West inaction boosts Assad regime

AMERICA’S half-hearted and confused approach to ending the civil war in Syria, now into its third year, has boosted the regime. As unpalatable as this fact may be to supporters of opposition forces, there is no escaping reality. In recent months, regime forces and those battling on Assad’s side, such as Iranian Revolutionary Guards and combatants from Hezbollah’s military wing have made substantial gains. Hardly surprising! The fight is unequal because the opposition arsenal doesn’t include airplanes, missiles and other heavy weaponry. As reported in the Washington Post on May 11, “Forces loyal to President Bashar Assad are beginning to turn the tide of the country’s war, bolstered by a new strategy, the support of Iran and Russia and the assistance of fighters with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.”
President Obama is known to be a reluctant war president and until now he has had little constituency to step in militarily. The mood on Capitol Hill may be hardening with some senators pressing the White House to back the intervention of an international force but Obama’s inherent cautiousness has been a confidence-boost to the Syrian leader who has been hugged by Moscow throughout. Obama’s lack of firm resolve was evident during a joint press conference with the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the White House Rose Garden last Thursday.
Whereas Erdogan is keen to get proactive to stop the bloodshed with the implementation of a “no-fly zone,” Obama shilly-shallied, stressing the absence of a “magic formula” and his hopes that Geneva II — an international conference scheduled for June — will bring the protagonists around a peace table. But it’s not sure that the conference will even get off the ground as Moscow is insisting upon Tehran’s participation, a demand that isn’t going down very well with some “Friends of Syria” member countries.
In comparison to Washington, the UK and France are prepared to put their money where their mouth is. Both EU nations have been trying to convince Germany, Austria and Sweden to support a lifting of an EU arms embargo on Syria when they say they’re willing to supply weapons to anti-government forces. French President Francois Hollande points out that the ban is unfair as long as the Russians are arming the Syrian regime. “We cannot allow the massacre of a people by a regime which right now does not want a political transition,” he adds.
Adding to the confused picture is the Israeli position. On the one hand, it has been accused of helping anti-regime fighters by bombing Syrian military sites ostensibly to prevent sophisticated weapons falling into Hezbollah’s hands. While on the other, there have been reports that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prefers the devil he knows to Syria being delivered to vehemently anti-Israel militants. A senior Israeli intelligence officer, quoted in The Times last Friday, disclosed that “a weakened but stable Syria under Assad is not only better for Israel but for the region as a whole.” An Israeli defense official, speaking to the same newspaper, admitted: “We originally underestimated Assad’s staying power and over-estimated the opposition’s fighting power.”
Netanyahu has denied preferring one side to the other, but given that Assad has had no appetite to take-on the Jewish state in spite of being aggressed and whoever follows him remains an unknown quantity, Israelis would probably sleep more soundly if Assad’s political longevity is assured. But that take isn’t certain as it depends on Israel’s long-term ambitions. If the “day after” resulted in Syria being split up into feeble ethnic cantons, which is a real possibility, that could serve Israel’s interests. However, a Muslim Brotherhood dominated Syrian government disposed to link up with its ideological counterparts in the region would be viewed as a threat.
In an interview published in the Observer, President Bashar Assad remains defiant. He says he has no intention of stepping down and blames Western governments for fueling the violence in his country and Israel for doing the bidding of fighter groups. The besieged president also made it clear that dialogue with the opposition to procure a cease-fire is a waste of time when there is no single partner for peace. “They are not a single entity,” he said. “They are different groups and bands, not dozens but hundreds. They are a mixture and each group has a local leader. And who can unify thousands of people? We can’t discuss a timetable with a party if we don’t know who they are…” Believing that a political conference will stop terrorism on the ground is unreal,” he said.
Love him or hate him, Assad has a point. Conferences backed-up by serious threats of Western military action could have done the trick earlier on in the days before Al-Qaeda offshoots and the Al-Nusra Front militants joined the fray when the Free Syrian Army was leading the charge. Last month, it was announced that the militant organization Al-Nusra Front had pledged its allegiance to Al-Qaeda chief Ayman Al-Zawahri and revealed its aim to reform Syria into an Islamic state. Adopting Al-Qaeda’s stock-in-trade, Al-Nusra and renegade elements from the Free Syrian Army have been posting execution videos on the Internet. One video shows a rebel fighter removing the heart of a dead Syrian soldier before biting a chunk out of it.
There’s plenty of blame to go round. No participant in this war has whiter than white hands. Assad’s intransigence toward the demands of a population legitimately calling for political pluralism and Russia’s unwavering support of the regime created the swamp. But Obama should have done much more than dip his toes into the murky water to solve it. The US and its allies should have been more decisive. They’ve rattled the lion’s cage but without unity of purpose they’ve exacerbated the situation by offering false hopes to opposition politicians and those ready to sacrifice their lives on the battlefield.

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