BACKGROUNDER: SYRIA

MAX FISHER WASHINGTON POST

 What is Syria?
Syria is a country in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s about the same size as Washington state with a population a little over three times as large – 22 million.  Syria is very diverse, ethnically and religiously, but most Syrians are ethnic Arab and follow the Sunni branch of Islam. Civilization in Syria goes back thousands of years, but the country as it exists today is very young. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers in the 1920s.
Syria is in the middle of an extremely violent civil war. Fighting between government forces and rebels has killed more 100,000 and created 2 million refugees, half of them children.


Syrian refugees cross into Iraq


Why are people in Syria killing each other?
The killing started in April 2011, when peaceful protests inspired by earlier revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia rose up to challenge the dictatorship running the country. The government responded — there is no getting around this — like monsters. First, security forces quietly killed activists. Then they started kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing activists and their family members, including a lot of children, dumping their mutilated bodies by the sides of roads. Then troops began simply opening fire on protests. Eventually, civilians started shooting back.



Fighting escalated from there until it was a civil war. Armed civilians organized into rebel groups. The army deployed across the country, shelling and bombing whole neighborhoods and towns, trying to terrorize people into submission. They’ve also allegedly used chemical weapons, which is a big deal for reasons I’ll address below. Volunteers from other countries joined the rebels, either because they wanted freedom and democracy for Syria or, more likely, because they are jihadists who hate Syria’s secular government. The rebels were gaining ground for a while and now it looks like Assad is coming back. There is no end in sight.

[                       CHRISTOPHER DICKEY DAILY BEAST:
     Among the most effective fighters are those affiliated with the Nusra Front, a component of al Qaeda. They are intimately allied with jihadists in Iraq who fought against the United States for most of the last decade. They have declared this a jihad against the Assad regime and called on would-be holy warriors from around the world to join their cause. Many have. One nightmare scenario in this war is that the Assads fall and al Qaeda gets hold of their chemical arsenal.]

That’s horrible. But there are protests lots of places. How did it all go so wrong in Syria? And, please, just give me the short version.
...Syria has been a powder keg waiting to explode for decades and that it was set off, maybe inevitably, by the 2011 protests ...you have to understand that the Syrian government really overreacted when peaceful protests started in mid-2011, slaughtering civilians unapologetically, ... Assad learned this from his father. In 1982, Assad’s father and then-dictator Hafez al-Assad responded to a Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising in the city of Hama by leveling entire neighborhoods. He killed thousands of civilians, many of whom had nothing to do with the uprising. But it worked, and it looks like the younger Assad tried to reproduce it. His failure made the descent into chaos much worse.


armored vehicles in Hama. Government forces attacked the city.

Most Syrians are Sunni Arabs, but the country is run by members of a minority sect known as Alawites (they’re ethnic Arab but follow a smaller branch of Islam). The Alawite government rules through a repressive dictatorship and gives Alawites special privileges, which makes some Sunnis and other groups hate Alawites in general, which in turn makes Alawites fear that they’ll be slaughtered en masse if Assad loses the war. [Dickey, above; Bashar al-Assad, could not make any deal that cut out his family and the clans that support it, even if he wanted to.]

 I hear a lot about how Russia still loves Syria, though. And Iran, too. What’s their deal?
Yeah, Russia is Syria’s most important ally. Moscow blocks the United Nations Security Council from passing anything that might hurt the Assad regime, which is why the United States has to go around the United Nations if it wants to do anything. Russia sends lots of weapons to Syria that make it easier for Assad to keep killing civilians and will make it much harder if the outside world ever wants to intervene.



 Russia has a naval installation in Syria, which is strategically important and Russia’s last foreign military base outside the former Soviet Union; Russia also hates the idea of “international intervention” against countries like Syria because it sees this as Cold War-style Western imperialism and ultimately a threat to Russia; and Syria buys a lot of Russian military exports, and Russia needs the money. [Russia has backed them since the Cold War and is betting that it can restore some of its lost influence in the region and the world if they hold on to power.--Dickey]

Iran’s thinking in supporting Assad is more straightforward. It perceives Israel and the United States as existential threats and uses Syria to protect itself, shipping arms through Syria to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. Iran is already feeling isolated and insecure; it worries that if Assad falls it will lose a major ally and be cut off from its militant proxies, leaving it very vulnerable. So far, it looks like Iran is actually coming out ahead: Assad is even more reliant on Tehran than he was before the war started.

[ Dickey: The alliance between the Assad regime and Iran goes back 30 years. The powerful Hezbollah militia in neighboring Lebanon, originally created by Iran and Syria, is another key ally of the Assads. ]

[Dickey, cont'd: On the opposition side, the Saudis see Iran as their greatest strategic threat and Hezbollah as a terrorist problem....The Saudis also want to undermine the Muslim Brotherhood and its operatives.

