Thursday, September 05, 2013 5:03:51 AM
9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask
By Max Fisher, Published: August 29, 2013 at 12:50 pm
The United States and allies are preparing for a possibly imminent series of limited military strikes against Syria, the first direct U.S. intervention in the two-year civil war, in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad’s suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians.
If you found the above sentence kind of confusing, or aren’t exactly sure why Syria is fighting a civil war, or even where Syria is located, then this is the article for you. What’s happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.
Here, then, are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. First, a disclaimer: Syria and its history are really complicated; this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.
1. What is Syria?
Syria is a country in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s about the same size as Washington state with a population a little over three times as large – 22 million. Syria is very diverse, ethnically and religiously, but most Syrians are ethnic Arab and follow the Sunni branch of Islam. Civilization in Syria goes back thousands of years, but the country as it exists today is very young. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers in the 1920s.
Syria is in the middle of an extremely violent civil war. Fighting between government forces and rebels has killed more 100,000 and created 2 million refugees, half of them children [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/un-says-child-refugees-fleeing-syria-violence-tops-1-million-mark/2013/08/23/b63571d6-0bb3-11e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html ].
2. Why are people in Syria killing each other?
The killing started in April 2011, when peaceful protests inspired by earlier revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia rose up to challenge the dictatorship running the country. The government responded — there is no getting around this — like monsters. First, security forces quietly killed activists. Then they started kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing activists and their family members, including a lot of children [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/syrias-war-against-children/249941/ ], dumping their mutilated bodies by the sides of roads. Then troops began simply opening fire on protests. Eventually, civilians started shooting back.
Fighting escalated from there until it was a civil war. Armed civilians organized into rebel groups. The army deployed across the country, shelling and bombing whole neighborhoods and towns, trying to terrorize people into submission. They’ve also allegedly used chemical weapons, which is a big deal for reasons I’ll address below. Volunteers from other countries joined the rebels, either because they wanted freedom and democracy for Syria or, more likely, because they are jihadists who hate Syria’s secular government. The rebels were gaining ground for a while and now it looks like Assad is coming back. There is no end in sight.
3. That’s horrible. But there are protests lots of places. How did it all go so wrong in Syria? And, please, just give me the short version.
That’s a complicated question, and there’s no single, definitive answer. This is the shortest possible version — stay with me, it’s worth it. You might say, broadly speaking, that there are two general theories. Both start with the idea that Syria has been a powder keg waiting to explode for decades and that it was set off, maybe inevitably, by the 2011 protests and especially by the government’s overly harsh crackdown.
Before we dive into the theories, you have to understand that the Syrian government really overreacted when peaceful protests started in mid-2011, slaughtering civilians unapologetically, which was a big part of how things escalated as quickly as they did. Assad learned this from his father. In 1982, Assad’s father and then-dictator Hafez al-Assad responded to a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the city of Hama by leveling entire neighborhoods [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/the-new-hama-rules.html ]. He killed thousands of civilians, many of whom had nothing to do with the uprising. But it worked, and it looks like the younger Assad tried to reproduce it. His failure made the descent into chaos much worse.
Okay, now the theories for why Syria spiraled so wildly. The first is what you might call “sectarian re-balancing” or “the Fareed Zakaria case [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/17/fareed-zakarias-case-against-u-s-involvement-in-syria/ ]” for why Syria is imploding (he didn’t invent this argument but is a major proponent). Syria has artificial borders that were created by European colonial powers, forcing together an amalgam of diverse religious and ethnic groups. Those powers also tended to promote a minority and rule through it, worsening preexisting sectarian tensions.
Zakaria’s argument is that what we’re seeing in Syria is in some ways the inevitable re-balancing of power along ethnic and religious lines. He compares it to the sectarian bloodbath in Iraq after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, after which a long-oppressed majority retook power from, and violently punished, the former minority rulers. Most Syrians are Sunni Arabs, but the country is run by members of a minority sect known as Alawites (they’re ethnic Arab but follow a smaller branch of Islam). The Alawite government rules through a repressive dictatorship and gives Alawites special privileges [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/15/the-alawite-lane/ ], which makes some Sunnis and other groups hate Alawites in general, which in turn makes Alawites fear that they’ll be slaughtered en masse if Assad loses the war. (There are other minorities as well, such as ethnic Kurds and Christian Arabs; too much to cover in one explainer.) Also, lots of Syrian communities are already organized into ethnic or religious enclaves, which means that community militias are also sectarian militias. That would explain why so much of the killing in Syria has developed along sectarian lines. It would also suggest that there’s not much anyone can do to end the killing because, in Zakaria’s view, this is a painful but unstoppable process of re-balancing power.
The second big theory is a bit simpler: that the Assad regime was not a sustainable enterprise and it’s clawing desperately on its way down. Most countries have some kind of self-sustaining political order, and it looked for a long time like Syria was held together by a cruel and repressive but basically stable dictatorship. But maybe it wasn’t stable; maybe it was built on quicksand. Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez seized power in a coup in 1970 after two decades of extreme political instability. His government was a product of Cold War meddling and a kind of Arab political identity crisis that was sweeping the region. But he picked the losing sides of both: the Soviet Union was his patron, and he followed a hard-line anti-Western nationalist ideology that’s now mostly defunct. The Cold War is long over, and most of the region long ago made peace with Israel and the United States; the Assad regime’s once-solid ideological and geopolitical identity is hopelessly outdated. But Bashar al-Assad, who took power in 2000 when his father died, never bothered to update it. So when things started going belly-up two years ago, he didn’t have much to fall back on except for his ability to kill people.
4. I hear a lot about how Russia still loves Syria, though. And Iran, too. What’s their deal?
Yeah, Russia is Syria’s most important ally. Moscow blocks the United Nations Security Council from passing anything that might hurt the Assad regime, which is why the United States has to go around the United Nations if it wants to do anything. Russia sends lots of weapons to Syria that make it easier for Assad to keep killing civilians and will make it much harder if the outside world ever wants to intervene.
The four big reasons that Russia wants to protect Assad, the importance of which vary depending on whom you ask, are: (1) Russia has a naval installation in Syria, which is strategically important and Russia’s last foreign military base [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/world/middleeast/russia-sends-warships-on-maneuvers-near-syria.html ] outside the former Soviet Union; (2) Russia still has a bit of a Cold War mentality, as well as a touch of national insecurity, which makes it care very much about maintaining one of its last military alliances; (3) Russia also hates the idea of “international intervention” against countries like Syria because it sees this as Cold War-style Western imperialism and ultimately a threat to Russia; (4) Syria buys a lot of Russian military exports, and Russia needs the money.
Iran’s thinking in supporting Assad is more straightforward. It perceives Israel and the United States as existential threats and uses Syria to protect itself, shipping arms through Syria to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. Iran is already feeling isolated and insecure; it worries that if Assad falls it will lose a major ally and be cut off from its militant proxies, leaving it very vulnerable. So far, it looks like Iran is actually coming out ahead [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iran-emerging-as-victor-in-syrian-conflict/2013/06/11/345d92b2-d2c2-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html ]: Assad is even more reliant on Tehran than he was before the war started.
5. This is all feeling really bleak and hopeless. Can we take a music break?
Oh man, it gets so much worse. But, yeah, let’s listen to some music from Syria. It’s really good!
If you want to go old-school you should listen to the man, the legend, the great Omar Souleyman [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgRUHIeaKOk (next below)]
Hope you enjoyed that, because things are about to go from depressing to despondent.
6. Why hasn’t the United States fixed this yet?
Because it can’t. There are no viable options. Sorry.
The military options are all bad. Shipping arms to rebels, even if it helps them topple Assad, would ultimately empower jihadists and worsen rebel in-fighting, probably leading to lots of chaos and possibly a second civil war (the United States made this mistake during Afghanistan’s early 1990s civil war, which helped the Taliban take power in 1996). Taking out Assad somehow would probably do the same, opening up a dangerous power vacuum. Launching airstrikes or a “no-fly zone” could suck us in, possibly for years, and probably wouldn’t make much difference on the ground. An Iraq-style ground invasion would, in the very best outcome, accelerate the killing, cost a lot of U.S. lives, wildly exacerbate anti-Americanism in a boon to jihadists and nationalist dictators alike, and would require the United States to impose order for years across a country full of people trying to kill each other. Nope.
The one political option, which the Obama administration has been pushing for, would be for the Assad regime and the rebels to strike a peace deal. But there’s no indication that either side is interested in that, or that there’s even a viable unified rebel movement with which to negotiate.
It’s possible that there was a brief window for a Libya-style military intervention early on in the conflict. But we’ll never really know.
7. So why would Obama bother with strikes that no one expects to actually solve anything?
Okay, you’re asking here about the Obama administration’s not-so-subtle signals that it wants to launch some cruise missiles at Syria, which would be punishment for what it says is Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians.
It’s true that basically no one believes that this will turn the tide of the Syrian war. But this is important: it’s not supposed to [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/27/heres-why-obama-is-giving-up-the-element-of-surprise-in-syria/ ]. The strikes wouldn’t be meant to shape the course of the war or to topple Assad, which Obama thinks would just make things worse anyway. They would be meant to punish Assad for (allegedly) using chemical weapons and to deter him, or any future military leader in any future war, from using them again.
8. Come on, what’s the big deal with chemical weapons? Assad kills 100,000 people with bullets and bombs but we’re freaked out over 1,000 who maybe died from poisonous gas? That seems silly.
You’re definitely not the only one who thinks the distinction is arbitrary and artificial. But there’s a good case to be made that this is a rare opportunity, at least in theory, for the United States to make the war a little bit less terrible — and to make future wars less terrible.
