By Steve Bolton
The rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad may call
themselves the Free Syrian Army, but that does not mean the people of Syria will have liberty
if they win.
When the so-called Arab Spring spread like wildfire
across the Middle East last year, the contemporaneous revolt that broke out
against Syria’s brutal dictator appeared to have little chance of succeeding.
The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt succeeded with far less bloodshed, but the
rebels who toppled Libya’s Muammar Khadafy were only able to survive because of
air cover provided by Britain and France. The opposition to Assad was not only
far weaker than that in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia but has not enjoyed much help
from the West, let alone air support or no-fly zones. Surprisingly, however,
the rebellion is not only still simmering a year and a half later but growing
hotter by the day. Up to 26,000 lives have now been lost in this virtual civil
war, including about 6,000 casualties among the regime’s armed forces.[1]
The rebels have gone beyond the mere hit-and-run attacks that characterize the
beginning of any simple guerrilla war to taking and holding territory,
including many important border posts, some strategically significant smaller
cities and towns scattered across the county, and some of the suburbs of
Damascus. It is not surprising that they hold the city of Hama, given that it
was a hotbed of rebellion in 1982, when Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad ordered
the massacre of between 10,000 and 20,000 civilians to crush an uprising by the
Muslim Brotherhood. The really shocking thing is that they hold parts of
Aleppo, a strategically crucial commercial hub that was thought to be entirely
loyal to Assad. In graduate school, I had to become deeply familiar with the
history of guerrilla warfare for the equivalent of a thesis on the history of
counterinsurgency, but I cannot recall any rebel group of the 20th Century
pulling off the kind spectacular coup de grace the Free Syrian Army did on July
18, when it manage to set off a bomb inside the very headquarters of the
National Security Bureau. In one fell swoop, they killed they nearly
decapitated Assad’s war machine by killing the head of the National Security
Bureau, the assistant vice president, the defense minister and the defense
minister’s deputy. On Wednesday, they launched another brazen assault, this
time against the headquarters of the national army in the center of the
capital.
Other signs that Assad is losing his grip are more
subtle. He has suffered some embarrassing high level defections, but the fact
that a sizeable number of his troops have deserted to the Free Syrian Army is
more problematic because it calls into question both the determination and the
loyalty of the forces he supposedly commands. One of the key determinants in
guerrilla warfare is typically the ability of one side to mobilize sufficient
numbers to overcome the other side, but Assad is clearly having trouble mustering
his own troops. While the foreign press has been focused mainly on the events
in big cities like Damascus and Aleppo, the rebels have quietly cut the
regime’s supply lines and extended their control across vast rural areas, which
the regime simply does not have the manpower to police. History has shown that
another important factor in the outcomes of guerrilla wars is the degree to
which ruling governments and the rebels they face are willing to engage in
indiscriminate violence, which is often a sign of impending collapse. As I have
touched on before in previous columns, when governments lose wars against
enemies applying guerrilla tactics, it is typically because they panic by
compensating for their lack of manpower with increasingly wanton misuse of raw
firepower; this creates a vicious circle of violence that drives ordinary
civilians into the arms of rebel groups who represent less of a threat. This
dynamic was what cost Spain control of Cuba before the Spanish-American War and
the Soviets control of Afghanistan, among a few better-known incidents from the
20th Century; ultimately, it was also the single most important factor that led
to America’s defeat in Vietnam. A more recent example was last year’s revolt
against Muammar Khadafy, whose main military mistake was resorting on
indiscriminate use of artillery, air strikes and widespread human rights abuses
to terrorize his Libyan subjects into submission. Assad has learned nothing
from Khadafy’s fate and is simply repeating the same process, by substituting
the use of artillery, air power and wanton massacres for his lack of manpower.
With each massacre like those that have laid waste to towns like Yalda, Qubair,
Dariya[2]
and Homs, Assad has not only damned his own soul but shot his own military
effort in the foot. His ever-expanding list of enemies may now include the
half-million Palestinian refugees living in the country, after his forces recklessly
shelled the Yarmouk refugee camp earlier this month.[3]
The revolt in Syria is less likely to succeed than in any country involved in
the Arab Spring, but even if they can manage to oust one of America’s bitterest
enemies, we still lose.
