Democracy in America | Syria

Uncontrolled demolition

By M.S.

SYRIA has been in a state of civil war long enough that it's now beginning to disintegrate, reports Ben Hubbard of the New York Times. His lead paragraph reads like a dispatch from the Wars of the Roses, or a trailer for a new season of Game of Thrones.

The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities. In the northeast, the Kurds have effectively carved out an autonomous zone.

...Increasingly, it appears Syria is so badly shattered that no single authority is likely to be able to pull it back together any time soon.

Instead, three Syrias are emerging: one loyal to the government, to Iran and to Hezbollah; one dominated by Kurds with links to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iraq; and one with a Sunni majority that is heavily influenced by Islamists and jihadis.

“It is not that Syria is melting down — it has melted down,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria.”

Very well then. What if Syria did fall apart? We know there's no political will for an American military intervention to help the rebels drive out the Assad regime. That's partly due to America's exhaustion after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's partly due to the difficulty of any intervention; with Russia supplying the Syrian government with advanced antiship cruise missiles and so forth, this war would not resemble the relatively easy campaign in Libya. And it's partly because the rebels are unlikely to form a successful government, and that even if they do, it's unlikely to be friendly to America, or to be a net improvement for liberty and human welfare over the Assad regime.

But what about trying to just end the bloodshed and freeze the current situation? Given that the country's population has effectively split into irreconcilable warring camps, wouldn't it be best for all concerned if those camps were each acknowledged as legitimate in their areas of control? If those areas of control are more homogenous than the overall Syrian state, couldn't that form a more stable basis for governance? Should America aim for a resolution along those lines in the talks it's convening with Russia?

Maybe. Then again, maybe not. The problem with formally acknowledging armed secessionist groups as soon as they gain control over a patch of territory is that it encourages new armed groups to secede, provoking yet more civil wars. (See under: Yugoslavia.) And in the middle east, hopes that such splinter groups will grow into non-belligerent stakeholders once they've become responsible for controlling populations and territory are often disappointed. (See under: Hamas; Gaza.)

The tableaus of death and suffering that are being broadcast from this civil war are horrifying. This generates a certain amount of political will for the United States to intervene and do something. It's hard to countenance a version of international morality in which the world's most powerful country sits back in the face of the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians and simply does nothing. Listening to C.J. Chivers's interview a few weeks back on Fresh Air, you could feel the desperation of the Syrian rebels he's traveled with, and their families and other civilians—people who decided to revolt against a dictatorial regime, or who simply found themselves on the wrong side of the territorial, confessional or ethnic lines, and are being slaughtered for it, with no help arriving from the so-called civilised west. And yet even if the American public had the political will to intervene, there seems little reason to believe it would lead to any greater stability, any less slaughter, any less misery.

Back in the early 1990s, it seemed plausible to believe that with the Cold War divisions having evaporated, the strong liberal democracies could use their military power to ensure, at a minimum, that governments not be permitted to massacre their own populations. In some places, they can. But Syria looks to be one of those cases where they can't.

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