ASSAD’S SYRIAN MASSACRE: ARAB CONDEMNATION MEETS OBAMA’S PROCRASTINATION

STOPPING SYRIA’S SLAUGHTER STARTS WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA
Editorial

Washington Post, August 10, 2011

 

The attempt by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to save himself by slaughter seems to be near a tipping point. A massive offensive launched by his regime on the eve of Ramadan appears to have pacified, at least for the moment, the restive city of Hama. But the use of tanks and artillery against Hama and the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, at the cost of hundreds of civilian lives, has provoked an angry backlash by governments that until now quietly tolerated Mr. Assad’s repression.

The U.N. Security Council and the Arab League finally condemned the regime. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah demanded that the “killing machine” stop, and Kuwait and Bahrain joined the Saudis in withdrawing their ambassadors from Damascus. Turkey, the regime’s last lifeline to the West, dispatched its foreign minister to insist that Mr. Assad stop the offensive. Even the Obama administration, whose timidity on Syria has betrayed the president’s promise to support the cause of freedom in the Middle East, has been hinting that it may finally declare that Mr. Assad should leave office.

Two factors will sway which way Syria goes: whether the international pressure continues to mount and what effect it has on Syrian leaders outside Mr. Assad’s immediate circle. The latter is very difficult for outsiders to judge, though there have been signs of cracks in the regime, such as the sudden resignation of the defense minister [last] Monday.

What we do know is that Mr. Assad himself has no intention of heeding the demands that he stop the killing and introduce democratic reforms. He “will not relent in pursuing the terrorist groups,” the state news agency quoted him as saying after his lengthy meeting [last week] with the Turkish foreign minister. That is a logical, if despicable, stance: Mr. Assad knows that if he allows Syrians free choice—or even if he stops assaulting them—he and his regime will not survive.

It is therefore worrying that the international response, though improving, remains inconsistent. Turkey is the leading example: Its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has condemned Mr. Assad for “pointing guns at his own people,” offered refuge on Turkish soil to civilians fleeing from the regime’s military offensives and pressed hard to stop the assault on Hama. But Mr. Erdogan continues to offer leeway to a dictator he assiduously cultivated until a few months ago. [Last] Wednesday, he said he expected that Mr. Assad would end the violence “within 10 to 15 days” and then “take steps for reform.” That seems to offer plenty of time for further murderous pacification of Syrian cities—and no specifics about what “reforms” the Turks believe are necessary.

This is the sort of situation in which the United States has historically stepped in to exercise leadership. But Mr. Obama has been passive throughout the Syrian crisis. He has spoken about it in public only twice in five months, while the State Department has performed an excruciating rhetorical striptease. It started with describing Mr. Assad as “a reformer”; a month ago the rhetoric finally progressed to calling the dictator “illegitimate.” But the last handkerchief—a demand that he leave office—has yet to drop. The time for those words is long overdue—and Mr. Obama should utter them, in person and in public.

 

RESPONDING TO SYRIA:
THE KING’S STATEMENT, THE PRESIDENT’S HESITATION
John Hannah
Foreign Policy, August 9, 2011

 

The floodgates of Arab diplomatic restraint on Syria have finally been breached. In the past few days, both the Gulf Cooperation Council and Arab League issued their first official statements on the situation, expressing alarm at the Syrian government’s excessive use of force and calling for an immediate end to violence. Even more important, the Gulf’s most influential leader, Saudi Arabia’s plainspoken King Abdullah, followed up with his own personal blast at the Assad regime, declaring that “What is happening in Syria is not acceptable to Saudi Arabia.…” For good measure, the King recalled his ambassador from Damascus, a step immediately echoed by Kuwait and Bahrain. (Fellow GCC member, Qatar, actually closed its embassy last month).

True, none of the various statements called on Assad to step down. All urged the regime to implement meaningful reforms immediately. But don’t be fooled. For the extraordinarily cautious Abdullah to move out against Assad so aggressively—after almost five months of sitting idly on the sidelines—is a sure sign that he’s betting the Syrian tyrant’s days are numbered.