Israel, meanwhile, does not have any major faction to support in the war. As long as the Syrian conflict does not cross its border, it is content to let its old enemy bleed. But Israel has to worry whether, if Obama draws a red line against chemical weapons in Syria and doesn't enforce it, he can be trusted when he says he has drawn a red line against nuclear weapons in Iran.]




Why hasn’t the United States fixed this yet?

[Dickey: The Obama administration’s objective, horrible as it sounds, is basically to help maintain a stalemate. Unfortunately, as we saw during the 15-year civil war in Lebanon, long after the people want to give up fighting, outside forces keep pushing them to kill and to die. The Bosnian war in the mid-1990s is another example. More than 200,000 died there before a peace accord could be hammered out.]

The military options are all bad. Shipping arms to rebels, even if it helps them topple Assad, would ultimately empower jihadists and worsen rebel in-fighting, probably leading to lots of chaos and possibly a second civil war (the United States made this mistake during Afghanistan’s early 1990s civil war, which helped the Taliban take power in 1996). Taking out Assad somehow would probably do the same, opening up a dangerous power vacuum.

Launching airstrikes or a “no-fly zone” could suck us in, possibly for years, and probably wouldn’t make much difference on the ground. An Iraq-style ground invasion would, in the very best outcome, accelerate the killing, cost a lot of U.S. lives, wildly exacerbate anti-Americanism in a boon to jihadists and nationalist dictators alike, and would require the United States to impose order for years across a country full of people trying to kill each other. Nope.

The one political option, which the Obama administration has been pushing for, would be for the Assad regime and the rebels to strike a peace deal. But there’s no indication that either side is interested in that, or that there’s even a viable unified rebel movement with which to negotiate.



 So why would Obama bother with strikes that no one expects to actually solve anything?
Okay, you’re asking here about the Obama administration’s not-so-subtle signals that it wants to launch some cruise missiles at Syria, which would be punishment for what it says is Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians.
It’s true that basically no one believes that this will turn the tide of the Syrian war. But this is important: it’s not supposed to. The strikes wouldn’t be meant to shape the course of the war or to topple Assad, which Obama thinks would just make things worse anyway. They would be meant to punish Assad for (allegedly) using chemical weapons and to deter him, or any future military leader in any future war, from using them again.

Come on, what’s the big deal with chemical weapons? Assad kills 100,000 people with bullets and bombs but we’re freaked out over 1,000 who maybe died from poisonous gas? That seems silly.
You’re definitely not the only one who thinks the distinction is arbitrary and artificial. But there’s a good case to be made that this is a rare opportunity, at least in theory, for the United States to make the war a little bit less terrible — and to make future wars less terrible.

The whole idea that there are rules of war is a pretty new one: the practice of war is thousands of years old, but the idea that we can regulate war to make it less terrible has been around for less than a century. The institutions that do this are weak and inconsistent; the rules are frail and not very well observed. But one of the world’s few quasi-successes is the “norm” (a fancy way of saying a rule we all agree to follow) against chemical weapons. This norm is frail enough that Syria could drastically weaken it if we ignore Assad’s use of them, but it’s also strong enough that it’s worth protecting. So it’s sort of a low-hanging fruit: firing a few cruise missiles doesn’t cost us much and can maybe help preserve this really hard-won and valuable norm against chemical weapons.



[Esco: Be Advised: the photos Esco used below to illustrate the analysis are gruesome. ]

You didn’t answer my question. That just tells me that we can maybe preserve the norm against chemical weapons, not why we should.

Fair point. Here’s the deal: war is going to happen. It just is. But the reason that the world got together in 1925 for the Geneva Convention to ban chemical weapons is because this stuff is really, really good at killing civilians but not actually very good at the conventional aim of warfare, which is to defeat the other side. You might say that they’re maybe 30 percent a battlefield weapon and 70 percent a tool of terror. In a world without that norm against chemical weapons, a military might fire off some sarin gas because it wants that battlefield advantage, even if it ends up causing unintended and massive suffering among civilians, maybe including its own. And if a military believes its adversary is probably going to use chemical weapons, it has a strong incentive to use them itself. After all, they’re fighting to the death.

So both sides of any conflict, not to mention civilians everywhere, are better off if neither of them uses chemical weapons. But that requires believing that your opponent will never use them, no matter what. And the only way to do that, short of removing them from the planet entirely, is for everyone to just agree in advance to never use them and to really mean it. That becomes much harder if the norm is weakened because someone like Assad got away with it. It becomes a bit easier if everyone believes using chemical weapons will cost you a few inbound U.S. cruise missiles.
That’s why the Obama administration apparently wants to fire cruise missiles at Syria, even though it won’t end the suffering, end the war or even really hurt Assad that much.

[Dickey: Chemical weapons are a game changer. Here the example of Iraq is highly instructive. In 1988 Saddam Hussein used gas to slaughter thousands of men, women, and children in the Kurdish city of Halabja. Three years later, at the end of the Gulf War, when he had been defeated in Kuwait, but his helicopters were still flying over Iraq, hundreds of thousands of panicked Kurds fled their homes and froze on mountainsides near the Turkish border. He had not used gas against them again. He didn’t have to. They knew its effects, and they were simply terrified.

