Syria isn’t going away
I couldn’t agree more with Fred Hof’s bottom line in his and Alex Simon’s paper prepared for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sectarian Violence in Syria’s Civil War: Causes, Consequences, and Recommendations for Mitigation:
Left on its current trajectory, Syria is on the path to state failure and sustained sectarian violence, featuring mass atrocities and cleansing that could amount to genocide in some areas.
That is a clear and compelling alarm, one the Holocaust Museum is uniquely qualified to sound.
As Fred and Alex painstakingly elaborate, all of the likely scenarios, including an opposition victory, will produce serious risks. This is due in no small measure to the history and context of the Syrian war. Syrian society is riddled with cleavages: sectarian, ethnic, regional, urban/rural and ideological. The Asad regime papered over them a thin veneer of secularism but quickly ripped that off when the Sunni majority rebelled. The regime has intentionally sectarianized the war, ensuring itself Alawite and other minority support by making the fight an existential one. As Hof and Simon put it:
Thus, while preaching and promoting secularism, Assad built a system implicitly featuring the sectarian poison pill: any attempt by non-Alawites to bring down the regime would run the risk of taking the country down with it via a bitter sectarian struggle.
- regime victory
- managed transition
- rebel victory
- stalemate, descent into further sectarian violence, possible state failure
They quite rightly conclude that each is worse than the last when it comes to the risks of mass atrocity and even genocide in some areas.
Check: possible future developments foreseen. Check: alarm bell rung. What is to be done?
That’s where the Holocaust Museum paper is less satisfying, but not for lack of good policy proposals. Hof and Simon want an inclusive, tolerant opposition government committed to rule of law on Syrian territory. They want a negotiated settlement that creates a transition regime. They want trust funds to back the transition. They want supply of training and weapons to good guys, while funding to bad guys is blocked. They want a UN-authorized, NATO-led stabilization force, to accompany unarmed observers. They want US support for a democratically oriented, non-sectarian outcome.
I can’t quarrel with wanting these things. But it is not at all clear how to get to them, or even how some of them would help to prevent mass atrocity. In my view, what is needed is a less global set of options targeted on the specific issue of protecting civilians. More than 70,000 Syrians are now dead due to a war that started only a bit more than two years ago. This is a colossal failure of the responsibility to protect, which lies first and foremost with the Syrian government. The options may be quite different in each scenario, but the moral imperative is the same: something needs to be done to save lives.
It is looking very much as if the fourth scenario is the most likely one (stalemate, descent into further sectarian violence, possible state failure). Preventing that or mitigating its consequences is going to require more international political will than has been forthcoming so far. Even if there is an opposition victory, the transition will be a long and painful one. With the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has dismantled much of its civilian capacity to handle cases of state failure. We need to be thinking about how to fill the gap, either with our own personnel and resources or other peoples’. UN? Arab League? Turkey? One way or another, Syria is going to be with us for a long time. It isn’t going away just because Washington ignores it.
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