The whole idea that there are rules of war is a pretty new one: the practice of war is thousands of years old, but the idea that we can regulate war to make it less terrible has been around for less than a century. The institutions that do this are weak and inconsistent; the rules are frail and not very well observed. But one of the world’s few quasi-successes is the “norm” (a fancy way of saying a rule we all agree to follow) against chemical weapons. This norm is frail enough that Syria could drastically weaken it if we ignore Assad’s use of them, but it’s also strong enough that it’s worth protecting. So it’s sort of a low-hanging fruit: firing a few cruise missiles doesn’t cost us much and can maybe help preserve this really hard-won and valuable norm against chemical weapons.
You didn’t answer my question. That just tells me that we can maybe preserve the norm against chemical weapons, not why we should.
Fair point. Here’s the deal: war is going to happen. It just is. But the reason that the world got together in 1925 for the Geneva Convention to ban chemical weapons is because this stuff is really, really good at killing civilians but not actually very good at the conventional aim of warfare, which is to defeat the other side. You might say that they’re maybe 30 percent a battlefield weapon and 70 percent a tool of terror. In a world without that norm against chemical weapons, a military might fire off some sarin gas because it wants that battlefield advantage, even if it ends up causing unintended and massive suffering among civilians, maybe including its own. And if a military believes its adversary is probably going to use chemical weapons, it has a strong incentive to use them itself. After all, they’re fighting to the death.
So both sides of any conflict, not to mention civilians everywhere, are better off if neither of them uses chemical weapons. But that requires believing that your opponent will never use them, no matter what. And the only way to do that, short of removing them from the planet entirely, is for everyone to just agree in advance to never use them and to really mean it. That becomes much harder if the norm is weakened because someone like Assad got away with it. It becomes a bit easier if everyone believes using chemical weapons will cost you a few inbound U.S. cruise missiles.
That’s why the Obama administration apparently wants to fire cruise missiles at Syria, even though it won’t end the suffering, end the war or even really hurt Assad that much.
9. Hi, there was too much text so I skipped to the bottom to find the big take-away. What’s going to happen?
Short-term maybe the United States and some allies will launch some limited, brief strikes against Syria and maybe they won’t. Either way, these things seem pretty certain in the long-term:
• The killing will continue, probably for years. There’s no one to sign a peace treaty on the rebel side, even if the regime side were interested, and there’s no foreseeable victory for either. Refugees will continue fleeing into neighboring countries, causing instability and an entire other humanitarian crisis as conditions in the camps worsen.
• Syria as we know it, an ancient place with a rich and celebrated culture and history, will be a broken, failed society, probably for a generation or more. It’s very hard to see how you rebuild a functioning state after this. Maybe worse, it’s hard to see how you get back to a working social contract where everyone agrees to get along.
• Russia will continue to block international action, the window for which has maybe closed anyway. The United States might try to pressure, cajole or even horse-trade Moscow into changing its mind, but there’s not much we can offer them that they care about as much as Syria.
• At some point the conflict will cool, either from a partial victory or from exhaustion. The world could maybe send in some peacekeepers or even broker a fragile peace between the various ethnic, religious and political factions. Probably the best model is Lebanon, which fought a brutal civil war that lasted 15 years from 1975 to 1990 and has been slowly, slowly recovering ever since. It had some bombings just last week [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/northern-lebanese-city-buries-it-dead-after-double-bomb-attack/2013/08/24/ff4d6eb8-0cf9-11e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91351516 and preceding and following)].
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Related:
Teju Cole’s 9 questions about Britain you were too embarrassed to ask
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/09/03/teju-coles-9-questions-about-britain-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/
More from WorldViews on Syria:
The one map that shows why Syria is so complicated
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/27/the-one-map-that-shows-why-syria-is-so-complicated/
The first truly heartwarming video from Syria in a long time
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/27/the-first-truly-heartwarming-video-from-syria-in-a-long-time/
Here’s why Obama is giving up the element of surprise in Syria
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/27/heres-why-obama-is-giving-up-the-element-of-surprise-in-syria/
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© 2013 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/29/9-questions-about-syria-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/ [with comments]
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Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West
Video [embedded]
Syrian Rebels Execute 7 Soldiers: Graphic video footage of Syrian rebels shooting and burying government soldiers in April.
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: September 5, 2013
The Syrian rebels posed casually, standing over their prisoners with firearms pointed down at the shirtless and terrified men.
The prisoners, seven in all, were captured Syrian soldiers. Five were trussed, their backs marked with red welts. They kept their faces pressed to the dirt as the rebels’ commander recited a bitter revolutionary verse.
“For fifty years, they are companions to corruption,” he said. “We swear to the Lord of the Throne, that this is our oath: We will take revenge.”
The moment the poem ended, the commander, known as “the Uncle,” fired a bullet into the back of the first prisoner’s head. His gunmen followed suit, promptly killing all the men at their feet.
This scene, documented in a video smuggled out of Syria a few days ago by a former rebel who grew disgusted by the killings, offers a dark insight into how many rebels have adopted some of the same brutal and ruthless tactics as the regime they are trying to overthrow.
As the United States debates whether to support the Obama administration’s proposal that Syrian forces should be attacked for using chemical weapons against civilians, this video, shot in April, joins a growing body of evidence of an increasingly criminal environment populated by gangs of highwaymen, kidnappers and killers.
The video also offers a reminder of the foreign policy puzzle the United States faces in finding rebel allies as some members of Congress, including Senator John McCain, press for more robust military support for the opposition.
In the more than two years this civil war has carried on, a large part of the Syrian opposition has formed a loose command structure that has found support from several Arab nations, and, to a more limited degree, the West. Other elements of the opposition have assumed an extremist cast, and openly allied with Al Qaeda.
Across much of Syria, where rebels with Western support live and fight, areas outside of government influence have evolved into a complex guerrilla and criminal landscape.
That has raised the prospect that American military action could inadvertently strengthen Islamic extremists and criminals.
Abdul Samad Issa, 37, the rebel commander leading his fighters through the executions of the captured soldiers, illustrates that very risk.
Known in northern Syria as “the Uncle” because two of his deputies are his nephews, Mr. Issa leads a relatively unknown group of fewer than 300 fighters, one of his former aides said. The former aide, who smuggled the video out of Syria, is not being identified for security reasons.
A trader and livestock herder before the war, Mr. Issa formed a fighting group early in the uprising by using his own money to buy weapons and underwrite the fighters’ expenses.
His motivation, his former aide said, was just as the poem he recited said: revenge.
In Washington on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the issue of radicalized rebels in an exchange with Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican. Mr. Kerry insisted, “There is a real moderate opposition that exists.”
Mr. Kerry said that there were 70,000 to 100,000 “oppositionists.” Of these, he said, some 15 percent to 20 percent were “bad guys” or extremists.
Mr. McCaul responded by saying he had been told in briefings that half of the opposition fighters were extremists.
Much of the concern among American officials has focused on two groups that acknowledge ties to Al Qaeda. These groups — the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — have attracted foreign jihadis, used terrorist tactics and vowed to create a society in Syria ruled by their severe interpretation of Islamic law.
They have established a firm presence in parts of Aleppo and Idlib Provinces and in the northern provincial capital of Raqqa and in Deir al-Zour, to the east on the Iraqi border.
While the jihadis claim to be superior fighters, and have collaborated with secular Syrian rebels, some analysts and diplomats also note that they can appear less focused on toppling President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, they said, they focus more on establishing a zone of influence spanning Iraq’s Anbar Province and the desert eastern areas of Syria, and eventually establishing an Islamic territory under their administration.
Other areas are under more secular control, including the suburbs of Damascus. In East Ghouta, for example, the suburbs east of the capital where the chemical attack took place, jihadis are not dominant, according to people who live and work there.
And while the United States has said it seeks policies that would strengthen secular rebels and isolate extremists, the dynamic on the ground, as seen in the execution video from Idlib and in a spate of other documented crimes, is more complicated than a contest between secular and religious groups.
Mr. Issa’s father was opposed to President Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president. He disappeared in 1982, according to Mr. Issa’s accounts.
Mr. Issa, the aide said, believes his father was killed during a 27-day government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood [ http://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/21/world/syria-said-to-raze-part-of-rebel-city.html ] that year, known as the Hama massacre.
By the time he was a young man, Mr. Issa was vocally antigovernment and was arrested and imprisoned twice for a total of nine months, the aide said.
When the uprising against Bashar al-Assad started two and a half years ago, the family saw it as a means to try to settle old scores.
At first, people who know Mr. Issa said, he was a protester, and then he led fighters in small skirmishes. By last year he was running a training camp in the highlands near Turkey.
By this year, the aide said, he was gathering weapons from relatives and Arab businessmen he knew from his work as a trader and, at least once, from the Western-supported Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, the rebel forces.
(Two representatives of the military council declined to comment on the council’s military collaboration or logistical support for Mr. Issa’s group. Mr. Issa could not be reached for comment over two days this week.)
By the spring, his group had taken a resonant name: Jund al-Sham, which it shares with three international terrorist groups, and another group in Syria.
Its relationship — if any — with these other groups is not clear.
Mr. Issa’s former aide and two other men who have met or investigated him said he appears to assume identities of convenience.
But, they said, one of his tactics has been to promise to his fighters what he calls “the extermination” of Alawites — the minority Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs, and which Mr. Issa blames for Syria’s suffering.
This sentiment may have driven Mr. Issa’s decision to execute his prisoners in the video, his former aide said. The soldiers had been captured when Mr. Issa’s fighters overran a government checkpoint north of Idlib in March.
Their cellphones, the former aide said, had videos of soldiers raping Syrian civilians and looting.
Mr. Issa declared them all criminals, he said, and a revolutionary trial was held. They were found guilty.
Mr. Issa, the former aide said, then arranged for their execution to be videotaped in April so he could show his work against Mr. Assad and his military to donors, and seek more financing.
The video ends abruptly after his fighters dump the soldiers’ broken bodies into a well.
One of the participants, a young man wearing a purple fleece jacket, looks into the camera and smiles.
Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Antakya, Turkey; Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.