The final straw for the Saudis appeared to be Assad’s Ramadan Rampage, during which Syrian troops have laid waste to the cities of Hama and Deir az-Zour. Up to 300 civilians may have been slaughtered, making it by far the deadliest week of the five month old uprising, where the death toll now stands in excess of 2,000 souls. And no doubt most distressing of all for the Saudi monarch is the fact that the vast majority of the victims are fellow Sunnis.

Weeks ago, a senior Saudi official told me that, from the beginning of the Syrian upheaval, the King has believed that regime change would be highly beneficial to Saudi interests, particularly vis a vis the Iranian threat. “The King knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.”

When pressed on why, then, the Saudis’ response to the crisis had been so passive, [the] interlocutor essentially pinned the blame on uncertainty over U.S. policy. Risk-averse under the best of circumstances, the Saudis, he said, were especially loathe to take on the Iranian-Syrian axis on such an existential issue absent assurances of America’s determination to see Assad gone. At least at that point in early July, the Saudis still claimed to “have no idea what outcome Obama really wants in Syria and what his strategy is to achieve it.”

Since then, the U.S. position against Assad has hardened considerably—though (inexplicably) still stopping short of an outright call for him to step down. Whether that shift helped embolden the Saudis to speak out now is unclear. It’s possible that Assad’s Ramadan bloodlust, combined with a growing conviction that his regime is destined for history’s dustbin, were sufficient to move the King to act.

Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that the Saudi condemnation represents a major development, one that the Obama administration should move quickly to exploit. Abdullah’s public vote of no confidence is a significant blow to Assad, an important morale boost for anti-regime forces, and an influential signal to the rest of the international community, particularly the Arab and Islamic worlds. Washington should be doing everything in its power to keep ratcheting up the pressure, producing a cascading series of shocks from the outside that—together with the relentless internal challenge of the protesters—seek to crack the regime as soon as possible, with the aim of short-circuiting the grinding, drawn-out escalation of brutality, death, and hatred that currently appears to be leading inexorably toward full-blown sectarian conflict and civil war.

Assuming that Syria’s security services have no intention of allowing U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford to undertake a repeat performance of last month’s remarkable sojourn to protect the people of Hama, Obama should follow the Saudi cue and officially recall him. Simultaneously, Assad’s man on the Potomac, Imad Mustafa, should be expelled for conduct inconsistent with his diplomatic status—including systematic efforts to surveil, intimidate, and threaten Syrian-Americans—and his embassy shuttered. Key European allies should be pressed to follow suit.

Economically, aggressive sanctions against the Syrian oil sector should be fast-tracked—in line with the nearly unanimous pleas of the Syrian opposition. As detailed in a valuable primer prepared by…the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, sales to Europe (led by Germany, France, and Italy) of approximately 150,000 barrels of oil per day account for at least a quarter of the regime’s total revenues—and probably more in light of the drastic deterioration in the overall economy since the uprising began. Deprived of those revenues, Assad’s ability to subsidize the key constituencies that keep his killing machine intact will be dramatically constrained.…

Perhaps most importantly, U.S. leadership is desperately needed to bring together the impressive, but so far disparate coalition of major countries now clearly inclined, however reluctantly, to see Assad’s removal as the sine qua non for resolving the increasingly dangerous Syrian crisis. A comprehensive strategy is required to topple his dictatorship as quickly as possible, and shepherd as peaceful and orderly a transition as can be fashioned to a more decent, accountable government.…

King Abdullah’s dramatic intervention has created a potential turning point in the unfolding Syrian tragedy, but one that can only be fully taken advantage of by authoritative U.S. leadership that infuses our allies with confidence and a clear sense of direction, and our adversaries with the inevitability of their own eventual demise. The Obama administration has been handed an important opportunity to secure U.S. interests. The president should act quickly to seize it.

