1. A terrifying menu for Syria’s endgame 

By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star

Now that the Arab League has decided to ask the United Nations Security Council to back its plan to resolve the crisis in Syria, the prospects of international involvement in Syria inches forward just a bit more. This adds a new dimension to the already fertile debate on how the mounting violence and expanding political crisis will end.

In the last few months, I have heard dozens of scenarios for how things might play out in Syria. Some are plausible, others are fantastic, but all are suggested seriously by usually knowledgeable observers and analysts. They go something like this.

The most common scenario I hear is that tensions and violence will continue to the point in the coming year where economic collapse causes some influential figures in regime of President Bashar Assad to carry out a coup, after despairing that Assad can find a political solution to the crisis. Such a coup would be led by Alawite and Sunni military officers who would recognize the need to make a deal with the demonstrators and send Syria onto a path of serious political democratization, while sparing Alawites widespread retribution after the fall of the House of Assad. A variation of this sees an inside plot to assassinate the top leaders, and bring an immediate end to the crisis.

Another common scenario is that the Russians will recognize that Assad’s approach is doomed to fail and will shift away from their current course of using a veto to prevent Security Council moves to pressure Damascus. In this script, Russia convinces Assad to step down and leave the country with his extended family and their riches.

A variation on this sees a combination of Alawite leaders, military officers and top businessmen collectively deciding that they are all doomed if the current trends persist, and working together to do one of two things: either to engineer a coup and force Assad’s exit, or to sit him down and make clear that they – his pillars of support – see only doom, so that he must turn over power to a democratic transitional leadership before total collapse ruins the country.

A more dramatic possibility in some people’s view is for regional and global powers to impose no-fly zones and safe havens along Syria’s northern and southern borders. This would speed up the regime’s abandonment by tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, speeding up its collapse from within. This process would be hastened by further economic deterioration impacting on all sectors of society, as tighter international sanctions – including bans on aviation and banking links with Syria – lead to shortages of basic goods and runaway inflation that make it impossible for most Syrians to live a normal life. This would also spark massive anti-regime demonstrations in Damascus and Aleppo, the death knell of the Assads.

A more drastic possibility is that the polarization of Syrian society along ethnic lines and full civil war will reach a point where the unified state collapses, and the Alawites retreat into their mountains to form their own state in their northwestern heartland. Some suggest this has been the aim of the crisis all along, with “outsiders” provoking civil strife to the point where Syria breaks up into statelets, including Alawite, Druze, Kurdish and Sunni entities.

This would occur at the same time as Iraq faces similar disintegration as a unified country and leaves behind Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish entities of some sort. Culprits behind this scenario it is said, of course, is Israel and America, whose desire for hegemony over the Middle East would be made much easier by the presence of weaker ethnic statelets rather than larger, stronger Arab states. In such a scenario, Israel would quickly come to the aid of some of these ethnic statelets – as it tried to do with some Lebanese groups in the 1980s – and thus cement both the fragmentation of the Levant and its dominance of it.

The most terrible scenario sees the deterioration in Syria leading the Assad regime to implement the Samson Option. It would seek to instigate strife and chaos across the region, in order to plunge the Levant into a regional conflagration. This option would be based on the Assads’ assumption that if they cannot rule over a unified Syria, then nobody in the neighborhood should be able to live in peace and security either. Such a scenario would involve attacking or fomenting strife in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, perhaps resulting in the desperate use of chemical or even nuclear weapons.

These are only the most plausible scenarios that are widely circulated in the region these days. The more outrageous ones we will leave for another day to ponder.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly by THE DAILY STAR

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2. Orderly transition ‘preferable’ in Syria 

by Michael Jansen | Feb 02,2012 | 22:47Jordan Times

Anti-regime protests in Syria have rapidly given way to an armed insurgency which threatens to plunge the country into civil war. Nevertheless, the Western powers that supported popular protests have, so far, refused to make the transition in thinking and approach.

Only Russia and China seem to have done this and Moscow is pressing for talks between government and opposition. But the Western powers are focused on regime change. France, Britain and the US, the prime movers of the effort to adopt a UN Security Council resolution on the Syrian crisis, have written into the draft text both Arab League plans for bringing an end to unrest in Syria.

The first plan called for an end to violence by all sides, withdrawal of tanks and troops from urban areas, release of prisoners, freedom of access to human rights bodies and media, and dialogue between government and opposition.

The text of the resolution embraces the intention of the first Arab League plan signed by Syria on November 2, 2011. The resolution also includes the points laid out in the Arab League proposal for political transition put forward on January 22.

