Two articles on Syria enclosed:
* Is it the end of Sykes-Picot?, by Patrick Cockburn, London Review of Books, June 6, 2013
* Stay Out of Syria!, by David Bromwich, New York Review of Books, June 20, 2013
Is it the end of Sykes-Picot?
Patrick Cockburn on the war in Syria and the threat to the Middle East
By Patrick Cockburn, London Review of Books, June 6, 2013
For the first two years of the Syrian civil war foreign leaders regularly predicted that Bashar al-Assad’s government would fall any day. In November 2011, King Abdullah of Jordan said that the chances of Assad’s surviving were so slim he ought to step down. In December last year, Anders Rasmussen, the Nato secretary general, said: ‘I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse.’ Even the Russian Foreign Ministry – which generally defends Assad – has at times made similar claims. Some of these statements were designed to demoralise Assad’s supporters by making his overthrow seem inevitable. But in many cases outsiders genuinely believed that the end was just round the corner. The rebels kept claiming successes, and the claims were undiscriminatingly accepted.
That Assad’s government is on its last legs has always been something of a myth. YouTube videos of victorious rebel fighters capturing military outposts and seizing government munitions distract attention from the fact that the war is entering its third year and the insurgents have succeeded in capturing just one of the 14 provincial capitals. (In Libya the insurgents held Benghazi and the whole of the east as well as Misrata and smaller towns in the west from the beginning of the revolt.) The Syrian rebels were never as strong militarily as the outside world supposes. But they have always been way ahead of the government in their access to the international media. Whatever the uprising has since become it began in March 2011 as a mass revolt against a cruel and corrupt police state. The regime at first refused to say much in response, then sounded aggrieved and befuddled as it saw the vacuum it had created being filled with information put out by its enemies. Defecting Syrian soldiers were on television denouncing their former masters while government units that had stayed loyal remained unreported and invisible. And so it has largely continued. The ubiquitous YouTube videos of minor, and in some cases illusory, victories by the rebels are put about in large part to persuade the world that, given more money and arms, they can quickly win a decisive victory and end the war.
There is a striking divergence between the way the Syrian war is seen in Beirut – just a few hours’ drive from Damascus, even now – and what actually appears to be happening on the ground inside Syria. On recent trips I would drive to Damascus, having listened to Syrians and non-Syrians in Beirut who sincerely believed that rebel victory was close, only to find the government still very much in control. Around the capital, the rebels held some suburbs and nearby towns, but in December I was able to travel the ninety miles between Damascus and Homs, Syria’s third largest city, without any guards and with ordinary heavy traffic on the road. Friends back in Beirut would shake their heads in disbelief when I spoke about this and politely suggest that I’d been hoodwinked by the regime.
Some of the difficulties in reporting the war in Syria aren’t new. Television has a great appetite for the drama of war, for pictures of missiles exploding over Middle Eastern cities amid the sparkle of anti-aircraft fire. Print journalism can’t compete with these images, but they are rarely typical of what is happening. Despite the iconic images Baghdad wasn’t, in fact, heavily bombarded in either 1991 or 2003. The problem is much worse in Syria than it used to be in Iraq or Afghanistan (in 2001) because the most arresting pictures out of Syria appear first on YouTube and are, for the most part, provided by political activists. They are then run on TV news with health warnings to the effect that the station can’t vouch for their veracity, but viewers assume that the station wouldn’t be running the film if it didn’t believe it was real. Actual eyewitnesses are becoming hard to find, since even people living a few streets from the fighting in Damascus now get most of their information from the internet or TV.
Not all YouTube evidence is suspect. Though easily fabricated, it performs certain tasks well. It can show that atrocities have taken place, and even authenticate them: in the case of a pro-government militia massacring rebel villagers, for instance, or rebel commanders mutilating and executing government soldiers. Without a video of him doing so, who would have believed that a rebel commander had cut open a dead government soldier and eaten his heart? Pictures of physical destruction are less reliable because they focus on the worst damage, giving the impression – which may or may not be true – that a whole district is in ruins. What YouTube can’t tell you is who is winning the war.