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Related
Obama Faces Barrier in His Own Party on Syria (September 5, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/obama-faces-barrier-in-his-own-party-on-syria.html
Questions of Policy and Leadership Dog Obama Before Meeting in Russia (September 5, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/europe/a-diminished-obama-heads-to-russia-for-g-20-meeting.html
Putin Says Proof of Chemical Arms Attack Is Not Enough to Justify U.S. Action (September 5, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/europe/putin-says-proof-of-chemical-arms-attack-not-enough-to-justify-us-attack.html
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© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/brutality-of-syrian-rebels-pose-dilemma-in-west.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/brutality-of-syrian-rebels-pose-dilemma-in-west.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Ali Habib, Syria's Former Minister Of Defense, Reportedly Defects In Break With Assad
Syrian Defense Minister Hassan Turkmani (R) and Chief of Syrian Army Ali Habib wait outside the Al-Shami hospital in Damascus as the body of Syrian Interior Minister Lieutenant General Ghazi Kanaan, who committed suicide in his office yesterday, is carried into an ambulance, 13 October 2005.
(LOUAI BESHARA/AFP/Getty Images)
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Amena Bakr
Posted: 09/04/2013 10:32 am EDT | Updated: 09/04/2013 11:46 am EDT
AMMAN/DOHA, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Former Syrian Defense Minister General Ali Habib, a prominent member of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect, has defected and is now in Turkey, a senior member of the opposition Syrian National Coalition told Reuters on Wednesday.
If his defection is confirmed, Habib would be the highest ranking figure from the Alawite minority to break with Assad since the uprising against his rule began in 2011.
"Ali Habib has managed to escape from the grip of the regime and he is now in Turkey, but this does not mean that he has joined the opposition. I was told this by a Western diplomatic official," Kamal al-Labwani said from Paris.
A Gulf source told Reuters that Habib had defected on Tuesday evening, arriving at the Turkish frontier before midnight with two or three other people. He was then taken across the border in a convoy of vehicles.
His companions were fellow military officers who supported his defection, the source said. They were believed to have also left Syria but there was no immediate confirmation of that.
Labwani said Habib was smuggled out of Syria with the help of a Western country.
"He will be a top source of information. Habib has had a long military career. He has been effectively under house arrest since he defied Assad and opposed killing protesters," Labwani said.
An officer in the opposition Free Syrian Army, who did not want to be identified, said the Habib appeared to have coordinated his defection with the United States.
Former military officers who have defected from Assad's army say it had about 36,000 officers, of which 28,000 are Alawites. The remaining 8,000 are a mix of Sunni Muslims, the majority community in Syria, and members of minorities such as Christians and Druze, they said.
Born in 1939, Habib was Defense Minister from 2009 to August 2011, when he was replaced for what official media said were health reasons.
After rumours that he was dismissed for opposing the killing of peaceful pro-democracy protesters, Habib was shown on state television pledging his loyalty to the Assad government. Western diplomats said the statement appeared to have been made under duress.
Habib participated in the 1973 October War against Israel, in which Syria failed to recapture the occupied Golan Heights, and in the 1990-91 Gulf War, when Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father and predecessor as president, symbolically joined a U.S.-led coalition that ousted Iraq occupation troops from Kuwait.
(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut,; Editing by William Maclean, Robin Pomeroy and Giles Elgood)
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/ali-habib-defects-syria_n_3866092.html [with comments]
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No, Iran Doesn’t Need Assad
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad welcomes Iran's former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at al-Shaaeb presidential palace in Damascus in 2010.
(Khaled al-Hariri/Reuters)
Tehran is particularly turned off by his use of chemical weapons and might be ready to play a role in negotiations.
Sune Engel Rasmussen
Sep 4 2013, 1:40 PM ET
As opponents of a strike against Syria scramble to find alternative avenues for a peaceful solution, there is one murky diplomatic route, rarely mentioned, which now seems more necessary than ever to explore: talking to Iran.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Iran’s support for Bashar al-Assad is neither unconditional nor everlasting. Despite having assisted the Assad regime from the beginning of the conflict with weapons and personnel, the war in Syria has not strengthened Iran, which likely wants to get out of the Syrian quagmire as soon as possible -- if it can do so with some influence in Syria intact.
First of all, the war has created a regional image problem for the clerics in Tehran. Since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has strived to be a beacon for the downtrodden people of the Muslim world and a standard-bearer against what it sees as oppression by America in the region. Assad’s carnage against fellow Muslims makes Iran look really bad on the Arab street, where Iran tried hard to make the Arab Spring look like a logical extension of its own revolution.
Iran’s support for Assad is also financially costly and strains an economy already suffering under sanctions, inflation, and widespread mismanagement. This is partly why Iran wouldn’t be able to afford a proportionate response to a U.S. attack on Syria. As Meir Javedanfar has argued [ http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/08/iran-syria-attack-assad-air-defense-nuclear-program-economy.html ( http://bit.ly/1cwf5Pb )], Iran wouldn’t want to risk the loss of hard-to-replace anti-aircraft systems and fighter aircrafts, or to expose its nuclear facilities to attacks from Israel.
Lastly, propping up Assad after his alleged use of chemical weapons against his own people is causing rifts in the Iranian leadership. On Sunday, Iran’s éminence grise – and presidential ally – Hashemi Rafsanjani reportedly blamed the Syrian government for the chemical weapons attack that killed more than 1,400 in a Damascus suburb. The government since denied the remarks, but regardless, the episode exposed a very real dissent within the establishment.
Saddam Hussein’s use of nerve gas during Iraq’s war against Iran in the 1980s is an open historical wound for Iranians, including many veterans among government officials who will find it difficult to consent, even tacitly, to supporting the use of such weapons against innocent civilians.
In fact, there are plenty of reasons Iran might have already cut Assad loose, were it not for the fact that Syria is Iran’s most important regional ally.
But that relationship is changing. The fall of Saddam Hussein has paved the way for much friendlier relations between Iran and Iraq and rendered Syria less vital for Iran than it used to be.
So there is a good chance that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be willing to “cut the head off the snake” in Damascus and keep the body. Assad is not as important for Tehran, as is ensuring that Syria’s power structure is friendly to Iran’s interests. Aware that a negotiated solution is the only way to achieve that, Iran has long called for [ http://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/09/03/259672/iran-backs-democratic-reforms-in-syria/ ( http://bit.ly/171Gczx )] political reforms in Syria.
As statements from the past weeks show, Washington and Tehran are closer to each other than many might think. On its side, Iran gave full support to the UN probe into the alleged chemical attacks.
“We completely & strongly condemn use of chemical weapons in Syria because Islamic Republic of Iran is itself victim of chemical weapons,” newly elected president Hassan Rouhani wrote on Twitter.
The Supreme Leader was also relatively muted, calling a possible U.S. attack a “disaster for the region,” which would lead to defeat for the U.S. and its allies. For Khamenei, such talk is autopilot rhetoric and not necessarily an attempt to escalate tensions.
The U.S. government, meanwhile, has worked to assure world leaders that diplomacy is still viable, emphasizing that an attack would not be aimed at regime change. President Obama has said that, “we’re prepared to work with anybody — the Russians and others — to try to bring the parties together to resolve the conflict.” The key here, of course, is “others.”
At the same time, UN Under Secretary for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman paid a visit to Iran’s foreign minister Zarif and reportedly stressed that Iran has a crucial role to play in negotiating peace in Syria.
Iran appears to have made efforts to do so: Last year’s Syrian National Dialogue meetings were held in Tehran, and in February of this year, Iran’s then-foreign minister met with Syrian opposition leader Moaz Al-Khatib in Munich.
With the UN General Assembly coming up, inviting Iran to talk would be a good first step.
By bringing Iran in, the West could give Rouhani an early success in his presidency and help bolster his moderate discourse. An escalation of the conflict, on the other hand, would boost militant hardliners in Tehran and corner Rouhani with less room for diplomatic maneuvers.
Perhaps understandably, the Obama administration will be apprehensive of acknowledging its long-time foe as a legitimate part of a negotiation. But weighed against the prospective death toll of a prolonged conflict in Syria, it could be worth a try.
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/no-iran-doesn-t-need-assad/279340/ [with comments]
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Analysis - U.S. strike on Syria could derail Iran president's master plan
By Yeganeh Torbati
DUBAI | Wed Sep 4, 2013 6:35pm BST
(Reuters) - If one thing could scuttle Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's big plan - to fix Iran's economy by winning some relief from Western sanctions - a U.S. strike on Tehran's ally Syria is it.
Rouhani's June election landslide won him the cautious backing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to pursue his pledge to engage with Western countries and attempt to ease Iran's isolation over Tehran's nuclear programme.
But the hardliners Rouhani defeated at the polls still dominate parliament and the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and are poised to return Iran to the familiar posture of defiance if the president's message of moderation falls on deaf ears abroad.
As the president prepares to travel to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly this month, U.S. military strikes on Syria could derail Rouhani's diplomacy before it even starts.
"You can hardly think of a more unlucky situation for a moderate government which wants to relax tensions with the world," wrote columnist Maziar Khosravi in Iran's reformist Sharq newspaper on Monday, referring to the likelihood of U.S. strikes to punish Assad for an apparent chemical weapons attack near Damascus on August 21.
Syria is Iran's sole regional ally, and Western foes say Tehran is supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with arms, cash and Revolutionary Guardsmen to train militia to help win the civil war.
A U.S. strike on Syria would spell "the end of a diplomacy aimed at reducing tensions with the West and reconciliation with the world," wrote Sadeq Zibakalam, a professor at Tehran University, in Etemad, another reformist newspaper, last week.
"The atmosphere between Syria's allies and the West, after a Western attack on Syria, will become so cold and dark that there would be practically no space for reducing tensions and improving relations ... Iran will be forced to change its tone towards the West to a hostile one."
RAISING THE STAKES
In Washington, some people reason that a U.S. strike on Syria would improve the prospects of a deal with Iran by reinforcing the credibility of the implicit U.S. threat to use force to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
"If there are a set of finite but effective strikes against Syria, the effect on the Iranians will be real," said Dennis Ross, a former White House and State Department official who served as one of President Barack Obama's key advisers on Iran.