Differing Traditions of Popular Revolt: A
Tale of Two Civilizations
For at least the last century, guerrilla groups have
consistently failed whenever they have employed indiscriminate violence. This
is why relatively tame Latin American rebel groups like the Sandinistas, Fidel
Castro’s Cuban rebels and El Salvador’s FMLN enjoyed much more success during
the Cold War than Peru’s Sendero Luminoso fanatics, who were wiped out
precisely because they employed tactics that were as genocidal as the regime
they fought. Brutality and indiscriminate violence may go hand-in-hand sometimes,
but they are not synonymous. As many American G.I.s will testify, the Viet Cong
could be pitiless. The reason that they won, however, is that they focused
their brutality in a way that did not alienate the civilian support they
depended on for survival. The rebels fighting against Assad fall into the same
boat, in the sense that they are vicious, but have so far focused their human
rights violations in a way that has not cost them the support of the masses.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the U.N. are among the watchdog
organizations who have pointed out widespread offenses by the Free Syrian Army,
especially routine torture and executions of regime soldiers and supporters. We’re
not dealing with some relatively disciplined Latin American rebel group that
unconsciously shares the same moral assumptions underlying the rhetoric of
Western civilization, which ultimately spring from our common Christian roots.
Quite frequently throughout Western history, virtues and gifts like peace,
tolerance, the equality of mankind and the like have been violated, but we at
least assume that they will be given lip service. The same assumptions do not
necessarily apply when dealing with a civilization that springs from entirely
different roots. The Viet Cong, for example, sprang from a non-Christian
civilization that was indifferent to human rights as we know them, which is why
we should not have been surprised that they disregarded those rights whenever
it suited their purposes. Almost all of the secular and religious rebel groups
that have arisen in the Islamic world in the last half-century have likewise
unconsciously followed an entirely different concept of the law of war, one
that is alien to the post-Christian Western mindset. Rather than being
indifferent to human rights like some Asian rebel groups, like Mao Tse Tung’s
Communist guerrillas, they have all tended to emphasize the concept of an eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, in concert with a Hitlerian idea of collective
punishment. Almost every rebel group from the Middle East in recent memory has
routinely resorted to levels and types of violence, including against unarmed
civilians, that would shock the peasant armies of Latin America. This is why we
have consistently seen secular rebels like Yasser Arafat engaging in acts of
terrorism against civilians, such as blowing up airliners, since the 1960s, but
nothing of the kind from the rebels of Latin America. Most Americans would be
shocked to learn just how badly our government has treated Latin America over
the last century and a half, by such means as routinely manipulating elections
and paying ruthless dictators to massacre and torture innocent civilians, in
order to protect the interests of Corporate America. The reality is actually
far more disgusting than the public myth. At times, the CIA has also been
caught red-handed treating Middle Eastern nations in the same way, as it did in
1953 when it overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran to protect
our oil investments, or in the 1970s, when it trained the Iranian secret police
(SAVAK) to torture the mullahs who now rule that country. Latin America has
suffered far more at our hands than the Middle East, but you don’t see
Sandinistas or members of the FMLN or FARC bombing our planes, driving truck
bombs into our markets or flying planes into our skyscrapers. There is a stark,
undeniable difference between the way Latin America and the Middle East
approach the issue of popular revolt, precisely because they spring from two
entirely different civilizations with very different ideas about morality,
including the law of war.