*
The reality is that no one is. Over the last year a military stalemate has prevailed, with each side launching offensives in the areas where they are strongest. Both sides have had definite but limited successes. In recent weeks government forces have opened up the road that leads west from Homs to the Mediterranean coast and the road from Damascus south to the Jordanian border. They have expanded the territory they hold around the capital and trained a militia of sixty thousand, the National Defence Force, to guard positions once held by the Syrian army. This strategy of retrenchment and consolidation isn’t new. About six months ago the army stopped trying to keep control of outlying positions and focused instead on defending the main population centres and the routes linking them. These pre-planned withdrawals took place at the same time as real losses on the battlefield, and were misinterpreted outside Syria as a sign that the regime was imploding. The strategy was indeed a sign of military weakness, but by concentrating its forces in certain areas the government was able to launch counterattacks at vital points. Assad isn’t going to win a total victory, but the opposition isn’t anywhere close to overthrowing him either. This is worth stressing because Western politicians and journalists so frequently take it for granted that the regime is entering its last days. A justification for the British and French argument that the EU embargo on arms deliveries to the rebels should be lifted – a plan first mooted in March but strongly opposed by other EU members – is that these extra weapons will finally tip the balance decisively against Assad. The evidence from Syria itself is that more weapons will simply mean more dead and wounded.
The protracted conflict that is now underway in Syria has more in common with the civil wars in Lebanon and Iraq than with the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya or the even swifter regime changes in Egypt and Tunisia at the start of the Arab Spring. The civil war in Lebanon lasted 15 years, from 1975 to 1990, and the sectarian divisions which caused it are as marked as ever. In Iraq, 2006 and 2007 are usually described as being the worst years of the slaughter – three thousand people murdered every month – but sectarian killings began immediately after the US invasion in 2003 and haven’t stopped since. According to the UN some seven hundred Iraqis were killed in April: the highest monthly total since 2008. Syria is increasingly resembling its neighbours to the west and east: there will soon be a solid bloc of fragmented countries that stretches between the Mediterranean and Iran. In all three places the power of the central state is draining away as communities retreat into their own well-defended and near autonomous enclaves.
Meanwhile, foreign countries are gaining influence with the help of local proxies, and in so doing the rebels’ supporters are repeating the mistake Washington made ten years ago in Iraq. In the heady days after the fall of Saddam, the Americans announced that Iran and Syria were the next targets for regime change. This was largely ill-informed hubris, but the threat was real enough for the Syrians and Iranians to decide that in order to stop the Americans acting against them they had to stop the US stabilising its occupation of Iraq and lent their support to all of America’s opponents regardless of whether they were Shia or Sunni.
From an early stage in the Syrian uprising the US, Nato, Israel and the Sunni Arab states openly exulted at the blow that would soon be dealt to Iran and to Hezbollah in Lebanon: Assad’s imminent fall would deprive them of their most important ally in the Arab world. Sunni leaders saw the uprising not as a triumph of democracy but as the beginning of a campaign directed at Shia or Shia-dominated states. As with Iraq in 2003, Hezbollah and Iran believe they have no alternative but to fight and that it’s better to get on with it while they still have friends in power in Damascus. ‘If the enemy attacks us,’ Hossein Taeb, a high-ranking intelligence officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, recently said, ‘and seeks to take over Syria or Khuzestan’ – an Iranian province – ‘the priority is to maintain Syria, because if we maintain Syria we can take back Khuzestan. But if we lose Syria we won’t be able to hold Tehran.’ Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, made it very clear in a speech on 30 April that the Lebanese Shia also see Syria as a battleground where they can’t afford a defeat. ‘Syria,’ he said, ‘has real friends in the region and the world who will not let Syria fall into the hands of America, Israel or takfiri groups.’ He believes the very survival of the Shia is at stake. For many in the Middle East this sounded like a declaration of war: a significant one, given Hezbollah’s experience in fighting a guerrilla war against the Israelis in Lebanon. The impact of its skill in irregular warfare has already been witnessed in the fighting at Qusayr and Homs, just beyond Lebanon’s northern border. ‘It probably is unrealistic to expect Lebanese actors to take a step back,’ a study by the International Crisis Group concludes. ‘Syria’s fate, they feel, is their own, and the stakes are too high for them to keep to the sideline.’