"It raises the stakes for them of not having diplomacy succeed," said Ross, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think-tank.
Conversely, Ross said a U.S. failure to punish Syria for crossing Obama's "red line" with the use of chemical weapons might make Iran believe it could pursue its nuclear programme with impunity.
This argument is reinforced by the view held by many in the United States that it is the sweeping U.S., European Union and United Nations sanctions on Iran that have brought about Iran's new willingness to engage over its nuclear programme.
However, there are those who make the opposite case: that strikes on Syria would reinforce those in Iran who favour obtaining nuclear weapons and undermine a potential deal.
"There's a valid argument to be made that U.S. inaction in Syria will embolden Iran to move forward with its nuclear ambitions. There's an equally valid argument that if the U.S. attacks Syria, Iran will feel an even greater need for a nuclear deterrent," said Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank in Washington.
DIVISIONS IN TEHRAN
When considering their response to any strike on Syria, Iranian leaders must weigh the costs and benefits of backing Assad, versus the advantage to be gained from a possible detente with the United States, the prospect of a nuclear deal and the easing of sanctions.
So far, Iran's response to the chemical weapons attack suggests disagreement within the corridors of power in Tehran.
A chorus of Revolutionary Guards commanders have issued daily dire warnings that U.S. strikes on Syria would result in a conflict engulfing the whole region - implying retaliation against Israel, presumably by Iran's Lebanese ally Hezbollah.
"An attack on Syria will mean the imminent destruction of Israel," IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted as saying last week in an interview with the Tasnim news agency.
In a speech on Wednesday, Rouhani said any U.S. strike on Syria would be illegitimate.
"The fact that the United States has asked for feedback from its own Congress for action against Syria means that the United States does not have international legitimacy for this action from the United Nations, the Security Council, and public opinion," the ISNA news agency quoted Rouhani as saying
Rouhani has also condemned the use of chemical weapons, pointing out that Iranian troops were victims of gas attacks during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. He stopped short of apportioning blame for the attack in Syria.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif went further, blaming Syrian rebels. He also warned the United States not to get involved: "The Syria crisis is a trap set by Zionist pressure groups for (the United States)," Iran's English-language channel Press TV quoted him as saying.
But Zarif has also offered some mild criticism of the Syrian government.
"We believe that big mistakes made by the government in Syria unfortunately provided an opportunity for abuse," Iranian media quoted him as saying this week. He has also repeatedly called for diplomacy as an alternative to Obama's stark alternatives of military strikes versus inaction.
Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an ally and mentor of Rouhani, appeared to go further last week by blaming the Syrian government for the August 21 attack.
The Foreign Ministry denied Rafsanjani said any such thing, but while the semi-official state news agency that originally quoted him changed those comments, it left unchanged Rafsanjani's charge that in Syria "the prisons are overflowing and they've converted stadiums into prisons".
"The Syrian crisis is as polarising for Iran's political elite as it is for the international community," said Yasmin Alem, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's South Asia Centre. "It is no longer clear whether Syria is the lynchpin of Iran's security or a threat to it."
Much depends on the intensity and extent of any U.S. attacks on Syrian government forces and facilities.
"A limited attack with minimum impact on the balance of power in Syria is unlikely to impede nuclear diplomacy with Iran," said Ali Vaez, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
"Rouhani's success depends on rescuing Iran's ailing economy, the realisation of which is nearly impracticable without sanctions relief. If he allows Syria to spoil the nuclear negotiations, his presidency will falter just one month after it began."
(Additional reporting by Marcus George in Dubai and Arshad Mohammed in Washington; Writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Peter Graff and Robin Pomeroy)
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/uk-syria-crisis-iran-usa-analysis-idUKBRE9830PU20130904 [with comments]
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Iran’s President to Speak at the U.N.
September 4, 2013
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, a cleric who was elected in June [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/middleeast/iran-election.html ] after promising to ease the country’s economic isolation and tensions with the West over a disputed nuclear program, will attend the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this month and deliver three speeches, his foreign minister said Wednesday.
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/irans-president-to-speak-at-the-un.html
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Syria Tests Limits of Iran President’s Overture to West
Iranian President Hassan Rohani, on screens, speaks during a parliament session in Tehran, on August 15, 2013.
Behrouz Mehri/AFP via Getty Images
By Ladane Nasseri - Sep 4, 2013 3:01 PM CT
Syria is proving a testing ground for Iranian President Hassan Rohani’s new foreign policy and his battle to assert dominance over the country’s hardliners.
Rohani, who came to power last month, has so far shunned the bellicose rhetoric of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the U.S. prepares for strikes on the country’s Syrian ally. By contrast, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said last week that U.S. is flirting with its “most historic defeat” and that intervention would be more dangerous than in Vietnam and could ultimately lead to Israel’s disappearance.
Rohani has promised a more constructive engagement with Western powers as sanctions linked to Iran’s disputed nuclear program cripple the economy of world’s sixth-largest oil producer. His challenge now is to ensure that any U.S. strike on Syria doesn’t upend that policy by giving hardliners an excuse to ratchet up their anti-U.S. rhetoric or place obstacles on the path to a resumption of nuclear talks, which stalled in April.
Iran’s president is “really compelled to either take on the hardliners or to see everything that he was elected to do go up in flames,” Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington said in a phone interview. Rohani was elected to “resolve the nuclear issue in a way that works to Iran’s advantage and with this kind of mandate it’s clear that Syria would be a major deterrent to any resolution.”
‘Active Diplomacy’
Rohani’s June election victory involved pledges to secure an economic revival in part through “active diplomacy” with Western states. Iran has supported Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad consistently through the two-year civil war, with both countries describing themselves as members of a “resistance front” against Israel.
Iran’s economy has suffered as the U.S. and European Union tightened sanctions in the past two years. Oil output is near a 25-year low, inflation reached 37.5 percent in July, and gross domestic product will shrink 1.3 percent this year according to International Monetary Fund forecasts. Unemployment is 12 percent officially and almost twice that in reality, the Tehran-based Shargh newspaper reported yesterday.
A team of senior Iranian parliamentarians visited Assad in a show of support for the “brother” nation on Sept. 2. Yet Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, didn’t directly answer several questions on what Iran would do if Syria were attacked.
Await Results
Instead he said any judgment on U.S. allegations of a chemical attack by Assad’s forces in Ghouta outside Damascus last month should await the results of samples taken by United Nations inspectors. President Barack Obama said Sept. 3 he was confident Congress would support his plan to attack Syria over the use of chemical weapons.
While not straying from the official line, Rohani’s comments have been measured. Iran “condemns any use of chemical weapons,” which were used against it during the eight-year long war with Iraq that ended in 1988, the president said. On Aug. 29, Rohani also urged the international community “not to jump to conclusions before facts are clear”, warning that military intervention in Syria risked destabilizing the entire region and fueling extremism, he said.
The sensitivity of the issue inside Iran was highlighted this week by reports on comments from former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. In an Aug. 31 speech, Rafsanjani was quoted by the Iranian Labour News Agency as saying the Syrian population has come “under chemical attack from their own government.”
Comments Revised
The comments were revised within hours by ILNA amid criticism on local hardline news websites. The updated version read “on the one hand the people of Syria are the target of a chemical attack.”
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham rejected the comments attributed to Rafsanjani. The former president and head of the Expediency Council sees “Syria as a solid fortress against the Zionist regime,” Afkham said, according to state-run Iranian Students News Agency.
Still, a video was subsequently posted on a website apparently showing Rafsanjani and where the original comments could be heard. The video’s authenticity could not be verified.
Analysts say the outcome of the debate with hardliners within Iran isn’t yet settled.
“It’s quite clear that Iran is going to play the Syria crisis carefully, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to see a resurgence of the hardline position,” Maloney said.
Moderate ‘Minority’
Iran’s “moderates are in relative minority and the hardliners” around Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “control most of the key levers of power, so they’re always going to be heard a little bit more loudly,” David Hartwell, Middle East analyst at research firm IHS Jane’s, said by phone from London. Military action may mean “that a more moderate approach by Iranians would get killed off before it even begun.”
Rebel groups that have been seeking to topple Assad for 2 1/2 years, with backing from the U.S. and its European and Arab allies, say more than 1,300 people were killed in the chemical attack last month. Syria’s government has denied responsibility.
Keeping Assad in power is of strategic importance to Iran, though it’s “very unlikely” that Iran would get involved in some form of military retaliation against the West or Israel as a consequence of U.S. strikes, Hartwell says.
Saeed Laylaz, a Tehran-based analyst and commentator in moderate Iranian newspapers, says Iran has little reason to step into an armed conflict in support of Syria.
“Iran doesn’t have the capacity to intervene in Syria’s affairs. It isn’t our priority for the time being,” Laylaz said in a note published Sept. 1 in the Etemaad newspaper. “From a geopolitical view, Syria is lost to Iran.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Ladane Nasseri in Dubai at lnasseri@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net
©2013 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-04/syria-tests-limits-of-iran-president-s-overture-to-west.html [no comments yet]
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John McCain Mocks Laura Ingraham's 'Vast Knowledge Of Military Tactics' On Syria
09/04/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/john-mccain-laura-ingraham_n_3865261.html [with embedded video, and comments]
*
John McCain Blasts Fox News Over 'Allahu Akbar' Criticism
09/03/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/03/john-mccain-fox-news_n_3859871.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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By Max Fisher, Published: August 29, 2013 at 12:50 pm
The United States and allies are preparing for a possibly imminent series of limited military strikes against Syria, the first direct U.S. intervention in the two-year civil war, in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad’s suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians.
If you found the above sentence kind of confusing, or aren’t exactly sure why Syria is fighting a civil war, or even where Syria is located, then this is the article for you. What’s happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.