In an increasingly sectarian war, Assad could use gas as the ultimate tool for ethnic cleansing—unless he is convinced that doing so will endanger him and his regime.]



 

What happens to Syria?

...these things seem pretty certain in the long-term:

• The killing will continue, probably for years. There’s no one to sign a peace treaty on the rebel side, even if the regime side were interested, and there’s no foreseeable victory for either. Refugees will continue fleeing into neighboring countries, causing instability and an entire other humanitarian crisis as conditions in the camps worsen.

• Syria as we know it, an ancient place with a rich and celebrated culture and history, will be a broken, failed society, probably for a generation or more. It’s very hard to see how you rebuild a functioning state after this. Maybe worse, it’s hard to see how you get back to a working social contract where everyone agrees to get along.

• At some point the conflict will cool, either from a partial victory or from exhaustion. The world could maybe send in some peacekeepers or even broker a fragile peace between the various ethnic, religious and political factions. Probably the best model is Lebanon, which fought a brutal civil war that lasted 15 years from 1975 to 1990 and has been slowly, slowly recovering ever since. It had some bombings just last week.

EGYPTIAN ARMY OUSTS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD PRES MORSI AFTER WEEK OF MASS DEMONSTRATIONS

Fireworks burst over opponents of Egypt's Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Tuesday, July 2, 2013. Photograph: Amr Nabil/AP



Crowds in Tahrir Square cheered and launched fireworks after the military announced Mohamed Morsi has been ousted as president and replaced by the chief justice of the constitutional court. In a televised statement, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the constitution will be suspended. He also called for presidential and parliamentary elections, and said the post-Morsi roadmap had been agreed on in consultation with various political groups. "All necessary measures will be taken to empower youth in civic dialogue and national reconciliation," al-Sisi said. The plan calls for the temporary institution of a technocrat government. The chief justice of the constitutional court will lead the country in the interim. On Facebook, Morsi denounced the move as a "military coup."  Muslim Brotherhood leadership has confirmed to CNN that President Mohamed Morsi has been placed under “house arrest,” along with his presidential team.

The gradual nature of Sisi's actions seemed to confirm the army's desire to be seen to be answering the will of the people, rather than enacting a unilateral coup.
Events indicated a rehabilitation of not just the army – whose chequered 15-month tenure in office between February 2011 and June 2012 prompted unprecedented criticism of the military – but the police, whose reputation took a battering in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising. The police piggybacked on the popularity of the protests, releasing two statements backing the protests against the president.

Islamists saw Morsi's removal as a betrayal of democracy. But for many in Tahrir it was a victory for people power.

For Mr. Morsi, it was a bitter and ignominious end to a tumultuous year of bruising political battles that ultimately alienated millions of Egyptians. Having won a narrow victory, his critics say, he broke his promises of an inclusive government and repeatedly demonized his opposition as traitors. With the economy crumbling, and with shortages of electricity and fuel, anger at the government mounted.

 

...in a sign of how little Mr. Morsi ever managed to control the Mubarak bureaucracy he took over, the officers of the Presidential Guard who had been assigned to protect him also burst into celebration, waving flags from the roof of the palace. 

 

The general stood on a broad stage, flanked by Egypt’s top Muslim and Christian clerics as well as a spectrum of political leaders including Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat and liberal icon, and Galal Morra, a prominent Islamist ultraconservative, or Salafi, all of whom endorsed the takeover.

 

Although the tacit control of the generals over Egyptian politics is now unmistakable, General Sisi laid out a more detailed and faster plan for a return to civilian governance than the now-retired generals who deposed Mr. Mubarak did two years ago. The chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court, Adli Mansour, would become acting president. General Sisi made no mention of any period of military rule and granted the acting president, Mr. Mansour, the power to issue “constitutional decrees” during the transition.

Mr. Mansour was named to the bench by Mr. Mubarak two decades ago, before Mr. Mubarak sought to pack the court with more overtly political loyalists or anti-Islamists.

 

 The general’s plan bore a close resemblance to one proposed in recent days by the ultraconservative Islamist Nour Party, and suggested that he was seeking to bring in at least some Islamists as well as liberals and leftists to support the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Nour Party, which quickly endorsed the plan, had joined other political groups in accusing Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood of monopolizing power at the price of a dangerous political polarization.

But unlike liberals, the ultraconservative Islamists were keen to avoid the installation of a liberal like Mr. ElBaradei as a transitional prime minister, or to see the current Constitution — with its prominent recognition of Islamic law — scrapped instead of revised. It was unclear if the generals planned to allow the Brotherhood to compete in parliamentary elections and potentially retake its dominant role in the legislature, which could give it the ability to name a new prime minister.