Xinhua that “every initiative holds its own mines that blast it fast.”

He gave the latest Egyptian initiative as an example, saying it has been buried alive after Egypt’s President Mohamed Morsi gave his blistering speech on Syria at the Non-Aligned Movement summit held recently in Tehran, in which he branded Damascus as ” oppressive” and urged the world countries to side with the Syrian opposition.

Morsi has recently proposed that Iran take part in a four- nation contact group including Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia that would mediate in the Syrian crisis.

Meanwhile, Shahadeh said that all the previous plans have not been that different than the Egyptian one “because all of the countries that have sponsored them are actual parties of the conflict and hold grudges toward the Syrian resistive and patriotic regime.”

Even though all endeavors have been rendered useless, the international community seems to keep pressing with the political approach despite some voices that have called for imposing buffer zones in Syria.

The latest move by the United Nations to keep with the diplomatic efforts is the appointment of veteran troubleshooter Lakhdar Brahimi as a new special envoy to Syria, replacing Annan who resigned last month after the failure of his mediation.

Brahimi on Saturday officially became in charge of picking up where his predecessor Annan left off in mediating the intractable Syrian crisis.

The Algerian figure discussed with Chinese officials Saturday the prospect of the Syrian crisis. He, who will pay visits to several regional and international capitals to garner support for his efforts, is also expected to set foot in Syria by the end of the current week, according to sources who told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Hasan Abdul-Azim, a prominent opposition leader, told Xinhua in a recent interview that the solution to the 18-months-old crisis in Syria does not rest in efforts of the UN and Arab League envoy but the achievement of a workable consensus among regional and international powers.

Also, Luai Hussain, head of the opposition current “Building Syrian State,” agreed with Abdul-Azim that any true and workable solution requires a wide-scale international effort and a consensus between the superpowers and regional ones as well.

He said the Syrian crisis is more complicated and intractable that makes the sole act of a certain organization insufficient to unravel it.

Experts believe that had the international community was sincere about solving the Syrian crisis without being biased to certain parties, the Syrian bloody crisis would have already been solved.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2012-09/02/c_131822745.htm

Seven Syrian myths

By KORAY ÇALIŞKAN |

Syria has been turned into a domestic policy debate. There are such low comments as: “Kılıçdaroğlu is supporting Bashar al-Assad because he is also an Alevi.” There are caricatures drawn, like: “A tiny Alevi minority is exerting genocide on Sunnis.” These inappropriate comments are fed by myths created on Syria. These myths are the following:

1 – Alevis are oppressing the Sunnis: It is true that the Nusayris are powerful political elite in Syria, even though they are a minority. However, the majority of Syria’s political and economic elite are Sunni. Most of the bourgeoisie and the upper middle class are made up of Sunnis supporting the regime. There is also Sunni domination among the middle class. Just to make it clear, it is the product of some people’s imagination to say: “Alevis are oppressing the poor, victimized Sunnis.”

2 – Bashar al-Assad is like Slobodan Milosevic: He is not. This opinion, which is based on an intellectual laziness similar to the leftist tendency to regard every authoritarianism as “fascism,” confuses firing against armed opponents and people with genocide. Bashar al-Assad is a dictator, but he is not a genocide-maker. He is not any worse than Mubarak or George Bush. Actually, Bush caused more deaths.

3 – The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is the only option: It is also a myth that the FSA will bring democracy. You may decide for yourself whether or not to believe that an army with the financial and military support of Saudi Arabia (the biggest enemy of the human rights struggle in the region and in the Middle Eastern revolutions, and which like Israel is an authoritarian theocratic regime), and also with all kinds of acrobatics from the CIA, is going to bring democracy.

4 – Military opposition is the only chance: It is not. It has not been from the beginning. The FSA, which was hastily organized outside Syria, which smeared the revolution with violence intentionally and willfully, and which disregards the unarmed opposition, is actually not even the last chance. It is a problem created at the beginning, whereas it should have been a symptom that emerged as a result. There is a civilian opposition in Syria. There are dozens of groups and opposition organizations who do not distinguish between the outrage of al-Assad and the atrocities of the FSA, maintaining a distance to both. These groups have true democratic reflexes, and believe in civilian will, administration and opposition, and who are afraid that their country will become like Iraq. Three days ago, 20 of these organizations gathered in Damascus and explicitly told the FSA to stop clashes. Take a note of the emphasis.

5 – A buffer zone is a must: Those who shouted: “Our door is open. Run away from al-Assad and come to us,” those who did not let national deputies inside those camps, are now saying: “We cannot manage this crisis anymore; the United Nations should take over.” Before even having tended the wounds of Van, we are flirting with giant mirrors in pursuit of becoming a little United States. We miss that declaring new zones, be it a buffer zone or a no-fly zone, is a similar construction activity that happened to Iraq 10 years ago. Why are people running away from al-Assad? Because that militia named “free” is attacking the al-Assad army. Al-Assad then attacks them, and also, indeed, the people caught in between. The civilians then run away, and so you step in to protect the civilians. Does that sound familiar?