 

THE ARAB WORLD CONDEMNS SYRIA’S ‘KILLING MACHINE’
Fouad Ajami

Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2011

 

In the manner of all momentous rebellions, the Syrian upheaval has been rich in iconography and lyrics and political language. A people long repressed have come out to give voice to what has been on their minds for four decades of silence. One placard read, “Like Father, Like Son,” to remind themselves, and their ruler, that they have been in the grip of this tyranny for far too long.

But the truth of it is that Bashar al-Assad, though in every way heir to his father’s despotism, lacks the guile of the old man. Hafez Assad bent things to his will but had a knack for avoiding terrible storms. He was the quintessential survivor, alternately playing arsonist and fireman for three long decades. He was an Alawite, from a historically persecuted community of peasants, and thus tread carefully, keen on avoiding a sectarian war. Not so with Bashar, the entitled prince, who has now set off what is, for all intents and purposes, a civil war within Syria, and in the process left his regime a pariah among nations.

It was a moment of reckoning for the regime of Bashar Assad when the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, recalled his envoy from Damascus and spoke out against the “killing machine” in Syria and the regime’s brazen brutality. A day later, from Cairo, the grand imam of Al Azhar, Sheikh Ahmad al-Tayeb, arguably Sunni Islam’s most prestigious religious authority, called on the Syrian rulers to desist from facing unarmed protesters with “live bullets and iron and fire.” His followers should no longer, he said, remain silent “in the face of a human tragedy that can’t be accepted religiously, when we know that the shedding of blood only increases the ferocity of rebellions.”

The powers that be in the Arab world had given Bashar time and rope, so strong is the principle within the system of Arab states of staying out of the sovereign workings and doings of other states. The break with Bashar came after nearly five months of hope that the Syrian ruler would step back from the brink. But Bashar shredded the norms of his world. He violated the sanctity of the holy month of Ramadan, challenged the right of his people to Friday prayers. Mosques were shelled, and every day brought news of yet another city under assault.

Within the Syrian rebellion there lies a terrible truth, that schism between a predominantly Sunni society, historically ruled from its principal cities, and an Alawite community that’s used the army and the security services to hold on to power. This schism haunted Hafez Assad. Yet now his Bashar is headed straight into the storm, seemingly eager to awaken its furies. His vigilantes, the shabiha, are Alawites, as are the dreaded security forces around him. His regional alliances, too, smack of the same Arab sectarianism. Unlike his father, Bashar has become a satrap of Iran; in Lebanon, a patron and ally of Hezbollah.…

The Alawis, some three million adherents out of a Syrian population of 22 million, are in a horrible predicament. An Alawi intellectual, writing under the pseudonym of Khudr for the website Syria Comment, depicts the Alawi dilemma in stark terms. The Alawis have been forced to become “Basharists,” he observes. They have few religious traditions in common. What Alawi solidarity that exists, he says, was forged in the military academies and the intelligence services. It was there, “deep in the sanctum of the security state,” that the Alawis formed bonds, not unlike the Sunnis in Iraq before the defeat of Saddam. But win or lose, Iraqi Sunnis belonged to a community that is pre-eminent in “countries stretching from Morocco to Saudi Arabia.” The Alawis, he explains, lack that sense of confident primacy. The “Basharist” way is a recipe for permanent vigilance—or ruin.

Legends die hard: Old Man Assad had laid down the principle of Syria’s indispensability to the order and the peace of the region. Thus were the Syrians given a green light for the conquest of Lebanon in 1990-91, a reward for assisting the U.S. in the first war with Iraq. The writ of Damascus was better than the alternatives, it was thought. That illusion came to an end a decade later during the second term of George W. Bush, after the Syrians mounted a ceaseless campaign against the American project in Iraq.

Now, the Syrian regime is on the ropes; its brutality evident to the Arabs, and to the Turks who had thought they’d reached a great accommodation with Bashar. In Washington, however, wisdom and diplomatic courage have been slower to come by. The hopes for stability invested in so destabilizing a figure as this Syrian ruler must be reckoned one of the diplomatic riddles of our time. It is said that the Obama administration is now done with Bashar, that a break with him is imminent, that President Obama is set to call on him to step down. But the process has dragged out. “We are building the chorus of international condemnation,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week on CBS News. But there is no “address” for the opposition, she added. “There is no place any of us who wish to assist can go.”