*
The Syrian civil war is spreading. This, not well-publicised advances or withdrawals on the battlefield, is the most important new development. Political leaders in the region see the dangers more intensely than the rest of the world. ‘Neither the opposition nor the regime can finish the other off,’ Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said earlier this year. ‘If the opposition is victorious, there will be a civil war in Lebanon, divisions in Jordan, and a sectarian war in Iraq.’ Of these countries, the most vulnerable is Lebanon, given the division between Sunni and Shia, a weak state, porous borders and proximity to heavily populated areas of Syria. A country of four million people has already taken in half a million Syrian refugees, most of them Sunnis.
In Iraq, the Syrian civil war has reignited a sectarian conflict that never entirely ended. The destabilising of his country that Maliki predicted in the event of an opposition victory has already begun. The overthrow of Saddam brought to power a Shia-Kurdish government that displaced Sunni rule dating back to the foundation of the Iraqi state in 1921. It is this recently established status quo that is now under threat. The revolt of the Sunni majority in Syria is making the Sunni minority in Iraq feel that the regional balance is swinging in their favour. They started to demonstrate in December, modelling their protests on the Arab Spring. They wanted reform rather than revolution, but to the Shia majority the demonstrations appeared to be part of a frighteningly powerful Sunni counter-offensive across the Middle East. The Baghdad government equivocated until 23 April, when a military force backed by tanks crushed a sit-in protest in the main square of Hawijah, a Sunni town south-west of Kirkuk, killing at least 50 people including eight children. Since then local Sunni leaders who had previously backed the Iraqi army against the Kurds have been demanding that it leave their provinces. Iraq may be disintegrating.
The feeling that the future of whole states is in doubt is growing across the Middle East – for the first time since Britain and France carved up the remains of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. ‘It is the end of Sykes-Picot,’ I was told repeatedly in Iraq; the reference was to the agreement of 1916 which divided up the spoils between Britain and France and was the basis for later treaties. Some are jubilant at the collapse of the old order, notably the thirty million Kurds who were left without a state of their own after the Ottoman collapse and are now spread across Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. They feel their moment has come: they are close to independence in Iraq and are striking a deal with the Turkish government for political rights and civil equality. In March, the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK declared an end to their thirty-year war with the Turkish government and started withdrawing into the mountains of northern Iraq. The 2.5 million Kurds in northern Syria, 10 per cent of the population, have assumed control of their towns and villages and are likely to demand a high degree of autonomy from any postwar Syrian government.
What will the new order in the Middle East look like? This should be Turkey’s great moment in the region: it has a powerful military, a prospering economy and a well-established government. It is allied to Saudi Arabia and Qatar in supporting the Syrian opposition and is on good terms with the US. But these are dangerous waters to fish in. Three years ago, Ankara was able to deal peaceably with Syria, Iraq and Iran, but now it has poisonous relations with all three. Engagement in Syria on the side of the rebels isn’t popular at home and the government is clearly surprised that the conflict hasn’t yet ended. There are signs that the violence is spilling over Turkey’s 510-mile frontier with Syria, across which insurgent groups advance and retreat at will. On 11 May, two bombs in a Turkish border town killed 49 people, almost all Turkish. An angry crowd of Turks marched down the main street chanting ‘kill the Syrians’ as they assaulted Syrian shopkeepers. Arab politicians wonder whether the Turks know what they are getting into and how they will handle it. ‘The Turks are big on rhetoric but often disappointing when it comes to operational ability,’ one Arab leader says. ‘The Iranians are just the opposite.’ The recent deal between the government and Turkey’s Kurds could easily unravel. A long war in Syria could open up divisions in Turkey just as it is doing elsewhere.
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it changed the overall balance of power and destabilised every country in the region. The same thing is happening again, except that the impact of the Syrian war is likely to be less easily contained. Already the frontier dividing the western deserts of Iraq from the eastern deserts of Syria is ceasing to have any physical reality. In April, al-Qaida in Iraq embarrassed the rebels’ Western supporters by revealing that it had founded, reinforced with experienced fighters and devoted half its budget to supporting al-Nusra, militarily the most effective rebel group. When Syrian soldiers fled into Iraq in March they were ambushed by al-Qaida and 48 of them were killed before they could return to Syrian territory.
