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3 Russia
and China Mull Syria ... and Saudi
Arabia By Peter Lee
Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao had an
interesting question to discuss during their
summit in Beijing. Is it good business and good
geopolitics to acquiesce to a Sunni Arab triumph
in Syria? Or is Syria the place to hold the line
against a destabilizing and counterproductive
projection of Saudi Arabian power into Iran's near
beyond?
Absent from the discussion is the
United States, which has abdicated any claims to
moral or political leadership and contents itself
by bleating from the sidelines as the Western
media pleasures itself with fantasies of
righteousness.
Meanwhile, Syria bleeds …
and bleeds … and bleeds.
The simplest
explanation for the massacre of almost 200 villagers
at Houla and Qubeir is
brutal payback by regime irregulars with a dash of
ethnic cleansing. The possibility of a false flag
operation - a massacre orchestrated by regime
opponents in order to discredit the regime of
President Bashar al-Assad and polarize opinion -
would appear to be unlikely. Murder will out, as
Shakespeare put it, and it would be nice to think
that even amid Syria's chaos the most brutal
strategist would shrink before the political risks
of trying to murder scores of civilians and try to
pin it on the other side.
However,
accurate details of the massacres have yet to
emerge. Most recently Rainer Hermann, Middle East
correspondent of Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, further muddied the waters by accusing
the rebels of committing the Houla atrocity. [1]
If one steps back and adopts the standard
of cui bono? - who benefits ? - to the
atrocities, it is undeniable that the massacres
have been a propaganda godsend to the opposition.
Post-Houla, broadcasting dire warnings of
an impending massacre of civilians seems to be
becoming a staple of rebel media management
whenever it faces a regime counter-offensive. Most
recently, the rebels assaulted the town of al
Haffeh. When government troops appeared to seal
off the town and prepare to retake it, the Free
Syrian Army warned of another impending massacre
and announced to the avid international media it
was spiriting civilians out of the city to safety.
For its part, the government broadcast wiretaps of
what it claimed were rebel provocateurs discussing
plans to stage a Houla-style outrage at Haffeh and
the nearby town of Tal and blame them on the
government.
The cry of (looming) massacre
also encourages the deployment of what one might
term "the Benghazi gambit" - using claims of
imminent civilian peril to short-circuit
discussion and investigation at the international
level, push for a quick military solution, and
then take advantage of the "winners write history"
privilege to bury any traces of error,
skullduggery, and dishonesty by the good guys.
The narrative of escalating Syrian
government brutality is important to Assad's
enemies, as it counters another, more embarrassing
narrative: the increased flow of money and
material aid to the rebels, aid that is in
contravention of the ceasefire, helps elicit more
brutal government action to quash the rebellion,
and thereby justifies the provision of more
clandestine aid to "protect civilians" while
rendering the failure of the Annan mission even
more likely a virtuous cycle, at least for the
opposition committed to Assad's downfall.
A sure sign of the increased flow of aid
to the rebels was the deployment of publicly
unsubstantiated accusations by the US State
Department that Russia was sending attack
helicopters to Syria. Perhaps the State Department
has unique insights into the flow of military
materiel from Russia to Syria, but the key change
in Syria is not in the order of battle of the
government forces; it is the increase in military
capabilities of the local rebels thanks in
significant part to foreign supply of arms.
Likewise, escalating foreign outrage over
the Assad regime's brutal excesses and the
emergence of the detested irregulars- the
shabiha - as regime shock troops has
paralleled the climbing death count of government
security forces.
The fact remains that the
only clear path to a negotiated solution of the
Syrian crisis requires a military stalemate, not
regime overthrow.
Assad's strategy (and
that of Russia and China) appears to be to
neutralize the armed opposition militarily, and
then goose the political process by releasing the
domestic moderates among the hundred thousand or
so political prisoners his secret polices services
have placed in their grim inventory. Indeed,
that's where things were headed after Assad's
forces crushed the rebels at Babu Amr in Homs and
held parliamentary elections … and before a flood
of international condemnation and an increased
flow of arms heartened the opposition.
The
fact that the United States is working toward the
exact opposite end by encouraging the armed
struggle now remorselessly polarizing the country
and grinding away at the regime's legitimacy (or
more accurately, just letting Syria collapse into
chaos) is, I suppose, a subject that the
infinitely capacious and flexible American
conscience will find a way to deal with.
To be fair, the United States, the EU, and
Turkey have been paragons of timidity when it
comes to effecting the overthrow of Assad. The
overt military option is off the table and Turkey,
which by rights should be seizing the regional
leadership role, has apparently acquired a serious
case of cold feet now that the inclusive liberal
revolution has turned into a sectarian-tinged
uprising that threatens to bring unrest and
anxiety to Kurdish populations in Turkey as well
as Syria.
Attempts to tease out the
significance of Houla and Qubeir, together with
the impression that the Assad regime is on its
last legs, has turned attention to a possible
endgame: a bloody spasm of ethnic cleansing in the
Alawite homeland of the coastal mountains,
followed by some sort of hunkering down by
pro-regime forces as they negotiate for their
future with a triumphant new regime in Damascus.
This speculation fueled comparisons with
Bosnia - another gateway justification for
increased foreign intervention.
There are
indeed some interesting historical precedents for
Alawite separatism.
Alawite communities,
which now constitute about 12% of Syria's
population, were marginalized during the Ottoman
empire thanks to widespread condemnation of their
heterodox and esoteric religious practice by
Islamic authorities. Indeed, traditional Alawi
belief apparently includes some unique elements,
particularly the deification of Ali, the
son-in-law of Muhammad, that would make it
extremely difficult for it to pass muster with
mainstream Muslim practitioners.
The
Ottomans categorized Alawites as apostates,
referring to them by the dismissive term of
Nusayris (a term that has re-emerged in heated
discussions of the Syrian situation on
Muslim-related message boards and even in media
accounts).
Until 1870, clerical
fatwas declared it was permissible to slay
Alawites and take their possessions; in the latter
decades of the Ottoman empire Alawite thieves were
still occasionally crucified or impaled for their
transgressions - a punishment that was not applied
to Muslims and had been eliminated for Christians
almost 100 years before.
At the fall of
the empire, only one "city" - a Christian town
with a population of 2,600 - allowed Alawites to
reside within its walls. The rest lived in small
hamlets under conditions of medieval poverty and
subjugation to the Sunni political, economic, and
administrative elite residing in the important
coastal towns of Latakia and Tartus.
French assumption of the Syria mandate
after World War I, though resented by most
Syrians, was a godsend to the Alawites. The
French, applying the proven divide-and-rule
template, supported the Alawites' aspirations to
equality and dignity, at least for a time, as well
as enrolling them disproportionately in the
military force it created to slug it out with the
Syrian nationalist uprising. The French
administration also promoted the use of the more
dignified term "Alawite" instead of "Nusayri".
From 1922 until 1935, when the French government
achieved a satisfactory accommodation with the
local governing authority in Damascus, the Alawite
areas enjoyed autonomy as the "Sanjak of
Lattakia", with their own rulers and flag, albeit
with a French tricolor in the corner. [2]
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