Syria is replete with return addresses for a defiant population bent on overthrowing the Assad tyranny—Hama, Homs, Idlib and Deir al-Zor, where it all began five months ago. No one is asking the president to dispatch the Marines to the shores of Latakia.… After the contempt displayed by the Bashar regime for all norms of conduct, the faith that Syria could give birth to something better than this “killing machine” should be easy to entertain.

(Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.)

 

THE LONELY DICTATOR
Amir Taheri
NY Post, August 11, 2011

 

Has the Obama administration abandoned its illusions about Bashar Assad?… [According to a senior official], the administration is working on a range of options [to remove Assad], including sanctions targeting Syrian oil and gas industries, banks and shipping lines. Washington is also working with an informal “contact group” of nations, including Turkey and Jordan, to coordinate Syria policy.

The reading of the Syrian situation is in sharp contrast with that of two years ago. Then, Obama and his advisers believed that it was President George W. Bush’s aggressiveness that had turned Syria hostile. Obama’s first diplomatic moves as president included a written message to Assad and the naming of an ambassador to Damascus.

High-profile visits to Damascus by a string of Democratic leaders, including then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, fostered the illusion that Assad would abandon his strategic alliance with Tehran and join a US-led peace process. The speaker even identified some members of the Assad entourage as “potential leaders” in a putative reform project.

Now, however, the administration source [says] that Pelosi’s imagined “reform team”—including former Prime Minister Naji al-Atri, Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallim and presidential adviser Buthaina Shaaban—have become “sidelined by hard-core elements of the Syrian regime.”

The dream that Assad would surround himself with pro-American moderates and lead a reform movement received another shock this week, when Defense Minister Gen. Ali-Habib stepped down, ostensibly on health grounds. Syrian sources [say] that Habib was forced out because of his opposition to the use of the regular army in massacring demonstrators. Replacing him is Gen. Dawoud Rajha—whose previous crucial position as army chief of staff will be taken by Gen. Assef Shawkat, who’s married to Assad’s sister.

The military purge isn’t limited to Habib. Garrison commanders in at least 12 cities, including Deir al-Zour close to the Iraqi border, were replaced [last] week. Assad has also created a Council of Military Advisers, grouping around himself a number of retired army officers known for their Ba’athist background.

Assad appears to have decided to purge his government of anyone remotely suspected of sympathizing with the pro-democracy uprising—with his first priority being to reassert control of the armed forces. To hammer that home, he’s appearing on state TV in military uniforms in his role as commander-in-chief—his chest often covered with Syria’s highest military decorations for bravery, although he’s never done military service.

America isn’t the only power abandoning its illusions about Assad. Turkey, which had tried to form an axis with Syria, has concluded that Assad represents a threat to regional peace and stability. In a stormy meeting in Damascus on Tuesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davoutoglu told Assad that Ankara “could no longer tolerate daily massacres in Syrian cities.” Turkish sources say Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan is pressing America and the EU nations to present a draft resolution demanding action by the UN Security Council. The same sources claim that Russia has assured Turkey that it wouldn’t be “an obstacle to meaningful [UN] action.”

Assad’s answer to Erdogan was defiance—with troops the next day invading Taftanaz, Sirmin and Binnish, close to the Turkish border, killing at least 50 people and arresting hundreds. Special emissaries from India, South Africa and Brazil also sought to stop the slaughter—only to see their hopes dashed as the killings spread to every part of Syria.

Assad’s diplomatic isolation provides America with an opportunity to lead international efforts to stop the massacre. All but seven of the 22 Arab League member states have withdrawn their ambassadors from Damascus. Most have publicly condemned the killings, a position also taken by Arab League Secretary-General Nabil al-Arabi.

Ten years ago, Bush labeled Assad as part of an “Axis of Evil.” Today, all those familiar with the situation in Syria would agree.