Halting Syrian
chaos By Robert D Kaplan and
Kamran Bokhari
What if Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad really goes? There is an
assumption in the West that the way to win a
strategic victory over Iran and improve the
human-rights situation inside Syria is to remove
the Syrian leader. It is true that Iran's
prospects of keeping Syria as its own
Mediterranean outpost are probably linked with the
survivability of Assad's regime. But his removal
might well hasten the slide into chaos within
Syria and in adjacent Lebanon, rather than slow
it.
Assad's departure could even ignite a
disintegration of the Syrian power structure into
various gangs and militias.
After all, we
are talking less of the removal of one man than of
the end of a 42-year dynasty. The president's
father, Hafez al-Assad, came to power in 1970
after 21 changes of government - mostly
through coups - in
Syria's first 24 years of independence. Moreover,
the new Syrian state held free and fair elections
in 1947, 1949 and 1954 that all broke down
according to tribal, regional and sectarian
interests. Hafez finally ended the chaos by
becoming the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world: He
staved off the future by institutionalizing fear,
even as he did nothing to nurture a civil society
out of the country's inherent divisions.
Alas, the collapse of such a state is
messy business. Sectarian awareness may be less
deeply etched in Syria than in Iraq, but once the
killing starts people have a tendency to revert to
these default identities.
Chaos in Syria
benefits nobody. The Turks do not want a
long-running refugee problem on their border. The
Lebanese are afraid of their own state becoming a
battlefront in an intensifying Syrian civil war.
The Jordanian regime, already unpopular at home,
is also afraid of regional upheaval.
The
Saudis, even more than the Jordanians, are
terrified of the specter of a major Arab state
crumbling - something they know is not out of the
question for their dynasty of octogenarians now in
its own tired, Brezhnevite phase. Simply because
Riyadh wants to topple the pro-Iranian Assad does
not mean it would be pleased with an extended
situation in which nobody is in charge in
Damascus.
The Israeli viewpoint is
similar. The Shi'ite government in Iraq fears
Sunni terrorists being given free rein in the
Syrian border area. As for the Iranians, they will
do all they can to keep the current Syrian regime
in place even as they may privately abhor Assad's
inefficient brutality. (The Iranians effectively
crushed the Green movement in 2009 by killing
hundreds, not thousands.)
The Russians
require stability in Damascus only partly for the
sake of naval rights in the port of Tartus. Syria
and Iran are the two remaining levers the Kremlin
has in the Middle East. Moreover, the collapse of
a pro-Moscow dictatorship in the Middle East
carries the potential to send shivers throughout
Central Asian authoritarian states.
As for
the Americans, they don't want a Yugoslavia-style
situation where they are under pressure to
intervene militarily.
One can also argue
that from a human-rights perspective, chaos can be
worse than authoritarianism. To wit, the record of
decapitation as it refers to fierce authoritarian
regimes in the Islamic world is grim. Libya has
slid into low-level chaotic violence in which the
writ of the central government is non-existent
throughout broad reaches of the country. Nearby
Mali has erupted into anarchy - a situation
ignited by regime change in Libya. The US
administration of George W Bush decapitated the
Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, an act that cost
perhaps 200,000 Iraqi lives over a few short
years, even as Saddam had directly killed perhaps
four times that many over the previous third of a
century.
Then there are the examples of
the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. When the Soviet
state collapsed, it led to a rash of ethnic and
regional wars across the Caucasus and Central Asia
- tens of thousands of people were killed in
Tajikistan alone - while in Yugoslavia, ethnic war
resulted in 140,000 lost lives. Remember that the
dynastic regime of the Assads in Syria was built
on an East Bloc model during the height of the
Cold War.
It is true that in Romania in
1989 the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife
Elena were executed, and ethnic war (between
Romanians and ethnic Hungarians) and chaos did not
result. But that was because rather than a real
democracy coming into force, the Ceausescu regime
was informally replaced by another branch of the
Communist Party, which ushered in a half-decade
transition before non-communists finally took real
power through elections. Romania, therefore, may
now be somewhat relevant to the Syrian situation.
Regional stability and moral
considerations both require a transitional phase
in Syria, not cold-turkey democracy. Cold-turkey
democracy coupled with regime collapse in Syria,
given the historical record, risks bloody anarchy.
And a transitional phase may require an implicit
deal between the United States and Iran. Those two
countries have a record of dealing with each other
behind the scenes; the Bush administration and the
ayatollahs did likewise in Iraq even as they
fought each other there.
The Iranians,
like the Americans, are already looking beyond
Assad. They are identifying generals and leading
businessmen who could rule in his place and
maintain the overall regime structure. There may
come a point where US and Iranian interests in
Syria overlap at least to the extent of agreeing
on Assad's replacement. To repeat, though, the
situation in Syria will probably have to
deteriorate further before reaching that stage.
Iran has to be made to feel that Assad is no
longer an option. We are not there yet. The fact
that Syrian air defenses were able to shoot down a
Turkish plane without incurring a military
response means Assad is still formidable.
The real horse-trading, if and when it
comes, may involve Turkey and Iran. Turkey wants
to replace the entire regime structure; Iran wants
the opposite. That's why both Ankara and Tehran
will need to compromise, identifying high-ranking
Syrians, probably military, who will protect each
country's interests and upon whom a new regime can
be based.
If Turkey and Iran can reach
some sort of agreement, it can then be blessed by
both the United States and Russia. The
administration of US President Barack Obama can
play a role in this process, but to do so
effectively will require more diplomatic
realpolitik than it has demonstrated thus far in
any crisis. This is all a long shot, but there may
be no other way out that averts a worsening civil
war.
There is a stark realization in all
of this: If the United States reduces its strategy
toward Iran to only stopping its nuclear
enrichment program, it increases the probability
of ascending bloodshed in Syria. Easing Assad out
becomes easier when some deference is paid to
Iran's and Russia's strategic interests.
Washington now wants two things that may not go
together: handing Iran (and maybe Russia) a total
strategic defeat in Syria, even as bloodshed is
reduced there.
This may sound like
appeasement, but keep in mind that Assad's Syria,
so dependent as it is on Iran, already represents
an Iranian satellite. Therefore, any deal between
Ankara and Tehran on a new transitional regime
holds out the distinct likelihood of a less
pro-Iran regime in the future, especially as
elections in Syria would eventually be held under
any arrangement.
For Iran to try to
undermine a post-Assad Syria - with no land border
between the two countries - to the same extent
that it has undermined Iraq will, in addition to
being opposed by Turkey, constitute a case of
imperial overstretch with self-defeating
consequences.
Syria's situation is dire.
From both a moral and geopolitical point of view,
fighting a proxy war with Iran and Russia there is
less desirable for the United States than reaching
out to them.
Published with permission
from STRATFOR, a
Texas-based geopolitical intelligence company.
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