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2 Syrian wheel of fortune spins
China's way By Peter Lee
The question
before the People's Republic of China (PRC)
leadership is how badly it misplayed its hand on
Syria. Or did it? Certainly, the solution
advocated by Russia and China - a coordinated
international initiative to sideline the
insurrection in favor of a negotiated political
settlement between the Assad regime and its
domestic opponents - is a bloody shambles.
As articulated in the Annan plan, it might
have been a workable, even desirable option for
the Syrian people as well as the Assad regime.
But Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey were
determined not to let it happen. And the United
States, in another case of the Middle Eastern tail
wagging the American dog, has downsized its
dreams of
liberal-democratic revolution for the reality of
regime collapse driven in significant part by
domestic thugs and opportunists, money and arms
funneled in by conservative Gulf regimes, violent
Islamist adventurism, and neo-Ottoman overreach by
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Erdogan.
But
a funny thing happened last week. The Assad regime
didn't collapse, despite an orchestrated,
nation-wide assault (coordinated, we can assume,
by the crack strategists of the international
anti-Assad coalition): a decapitating terrorist
bombing in the national security directorate,
near-simultaneous armed uprisings in the main
regime strongholds of Damascus and Aleppo, and the
seizure of many of Syria's official border
crossings with Iraq and Turkey.
The border
adventures revealed some holes in the insurgents'
game, as far as showing their ability to operate
independently outside of their strongholds to hold
territory, and in the vital area of image
management.
Juan Cole of the University of
Michigan laid out the big picture strategic
thinking behind some of the border seizures on his
blog, Informed Comment:
If the FSA can take the third
crossing from Iraq, at Walid, they can control
truck traffic into Syria from Iraq, starving the
regime. The border is long and porous, but big
trucks need metalled roads, which are few and go
through the checkpoints. Some 70% of goods
coming into Syria were coming from Iraq, because
Europe cut off trade with the Baath regime of
Bashar al-Assad. The rebels are increasingly in
a position to block that trade or direct it to
their strongholds. [1]
According to an
Iraqi deputy minister of the interior, the units
that seized the border were perhaps not the
goodwill ambassadors that the Syrian opposition or
Dr Cole might have hoped for:
The top official said Iraqi border
guards had witnessed the Free Syrian Army take
control of a border outpost, detain a Syrian
army lieutenant colonel, and then cut off his
arms and legs.
"Then they executed 22
Syrian soldiers in front of the eyes of Iraqi
soldiers." [2]
They reportedly also
raised the al-Qaeda flag.
The forces
participating in the operation at the Turkish
border crossings were also an interesting bunch -
and certainly not all local Syrian insurgents, as
AFP reported:
By Saturday evening, a group of some
150 foreign fighters describing themselves as
Islamists had taken control of the post.
These fighters were not at the site on
Friday, when rebel fighters captured the post.
Some of the fighters said they belonged
to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), while
others claimed allegiance to the Shura Taliban.
They were armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles,
rocket launchers and improvised mines.
The fighters identified themselves as
coming from a number of countries: Algeria,
France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the
United Arab Emirates - and the Russian republic
of Chechnya… [3]
The operation also
had a distinct whiff of Taliban-at-the-Khyber-Pass
about it, as the fighters looted and, in some
cases, torched more than two dozen Turkish trucks,
to the embarrassment of the Erdogan government.
Aside from occupation of frontier posts by
the kind of hardened foreign Islamist fighters
that, before Bashar al-Assad's removal became a
pressing priority, served as the West's ultimate
symbol of terrorism run amok, things have gotten
quite lively at the Syria/Turkish border.
It is alleged that, in order to fill the
vacuum left by the departure of Syrian border
forces to fight the insurgents in the heartland,
the Syrian regime has turned over local security
to Syrian Kurdish political groups, and Kurdish
flags are flying all over Syria's northeast.
Not to be left out of the rumpus, the
president of the virtually-independent region of
Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, announced that
Syrian Kurd army deserters sheltering in northern
Iraq have been organized into an expeditionary
force that will, at the proper time, return home
to keep order in the Kurdish areas of Syria.
Presumably the strongly pro-American Iraqi
Kurds under Barzani can easily be induced to
inflict mischief on Assad, but at the same time
they will feel little incentive to minimize the
Kurdish nationalist headache Erdogan has created
for himself on Turkey's southeastern border. [4]
Now that the democratic opposition, the
overseas agitators of the Syrian National
Congress, and the insurrectionists of the Free
Syrian Army have all taken their shot at the Assad
regime and failed, at least for the time being,
attention is once again turning to "the Yemen
solution", a k.a. regime restructuring featuring
the symbolic removal of an embattled strongman,
lip service toward democratic reform, and the
continuation of business as usual under a selected
junta of more palatable regime strongmen.