If our policymakers assume that the Free Syrian Army
is led by rebels who believe in the same ideals as George Washington or Emiliano
Zapata, then they are in for a rude shock. Washington didn’t torture his Tory
captives, nor did Zapata’s peasant army massacre its opponents, but the Free
Syrian Army apparently has different principles. Over the last month, the
rhetoric of the rebels has taken a turn down a dark path, with a lot of sincere
talk among various factions of killing their own family members should they
back Assad, or of exterminating the Alawite minority once Assad is toppled. The
rebel alliance is a fragmented hodge-podge of regular army defectors, peasants
and members of various ethnic and religious groups, but to date no faction has
come to the fore with a plan of post-war reconciliation, democratic rule,
ethnic peace and religious tolerance. Voices that most Westerners would
consider moderate have been more muffled in this conflict than in any other in
the Arab Spring, even the Libya civil war. Regional, religious and ethnic
differences are also more pronounced in Syria as well, which raises the
likelihood of serious internecine strife and revenge killings if the rebels
take power. As it stands, the coalition against Assad is quite broad,
encompassing everyone from certain Christian and Shiite Muslim communities to
Sunni Muslim fundamentalists to top officers in the national army, but there is
a real risk that the majority Sunnis will derail their own rebellion by
alienating the Christians and Shiites. Assad’s cruelty has even shocked members
of the minority Alawite sect that he and his father belong to, apparently to
the point of turning them against the regime.[4]
Many Christians have also turned against Assad, perhaps in part because of the
historical memory of numerous human rights violations perpetrated against their
communities by his father. Nevertheless, both the Alawite and the Christian
communities have much to fear if the Free Syrian Army takes power, if the vicious
rhetoric of some of its factions can be taken seriously. There has been some
sectarian friction among the regime’s opponents, including such foreboding
signs as a public warning to the Christians of the city of Qusayr to pack their
bags and leave town, in what really amounted to a local episode of ethnic
cleansing. If that sort of hate comes to the surface before Assad is toppled,
it is highly likely that the weak rebellion will fail. It may be worse, however,
if it occurs after Assad leaves, because then any pretense of restraint on the
part of the most fanatical rebels will be removed.
The second outcome is more likely, thanks to several
long-lasting global trends that are running against Assad. The regime’s
self-defeating counterinsurgency strategy is perhaps more inappropriate in
Syria than in any other modern guerrilla war, precisely because Assad’s inner
circle already depends entirely on the support of the privileged Alawite
minority, which makes up just ten percent of the nation’s population. This was
a relic of the colonial policy of the French, who consciously (and quite
stupidly) took unpopular ethnic minorities and transformed them into ruling
elites in many of the far-flung colonies they governed in the 19th and 20th
Centuries. The policy helped stave off the collapse of French colonial rule for
a generation or two, but it inevitably led to ethnic strife in these countries
once they gained independence; it is because of such stupid and selfish
decision-making that most of the former French colonies are in far worse shape
than those governed by the British, who weren’t quite as inept and rapacious.
Assad’s collapse represents the last fading echo of French imperialism.
Unfortunately, however, it also represents the last dying gasp of the few
positive aspects of Western civilization that France introduced into its former
colonies. Now that the tide of Western imperialism has been receding for the
past half century or more, the entire Middle East has slowly reverted into what
it always was, until the 17th Century: a bastion of Islamic fundamentalism,
permanently pitted against everything Western civilization stands for.
Because the French were more intent on making money
and improving their strategic position than in spreading Western values, their
cultural impact on countries like Syria was always ephemeral. The best ideals
of the French Revolution, for example, never took root in Syria, although
Western ideas about nationalism did. Whether men like Washington, Jefferson and
Lincoln recognized it or not, democracy was an idea that sprang exclusively
from two sources, a few isolated Greek city-states like Athens and much later,
the Catholic Church; in America’s War of Independence, our Founding Fathers
were fighting absolutism and the divine right of kings, two degenerate
political ideologies that were exclusively Protestant in origin. Poland had
democracy more than two hundred years before England did, while Cardinal Robert
Bellarmine wrote in favor of the idea long before enemies of the Church like
Voltaire did. There is some evidence of crude democratic feeling in other
cultures scattered across the globe since the time of ancient Sumeria, but in
no case are they anywhere near as clearly distilled as we find in the ideals of
the medieval Catholic Church, the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution
and to a certain extent, some factions active in the French Revolution. When
our ancestors broke the back of the Muslim armies that threatened Europe, back
in the days of the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and the Battle of Vienna (1683),
they had the will but lacked the power to infuse these democratic and Christian
ideals into Islamic civilization. By the late 19th and early 20th Centuries,
when the West had almost completely conquered the entire Islamic world, they
lacked the will but had the power. As a result, even secular fruits of
Catholicism, like democracy, never took a firm grip in places like Syria, nor
did their own culture provide them with any tradition or incentive to “liberté,
égalité, fraternité.” To make matters worse, over the last century, the
definition of “freedom” in the West itself underwent a subtle, slow
transformation, into a form that men like Washington or Lincoln would have
found entirely alien and offensive. It does not mean anything so noble as the
equality of man, but the freedom of the superior to injure the inferior without
criticism or interference; this is the entire meaning of “free markets,” which
allow the rich to steal a man’s house, or “free love,” which likewise allows
them to steal his wife. Among the darkest examples of this redefinition is the
“liberty” to take away someone else’s liberty, through the genocide that
abortion has unleashed on our whole civilization. There is nothing particularly
democratic about killing babies before they are old enough to vote, obviously.
