[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on November 17, 2012. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided.]
According to Russia's TASS news
agency, a grim milestone was achieved in Syria a
few days ago: several peaceful demonstrators in
Aleppo were massacred. [1] The twist is that the
demonstrators were calling for protection by the
Syrian army to end the destruction of the city;
they were shot by insurgents.
A single,
thinly sourced news item is not needed to
demonstrate the profound moral and strategic
disarray afflicting the Syrian insurrection as the
country totters toward collapse. A handier and
more reliable reference point is the abrupt and
forcible reorganization of the overseas Syrian
opposition at the behest of the United States.
The Syrian National Council (SNC) is now
just a junior partner in a broader opposition
grouping, the "Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and
Revolutionary Forces" (SNCORF). Reportedly, this
new group was formed at the insistence of US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is
retiring in a few weeks and apparently wished to
pull the plug on the ineffectual SNC and replace
it with something less overtly Sunni/Muslim
Brotherhood-esque. The SNC's major sponsor, Qatar,
and the great minds at the Doha branch of the
Brookings Institute responded with the marvel that
is SNCORF.
SNCORF is striving for
rainbow-coalition inclusiveness. The big tent
includes secularists, Christians, Alawites, and
women - and also 22 SNC/Muslim Brotherhood
holdovers - but, for the time being, no Kurds.
Also, none of the Western reporting indicated that
representatives of the most inclusive and
legitimate in-country opposition, the National
Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, led
by Hassan Abdul Azim, attended the meeting.
In an attempt to have its communal cake
and eat it too, SNCORF announced that this
inclusive grouping would be headed by a Sunni
cleric, an ex-imam of the Umayyad Mosque, one
Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, who appeared in a suit and
tie to advertise, if not his secularism, his
secular-friendly taste in attire.
A
throwback in a suit
Judging from the
comments of Asad Abu Khalil , the acerbic "Angry
Arab" observer of Middle East shenanigans, the
motto for SNCORF and America's Syria policy may
well turn out to be "Reorganize in Haste ...
Repent at Leisure".
Abu Khalil reported on
several interesting items he gleaned from
al-Khatib's web postings:
I spent last night reading the
writings of ... Ahmad Ma'adh Al-Khatib: a clear
follower of the Muslim Brotherhood and a
disciple of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi [an important
theological mentor to Egypt's Muslim
Brotherhood]. He has many views that his Western
sponsors did not know about. Take his treatise
on masturbation here: he maintains that this
"sinister habit" causes tuberculosis and tears
down the flesh.
Here, Mr Ahmad Ma'adh
Al-Khatib calls for Jihad to rescue the ummah
[the posting referred to now appears to be
inaccessible]. Enjoy him, please, especially
those in Western governments which approved him
and promoted him without reading a word of his
writings.
I am sure that the US Zionists
who approved the appointment of Mr Al-Khatib as
head of the exile Syrian opposition did not know
that he referred to Zionism as a "cancerous
racist movement."
Mr Ma'adh Al-Khatib
says here [see above note on access to the
posting] that Saddam has virtues among them:
"that he terrified the Jews".
This kook
(who could not have been appointed to the
position of preacher in the Mosque of the
Umayyads in Damascus without the approval of the
Syrian regime intelligence apparatus) here
declares that Facebook is a US-Israeli
intelligence plot. Read to believe. [2]
Good luck, Secretary Clinton, with
that Syrian opposition re-boot.
There was,
perhaps, a more significant element to this
reorganization that was largely overlooked - the
relative absence of Saudi Arabia at SNCORF's
coming-out party. The meeting in Doha was
orchestrated by the United States, Turkey, and
Qatar. Qatar's prime minister keynoted the opening
session and "presided" over the expanded meeting
of the Syrian opposition. [3]
Apparently,
no Saudi Arabian heavyweight attended. That is
significant because the reorganization of the
Syrian overseas opposition was a reaction against
the inadequacies of the Qatar-backed SNC, but also
a response to the crisis caused by the mushrooming
influence of Saudi-funded jihadis inside Syria.
Foreign efforts to support the
insurrection had largely turned into directionless
dithering, thanks in large part to Western
unwillingness to validate and empower the
expatriate and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated SNC
with significant amounts of arms. Saudi Arabian
Salafists displayed no such qualms about
dispatching arms and jihadis to Syria, with the
result that extremists have filled the
revolutionary vacuum.
News coverage of the
uprising now often includes reporting on gruesome
atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, the
occasional raising of the al-Qaeda flag, and the
profound weariness and disgust Syrian citizens are
expressing against the insurrectionists as well as
the government. With blowback into Lebanon and
Turkey, and Israel now firing on Syrian armor, the
situation is generally acknowledged to be getting
out of hand - and the SNC, never much more than a
stalking horse for the Muslim Brotherhood and a
convenient propaganda front for the foreign powers
seeking to unseat Bashar al-Assad, is definitely
not the group needed to bring order out of the
chaos.