6 – It will not affect the Kurdish issue: After the capture of Öcalan, the most serious shift in the issue, of course, came with the Syrian crisis. Actually, Turkey became Syria’s domestic problem. Young Kurds are now distancing themselves from the logical solution that could be summarized thus: “We want education in our mother tongue and we should be able to call Diyarbakýr ‘Amed.’” Time is running out. The state is losing the Osman Baydemir generation with each passing day. On the one hand, it says it is against the independence of Kurds, while on the other hand it serves the de facto formation of a Kurdish state with every step it takes. Then it hopes that “Barzani will manage our Kurdish issue.”

7 – Our Syrian policy is good: I wonder if there is need for an explanation of this. Some things are definitely not going right. If we cannot do anything at a time when the country we have the longest border with, Syria, is being dragged into chaos with an undetermined end, like Iraq, we at least need to revise our 2023 dreams.

koray.caliskan@radikal.com.tr

Koray Çalışkan is a columnist for daily Radikal in which this piece was published August 31. It was translated into English by the Daily News staff.

September/01/2012

Five reasons for Assad’s regime resilience

August 30, 2012|
There are five reasons why Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist regime survives, says a prominent observer.

Regional and international strategic rivalries reinforce the stalemate; the regime has exported the crisis to its neighbors, the complexity of the end game; the divided opposition; and the regime’s retention of a significant base of support, writes Time’s Tony Karon.

“Assad retains the fierce loyalty of a hard core of Alawites, a community that sees its own fate tied to that of his regime, fearing at best, disenfranchisement, and at worst, brutal retribution, should the Sunni-led rebellion triumph,” he notes:

Far from being ground down by the attrition of more than a year of full-blown civil war, the regime’s core fighting forces remain more determined and fanatical than ever. Indeed, as the International Crisis Group recently noted, the regime’s control has at once diminished and hardened,  its will and capacity to fight fueled by the sectarian character of the civil war.

Observers have expressed concern that the West’s failure to support democratic elements within the opposition is playing into the hands of radical Islamists.

Provision of technical assistance and even arms are needed to prevent extremists from filling a political vacuum, said Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US envoy to the UN and a board member of the National  Endowment for Democracy.

The US has offered to provide communications equipment and other forms of non-lethal assistance, but refuses to supply arms, at least openly.

With the formation of the Syrian Support Group, exiles and their allies have taken the initiative.

“If you keep giving people videos and cameras and satellite equipment so they can document how they are getting killed, it won’t stop the killing,” said Louay Sakka, one of the group’s eight board members, referring to the American aid. As for Mr. Assad’s loyalists, he added, “it’s only the language of force they understand.”

The New York Times reports that…

While maintaining good relations with the Obama administration, the group has also been a critic of the administration’s approach, with added credibility because of its ties inside Syria. Dr. Danan, for example, said President Obama’s warning that any use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces would be “a red line” that could provoke intervention amounted to a “green light” for Mr. Assad to use as much conventional force as possible.

Administration officials say that outsourcing the supply of money and arms to the rebels maintains a crucial distinction that keeps American military fingerprints off a conflict that has already turned into a bloody civil war.

“It’s not for us to determine what the donations are used for,” said one official, who requested anonymity to discuss administration thinking, describing a plausible deniability that might not be plausible to all. “It could be for medical supplies.”

Arguably, Assad’s strongest asset is, as Karon notes, the opposition is not only deeply divided, it also lacks a clear strategy:

When France’s President François Hollande urged the Syrian opposition earlier this week to form a transitional government in exile that France and other Western governments would immediately recognize as the legitimate government of Syria, he seemed to have forgotten one of the golden rules of French cuisine: You can’t reheat a souffle. …. The idea was quickly pooh-poohed by U.S. officials, who branded it “premature” given the consistent failure of Syrian opposition groups, over 18 months of rebellion, to create a single unified leadership.

Washington’s response was immediately slammed by Syrian National Council (SNC) leader Abdelbaset Sieda, who accused the U.S. of indecisiveness, but his complaints would have been undermined by the fact that his group’s longtime spokeswoman Basma Kodmani resigned from the SNC on the same day, declaring that it had failed to earn “the required credibility and did not maintain the confidence of the people”. Indeed, despite its support from the French government and Turkey, the SNC appears to have been largely sidelined, having failed to win the support of unarmed opposition groups on the ground, or of the various armed formations that fight under the Free Syrian Army banner.

Besides having no umbrella political leadership, the rebellion also appears to have limited military coherence, with hundreds of disparate fighting formations making their own decisions at local level, and Islamist fighters — some of them foreign — making an increasingly visible showing.

http://www.demdigest.net/blog/2012/08/five-reasons-for-assads-regime-resilience/