There is virtually no state in the region that hasn’t got some stake in the conflict. Jordan, though nervous of a jihadi victory in Syria, is allowing arms shipments from Saudi Arabia to reach rebels in southern Syria by road. Qatar has reportedly spent $3 billion on supporting the rebels over the last two years and has offered $50,000 to every Syrian army defector and his family. In co-ordination with the CIA it has sent seventy military flights to Turkey with arms and equipment for the insurgents. The Tunisian government says that eight hundred Tunisians are fighting on the rebel side but security sources are quoted as saying the real figure is closer to two thousand. Moaz al-Khatib, the outgoing president of the Syrian National Coalition, which supposedly represents the opposition, recently resigned, declaring as he did so that the group was controlled by outside powers – i.e. Saudi Arabia and Qatar. ‘The people inside Syria,’ he said, ‘have lost the ability to decide their own fate. I have become only a means to sign some papers while hands from different parties want to decide on behalf of the Syrians.’ He claimed that on one occasion a rebel unit failed to go to the rescue of villagers being massacred by government forces because they hadn’t received instructions from their paymasters.
Fear of widespread disorder and instability is pushing the US, Russia, Iran and others to talk of a diplomatic solution to the conflict. Some sort of peace conference may take place in Geneva over the next month, with the aim at least of stopping things getting worse. But while there is an appetite for diplomacy, nobody knows what a solution would look like. It’s hard to imagine a real agreement being reached when there are so many players with conflicting interests. Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria: a popular uprising against a dictatorship which is also a sectarian battle between Sunnis and the Alawite sect; a regional struggle between Shia and Sunni which is also a decades-old conflict between an Iranian-led grouping and Iran’s traditional enemies, notably the US and Saudi Arabia. Finally, at another level, there is a reborn Cold War confrontation: Russia and China v. the West. The conflict is full of unexpected and absurd contradictions, such as a purportedly democratic and secular Syrian opposition being funded by the absolute monarchies of the Gulf who are also fundamentalist Sunnis.
By savagely repressing demonstrations two years ago Bashar al-Assad helped turn mass protests into an insurrection which has torn Syria apart. He is probably correct in predicting that diplomacy will fail, that his opponents inside and outside Syria are too divided to agree on a peace deal. He may also be right in believing that greater foreign intervention ‘is a clear probability’. The quagmire is turning out to be even deeper and more dangerous than it was in Iraq.
23 May, 2013
Stay Out of Syria!
By David Bromwich, New York Review of Books, June 20, 2013
After the troubling revelations of the May 8 Senate hearing on Benghazi, much remains unclear about the attack that killed four Americans last September. Were the killers aiming to prove the incompetence of American power? Or was the assault directed more specifically against CIA operations? How did the White House, the State Department, and the CIA all agree to say so early and wrongly that the attack could have been the spontaneous action of a crowd infuriated by an anti-Muslim video? Why did the administration delete from its talking points the mention of five similar attacks in Libya, and the fact that al-Qaeda-linked forces were known to be active in the vicinity?
One thing is clear. The Benghazi killings were an indirect but predictable consequence of the NATO intervention that overthrew Muammar Qaddafi. Disorder was a necessary condition of the attack. The “light footprint” of NATO was never going to be sufficient to contain the forces the war released. With the death of Qaddafi and the instability of NATO’s interim arrangements, his troops and weapons moved southward in Africa; and the evacuation of US State Department workers in Mali in January and the attack on international workers in Algeria are now widely understood to have been another fruit of the NATO action in Libya. For Americans, of course, Libya is almost forgotten, but for North Africa and the watching Arab world, it remains a vivid and disturbing memory: seven months of air attacks, with thousands of sorties, 7,700 bombs dropped or missiles launched, and uncounted civilian casualties.
The deepening violence of the Syrian civil war is also in some measure a consequence of Libya: Qaddafi’s disbanded army and unguarded weapons moved southward in Africa, but they also moved eastward to Asia. The state terror of the most “surgical” air war leaves in its wake many thousands of stateless terrorists. As Nancy Youssef pointed out in a penetrating survey on March 14 in the McClatchy newspapers (“Middle East in Turmoil 10 Years After Iraq Invasion”): “The most effective anti-Assad rebel military faction [in Syria], the Nusra Front,” is itself “a branch of al Qaida in Iraq, the same radical Islamist group that the US fought in that country and that the current Iraqi government also is battling.”