It is impossible for us to expect a democratic transition as we know it to
occur in the Middle East as the result of the Arab Spring, because our
governments have never shown much interest in promoting the idea (except when
it was conducive to corporate profits), nor do we believe in democracy as men
like Jefferson would have understood it. We cannot give what we do not have; we
cannot expect the people of a completely different civilization to suddenly
start practicing difficult virtues like tolerance in debate, freedom of the
press and freedom of religion – as opposed to freedom from religion – if we do
not believe in them ourselves. And if it is one thing our commercial
civilization, based on its Gospel of Greed, stands squarely against, it is the
belief that All Men Are Created Equal.
Why the West Doesn’t Suffer Islamic
Suffrage
Ironically, the rebirth of Muslim fundamentalism over
the last four decades has actually provided the people of the Middle East with
more democracy than they have ever known, despite the fact that the Koran has
nothing in common with the tracts of Thomas Paine or the writings of
Bellarmine.[5]
Until the 1970s, every regime in the Islamic world, or Umma, was a naked dictatorship. The most sophisticated and Westernized
of them all were actually those which followed the nationalist ideology of
Baathism, which envisioned a reunion of all Arab lands into one secular state. It
had much in common with the Western philosophy of fascism, including its
anti-Semitic portions, which were displayed in unwavering, fanatical hatred of
the state of Israel. The movement’s hero was Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Egyptian
officer who took power in a coup in 1952 and later faced down Britain and
France in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Assad, like his late nemesis Saddam Hussein,
is a relic of that age of pan-Arabism, which sprang from some of the worst
ideas produced by Western thinkers in the late 19th Century, like ethnic chauvinism
and militarism. Baathism has clearly lost the struggle for the hearts and minds
of the Umma to the homegrown
philosophy of Islamic fundamentalism, which has roots stretching back to Mohammed.
One of the first signs of this broad, long-lasting revival was the massacre at
Hama, shortly after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 spilled over across the
region. At the time, every single regime in the Islamic world lacked even a fig
leaf of a democratic process, with most of the governments either being
absolute monarchies (as is still the case in Morocco and Saudi Arabia) or
brutal fascist dictatorships like those of Hussein, Assad’s father and Anwar Sadat in Egypt. Iran’s theocratic
government was and is hardly democratic by either our standards or those of our
ancestors, but it did establish at least a semblance of checks and balances, as
well as providing the public with choices of candidates. To this day, those
choices are severely restricted by a process of vetting candidates, as well as
censorship of the press – but the same is true in America and the rest of the
Western democracies, where we have freedom for those who can afford a press and
our candidates are vetted secretly by Corporate America. Americans have long
been limited to two parties, but Iranians actually have numerous parties to
choose from.
Since
then, the greatest advances in democracy in the region have been made in
Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt, thanks to victories of Muslim fundamentalists in 2002,
2011 and 2012 respectively. Prior to that, the people of Algeria overwhelmingly
voted for Islamic fundamentalists during free elections held there in 1992,
which were wiped out by a Western-backed military coup. Whenever the people of
the Islamic world have been given a chance to speak, they have not always chose
democracy, but they have preferred an Islamic government of one flavor or
another. Their vision of what democracy should mean, however, is entirely alien
to our way of thinking. The Puritans who set foot on Plymouth Rock chose a
system of government based on town meetings, but one that most modern Americans
would reject as far too theocratic for their tastes. Islamic fundamentalism of
any stripe is even more incompatible, in the sense that is not only theocratic
but based on a completely different holy book that neither we nor our ancestors
have even bothered to read. Even in its mildest forms, political Islam
invariably envisions a rejection of Western consumerism, a flat denial of
Western principles secularism and a role for women in society that early
feminists like Susan B. Anthony would have considered offensive,. Our
generation has rejected the ideas of separation of church and state, by
transforming the state into a weapon to eradicate every vestige of religion in
society, which is completely incompatible with the one tenet Muslim
fundamentalists of all stripes share: that the detailed commands of the Koran
should dictate how society is governed. That common source makes many plain
statements that would frighten many Westerners, if they actually bothered to
read it – including many regarding an entirely different concept of the law of
war. They also ought to be chilled to the bone about one particularly telling
exercise of democratic rights in the Middle East, where the most popular name
for newborn boys after Mohammed is now Osama. Throughout history human beings
have rarely been free to vote, but they have generally been allowed to express
their feelings through the names given to their children, and the ordinary
people of the Middle East apparently approve of what Osama Bin Laden stood for.