SNCORF, with its Muslim Brotherhood
component sufficiently diluted (or, if you prefer,
with its internal politics now satisfactorily
factionalized so that the US and Europe can expect
to exert a controlling influence on its policies
and actions), is being positioned as a suitable
and properly vetted vehicle for formal recognition
of the Syrian opposition as a government-in-exile
and conduit for foreign military aid.
SNCORF might best be regarded not so much
as an attempt to level the playing field with
al-Assad as an initiative to level the playing
field with the Salafist jihadis who have been
filling the power vacuum created by the civil war
in Syria.
Can the reach of the Salafist
jihadis on the battlefield be rolled back so Syria
can enter the liberal democratic nirvana promised
by the West? The Syrian toothpaste is pretty much
out of the tube, Syria appears headed for national
collapse, and it is open to question whether
SNCORF, even with the superpowers bestowed upon it
by its inclusiveness, democratic aspirations,
loving coverage in the Guardian, and Western and
Gulf Cooperation Council diplomatic and military
support, can bring peace and unity back to the
torn and bloody nation.
Death squads
missing from action
SNCORF has its work cut
out for it, and it's worth wondering if Syria's
emigres and dissidents - characterized as
"reliable technocrats", not "insurrectionists with
fists of iron" - can tear the leading role on the
Syrian battlefield away from the jihadis and the
local bandits, bullies, and heroes who make up the
Free Syrian Army and the multitudes of local
anti-government militias.
There is one
remedy for Islamic extremist insurgencies that is
perceived as extremely effective by its US
practitioners but is unfortunately out of reach of
SNCORF, at least for the time being: death squads.
Syria is now at a point similar to that of Iraq in
2006 - a Sunni insurrection has fought the central
authority to a standstill, but at the cost of
Salafist extremists hijacking local power.
In Iraq, the Sunni opposition to the US
occupation eventually fractured as Sunni tribal
leaders, threatened by the bloody-minded ambition
of their jihadi allies and incentivized by US
money, arms and protection, set aside their
anti-American, anti-Shi'ite, and anti-Iran
sentiments, at least for the time being, turned on
the jihadis and cleansed Iraq's Sunni heartland -
Anbar Province - of al-Qaeda militants.
The BBC provides some context of this
event, the "Anbar Awakening", describing a
situation that looks a lot like today's Syria:
But by 2006, in one of the many
unintended consequences of the invasion, foreign
fighters such as the Jordanian Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, who had pledged themselves to
al-Qaeda and received funding directly from
Osama Bin Laden, had come to dominate the
insurgency. Their control extended over vast
swathes of Iraq.
Their ruthless exercise
of power threatened to rip the country apart.
...
For Sheikh Jabbar, desperate times
required desperate measures and this was the
moment he triggered what would become the
Awakening, a military counter-offensive in which
he and his supporters joined forces with their
former enemies, the Americans, to confront
al-Qaeda.
Sheikh Jabbar sought help from
the Americans to break al-Qaeda's hold on Anbar
province. In late 2006, he arranged a meeting
with Colonel John Tien of the US Army in which
he asked for weapons and ammunition for his men
to take on al-Qaeda. The Awakening had begun,
marking a key turning point in the fortunes of
Iraq. Although at the time they numbered in the
dozens, the forces who would later be known as
the Sons of Iraq swelled to a 100,000 or so. [4]
The leaders of the Sunni Awakening in
Anbar Province were the leading figures of their
communities, tribal big shots with extensive local
familial and patronage relationships. They were
also working hand in hand with the US military
occupation, a rather capable killing machine. This
tag-team arrangement helped make the Iraq al-Qaeda
hunt a success.
In a study of the
Awakening published in the Washington Quarterly,
John McCrary quoted the son of one of the Anbar
sheiks:
The Coalition Forces has the very
strong military ability. The civilians and the
tribes, they have a difference that the
Coalition Forces doesn't have. It's that they're
local - they found and know who comes from
outside. They know who are the insurgents and
who are al-Qaeda in general, such that there is
no more al-Qaeda or anything else. You wouldn't
believe me. I'm not exaggerating that in two
months, in two months everything was finished.
[5]
Anbar Province, which resisted US
pacification for four years, became one of Iraq's
safer places after a few months of "Awakening".