The recent past is still with us, if we take the time to look. This is the background against which one must assess the judgment of those persons—well placed in the media and the foreign policy elite—who have lately urged another violent intervention by the US in Arab lands. Three days before the Benghazi hearings, on May 5, Bill Keller published a double-length Op-Ed in The New York Times. His column was entitled “Syria Is Not Iraq,” and its moral was adequately conveyed in Keller’s final words: “Getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.”
Let us pause to remember Iraq before we follow Keller’s invitation to get over it. Almost 4,500 Americans died in Iraq, and 32,000 came home wounded. Of the numbers of Iraqi dead that would be living had the Americans not bombed, invaded, and occupied their country, reliable estimates are harder to come by, but in 2008 The New England Journal of Medicine estimated a total of 151,000 violent deaths by June 2006; and the seven years that followed have added many thousands more.
At the time of the Iraq invasion, Keller was an Op-Ed columnist and senior writer at the Times. In 2002–2003, when his newspaper’s slanted coverage of Iraq played a significant part in leading the country into war, Keller believed the Times stories based on forged or dubious evidence circulated by the Bush administration, and threw his considerable journalistic energy into support of the war. Looking back, in his May 5 Op-Ed, he speaks euphemistically of “our ill-fated adventure in Iraq”; his own part in it he calls “a humbling error of judgment” that for a time “left me gun-shy.”
But Syria is not Iraq, he says, and he now recommends the deployment of American military might against Syria. Keller’s pressing fear is that by inaction, the US may surrender its role as international leader: “Prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy.” By means of violent intervention, he believes, the tragedy can be made smaller; and he deplores the reticence of President Obama as the evasion of “a president looking for excuses to stand pat.”
There follow, in Keller’s piece, a series of elaborate distinctions intended to show that Syria presents a more soluble problem than Iraq. “In Iraq our invasion unleashed a sectarian war” whereas “in Syria, [sectarian war] is already well under way.” We ought to intervene, then, because things are already bad. The underlying assumption is that American action could not make things worse. “This time,” Keller continues, “we have allies waiting for us to step up and lead.” We did have allies, and much the same allies, in Libya, but in the thirteen hundred words of this column the word “Libya” does not occur.
The evident self-assurance of Keller’s advice on Syria was dismaying in itself; but it also confirmed a tendency that emerged in a series of recent Times articles. These news articles by several hands all bore headlines of a consistent tendency, implying that American military intervention had now become the natural upshot of events in Syria.
On April 26, for example, a story by Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt was entitled “White House Says Syria Has Used Chemical Arms.” The factual substance of the article was ambiguous, and its headline might more accurately have read: “Chemical Weapons Used in Syria. US Uncertain of Source.” Again, on May 7 the headline delivered a judgment: “White House Sticks to Cautious Path on Syria.” This would not, in most papers at most times, have qualified as a front-page story at all. That there has been no change of policy is hardly news unless a great many sensible persons are expecting a change. The headline implied that the common sense of the well-informed now favors armed intervention; yet the paper had carried the day before, in a corner of page 9, a Reuters dispatch of some significance. This was a report of a statement by a qualified investigator, Carla Del Ponte of the UN commission of inquiry on Syria, who flatly contradicted the rumors of the use of sarin by the Assad government: “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities.” UN officials commented that there was “no conclusive proof” about the use of chemical weapons. Astonishingly the Reuters story was neither analyzed nor incorporated in the lead Times story of the day’s events.
In April and May, it must be said, the Times has been an extreme case. On May 7, when the Times played down the public contradiction of its own reports, a Wall Street Journal story by Naftali Bendavid confirmed the skeptical judgment about Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons by testimony from a second non-American source. The secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was said to acknowledge indications that chemical weapons may have been used but without any “confirmed, consolidated information as to who might have used [them].” On May 6, The Guardian reported that the UK defense secretary Philip Hammond “admitted that Western intelligence services would probably have to wait for a further chemical attack before gathering enough information to trace it back to the government.” A week later, on May 12, Robert Gates on Face the Nation offered a judgment of the wisdom of American intervention in Arab lands: “I thought it was a mistake in Libya,” said Gates. “And I think it is a mistake in Syria.” That verdict came with a certain authority from the person who, as defense secretary under Bush and Obama, spent much of 2007 keeping America out of war with Iran and much of Obama’s first term withdrawing American soldiers from Iraq.