Here, then, are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. First, a disclaimer: Syria and its history are really complicated; this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it.
1. What is Syria?
Syria is a country in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s about the same size as Washington state with a population a little over three times as large – 22 million. Syria is very diverse, ethnically and religiously, but most Syrians are ethnic Arab and follow the Sunni branch of Islam. Civilization in Syria goes back thousands of years, but the country as it exists today is very young. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers in the 1920s.
Syria is in the middle of an extremely violent civil war. Fighting between government forces and rebels has killed more 100,000 and created 2 million refugees, half of them children [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/un-says-child-refugees-fleeing-syria-violence-tops-1-million-mark/2013/08/23/b63571d6-0bb3-11e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html ].
2. Why are people in Syria killing each other?
The killing started in April 2011, when peaceful protests inspired by earlier revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia rose up to challenge the dictatorship running the country. The government responded — there is no getting around this — like monsters. First, security forces quietly killed activists. Then they started kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing activists and their family members, including a lot of children [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/syrias-war-against-children/249941/ ], dumping their mutilated bodies by the sides of roads. Then troops began simply opening fire on protests. Eventually, civilians started shooting back.
Fighting escalated from there until it was a civil war. Armed civilians organized into rebel groups. The army deployed across the country, shelling and bombing whole neighborhoods and towns, trying to terrorize people into submission. They’ve also allegedly used chemical weapons, which is a big deal for reasons I’ll address below. Volunteers from other countries joined the rebels, either because they wanted freedom and democracy for Syria or, more likely, because they are jihadists who hate Syria’s secular government. The rebels were gaining ground for a while and now it looks like Assad is coming back. There is no end in sight.
3. That’s horrible. But there are protests lots of places. How did it all go so wrong in Syria? And, please, just give me the short version.
That’s a complicated question, and there’s no single, definitive answer. This is the shortest possible version — stay with me, it’s worth it. You might say, broadly speaking, that there are two general theories. Both start with the idea that Syria has been a powder keg waiting to explode for decades and that it was set off, maybe inevitably, by the 2011 protests and especially by the government’s overly harsh crackdown.
Before we dive into the theories, you have to understand that the Syrian government really overreacted when peaceful protests started in mid-2011, slaughtering civilians unapologetically, which was a big part of how things escalated as quickly as they did. Assad learned this from his father. In 1982, Assad’s father and then-dictator Hafez al-Assad responded to a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the city of Hama by leveling entire neighborhoods [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/the-new-hama-rules.html ]. He killed thousands of civilians, many of whom had nothing to do with the uprising. But it worked, and it looks like the younger Assad tried to reproduce it. His failure made the descent into chaos much worse.
Okay, now the theories for why Syria spiraled so wildly. The first is what you might call “sectarian re-balancing” or “the Fareed Zakaria case [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/17/fareed-zakarias-case-against-u-s-involvement-in-syria/ ]” for why Syria is imploding (he didn’t invent this argument but is a major proponent). Syria has artificial borders that were created by European colonial powers, forcing together an amalgam of diverse religious and ethnic groups. Those powers also tended to promote a minority and rule through it, worsening preexisting sectarian tensions.
Zakaria’s argument is that what we’re seeing in Syria is in some ways the inevitable re-balancing of power along ethnic and religious lines. He compares it to the sectarian bloodbath in Iraq after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, after which a long-oppressed majority retook power from, and violently punished, the former minority rulers. Most Syrians are Sunni Arabs, but the country is run by members of a minority sect known as Alawites (they’re ethnic Arab but follow a smaller branch of Islam). The Alawite government rules through a repressive dictatorship and gives Alawites special privileges [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/15/the-alawite-lane/ ], which makes some Sunnis and other groups hate Alawites in general, which in turn makes Alawites fear that they’ll be slaughtered en masse if Assad loses the war. (There are other minorities as well, such as ethnic Kurds and Christian Arabs; too much to cover in one explainer.) Also, lots of Syrian communities are already organized into ethnic or religious enclaves, which means that community militias are also sectarian militias. That would explain why so much of the killing in Syria has developed along sectarian lines. It would also suggest that there’s not much anyone can do to end the killing because, in Zakaria’s view, this is a painful but unstoppable process of re-balancing power.
The second big theory is a bit simpler: that the Assad regime was not a sustainable enterprise and it’s clawing desperately on its way down. Most countries have some kind of self-sustaining political order, and it looked for a long time like Syria was held together by a cruel and repressive but basically stable dictatorship. But maybe it wasn’t stable; maybe it was built on quicksand. Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez seized power in a coup in 1970 after two decades of extreme political instability. His government was a product of Cold War meddling and a kind of Arab political identity crisis that was sweeping the region. But he picked the losing sides of both: the Soviet Union was his patron, and he followed a hard-line anti-Western nationalist ideology that’s now mostly defunct. The Cold War is long over, and most of the region long ago made peace with Israel and the United States; the Assad regime’s once-solid ideological and geopolitical identity is hopelessly outdated. But Bashar al-Assad, who took power in 2000 when his father died, never bothered to update it. So when things started going belly-up two years ago, he didn’t have much to fall back on except for his ability to kill people.
4. I hear a lot about how Russia still loves Syria, though. And Iran, too. What’s their deal?
Yeah, Russia is Syria’s most important ally. Moscow blocks the United Nations Security Council from passing anything that might hurt the Assad regime, which is why the United States has to go around the United Nations if it wants to do anything. Russia sends lots of weapons to Syria that make it easier for Assad to keep killing civilians and will make it much harder if the outside world ever wants to intervene.
The four big reasons that Russia wants to protect Assad, the importance of which vary depending on whom you ask, are: (1) Russia has a naval installation in Syria, which is strategically important and Russia’s last foreign military base [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/world/middleeast/russia-sends-warships-on-maneuvers-near-syria.html ] outside the former Soviet Union; (2) Russia still has a bit of a Cold War mentality, as well as a touch of national insecurity, which makes it care very much about maintaining one of its last military alliances; (3) Russia also hates the idea of “international intervention” against countries like Syria because it sees this as Cold War-style Western imperialism and ultimately a threat to Russia; (4) Syria buys a lot of Russian military exports, and Russia needs the money.
Iran’s thinking in supporting Assad is more straightforward. It perceives Israel and the United States as existential threats and uses Syria to protect itself, shipping arms through Syria to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. Iran is already feeling isolated and insecure; it worries that if Assad falls it will lose a major ally and be cut off from its militant proxies, leaving it very vulnerable. So far, it looks like Iran is actually coming out ahead [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iran-emerging-as-victor-in-syrian-conflict/2013/06/11/345d92b2-d2c2-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html ]: Assad is even more reliant on Tehran than he was before the war started.
5. This is all feeling really bleak and hopeless. Can we take a music break?
Oh man, it gets so much worse. But, yeah, let’s listen to some music from Syria. It’s really good!
If you want to go old-school you should listen to the man, the legend, the great Omar Souleyman [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgRUHIeaKOk (next below)]
(playing Brooklyn this Saturday [ http://issueprojectroom.org/drupal/event/omar-souleyman-bobb-trimble-75-dollar-bill-steve-gunn ]!). Or, if you really want to get your revolutionary on, listen to the infectious 2011 anti-Assad anthem “Come on Bashar leave [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCS8SsFOBAI (next below)].”
The singer, a cement mixer who made Rage Against the Machine look like Enya, was killed for performing it in Hama [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/world/middleeast/22poet.html?pagewanted=all ]. But let’s listen to something non-war and bit more contemporary, the soulful and foot-tappable George Wassouf [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAnbdjGk3CU (next below, as embedded)]:
Hope you enjoyed that, because things are about to go from depressing to despondent.
6. Why hasn’t the United States fixed this yet?
Because it can’t. There are no viable options. Sorry.
The military options are all bad. Shipping arms to rebels, even if it helps them topple Assad, would ultimately empower jihadists and worsen rebel in-fighting, probably leading to lots of chaos and possibly a second civil war (the United States made this mistake during Afghanistan’s early 1990s civil war, which helped the Taliban take power in 1996). Taking out Assad somehow would probably do the same, opening up a dangerous power vacuum. Launching airstrikes or a “no-fly zone” could suck us in, possibly for years, and probably wouldn’t make much difference on the ground. An Iraq-style ground invasion would, in the very best outcome, accelerate the killing, cost a lot of U.S. lives, wildly exacerbate anti-Americanism in a boon to jihadists and nationalist dictators alike, and would require the United States to impose order for years across a country full of people trying to kill each other. Nope.
The one political option, which the Obama administration has been pushing for, would be for the Assad regime and the rebels to strike a peace deal. But there’s no indication that either side is interested in that, or that there’s even a viable unified rebel movement with which to negotiate.
It’s possible that there was a brief window for a Libya-style military intervention early on in the conflict. But we’ll never really know.
7. So why would Obama bother with strikes that no one expects to actually solve anything?
Okay, you’re asking here about the Obama administration’s not-so-subtle signals that it wants to launch some cruise missiles at Syria, which would be punishment for what it says is Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians.
It’s true that basically no one believes that this will turn the tide of the Syrian war. But this is important: it’s not supposed to [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/27/heres-why-obama-is-giving-up-the-element-of-surprise-in-syria/ ]. The strikes wouldn’t be meant to shape the course of the war or to topple Assad, which Obama thinks would just make things worse anyway. They would be meant to punish Assad for (allegedly) using chemical weapons and to deter him, or any future military leader in any future war, from using them again.
8. Come on, what’s the big deal with chemical weapons? Assad kills 100,000 people with bullets and bombs but we’re freaked out over 1,000 who maybe died from poisonous gas? That seems silly.
You’re definitely not the only one who thinks the distinction is arbitrary and artificial. But there’s a good case to be made that this is a rare opportunity, at least in theory, for the United States to make the war a little bit less terrible — and to make future wars less terrible.