Or, as the Syrian National Council put it
on July 24:
"We would agree to the departure of
Assad and the transfer of his powers to a regime
figure, who would lead a transitional period
like what happened in Yemen," SNC spokesman
Georges Sabra told AFP. [5]
The SNC's
statement found a prompt echo from US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, according to Xinhua:
US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton on Tuesday urged Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad to plan a political transition in his
violence-plagued country. "We do believe that it
is not too late for the al-Assad regime to
commence with planning for a transition, to find
a way that ends the violence by beginning the
kind of serious discussions that have not
occurred to date," Clinton told reporters …
[6]
It is perhaps unnecessary to
mention that for the last few months the groups
steadfastly opposed to any "serious discussions"
have been the anti-Assad coalition and the SNC,
while Assad, backed by Russia and China, has been
gamely attempting to cobble together a loyal
opposition with sufficient heft to credibly
discuss political reform.
But all of a
sudden, it seems not everyone is singing from the
same hymnal:
Earlier Tuesday, some Western media
reported that SNC spokesman George Sabra said
the main opposition group was willing to accept
a transition led temporarily by a member of the
current government if President Bashar al-Assad
agrees to step down.
"This is an utter
lie. Neither Mr. Sabra nor Ms. Kodmani has made
these statements," SNC European foreign
relations coordinator Monzer Makhous told
Russia's Interfax news agency, referring to
Bassma Kodmani, the SNC's head of foreign
relations.
Makhous said the opposition
would not agree to accept talks with the Assad
government as "no persons associated with
murders of the Syrian people could participate
in the talks." [7]
It remains to be
seen how the AFP or Secretary Clinton - or, for
that matter, the unhappy spokesman Georges Sabra -
respond to this rebuke.
One catches hints
of a possible disconnect between Gulf-state
intransigence (which has driven the "Assad must
go" rhetoric of the last year and a half") and US
and EU dreams of a quick, face-saving resolution
along the lines of Yemen.
A "Yemen
solution" would probably also be acceptable to
Russia and China. Instead of Syria becoming a
pro-Western/Sunni dagger aimed at the heart of
Shi'ite Iraq and Iran, it would instead become a
dysfunctional, expensive, and bloody liability for
the West and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
In other words, just like Yemen.
There are, however, problems with the
Yemen precedent for Syria that go beyond the
unwillingness of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to settle
for anything less than a triumphal march into a
conquered Damascus.
The key event in the
"Yemen solution" was President Saleh getting blown
up in his palace mosque. Although he wasn't
killed, he was injured badly enough that he was
removed from the scene for several months as he
underwent medical treatment, allowing a new crew
in the presidential palace to undertake the
transition.
The anti-Assad coalition had
worse luck with the bomb in Damascus; Assad was
not present at the meeting, he is still the face
of the Syrian regime, and his inconvenient
presence makes it more difficult for the
international community to claim victory in
principle while allowing the regime to survive in
practice.
There's another problem with the
Yemen solution; although there are continued news
reports, leaks, and analyses - and, most recently,
a proposal by the Arab League - ballyhooing the
idea that Assad can receive immunity from
prosecution for crimes against humanity under the
International Criminal Court if he agrees to leg
it to Russia, there is no way for the coalition to
provide a convincing guarantee to him, let alone
his family and associates under the current state
of affairs.
The fact is, the entire
purpose of the Treaty of Rome, which set up the
International Criminal Court, was to prevent this
sort of sordid deal-cutting.
In practice
the ICC is something of an unhappy mutant. Its
fundamental premise of "universal jurisdiction" -
the idea that bad guys could be prosecuted in the
courts of any member country - was undermined by
the United States and other countries not to keen
to see their political and military supremos
vulnerable to prosecution in some remote
do-goodery or hostile jurisdiction.
The
result was an unwieldy two-tier system. Those
states with a masochistic desire to permit other
nations to interfere in their criminal affairs
ratified the treaty, becoming "states parties".
Within this exclusive club, universal jurisdiction
reigns.
States that merely signed the
treaty - "non states parties" - are not subject to
universal jurisdiction. Their miscreants can only
be brought to justice by the consent of their own
governments or if the UN Security Council decided
that the overriding demands of international
security merited the opening of a prosecution.
This was still not enough for the United
States, which took the ungraceful step of
"unsigning" the Treaty of Rome.
Yemen had
placed itself in the exalted company of the United
States by also "unsigning" the treaty in 2007, so
a successor regime has no immediate recourse to
the ICC and ex-president Saleh's fate is in the
sympathetic hands of the United States and the
rest of the UN Security Council.
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