The US component of this effort was JSOC, the
no-holds barred assassination initiative. JSOC was
described by Bob Woodward while promoting his Iraq
War book,
The War Within:
Beginning in the late spring of
2007, the US military and intelligence agencies
launched a series of top-secret operations that
enabled them to locate, target and kill key
individuals in groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq,
the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias,
or so-called special groups. The operations
incorporated some of the most highly classified techniques
and information in the US government.
Senior military officers and officials
at the White House urged against publishing
details or code names associated with the
groundbreaking programs, arguing that
publication of the names alone might harm the
operations that have been so beneficial in Iraq.
As a result, specific operational details have
been omitted in this report and in The War
Within.
But a number of
authoritative sources say the covert activities
had a far-reaching effect on the violence and
were very possibly the biggest factor in
reducing it. Several said that 85 to 90% of the
successful operations and "actionable
intelligence" had come from the new sources,
methods and operations. Several others said that
figure was exaggerated but acknowledged their
significance.
Lt Gen Stanley McChrystal,
the commander of the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC) responsible for hunting al-Qaeda
in Iraq, employed what he called "collaborative
warfare," using every tool available
simultaneously, from signal intercepts to human
intelligence and other methods, that allowed
lightning-quick and sometimes concurrent
operations.
Asked in an interview about
the intelligence breakthroughs in Iraq,
President [George W] Bush offered a simple
answer: "JSOC is awesome." [6]
Looking at Syria
through the lens of what happened next door in
Iraq, it would appear that the best way to bring
order to the country would be for a transition
that would reach beyond intransigent but
incapable anti-government emigres to ally
in-country moderate Sunni elements with the
dominant local military force - in this case,
the Syrian Army - and kick off the national
reconciliation exercise by a purge of Salafists.
It appears that there were glimmerings
of a "negotiated transition", aka deal cutting,
with the Assad regime in the early stages of the
SNCORF process but unsurprisingly the maximalist
"Assad must go/no negotiations" approach
prevailed. This is regrettable - at least to
people who would like to see a negotiated end to
the inconclusive butchery - but understandable.
Flip-flops have their
limits
The US and the
West are heavily vested in the "Assad must go"
position. Presumably, the US could only flip-flop
in response to a unanimous declaration in favor of
negotiations by the Syrian opposition, but this
was not to be:
Some of the last holdouts said they
suspected that the agreement was a sly way for
the international community to negotiate with Mr
Assad about a transition to a new government. So
one clause in the agreement specifically bars
such talks. [7]
One might speculate
that the "last holdouts" for the maximalist
charter are not only motivated by overwhelming
moral scruples and/or irrational rage against
ending Syria's carnage by dialogue with Assad;
they are also opposing an attempt to marginalize
and subsequently purge extremist Islamists from
the redefined movement.
Amidst all this,
there was the usual tired effort to shame Russia
and the People's Republic of China into solving
the West's self-created Syria problem by
pressuring Assad.
The PRC's four-point
proposal for supporting the UN peace process was,
not for the first time, shoe-horned into a
West-gratifying narrative of China trying to
repair damage to its global reputation caused by
Beijing's obstruction on Syria at the UN Security
Council. [8]
There are a couple big flaws
in this tale of Western neo-liberalism tutelage of
the morally obtuse PRC. First, since July 2012 the
United States has been exploring the "Yemen
solution", ie Assad hands over power to a
carefully chosen group of supporters and opponents
who perpetuate the status quo albeit in a
modified, more democracy-friendly form. Does
anybody remember Manaf Tlass, the Syrian military
princeling/defector unsuccessfully touted as the
great uniter of the loyal and insurrectionist
opposition this summer? Maybe not. [9]
US
equivocation on its own stance - and drift toward
the Chinese position - not only from four months
ago but also in the days of haggling leading up to
the formation of the SNCORF is not an example or
incentive for a Chinese flip-flop on Syria.
Also, as patient and retentive readers of
Asia Times Online will also recall, the PRC has
been pushing its Syria initiative since early
2012, with the sound, if as yet unrewarded,
calculation that its most persuasive Middle
Eastern role is as the alternative to democratic
chaos for authoritarian governments - aka Saudi
Arabia - and managed democracies - aka Iran - in
the neighborhood: in other words, leveraging its
role as the world's biggest customer for Saudi and
Iranian oil to act as the guarantor of economic
development and supporter of political stability
in the region. [10]
This is a relatively
sound geopolitical strategy, especially since the
United States is successfully weaning itself off
Middle Eastern oil - and the need to share fully
and deeply in Saudi Arabia's local security
anxieties - thanks to domestic fracking and a
coming boom in oil sand crude imports from Canada.
Judging from the journalistic tea leaves,
there is no sign that China is abandoning its
Middle Way strategy in order to act as the West's
clueless trained ape, mindlessly endorsing the
merits of externally promoted regime change to its
own detriment, a role that that foreign observers
for some reason believe Beijing will happily fill
in order to gain the approval of the US and
European Union.