The whole idea that there are rules of war is a pretty new one: the practice of war is thousands of years old, but the idea that we can regulate war to make it less terrible has been around for less than a century. The institutions that do this are weak and inconsistent; the rules are frail and not very well observed. But one of the world’s few quasi-successes is the “norm” (a fancy way of saying a rule we all agree to follow) against chemical weapons. This norm is frail enough that Syria could drastically weaken it if we ignore Assad’s use of them, but it’s also strong enough that it’s worth protecting. So it’s sort of a low-hanging fruit: firing a few cruise missiles doesn’t cost us much and can maybe help preserve this really hard-won and valuable norm against chemical weapons.
You didn’t answer my question. That just tells me that we can maybe preserve the norm against chemical weapons, not why we should.
Fair point. Here’s the deal: war is going to happen. It just is. But the reason that the world got together in 1925 for the Geneva Convention to ban chemical weapons is because this stuff is really, really good at killing civilians but not actually very good at the conventional aim of warfare, which is to defeat the other side. You might say that they’re maybe 30 percent a battlefield weapon and 70 percent a tool of terror. In a world without that norm against chemical weapons, a military might fire off some sarin gas because it wants that battlefield advantage, even if it ends up causing unintended and massive suffering among civilians, maybe including its own. And if a military believes its adversary is probably going to use chemical weapons, it has a strong incentive to use them itself. After all, they’re fighting to the death.
So both sides of any conflict, not to mention civilians everywhere, are better off if neither of them uses chemical weapons. But that requires believing that your opponent will never use them, no matter what. And the only way to do that, short of removing them from the planet entirely, is for everyone to just agree in advance to never use them and to really mean it. That becomes much harder if the norm is weakened because someone like Assad got away with it. It becomes a bit easier if everyone believes using chemical weapons will cost you a few inbound U.S. cruise missiles.
That’s why the Obama administration apparently wants to fire cruise missiles at Syria, even though it won’t end the suffering, end the war or even really hurt Assad that much.
9. Hi, there was too much text so I skipped to the bottom to find the big take-away. What’s going to happen?
Short-term maybe the United States and some allies will launch some limited, brief strikes against Syria and maybe they won’t. Either way, these things seem pretty certain in the long-term:
• The killing will continue, probably for years. There’s no one to sign a peace treaty on the rebel side, even if the regime side were interested, and there’s no foreseeable victory for either. Refugees will continue fleeing into neighboring countries, causing instability and an entire other humanitarian crisis as conditions in the camps worsen.
• Syria as we know it, an ancient place with a rich and celebrated culture and history, will be a broken, failed society, probably for a generation or more. It’s very hard to see how you rebuild a functioning state after this. Maybe worse, it’s hard to see how you get back to a working social contract where everyone agrees to get along.
• Russia will continue to block international action, the window for which has maybe closed anyway. The United States might try to pressure, cajole or even horse-trade Moscow into changing its mind, but there’s not much we can offer them that they care about as much as Syria.
• At some point the conflict will cool, either from a partial victory or from exhaustion. The world could maybe send in some peacekeepers or even broker a fragile peace between the various ethnic, religious and political factions. Probably the best model is Lebanon, which fought a brutal civil war that lasted 15 years from 1975 to 1990 and has been slowly, slowly recovering ever since. It had some bombings just last week [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/northern-lebanese-city-buries-it-dead-after-double-bomb-attack/2013/08/24/ff4d6eb8-0cf9-11e3-89fe-abb4a5067014_story.html (and see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91351516 and preceding and following)].
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Related:
Teju Cole’s 9 questions about Britain you were too embarrassed to ask
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/09/03/teju-coles-9-questions-about-britain-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/
More from WorldViews on Syria:
The one map that shows why Syria is so complicated
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/27/the-one-map-that-shows-why-syria-is-so-complicated/
The first truly heartwarming video from Syria in a long time
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/27/the-first-truly-heartwarming-video-from-syria-in-a-long-time/
Here’s why Obama is giving up the element of surprise in Syria
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/27/heres-why-obama-is-giving-up-the-element-of-surprise-in-syria/
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© 2013 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/29/9-questions-about-syria-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/ [with comments]
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Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West
Video [embedded]
Syrian Rebels Execute 7 Soldiers: Graphic video footage of Syrian rebels shooting and burying government soldiers in April.
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: September 5, 2013
The Syrian rebels posed casually, standing over their prisoners with firearms pointed down at the shirtless and terrified men.
The prisoners, seven in all, were captured Syrian soldiers. Five were trussed, their backs marked with red welts. They kept their faces pressed to the dirt as the rebels’ commander recited a bitter revolutionary verse.
“For fifty years, they are companions to corruption,” he said. “We swear to the Lord of the Throne, that this is our oath: We will take revenge.”
The moment the poem ended, the commander, known as “the Uncle,” fired a bullet into the back of the first prisoner’s head. His gunmen followed suit, promptly killing all the men at their feet.
This scene, documented in a video smuggled out of Syria a few days ago by a former rebel who grew disgusted by the killings, offers a dark insight into how many rebels have adopted some of the same brutal and ruthless tactics as the regime they are trying to overthrow.
As the United States debates whether to support the Obama administration’s proposal that Syrian forces should be attacked for using chemical weapons against civilians, this video, shot in April, joins a growing body of evidence of an increasingly criminal environment populated by gangs of highwaymen, kidnappers and killers.
The video also offers a reminder of the foreign policy puzzle the United States faces in finding rebel allies as some members of Congress, including Senator John McCain, press for more robust military support for the opposition.
In the more than two years this civil war has carried on, a large part of the Syrian opposition has formed a loose command structure that has found support from several Arab nations, and, to a more limited degree, the West. Other elements of the opposition have assumed an extremist cast, and openly allied with Al Qaeda.
Across much of Syria, where rebels with Western support live and fight, areas outside of government influence have evolved into a complex guerrilla and criminal landscape.
That has raised the prospect that American military action could inadvertently strengthen Islamic extremists and criminals.
Abdul Samad Issa, 37, the rebel commander leading his fighters through the executions of the captured soldiers, illustrates that very risk.
Known in northern Syria as “the Uncle” because two of his deputies are his nephews, Mr. Issa leads a relatively unknown group of fewer than 300 fighters, one of his former aides said. The former aide, who smuggled the video out of Syria, is not being identified for security reasons.
A trader and livestock herder before the war, Mr. Issa formed a fighting group early in the uprising by using his own money to buy weapons and underwrite the fighters’ expenses.
His motivation, his former aide said, was just as the poem he recited said: revenge.
In Washington on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the issue of radicalized rebels in an exchange with Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican. Mr. Kerry insisted, “There is a real moderate opposition that exists.”
Mr. Kerry said that there were 70,000 to 100,000 “oppositionists.” Of these, he said, some 15 percent to 20 percent were “bad guys” or extremists.
Mr. McCaul responded by saying he had been told in briefings that half of the opposition fighters were extremists.
Much of the concern among American officials has focused on two groups that acknowledge ties to Al Qaeda. These groups — the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — have attracted foreign jihadis, used terrorist tactics and vowed to create a society in Syria ruled by their severe interpretation of Islamic law.
They have established a firm presence in parts of Aleppo and Idlib Provinces and in the northern provincial capital of Raqqa and in Deir al-Zour, to the east on the Iraqi border.
While the jihadis claim to be superior fighters, and have collaborated with secular Syrian rebels, some analysts and diplomats also note that they can appear less focused on toppling President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, they said, they focus more on establishing a zone of influence spanning Iraq’s Anbar Province and the desert eastern areas of Syria, and eventually establishing an Islamic territory under their administration.
Other areas are under more secular control, including the suburbs of Damascus. In East Ghouta, for example, the suburbs east of the capital where the chemical attack took place, jihadis are not dominant, according to people who live and work there.
And while the United States has said it seeks policies that would strengthen secular rebels and isolate extremists, the dynamic on the ground, as seen in the execution video from Idlib and in a spate of other documented crimes, is more complicated than a contest between secular and religious groups.
Mr. Issa’s father was opposed to President Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president. He disappeared in 1982, according to Mr. Issa’s accounts.
Mr. Issa, the aide said, believes his father was killed during a 27-day government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood [ http://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/21/world/syria-said-to-raze-part-of-rebel-city.html ] that year, known as the Hama massacre.
By the time he was a young man, Mr. Issa was vocally antigovernment and was arrested and imprisoned twice for a total of nine months, the aide said.
When the uprising against Bashar al-Assad started two and a half years ago, the family saw it as a means to try to settle old scores.
At first, people who know Mr. Issa said, he was a protester, and then he led fighters in small skirmishes. By last year he was running a training camp in the highlands near Turkey.
By this year, the aide said, he was gathering weapons from relatives and Arab businessmen he knew from his work as a trader and, at least once, from the Western-supported Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army, the rebel forces.
(Two representatives of the military council declined to comment on the council’s military collaboration or logistical support for Mr. Issa’s group. Mr. Issa could not be reached for comment over two days this week.)
By the spring, his group had taken a resonant name: Jund al-Sham, which it shares with three international terrorist groups, and another group in Syria.
Its relationship — if any — with these other groups is not clear.
Mr. Issa’s former aide and two other men who have met or investigated him said he appears to assume identities of convenience.
But, they said, one of his tactics has been to promise to his fighters what he calls “the extermination” of Alawites — the minority Islamic sect to which the Assad family belongs, and which Mr. Issa blames for Syria’s suffering.
This sentiment may have driven Mr. Issa’s decision to execute his prisoners in the video, his former aide said. The soldiers had been captured when Mr. Issa’s fighters overran a government checkpoint north of Idlib in March.
Their cellphones, the former aide said, had videos of soldiers raping Syrian civilians and looting.
Mr. Issa declared them all criminals, he said, and a revolutionary trial was held. They were found guilty.
Mr. Issa, the former aide said, then arranged for their execution to be videotaped in April so he could show his work against Mr. Assad and his military to donors, and seek more financing.