Having freedom does not necessarily mean that people will exercise it wisely.
This is precisely why the U.S. and its allies have violently resisted the
spread of free elections in the Middle East for so long, because the things the
ordinary foreign Muslim dreams about are a threat to the security of the
planet: the reunion of the Umma into a single Islamic superpower, the
humiliation of the West, the destruction of Israel and the spread of an
entirely different way of life, one incompatible with either orthodox
Christianity or modern consumerism. Nowhere in the Middle East can we find a
faction that supports democracy as we know it, or even as our theocratic
Christian ancestors knew it when they set foot on Plymouth Rock and later wrote
the Declaration of Independence. These things were the natural outgrowths of
our once-Christian civilization, not theirs. At best, we can find a rare
intellectual or technocrat here or there who happened to pick up a few Western
ideals while spending time at an American college or whatever, but that’s about
it. Because we take what few Christian ideals we have left for granted,
Americans tend to assume that they are universal, but they are not, and we will
be making a big mistake if we bet the future of the planet on an assumption
that radical Islam and our post-Christian civilization can coexist. Political
Islam is clearly the wave of the future, now that Western imperialism and the
ideas it grafted onto the Umma, like secularism and Baathism, are finished.
There is simply no ideological competition left. The only question that remains
is what brand of fundamentalism the world’s 1 billion Muslims will choose to
follow, as well as who will lead them.
The
Arab Spring is never going to bring forth democracy as we know it, but as Iran
or Turkey knows it, if we’re fortunate. Back in 1979, when the Iranian
Revolution was in its infancy and the only other Islamic rebels on the planet
were fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Islamic fundamentalism was
considered merely a local or sectarian aberration. As I’ve discussed in
previous columns, the trend since then has been towards constant expansion of
the area controlled by fundamentalists of one stripe or another, as well as
constant process of radicalization, as the various factions compete to prove
that they are more fanatical than their rivals. The Arab Spring represents
merely an astonishing acceleration of that same trend, one which has put Islamic
governments into power in three North African states in a little more than a
year and threatens to do the same in Syria. At the same time (as I discussed in
greater detail in Mali
and the Return of Mohammed) rebels
linked to what remains of Al-Qaeda swept across the Saharan desert in matter of
weeks and took control of a swath of territory the size of Texas or France,
almost unnoticed by the Western press. In every other country in the Islamic
world that is not yet governed by theocrats, the main opposition is now
fundamentalist; this is true in Chechnya, in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Indonesia
and in Somalia. It is now true even in Tatarstan, a Muslim region in the heart
of Russia that was once considered immune from fundamentalism. The issue is no
longer whether or not fundamentalism will sweep the Muslim world, but how much
longer the remaining secular leaders can hang on. After that, the next contest
for power will be between competing versions of Islam, among factions who at
best dislike us or at worst want to convert the whole planet by the sword, as
the Koran clearly commands. In Syria, the issue is not how a pro-Western,
secularist regime can replace Assad, but of which brand of Islamic
fundamentalism will dominate the next government.
