NATO should arm the rebels in Hama

Today's Hot Topic, 19th September 2011. NATO should arm the rebels in Hama

The revolt in Syria has now lasted 6 months – it started around the same time as did protests against Gaddafi in Libya. Look at the difference today, say the interventionists: we have the stirrings in Tripoli of a free, democratic Libya, while the streets of Syria’s large cities are weekly covered in the blood of defenceless citizens mercilessly picked off by the regime. Don’t get carried away by the early signs of a success in Libya, say the anti-interventionists: there are important and relevant differences in the two cases. Intervention in Syria will bring on the sorts of disasters that were apparently averted by intervention in Libya.

YES
2,600 dead in the last six months of repression; 15,000 in prison; children shot at from rooftops by shady government forces (a boy of 11 assassinated just this weekend, a sniper bullet in his skull)...what will it take for the international community to wake up to its Responsibility to Protect – the Syrian state is clearly committing war crimes against its own. We have a responsibility that we have agreed to as members of the United Nations. NATO, which has demonstrated in Libya that it has learned lessons from the mismanagement of the Iraq invasion, is best suited to deliver protection to the Syrian people. The five-step model is now clear: state loudly that we will back internal opponents of the regime; covertly help to establish a base for a rebel army; have the rebels request air cover, and use that as a pretext for weakening the Syrian army; finally, launch a major offensive against Damascus and the regime.

NO
Does the hubris of the West know no bounds? Just because we could help Kosovo secede from Serbia, we suddenly knew how to fix Afghanistan and Iraq; just because we managed to assist in the overthrow of a tin-pot playboy dictator in an under-populated expanse of desert, we can now fix the complex tinder-box that is Syria. Remember: Syria gets regional legitimacy from its anti-Israel stance; the Alawites, the minority that holds power, are a Shia sect; the regime has close ties to Iran and to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria is precariously balanced on the major divisions of the Middle East, and no one – save a few lunatic war-mongers – has any appetite to destabilise the situation. Syria is no Libya. In Libya, the Lebanese prodded the Arab League to request the Security Council for an intervention. That gave the Libyan campaign regional and international legitimacy. No one in the region wants to set fire to Syria, and there will be no regional legitimacy forthcoming for an intervention. The Russians understand this well and have made it clear that they will block any Security Council resolution to intervene. So there won’t be international legitimacy for an intervention. If there’s one thing we should always take as a lesson from Iraq it is that there needs to be genuine regional and international agreement that action is needed. Without it, the intervening power will always be blamed for the outcome, however well it goes.

YES
Agreed – military intervention needs international support. But the question is how strongly we should be pushing for military solutions in the right diplomatic channels. It is not the case that only war-mongers want to see instability in Syria. The truth is that we have instability there. The Arab Spring will not pass Damascus by, so there is no avoiding the tinder-box. The remarkable thing about the Syrian people is that they keep opposing. The killings and arrests don’t stop them. Every Friday, millions assemble in Mosques and understand the power of the crowd. They bury their dead, and on Saturdays, filled with righteous loathing of the regime, they are back on the streets. This will not stop. The only question is what emerges from it and how friendly it is to the West. An Israel-friendly, pro-Western Syria is a prize worth angling for. Agreed also that bringing Iran into a military conflict is the last thing we want to do. But Iran is in a very tight spot here: it needs to argue that it is for the Arab Spring and its democratic forces. Tehran feels that it was the harbinger of Muslim revolutions in 1979. Aligning itself with secularist autocrats like Assad will only reduce its influence in the region and stoke the internal opposition that was itself brutally suppressed in the 2009 Green movement. So don’t worry about Iran. And without Iran’s involvement, neither Hezbollah nor Hamas will dare to take a pro-regime line. Bringing the Syrian regime down could well be the key to a grand resolution of the Middle East conflict, the key we have all been waiting on for so long.

NO
Ah! The secret key fantasy. We heard that a lot about Iraq, and guess what? The key turned into another lock that will have to be expensively picked over generations to come. The real worry is that you can probably manufacture international support - give Russia rights over the Arctic, or WTO membership and swap that for Security Council support; promise Saudi Arabia a freer hand in the Horn of Africa and ask it to sponsor an Arab League resolution … but this horse-trading style of diplomacy just doesn’t work. You need real, on the ground, support – not something stitched together amongst corrupt elites who anyway have no legitimacy on the street. Now think of the Responsibility to Protect, and consider what everyone in the region knows: this regime will be brutal in hanging on to power. Remember the Hama blood-bath of 1982. The regime besieged the town that was at the center of a Sunni insurgency against the regime; it sent the tanks in and 40,000 people were killed. You have to understand the position of the Alawite minority that is in power: they are so steeped in blood that if they lose their grip, they, their families, their villages and anyone associated with them is done for. They will stop at nothing. When air-support for the Libyan rebels was justified on the grounds that it was needed to “stop another Srebrenica”, our duty this time is to prevent military intervention if we want to avoid a repeat of Srebrenica this time.

YES
Look, you’re arguing as if the Arab Spring had not happened. The climate today is just completely different. This is no longer Sunni versus Alawi, Christian versus Muslim or any of that sectarian thinking that the regime found so convenient to encourage. Don’t be taken in by the way the regime presents Syria. As one insider has blogged: “Regime supporters explain the revolution thus: the people of Dara‘a are tribal and backward; the people of Deir ez-Zor likewise; the Hamwis are Muslim Brotherhood terrorists; the Homsis are Salafists and stupid; in Qamishli they’re all dirty Kurds and separatists; in the Damascus suburbs they’re all flip-flop wearing scum. The Syrians are a filth that must be cleansed. There is no god but Bashaar.” But that thinking is over in the Arab world - the people have seen through it as manipulation by their real oppressors, the tyrants who rule them. Achraf Al-Miqdad, the leader of the Syrian opposition movement – the Damascus Declaration – has written in the pan-arab daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that senior Alawite generals in the army are ready to defect if the international community starts an aerial bombing campaign. This is a historic opportunity for a democratic transformation of the region, and Syria deserves our support. Every diplomatic muscle should now be stretched to gain international approval for military intervention.

NO
The trouble with the muscular interpretation of the Responsibility to Protect is that it really does allow people of goodwill but little judgement flights of dangerous fancy. It happened to Tony Blair, and we have to hope that our current crop of leaders is made of sterner stuff. Don’t focus on the similarities with Libya. Look at the differences and consider their importance. Benghazi was an excellent tactical base for opposition. There is no sea port that could easily fall into rebel hands and serve the purpose of rebel refuge and base camp in Syria. The Alawite army – helped by Iranian Revolutionary Guards – is a serious, disciplined army with a lot to lose from defeat, not like the rag-tag mercenary army from sub-Saharan Africa that Gaddafi relied on. Even the Syrian opposition is divided along class, ethnic and denominational lines. Mohammad Riyad Al-Shaqfa, leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, does not want to see military intervention; nor do the local Rebellion coordination committees. It’s fine for Achraf Al-Miqdad to call for aerial bombardments – he writes from comfortable exile in Australia! No internal cohesion; no tactical clarity; no regional legitimacy; no international agreement...would arguments against intervention, one wonders, ever persuade you?

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