Unsurprisingly, Xinhua's
analysis sniffed that SNCFOR was "dubious",
commented unfavorably on its rejection of
"dialogue", and also reported on some pushback
in-country members of the Syrian opposition who,
Xinhua implies, are more qualified to discuss
Syria's fate that the emigres in Doha:
Luai Hussain, head of the opposition
Building Syria State party, said his party
rejects everything that comes out of the
overseas-based opposition.
"We reject
the formation of any transitional government
abroad and any other decision ... and we regard
such act as direct and real aggression on
Syrians' right to choose their leadership and
determine their destinies."
He said his
party will mobilize Syrian public opinion to
thwart efforts to form a government abroad. "The
formation of any interim government abroad would
be conducive to increasing division in the
Syrian society, and thus would widen the
platform of a civil war," he added.
Along with other leading opponents,
Hussain did not take part in the Doha meeting
apparently because he was not invited. [11]
Xinhua interviewed Luai (who spent
seven years in Syrian prison) in Damascus; while
Western outlets confide themselves largely to war
reporting, war tourism, atrocity journalism, and
deriding the Assad government, Xinhua has stepped
up its in-country presence in an attempt to
promote the visibility and credibility of the
PRC's proposed political solution.
Luai
advocated "international consensus" to solve the
crisis; in Syria-speak, this is the Chinese
position of foreign powers ceasing aid to the
rebels and switching the international focus from
regime change to compelling dissidents to enter
the political dialogue track preferred by Russia
and China.
If, as appears likely, Saudi
Arabia is chafing at the snub administered by
Qatar and the United States, the PRC has a chance
to present itself as the Kingdom's understanding
buddy and redirect King Abdullah's vision toward
economics and his country's future as China's
energy partner. Perhaps Saudi Arabia will decide
its anti-Shi'ite/anti-Iranian crusade has yielded
most of the benefits that can be expected, and it
is time to ring down the curtain on the
extremist-Sunni escapade inside Syria.
However, the idea of imploding Assad's
regime is probably irresistible to Riyadh, and in
any case the window for happy-talk political
solutions is rapidly closing.
Assad's
government has lost control of a lot of territory.
Judging by its increasing reliance on air power,
the government has determined that the battered
Sunni conscripts of the regular army and the
dubious shabiha paramilitaries are not up to the
job of fighting street to street and house to
house to get territory back, and the regime is
mainly interested in denying key assets and
strongpoints to the insurgency by use of jet
bombers and attack helicopters. That's not a good
augury for the city of Damascus if and when the
mayhem moves to the capital from Aleppo.
The initiative in the insurgency appears
to lie with aggressive, opportunistic and
none-too-popular militant outfits, whose efforts
to destroy the Assad regime are frustrated by
suspicious Western governments unwilling to give
them the money, arms, and support needed to finish
the job - and Syria.
Under these
circumstances, a political settlement, however
desirable, seems unlikely unless a major force -
probably not SNCORF, more likely a new Sunni
strongman with a taste for order emerging from the
Syrian army - tips the scales one way or another.
For the United States and the West - which
are primarily interested in finessing their way
out of a Syria mess that they, to a significant
extent, helped create - the end will come soon
enough.
For the PRC, which, for reasons of
energy security, is committed to playing the long
game in the Middle East, bloody chaos in Syria is
just another challenge and opportunity for Beijing
to advance its interests in the world's most
dangerous neighborhood.
For the people of
Syria, it must feel as if the agony will go on
forever.
Notes:
1.
Syrian
insurgents open fire on protestors, Voice of
Russia, Nov 9, 2011.
2. Click
here for
his blog.
3.
HE
the Prime Minister Presides Over Expanded Meeting
of Syrian Opposition, Alarabia, Nov 9,
2012.
4.
Iraq's
militia leaders reveal why they turned on
al-Qaeda, BBC, Sep 29, 2010.
5.
The
Anbar Awakening, Washington Quarterly, Jan
2009.
6.
Why
Did Violence Plummet? It Wasn't Just the
Surge, Washington Post, Sep 8, 2008.
7.
With
Eye on Aid, Syria Opposition Signs Unity Deal,
NY Times, Nov 11, 2012.
8.
China signals more active role in world
affairs, USA Today, Nov 9, 2012.
9.
Syrian
wheel of fortune spins China's way, Asia Times
Online, Jul 28, 2012.
10.
A
Chinese vision begins to emerge, Asia Times
Online, Feb 25, 2012.
11.
New
Syrian opposition bloc wins recognition, role
remains dubious, China Daily, Nov 13, 2012.