At present, the contest is likely to come down to
three main challengers, the Turkish model, the Iranian model, and the
alternative of immediate jihad that Al-Qaeda promotes. As I discuss in greater
detail in columns like Blood in the Water: America Wins Another Battle While
Bin Laden Wins the War, Al-Qaeda as
an organization is almost as dead as Bin Laden, but as a mode of thought, it is
rapidly gaining adherents throughout the Sunni Muslim lands. Ever since the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan, a multi-national floating army of radical
volunteers has fought on behalf of fundamentalists, from Bosnia to Somalia,
from Yemen to Iraq. Now this Islamic equivalent of the French Foreign Legion is
active in Syria, where their reputation as tenacious fighters is gaining them
great respect – despite the fact that the ultimate, distant dream of these
Al-Qaeda sympathizers is to ignite World War III and convert the whole world by
the sword. It is unlikely that they will take power directly in Syria, but the
longer the conflict drags on and the more violent it becomes, the more likely
it is that native Syrians will be radicalized themselves and show greater
support for them; this has been the pattern in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where
the success of the extremists has been in direct proportion to the amount of
violence needed to oust their particular dictators. Sunni extremists of this
stripe aren’t likely to govern Syria immediately, but there is a distinct
possibility that they will gain enough of a foothold to at least harass
Israel’s northern border with guerrilla attacks, as Hezbollah and Hamas
routinely do from the Lebanese and Gaza borders respectively.
The Geopolitical Consequences of the
Syrian Revolt and Arab Spring
In
either scenario, the possibility for aggravation of the ancient Sunni-Shiite
rivalry exists. This preoccupation, together with their penchant for
indiscriminate car bombings, is essentially what cost Al-Qaeda its war against
the American occupation of Iraq. The more success that fundamentalists enjoy
throughout the Umma, the more this issue will come to the fore, as the issue of
which faction will lead the Islamic world becomes a more pressing question than
whether or not it will be led. This represents the best hope for the West of
driving a wedge between the two most dangerous wings of the fundamentalist
movement, which Iran and Al-Qaeda represent. If a Sunni government sympathetic
to Al-Qaeda’s goals were to come to power, it is entirely likely that their own
virulent fanaticism would lead to pogroms, or even genocide, of the Alawites,
Christians and Shiites within their borders. This would be a horrible
development, but it might at least offend the majority Shiites of Iraq and Iran
enough to forestall the nightmare scenario our policymakers really ought to
fear: an alliance between Iran and the successors of Al-Qaeda. Such a scenario
is not far-fetched, given that Sudan has had cordial relations with Iran ever
since its own Sunni fundamentalists took power in 1989. On the other hand, Iran
is seriously complicating its ties to the next rulers of Syria by backing Assad
in the current civil war. Reports differ as to whether Iran is merely giving
Assad moral and diplomatic encouragement or actually using its own
Revolutionary Guards to bolster his troops, but the effect is the same: Tehran
is thankfully alienating the Syrian people, thereby raising an obstacle to any
postwar rapprochement. Yet it is difficult to imagine that this obstacle would
last long, given that the overwhelming obsession of any radical regime based in
Damascus would be to destroy Israel. It is also hard to envision leaders
sympathetic to Al-Qaeda ever shutting off the Iranian supply of arms to their
Shiite kin in Hezbollah. Iran and Syria do not share a border, so neither
represents a territorial threat to the other. That geographic accident is the
sole reason why Iran and Syria have been staunch allies for so long. Assad and
his father were every bit as ruthless as Iran’s nemesis, Saddam Hussein, and
crushed every manifestation of Iran’s theocratic ideology with inhuman
violence, but Syria happened share a border with their common enemy, Israel. That
insuperable alliance was so beneficial to both rogue states for so long that
Iran is defending Assad’s regime in an almost sentimental way, one that may
hopefully impair their relations with Syria’s next rulers. If the Free Syrian
Army doesn’t resent this enough, then when the dust settles, Iran’s strategic
influence in the region may actually be augmented. At present, they are allied
with a Syrian regime which actively opposes their ideology, which is now
sweeping the Middle East; in the future, they may be allied with a Syrian
regime which actively supports it.