Meanwhile, within Congress, the voices that led the march to war in 2003 have been clamoring against any hesitation by Obama to take military action. About John McCain, it is no satire but simple truth to say that he cannot have enough wars. On May 8, McCain published in Time a characteristic editorial, “Syria: Intervention Is in Our Interest,” which contained a list of practical suggestions. Since the column supplies answers without having asked questions, it may serve economy to list in brackets the questions that naturally occur to a mind less confident and rash:
We could train and arm well-vetted Syrian opposition forces, as recommended last year by President Obama’s national-security team. [“Vetted” by whom and with what expertise?] We could strike Assad’s aircraft and Scud-missile launchers. [Inside Russian-built air defenses stronger than those in Libya?] We could destroy artillery and drive Assad’s forces from their posts. [All without ground forces?]
Yet much of the recent pressure for another American intervention is coming from liberals. Senator Carl Levin, for one, cosigned with McCain a letter to the president on March 21 which urged—among other “limited military options”—the launching of “precision airstrikes” against the Syrian air force, as well as “more robust assistance” to opposition fighters believed to be unconnected with al-Qaeda. One of the tricks of persuasion of the liberal section of the war party, from Iraq through Libya to Syria, has been to aestheticize war. The Iraqi advisers of the Bush administration—Ahmed Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, and others—frequently said that American forces occupying Iraq would be “greeted with sweets and flowers.” The optimism of Bill Keller departs from that pattern to some degree, and offers elevating comparisons to dance and music: “All of this [program of military intervention] must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by a symphony of diplomacy.”
A less sanguine prognosis was suggested by Dexter Filkins in the May 13 New Yorker. Looking for reasons to intervene—though, by the end of the article, he does not seem to have found them—Filkins interviewed Fouad Ajami, but quotes him without remarking that Ajami was, as indeed he remains, an enthusiastic endorser of the war in Iraq. The same article quotes Anne-Marie Slaughter without mentioning her close association with Hillary Clinton and the strong position she took in pressing Obama to execute “regime change” in Libya. Slaughter treated Filkins to the inverted aestheticism typical of much war propaganda when she imagined a result of a Syrian chemical attack: “Syrian civilians rolling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, dying by the thousands while the United States stands by.” That fantasy of the future was challenged within days by the assessments from Del Ponte, Rasmussen, and Hammond.
The Obama administration has been strangely tentative in justifying its choice not to arm Syrian rebels: a policy that would need little defense if the president could bring himself to speak it plainly. On the use of sarin, the White House statement told of an ambiguous “chain of custody” of the prohibited chemicals: a phrase that clarifies nothing for most readers. It would have been straighter and wiser to say: “Things are in such chaos in Syria that we can’t be sure whether the government or the rebels used sarin.” Filkins himself reflects the same tentativeness: he is drawn to the idea (dimly in the background) that there should be a military solution, and if so the US should be equipped to supply it. His article—and there have been others like it—exhibits a plenitude of military speculations but is void of political analysis. To judge by what he writes, Filkins did not consult Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Pape, or any other well-known authorities whose previous warnings have proved accurate. In fact, Brzezinski recently issued a sharp admonition in Time:
The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddly-winks intervention from around the edges of the conflict—no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth—would simply make the situation worse. None of the proposals would result in an outcome strategically beneficial for the US. On the contrary, they would produce a more complex, undefined slide into the worst-case scenario.
Filkins’s article closes by quoting a government official who gets away with saying unchallenged that Iraq was “a crisis…that was contained.”
Contained at what cost, and for how long? The day of the Boston Marathon bombings saw seventy-five killed in Iraq, and 356 wounded: just one story, which few Americans will have read, out of dozens about the aftermath of the American occupation. Our rehearsals of our own good intentions, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, and now in Syria, have swollen to the shape of a rationalized addiction. What then should the US do? Nothing, until we can do something good. But the situation could not be less promising. At present, the main support of Syrian opposition forces comes from Saudis and Qataris. The US has offered help at two removes, but lacks the intelligence to perform much more without strengthening al-Qaeda as we did in Libya. Luis Lema, in a recent editorial in Le Temps of Geneva, rightly remarked that the war is becoming “not only less and less ‘legible,’ but more and more unpredictable.”