The video ends abruptly after his fighters dump the soldiers’ broken bodies into a well.
One of the participants, a young man wearing a purple fleece jacket, looks into the camera and smiles.
Karam Shoumali contributed reporting from Antakya, Turkey; Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.
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Related
Obama Faces Barrier in His Own Party on Syria (September 5, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/obama-faces-barrier-in-his-own-party-on-syria.html
Questions of Policy and Leadership Dog Obama Before Meeting in Russia (September 5, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/europe/a-diminished-obama-heads-to-russia-for-g-20-meeting.html
Putin Says Proof of Chemical Arms Attack Is Not Enough to Justify U.S. Action (September 5, 2013)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/europe/putin-says-proof-of-chemical-arms-attack-not-enough-to-justify-us-attack.html
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© 2013 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/brutality-of-syrian-rebels-pose-dilemma-in-west.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/brutality-of-syrian-rebels-pose-dilemma-in-west.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Ali Habib, Syria's Former Minister Of Defense, Reportedly Defects In Break With Assad
Syrian Defense Minister Hassan Turkmani (R) and Chief of Syrian Army Ali Habib wait outside the Al-Shami hospital in Damascus as the body of Syrian Interior Minister Lieutenant General Ghazi Kanaan, who committed suicide in his office yesterday, is carried into an ambulance, 13 October 2005.
(LOUAI BESHARA/AFP/Getty Images)
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Amena Bakr
Posted: 09/04/2013 10:32 am EDT | Updated: 09/04/2013 11:46 am EDT
AMMAN/DOHA, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Former Syrian Defense Minister General Ali Habib, a prominent member of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite sect, has defected and is now in Turkey, a senior member of the opposition Syrian National Coalition told Reuters on Wednesday.
If his defection is confirmed, Habib would be the highest ranking figure from the Alawite minority to break with Assad since the uprising against his rule began in 2011.
"Ali Habib has managed to escape from the grip of the regime and he is now in Turkey, but this does not mean that he has joined the opposition. I was told this by a Western diplomatic official," Kamal al-Labwani said from Paris.
A Gulf source told Reuters that Habib had defected on Tuesday evening, arriving at the Turkish frontier before midnight with two or three other people. He was then taken across the border in a convoy of vehicles.
His companions were fellow military officers who supported his defection, the source said. They were believed to have also left Syria but there was no immediate confirmation of that.
Labwani said Habib was smuggled out of Syria with the help of a Western country.
"He will be a top source of information. Habib has had a long military career. He has been effectively under house arrest since he defied Assad and opposed killing protesters," Labwani said.
An officer in the opposition Free Syrian Army, who did not want to be identified, said the Habib appeared to have coordinated his defection with the United States.
Former military officers who have defected from Assad's army say it had about 36,000 officers, of which 28,000 are Alawites. The remaining 8,000 are a mix of Sunni Muslims, the majority community in Syria, and members of minorities such as Christians and Druze, they said.
Born in 1939, Habib was Defense Minister from 2009 to August 2011, when he was replaced for what official media said were health reasons.
After rumours that he was dismissed for opposing the killing of peaceful pro-democracy protesters, Habib was shown on state television pledging his loyalty to the Assad government. Western diplomats said the statement appeared to have been made under duress.
Habib participated in the 1973 October War against Israel, in which Syria failed to recapture the occupied Golan Heights, and in the 1990-91 Gulf War, when Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father and predecessor as president, symbolically joined a U.S.-led coalition that ousted Iraq occupation troops from Kuwait.
(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut,; Editing by William Maclean, Robin Pomeroy and Giles Elgood)
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/ali-habib-defects-syria_n_3866092.html [with comments]
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No, Iran Doesn’t Need Assad
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad welcomes Iran's former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at al-Shaaeb presidential palace in Damascus in 2010.
(Khaled al-Hariri/Reuters)
Tehran is particularly turned off by his use of chemical weapons and might be ready to play a role in negotiations.
Sune Engel Rasmussen
Sep 4 2013, 1:40 PM ET
As opponents of a strike against Syria scramble to find alternative avenues for a peaceful solution, there is one murky diplomatic route, rarely mentioned, which now seems more necessary than ever to explore: talking to Iran.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Iran’s support for Bashar al-Assad is neither unconditional nor everlasting. Despite having assisted the Assad regime from the beginning of the conflict with weapons and personnel, the war in Syria has not strengthened Iran, which likely wants to get out of the Syrian quagmire as soon as possible -- if it can do so with some influence in Syria intact.
First of all, the war has created a regional image problem for the clerics in Tehran. Since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has strived to be a beacon for the downtrodden people of the Muslim world and a standard-bearer against what it sees as oppression by America in the region. Assad’s carnage against fellow Muslims makes Iran look really bad on the Arab street, where Iran tried hard to make the Arab Spring look like a logical extension of its own revolution.
Iran’s support for Assad is also financially costly and strains an economy already suffering under sanctions, inflation, and widespread mismanagement. This is partly why Iran wouldn’t be able to afford a proportionate response to a U.S. attack on Syria. As Meir Javedanfar has argued [ http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/08/iran-syria-attack-assad-air-defense-nuclear-program-economy.html ( http://bit.ly/1cwf5Pb )], Iran wouldn’t want to risk the loss of hard-to-replace anti-aircraft systems and fighter aircrafts, or to expose its nuclear facilities to attacks from Israel.
Lastly, propping up Assad after his alleged use of chemical weapons against his own people is causing rifts in the Iranian leadership. On Sunday, Iran’s éminence grise – and presidential ally – Hashemi Rafsanjani reportedly blamed the Syrian government for the chemical weapons attack that killed more than 1,400 in a Damascus suburb. The government since denied the remarks, but regardless, the episode exposed a very real dissent within the establishment.
Saddam Hussein’s use of nerve gas during Iraq’s war against Iran in the 1980s is an open historical wound for Iranians, including many veterans among government officials who will find it difficult to consent, even tacitly, to supporting the use of such weapons against innocent civilians.
In fact, there are plenty of reasons Iran might have already cut Assad loose, were it not for the fact that Syria is Iran’s most important regional ally.
But that relationship is changing. The fall of Saddam Hussein has paved the way for much friendlier relations between Iran and Iraq and rendered Syria less vital for Iran than it used to be.
So there is a good chance that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be willing to “cut the head off the snake” in Damascus and keep the body. Assad is not as important for Tehran, as is ensuring that Syria’s power structure is friendly to Iran’s interests. Aware that a negotiated solution is the only way to achieve that, Iran has long called for [ http://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/09/03/259672/iran-backs-democratic-reforms-in-syria/ ( http://bit.ly/171Gczx )] political reforms in Syria.
As statements from the past weeks show, Washington and Tehran are closer to each other than many might think. On its side, Iran gave full support to the UN probe into the alleged chemical attacks.
“We completely & strongly condemn use of chemical weapons in Syria because Islamic Republic of Iran is itself victim of chemical weapons,” newly elected president Hassan Rouhani wrote on Twitter.
The Supreme Leader was also relatively muted, calling a possible U.S. attack a “disaster for the region,” which would lead to defeat for the U.S. and its allies. For Khamenei, such talk is autopilot rhetoric and not necessarily an attempt to escalate tensions.
The U.S. government, meanwhile, has worked to assure world leaders that diplomacy is still viable, emphasizing that an attack would not be aimed at regime change. President Obama has said that, “we’re prepared to work with anybody — the Russians and others — to try to bring the parties together to resolve the conflict.” The key here, of course, is “others.”
At the same time, UN Under Secretary for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman paid a visit to Iran’s foreign minister Zarif and reportedly stressed that Iran has a crucial role to play in negotiating peace in Syria.
Iran appears to have made efforts to do so: Last year’s Syrian National Dialogue meetings were held in Tehran, and in February of this year, Iran’s then-foreign minister met with Syrian opposition leader Moaz Al-Khatib in Munich.
With the UN General Assembly coming up, inviting Iran to talk would be a good first step.
By bringing Iran in, the West could give Rouhani an early success in his presidency and help bolster his moderate discourse. An escalation of the conflict, on the other hand, would boost militant hardliners in Tehran and corner Rouhani with less room for diplomatic maneuvers.
Perhaps understandably, the Obama administration will be apprehensive of acknowledging its long-time foe as a legitimate part of a negotiation. But weighed against the prospective death toll of a prolonged conflict in Syria, it could be worth a try.
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/no-iran-doesn-t-need-assad/279340/ [with comments]
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Analysis - U.S. strike on Syria could derail Iran president's master plan
By Yeganeh Torbati
DUBAI | Wed Sep 4, 2013 6:35pm BST
(Reuters) - If one thing could scuttle Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's big plan - to fix Iran's economy by winning some relief from Western sanctions - a U.S. strike on Tehran's ally Syria is it.
Rouhani's June election landslide won him the cautious backing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to pursue his pledge to engage with Western countries and attempt to ease Iran's isolation over Tehran's nuclear programme.
But the hardliners Rouhani defeated at the polls still dominate parliament and the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and are poised to return Iran to the familiar posture of defiance if the president's message of moderation falls on deaf ears abroad.
As the president prepares to travel to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly this month, U.S. military strikes on Syria could derail Rouhani's diplomacy before it even starts.
"You can hardly think of a more unlucky situation for a moderate government which wants to relax tensions with the world," wrote columnist Maziar Khosravi in Iran's reformist Sharq newspaper on Monday, referring to the likelihood of U.S. strikes to punish Assad for an apparent chemical weapons attack near Damascus on August 21.
Syria is Iran's sole regional ally, and Western foes say Tehran is supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with arms, cash and Revolutionary Guardsmen to train militia to help win the civil war.
A U.S. strike on Syria would spell "the end of a diplomacy aimed at reducing tensions with the West and reconciliation with the world," wrote Sadeq Zibakalam, a professor at Tehran University, in Etemad, another reformist newspaper, last week.