The most tolerable outcome we can hope for in Syria
is the emergence of a regime somewhat more radical that Turkey, but still
within the same less virulent mold of Turkish fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia may
play a role here as well, given that it likes to throws around a lot of cash in
support of its own Wahhabi brand of fundamentalism, but Wahhabism is fading
fast as a distinct alternative to these competing visions of Islamism. Turkey
is not only accumulating some good will with the Free Syrian Army with moral
and material support, but is also enjoying an unprecedented economic boom and
newfound sense of confidence under its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a
democratically elected follower of a mild brand of fundamentalism. Turkey is
still a member of NATO, despite a long-time rivalry with Greece, with whom it
perennially engages in games of military brinksmanship. Thanks to the austerity
crisis in Greece and the concurrent economic boom under Erdogan, Turkey now has
the upper hand in that rivalry. At the same time Ankara’s relationship with
Israel has seriously soured in recent years, especially after Israeli commandos
stormed a Turkish ship in 2010 and killed nine Turkish citizens. The stage may
be set for a quite complicated contest for power over postwar Syria, involving
not merely Turkey, Iran and Israel, but also Saudi Arabia, Greece, Salafist
rebels sympathetic to Bin Laden’s vision and the Kurdish minorities who live in
the mountains of Iraq, Syria and Turkey – not to mention Armenia, which is
still fuming over the alleged genocide of more than a million Armenians by the
Turks during World War I, and Armenia’s other rival, Azerbaijan. The next
Syrian regime is also going to inherit many serious differences of opinion over
issues like water rights that are perennial thorns in Syrian-Turkish relations.
Many wild cards may come in to play, including the possibility of an Israeli
and/or American strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities next year, the
simmering Islamic rebellions against Russian rule in Chechnya and Dagestan, and
the financial crisis in the European Union. Last but not least, whither goes
Syria, there goes Lebanon; the civil war is already spilling over into Beirut,
which is hardly going to remain untouched if the Free Syrian Army brings a
Muslim fundamentalist government to power in Damascus.
The
very complexity of these issues is one of the many factors keeping the West
from intervening in the Syria the same way as the British and French did in
Libya. As I warned against over a year ago in The Arab Spring, the NATO Fall, that intervention has already ended up decreasing
the security of the Western powers by bringing Islamic fundamentalists to the
brink of power; last week, it even cost the life of our ambassador and four
other Americans. Furthermore, France and Britain could barely afford to
prosecute the war against Libya and can afford it less today, thanks to the Age of Austerity, as I discussed in more detail two months ago. France is now giving
the Free Syrian Army tepid humanitarian support, rather than air cover or free
weapons, but that’s about as much as the West can comfortably do at this point.
The potential for Assad to use his chemical weapons, the need to address the
Iranian nuclear issue and the like are all weighing heavily on our
policymakers, who have many options, all of which could blow up in our faces.
We have cards we can play, but it is unlikely that we can use them in an
effective way without making a dire problem even worse. Because the Arab Spring
has put almost all of the Westernized demagogues, dictators and democrats of
the region on the run, we have no real allies left in the region, beyond a few
corrupt royal regimes like those of Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states and
Morocco. No one will shed a tear when Assad is dead and gone, but despite the
fact that he is our sworn enemy, his passing is likely to further diminish the
rapidly receding influence of the Western powers in the Muslim world. Today,
Iran has an ally in place on Israel’s northern border that is not only
anti-Western, but also devoted to Israel’s destruction; tomorrow, it can count
on a regime coming to power that is not only anti-Western and reinvested with
determination to exterminate Israel, but also espousing a similar theocratic
ideology. Instead of a stagnant war front with a permanent enemy well-armed
with conventional weapons, Israel is likely to face constant border raids for
the next generation, just as it now does from the Gaza Strip and the Lebanese
border. The border with Egypt is likewise insecure now, thanks to the power
vacuum opened on the Sinai Peninsula by the Arab Spring; furthermore, if Syria
falls, Lebanon is certain to as well.