The first point is to demand dialogue among all sides. Talks are meant to be followed by the formation of a unity government, the hand over of power by President Bashar Assad and the assumption of the presidency by one or other (not specified) of his deputies, and elections under Arab and international supervision.

The league proposal had a timeline that has been, perhaps realistically, dropped as the transition process is likely to take more time than originally envisaged.

The government considers the latest Arab League plan a flagrant violation of Syria’s sovereignty and some opposition groups have no intention of abiding by the league plan or the resolution if it is adopted. The opposition-in-exile, represented by the coalition dubbed the Syrian National Council, rejects talks while Assad remains president and seeks to unseat him immediately.

The fact that the actual text of the resolution does not call for Assad to step down immediately is likely to be ignored because it does not suit the Syrian National Council, some other opposition groups, and the Western powers. The hardliners are certain to take advantage of flagrant misreporting by the media of the Security Council draft, the text of which was leaked on Tuesday.

The resolution backs the continuation of the league’s monitoring mission, which started work at the end of last month but was suspended after Saudi Arabia and five other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council pulled out their monitors. Four members of Gulf regional grouping — Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates — were reluctant to follow Saudi Arabia’s lead on this issue, but could not resist Riyadh.

The government, unfortunately, only agreed to the deployment of the monitors after armed elements mounting the insurgency won control of some quarters of Homs, several suburbs of Damascus and other locations around the country. Once the monitors were in place, the government found that they reported anti-regime violence as well as operations by the regular army against political dissidents and army defectors. This was seen as a positive development by the government but not by the opposition, which tries to claim, falsely, that the unrest consists mainly of peaceful protests.

Opposition supporters in the West and the Arab world, therefore, combined to press for terminating the league’s monitoring mission. They settled for suspension until Arab ministers meet to decide what to do about it.

If the violence does not subside, the mission will be withdrawn because, as an informed source in the Gulf told this correspondent, monitors’ lives could be put at risk if they continue their mission. He said there are no political reasons behind the decision to pull out the 55 monitors from the Gulf. That is hard to believe. There is a very important political dimension to the ongoing conflict in Syria and it is no accident that the Western powers, particularly Britain and France, which carved up the region after World War I, are leading the pack of regime changers.

Their problem with Syria is that it is the last bastion of the secular pan-Arab nationalist trend, impulse or movement that rose in the Arab world as the Ottoman empire faltered and faded. The Western colonial powers never liked Arab nationalists, initially represented by Sharif Hussein of Mecca and later by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Baathist rulers of Syria and Iraq.

Assad is struggling to stay in power. While there is little doubt that he should have stuck to the political reforms he put forward during the “Damascus Spring” of 2001, he did initiate dramatic changes in the formerly centrally controlled Syrian economy and opened up Syria, a closed country, to the world by introducing the Internet, financial connections with the West, foreign schools and universities and tourism. Economic liberalisation was accompanied, willy-nilly, by political liberalisation at the popular level.

However, the regime did not recognise this development and did not respond by making the necessary structural and other changes. Therefore, when the Arab Spring of popular discontent swept away the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, Syria did not have the flexibility to meet and digest the challenge of popular protest.

This protest was initially class based: the “haves” of Damascus’ and Aleppo’s wealthy and middle classes against the “have nots” of the urban slums in and surrounding the country’s cities and towns. The “have nots” consisted of farmers driven from homes and farms by several years of drought and unemployed workers desperate for jobs.

Protests were exploited by anti-regime exiles who made common cause with the US, Britain, France and other powers eager to oust Assad by any means. These powers tried and failed to do so after the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri, which was instantly blamed on Syria. Last year, the opportunity to topple Assad came again. Little wonder that the usual Western suspects, all allies of Israel, are in the vanguard of the effort to secure regime change in Syria, whatever the cost to the Syrian people living in the country.

The external powers working with the exiled Syrian National Council have little thought of what will happen to Syrian families and individuals if there is an all-out civil conflict in that country. A friend who met with Muslim Brotherhood activists several months ago said that they are prepared for a “period” of chaos and anarchy, of killing and retribution. But then, of course, these people do not know what it is like trying to survive civil conflict. Having lived for 18 months in Lebanon during the civil war, I do and I do not recommend it. If conflict can be avoided, everything should be done to avert it.

An orderly transition is far preferable. The only way this can happen is for the government to end military operations against protest hubs and implement the steps of the first Arab League plan, including engaging in serious negotiations with the opposition. It has to rein in armed elements and army defectors, restrict activists to protests, call for the deployment of scores of league monitors, and engage in dialogue with the regime with the aim of transitioning to a new, more democratic order.

My preference would be to retain the secular pan-Arab orientation — to spite powers that have done their best to defeat it over the decades.