"The atmosphere between Syria's allies and the West, after a Western attack on Syria, will become so cold and dark that there would be practically no space for reducing tensions and improving relations ... Iran will be forced to change its tone towards the West to a hostile one."
RAISING THE STAKES
In Washington, some people reason that a U.S. strike on Syria would improve the prospects of a deal with Iran by reinforcing the credibility of the implicit U.S. threat to use force to prevent Iran acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
"If there are a set of finite but effective strikes against Syria, the effect on the Iranians will be real," said Dennis Ross, a former White House and State Department official who served as one of President Barack Obama's key advisers on Iran.
"It raises the stakes for them of not having diplomacy succeed," said Ross, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think-tank.
Conversely, Ross said a U.S. failure to punish Syria for crossing Obama's "red line" with the use of chemical weapons might make Iran believe it could pursue its nuclear programme with impunity.
This argument is reinforced by the view held by many in the United States that it is the sweeping U.S., European Union and United Nations sanctions on Iran that have brought about Iran's new willingness to engage over its nuclear programme.
However, there are those who make the opposite case: that strikes on Syria would reinforce those in Iran who favour obtaining nuclear weapons and undermine a potential deal.
"There's a valid argument to be made that U.S. inaction in Syria will embolden Iran to move forward with its nuclear ambitions. There's an equally valid argument that if the U.S. attacks Syria, Iran will feel an even greater need for a nuclear deterrent," said Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank in Washington.
DIVISIONS IN TEHRAN
When considering their response to any strike on Syria, Iranian leaders must weigh the costs and benefits of backing Assad, versus the advantage to be gained from a possible detente with the United States, the prospect of a nuclear deal and the easing of sanctions.
So far, Iran's response to the chemical weapons attack suggests disagreement within the corridors of power in Tehran.
A chorus of Revolutionary Guards commanders have issued daily dire warnings that U.S. strikes on Syria would result in a conflict engulfing the whole region - implying retaliation against Israel, presumably by Iran's Lebanese ally Hezbollah.
"An attack on Syria will mean the imminent destruction of Israel," IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted as saying last week in an interview with the Tasnim news agency.
In a speech on Wednesday, Rouhani said any U.S. strike on Syria would be illegitimate.
"The fact that the United States has asked for feedback from its own Congress for action against Syria means that the United States does not have international legitimacy for this action from the United Nations, the Security Council, and public opinion," the ISNA news agency quoted Rouhani as saying
Rouhani has also condemned the use of chemical weapons, pointing out that Iranian troops were victims of gas attacks during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. He stopped short of apportioning blame for the attack in Syria.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif went further, blaming Syrian rebels. He also warned the United States not to get involved: "The Syria crisis is a trap set by Zionist pressure groups for (the United States)," Iran's English-language channel Press TV quoted him as saying.
But Zarif has also offered some mild criticism of the Syrian government.
"We believe that big mistakes made by the government in Syria unfortunately provided an opportunity for abuse," Iranian media quoted him as saying this week. He has also repeatedly called for diplomacy as an alternative to Obama's stark alternatives of military strikes versus inaction.
Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an ally and mentor of Rouhani, appeared to go further last week by blaming the Syrian government for the August 21 attack.
The Foreign Ministry denied Rafsanjani said any such thing, but while the semi-official state news agency that originally quoted him changed those comments, it left unchanged Rafsanjani's charge that in Syria "the prisons are overflowing and they've converted stadiums into prisons".
"The Syrian crisis is as polarising for Iran's political elite as it is for the international community," said Yasmin Alem, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's South Asia Centre. "It is no longer clear whether Syria is the lynchpin of Iran's security or a threat to it."
Much depends on the intensity and extent of any U.S. attacks on Syrian government forces and facilities.
"A limited attack with minimum impact on the balance of power in Syria is unlikely to impede nuclear diplomacy with Iran," said Ali Vaez, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
"Rouhani's success depends on rescuing Iran's ailing economy, the realisation of which is nearly impracticable without sanctions relief. If he allows Syria to spoil the nuclear negotiations, his presidency will falter just one month after it began."
(Additional reporting by Marcus George in Dubai and Arshad Mohammed in Washington; Writing by Jon Hemming; Editing by Peter Graff and Robin Pomeroy)
Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/09/04/uk-syria-crisis-iran-usa-analysis-idUKBRE9830PU20130904 [with comments]
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Iran’s President to Speak at the U.N.
September 4, 2013
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, a cleric who was elected in June [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/middleeast/iran-election.html ] after promising to ease the country’s economic isolation and tensions with the West over a disputed nuclear program, will attend the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this month and deliver three speeches, his foreign minister said Wednesday.
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/irans-president-to-speak-at-the-un.html
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Syria Tests Limits of Iran President’s Overture to West
Iranian President Hassan Rohani, on screens, speaks during a parliament session in Tehran, on August 15, 2013.
Behrouz Mehri/AFP via Getty Images
By Ladane Nasseri - Sep 4, 2013 3:01 PM CT
Syria is proving a testing ground for Iranian President Hassan Rohani’s new foreign policy and his battle to assert dominance over the country’s hardliners.
Rohani, who came to power last month, has so far shunned the bellicose rhetoric of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the U.S. prepares for strikes on the country’s Syrian ally. By contrast, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said last week that U.S. is flirting with its “most historic defeat” and that intervention would be more dangerous than in Vietnam and could ultimately lead to Israel’s disappearance.
Rohani has promised a more constructive engagement with Western powers as sanctions linked to Iran’s disputed nuclear program cripple the economy of world’s sixth-largest oil producer. His challenge now is to ensure that any U.S. strike on Syria doesn’t upend that policy by giving hardliners an excuse to ratchet up their anti-U.S. rhetoric or place obstacles on the path to a resumption of nuclear talks, which stalled in April.
Iran’s president is “really compelled to either take on the hardliners or to see everything that he was elected to do go up in flames,” Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington said in a phone interview. Rohani was elected to “resolve the nuclear issue in a way that works to Iran’s advantage and with this kind of mandate it’s clear that Syria would be a major deterrent to any resolution.”
‘Active Diplomacy’
Rohani’s June election victory involved pledges to secure an economic revival in part through “active diplomacy” with Western states. Iran has supported Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad consistently through the two-year civil war, with both countries describing themselves as members of a “resistance front” against Israel.
Iran’s economy has suffered as the U.S. and European Union tightened sanctions in the past two years. Oil output is near a 25-year low, inflation reached 37.5 percent in July, and gross domestic product will shrink 1.3 percent this year according to International Monetary Fund forecasts. Unemployment is 12 percent officially and almost twice that in reality, the Tehran-based Shargh newspaper reported yesterday.
A team of senior Iranian parliamentarians visited Assad in a show of support for the “brother” nation on Sept. 2. Yet Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, didn’t directly answer several questions on what Iran would do if Syria were attacked.
Await Results
Instead he said any judgment on U.S. allegations of a chemical attack by Assad’s forces in Ghouta outside Damascus last month should await the results of samples taken by United Nations inspectors. President Barack Obama said Sept. 3 he was confident Congress would support his plan to attack Syria over the use of chemical weapons.
While not straying from the official line, Rohani’s comments have been measured. Iran “condemns any use of chemical weapons,” which were used against it during the eight-year long war with Iraq that ended in 1988, the president said. On Aug. 29, Rohani also urged the international community “not to jump to conclusions before facts are clear”, warning that military intervention in Syria risked destabilizing the entire region and fueling extremism, he said.
The sensitivity of the issue inside Iran was highlighted this week by reports on comments from former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. In an Aug. 31 speech, Rafsanjani was quoted by the Iranian Labour News Agency as saying the Syrian population has come “under chemical attack from their own government.”
Comments Revised
The comments were revised within hours by ILNA amid criticism on local hardline news websites. The updated version read “on the one hand the people of Syria are the target of a chemical attack.”
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham rejected the comments attributed to Rafsanjani. The former president and head of the Expediency Council sees “Syria as a solid fortress against the Zionist regime,” Afkham said, according to state-run Iranian Students News Agency.
Still, a video was subsequently posted on a website apparently showing Rafsanjani and where the original comments could be heard. The video’s authenticity could not be verified.
Analysts say the outcome of the debate with hardliners within Iran isn’t yet settled.
“It’s quite clear that Iran is going to play the Syria crisis carefully, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to see a resurgence of the hardline position,” Maloney said.
Moderate ‘Minority’
Iran’s “moderates are in relative minority and the hardliners” around Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “control most of the key levers of power, so they’re always going to be heard a little bit more loudly,” David Hartwell, Middle East analyst at research firm IHS Jane’s, said by phone from London. Military action may mean “that a more moderate approach by Iranians would get killed off before it even begun.”
Rebel groups that have been seeking to topple Assad for 2 1/2 years, with backing from the U.S. and its European and Arab allies, say more than 1,300 people were killed in the chemical attack last month. Syria’s government has denied responsibility.
Keeping Assad in power is of strategic importance to Iran, though it’s “very unlikely” that Iran would get involved in some form of military retaliation against the West or Israel as a consequence of U.S. strikes, Hartwell says.
Saeed Laylaz, a Tehran-based analyst and commentator in moderate Iranian newspapers, says Iran has little reason to step into an armed conflict in support of Syria.
“Iran doesn’t have the capacity to intervene in Syria’s affairs. It isn’t our priority for the time being,” Laylaz said in a note published Sept. 1 in the Etemaad newspaper. “From a geopolitical view, Syria is lost to Iran.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Ladane Nasseri in Dubai at lnasseri@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net
©2013 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-04/syria-tests-limits-of-iran-president-s-overture-to-west.html [no comments yet]
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John McCain Mocks Laura Ingraham's 'Vast Knowledge Of Military Tactics' On Syria
09/04/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/john-mccain-laura-ingraham_n_3865261.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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John McCain Blasts Fox News Over 'Allahu Akbar' Criticism
09/03/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/03/john-mccain-fox-news_n_3859871.html [with embedded video, and comments]
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