With
each passing month, The Unpromising Land is looking more vulnerable than any time since its independence in
1947. Like the Arab Spring, this erosion of Israeli security is yet another
subtle sign of the receding of Western imperialism. This is a long-term trend
in international politics I refer to in my unpublished sleeping pill of a book,
The Retreat of the West, one that has
dominated the headlines for the last century and is likely to influence the key
global events of the next century as well. Given that this long-term wave in
global affairs is unlikely to end anytime soon, or even within the lifetimes of
our grandchildren, Israel is going to be hard-pressed to survive in the long
term. It has compounded its own dire predicament by jumping on the bandwagons
of abortion and contraception, thereby committing virtual national suicide at a
time when it simply lacks the manpower to take on the resurgent hordes of
Islam. The Arab Spring is not a sign of hope, but more like an Indian Summer,
or what Stephen King has referred to in a particularly chilling short story as
a Strawberry Spring; it is merely one more event arising from the Retreat of
the West which is inexorably leading the whole planet slowly towards what
political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called The Clash of Civilizations. The
clash he predicted almost two decades ago has yet to materialize precisely
because such movements in global politics take place at an almost glacial pace,
but when it erupts into actual fighting, one of the first fronts that the West
will likely be Israel, that isolated outpost of Westernized Jewish settlers
living far from the succor of any potential ally. The question in places like
Syria is not how much influence the West is going to lose as a result of the
Arab Spring, but how fast and how much. The question will then become how much
longer Israel can hold on, surrounded by a sea of reinvigorated enemies, filled
with hate and with no compunctions about using weapons of mass destruction, at
a time when its own policies of depopulation have left it old, grey and
complacent. A surgical strike here or there against rogue nations like Iran or
merely buying a new weapons system or two isn’t going to do the trick anymore,
especially since our proliferating enemies can now afford to buy or manufacture
weapons of a less inferior grade than the ones they once wielded against the
West. Even though we still have a large lead in technology, education and
money,, the gap has been closing for generations, to the point where the West
simply no longer has the power to boss the entire region around; thanks the
sheer speed at which information travels these days and numerous other factors,
that gap is likely to shrink further over the next few generations. Once that
dilemma is laid bare, our descendants will become conscious of a problem our
ancestors didn’t have to face since the Battles of Lepanto and Vienna: the
defense of the West itself. Like Bin Laden, some of the fighters on the ground
in places like Libya and Syria are speaking of this as their ultimate dream, to
threaten places like Spain and the Balkans with conquest. As one ordinary Libya
fighter put it so colorfully to the Western press last year, many of his
comrades want to march into Europe and take away the naked women depicted on
their televisions. The will is there, but the means are not there and won’t be
for quite some time, even when the torrid pace of world events in recent
decades is taken into account. Yet on the day Assad falls, that distant
nightmare will be one step closer to reality.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in
journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at
Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in
U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a
paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate
in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has
been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to
psychology to economics since age 9.
[1]
The first figure comes from the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights. See Reuters, 2012, Syria calls reserves as it
strains to crush revolt.” Published Sept. 4, 2012, in the online edition of The
Jerusalem Post. Available at http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=283775%20%20. Also see, Lederer, Edith M., 2012, “The Associated
Press UN chief: Both Sides in Syria
Violating Rights.” Published Sept. 4, 2012 in the online edition of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. Available at http://www.ajc.com/ap/ap/social-issues/germany-urges-syria-opposition-to-ready-transition/nR228/ .
[2]
For a report on Dariya, see Mahmood, Mona; Harding, Luke; et al., 2012,
“Syria's Worst Massacre: Daraya Death Toll Reaces 400.” Published Aug. 28, 2012
in the online edition of The Guardian. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/28/syria-worst-massacre-daraya-death-toll-400?newsfeed=true
. For some of the other towns, see The Los Angeles Times, 2012,
"Syria Massacres Seem To Show Slow, Steady Killing Strategy."
Published Sept. 15, 2012 in the online edition of The Los Angeles Times.
[3] See Kirkpatrick, David D., 2012, “Syria Criticizes
France for Supporting Rebels, as Fears Grow of Islamist Infiltration” Published
Sept. 9, 2012 in the online edition of The New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/world/middleeast/syria-criticizes-frances-support-of-rebels.html%20. Also see Spencer, Richard, 2012, “Syria: Aleppo
Plunged into Fresh Turmoil by Heavy Regime Air Raids.” Published Sept 9, 2012
in the online edition of The Telegraph. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9532018/Syria-Aleppo-plunged-into-fresh-turmoil-by-heavy-regime-air-raids.html
[4]
Sotloff, Steven, 2012, “Dissent among the
Alawites: Syria’s Ruling Sect Does Not Speak with One Voice.” Published Sept.
10, 2012 in the online edition of TimeWorld. Available at http://world.time.com/2012/09/10/dissent-among-the-alawites-syrias-ruling-sect-does-not-speak-with-one-voice/ .
[5]
Before disputing that fact, read them first.