And each day adds a new reminder of the futility of allegedly pragmatic solutions. A Times report on May 15 by Anne Barnard and Hania Mourtada (“An Atrocity in Syria, with No Victim Too Small”) told of the sectarian “cleansing” by pro-government forces of Sunni enclaves, in the village of Bayda and the city of Baniyas, both located in a mainly Alawite and Christian province. Three hundred twenty-two corpses have been identified, many of them horribly mutilated. As a pledge of retaliation, a rebel commander filmed himself “cutting out an organ of a dead pro-government fighter, biting it and promising the same fate to Alawites.” It is a saccharine optimism that says the country has begun to fall apart and a more “proactive” US could hold it together.
Syria has already largely disintegrated. The government and its Alawite and Christian supporters have secured the west, the Kurds are in the northeast, and the Islamist rebels are in the east (where the al-Nusra Front has already begun to enforce sharia law). The grossness of the chatter about intervention is suggested by a recent debate between American advisers on Syria and the “moderate” rebel forces they are best satisfied with. The question in dispute, as Phil Sands revealed in a May 9 report in The National (“America’s Hidden Agenda in Syria’s War”), turned on whether the moderates should go into combat first against the Assad loyalists, or against the al-Nusra Front whom they will eventually have to kill.
But the untold story of Syria concerns something beyond the atrocities on both sides. It has also to do with the sinews of war—the financial motive and muscle that keeps it going. A Financial Times article by Roula Khalaf and Abigail Fielding-Smith on May 17, “How Qatar Seized Control of the Syrian Revolution,” quoted persons close to the Qatari government who estimate that $3 billion has thus far been spent bankrolling the rebel groups. Sources inside Syria had guessed only a third of that. But the money must keep coming, since Qatar is buying up the loyalty of networks of rebel forces as an investment in the divided Syria of the future. This is calculated for geopolitical and economic influence, without clear religious or ideological motivation: the rulers of Qatar have no apparent common ground with the Islamist sects they are subsidizing. Nor does their involvement bode a peaceful future order: the flow of money, according to Khalaf and Fielding-Smith, “has already created many enemies inside Syria, and not just among pro-regime supporters.”
Against Qatar and Saudi Arabia stand the Shia powers including Iran and its ally Hezbollah, along with numbers of Iraqi Shiites whom the war of 2003 displaced. All these groups support the Alawites—related to Shia Islam. All of them except the Alawites are outsiders to Syria who for religious, cultural, and political reasons do not believe that they are outsiders. The US, by contrast, is seen throughout the region as a perfect outsider. The violence has now taken almost 80,000 lives, yet it remains a reasonable fear that disorders sprung from another American war could lead to still more ferocious bloodlettings. Our ally Turkey, which has supported Syrian rebels, is troubled by the prospect of separationist energy driving the Kurds of Syria to form a state of their own; and the International Crisis Group report on Syria’s Kurds (issued on January 22) contains an entire section uneasily entitled: “From Arab Uprising to Kurdish Opportunity.”
Americans for a long time have tended to think (when we think of other countries at all) that the more new nations spring up, the better. This goes with our relaxed communitarianism but bears little relation to realities elsewhere. Our latest siege of optimism, which followed the collapse of the Soviet empire, has now been given a fair trial over a quarter of a century. It has not always worked out well. Not in the Balkans, not in the former Soviet republics, and not, it seems, in the Middle East.
The high-pressure bid for intervention in Syria may have come to a temporary halt. (The quickness of its start and stop recalls those weeks of March and April 2007 that witnessed an equally sudden press for war with Iran.) On May 7, John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced their plan for an international conference on Syria, possibly as early as the end of May. And barring the extreme possibilities—a White House panicked from other causes and desperate to prove its potency; another Israeli bombing of Syria that succeeds in dragging the US in—it might require a breakdown of negotiations to prompt Barack Obama to follow the militarized advice he is getting now from sources that do not include the US military.
An article on the Kerry–Lavrov meeting by Peter Beaumont in the May 5 Observer of London made clear, as no American publication yet has done, the extent of the damage to the US from the miscarriage of NATO actions in Libya. The powers outside NATO whom we must rely on—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—eventually realized that in Libya the three leading powers, France, Britain, and the US, were all bent on regime change rather than merely the enforcement of a no-fly zone. Those countries, as Beaumont pointed out, felt betrayed and they will be understandably harder to move on Syria.
The difficulty of uniting so distrustful a group will be matched, in any negotiations on Syria, by the disunity of the Arab League. They are divided between Shiite and Sunni loyalties and often further divided within. But theirs is the region that will bear the burden of the nearly one and a half million Syrians who are now refugees, most of them in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon. Iranian involvement, qualified observers have said, will be necessary for a lasting peace agreement, given the role of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran in the hostilities; and by keeping Iran in the outer darkness, Obama’s lack of imagination may have served his cause as poorly as his insistence on saying again and again that “Assad must go.” A good result of negotiations would be a transitional governing body that offers Assad a slow exit, but the obstacles to such an outcome are formidable.
The refugees of the Iraq war were the great unspoken disaster of the bombing, invasion, and armed occupation of Iraq, during the first five years of our nine-year stay. Two and a half million fled that country, out of a population of 27 million. Thus far the US has admitted as immigrants 64,000: a little under 3 percent. The vast majority of those displaced lives have become the unasked responsibility of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and other Arab nations. And the scale of the crisis of the refugees from Syria is only beginning to be recognized. Of the nearly one and a half million refugees scattered by the civil war into foreign lands, 500,000 are in Jordan alone, more than half of them under the age of eighteen.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote about the millions of stateless and rightless persons cast up by the early wars of the twentieth century and the imperialist manufacture of new nations before and after World War I. A whole generation of the displaced were brought into the world so lacking in hope, so without access to elementary rights that, for them, to live within the law presented no advantage over crime and for that matter terrorism. “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Arendt wrote, “but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them.” The disasters of the twentieth century, as she judged them, had proved that a globalized order might “produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.” An end no happier, if we do not take care, awaits us down the road of the “carefully choreographed” violence and the “symphony of diplomacy” conducted by the last of the great powers.
—May 23, 2013
David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. He is the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s speeches and co-editor of the Yale edition of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. (July 2013)
Letters: Dexter Filkins, and reply by David Bromwich
To the Editors:
In his review of my piece on the Obama administration’s choices in Syria [“Stay Out of Syria!,” NYR, June 20], David Bromwich accuses me of “looking” for reasons to intervene in Syria and of being “drawn to the idea” of a military solution to the conflict. In fact, not a single word in the article offers anything remotely approaching a policy prescription. The essay examines the pros and cons of a possible American intervention in Syria, and in the course of doing so considers a number of points of view and possible scenarios. This is known as balanced journalism. Only the most willful sort of ideologue, for whom the prospect of 80,000 dead Syrians matters less than having the right political line, could read the piece and conclude anything any other than that American options in Syria are deeply sobering. If Mr. Bromwich is going to continue to stray from literary criticism and into the realm of foreign affairs, he might consider doing some reporting of his own.
Dexter Filkins
The New Yorker
New York City
David Bromwich replies:
Dexter Filkins has been a courageous and resourceful combat journalist. But his article on Syria was an attempt at political analysis: a different kind of writing. The article asked a question—should the US back rebel forces in Syria?—yet it never paused to wonder: Why are we asking this question? It offered no account of the prehistory or the aftereffects of American engagements in the Balkans and Iraq, and gave only a minimal sketch of the rival forces in Syria. It relied very heavily on conventional experts, whom it did not characterize adequately. Thus James Rubin, a partisan of intervention in Syria, is introduced as “a Clinton-era official at the State Department,” but Rubin was also an influential advocate of the Iraq war: a piece of history that matters. “Last year,” Filkins recalls, in a conspicuous first-person aside, “…I stood near the Syrian border and watched one of Assad’s gunships strafe a group of rebels.” Political analysis, too, has a use for evidence that comes from watching and testifying. But first-person narratives are not always enough; and it is not forbidden to think.
