Regime change in Syria would have unforeseeable consequences – By Michael Lüders
The Syrian leadership’s treatment of its own people is inhumane and playing havoc with the economic and social foundations of the country. Nevertheless, President Bashar al-Assad retains a relatively firm grip on power.
This is primarily because neither Russia nor China will allow the Damascus regime to collapse. Next to Iran, Syria is their most important ally in the region. It would not be opportune for Moscow and Beijing if the West, and in particular the USA and Israel, consolidated their dominant position in the Middle East. Assad knows this, and that knowledge is keeping him in power. The second reason Assad remains in power is the complexity of his country.
Syria is an ethnic-confessional state where the Alawite religious minority controls the government, part of the economy and the military. The Assad regime has formed strong ties with middle-class sections of the Sunni majority. The terms of the deal go like this: We’ll allow you every freedom when it comes to making money for as long as you accept our monopoly on power.
Because the Alawites are themselves a minority, the government displays tolerance when it comes to the other minorities, particularly Christians and Druze. The uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime is mainly being staged by poorer sections of the Sunni population in the provinces while in Damascus and the economic metropolis Aleppo the situation remains calm. The minorities are afraid of regime change because they fear – and not without justification – the development of a situation similar to that in Iraq.
For this reason, game plans for a military intervention aren’t helpful. Who should intervene and with which mandate? Moscow and Beijing will put major obstacles in the way of a UN mandate. Without a legal basis though, an intervention would be little more than an act of adventurism. And what should be the goal? Regime change? Whom should power be given to afterwards?
Whoever engages the Syrian military could end up also fighting sections of the civilian population who support Assad. That means a worst-case scenario of street fighting in Damascus. The Alawites will defend their position of power at all costs – their utter demise looms if they lose it. The slaughter of Alawites by Sunnis and vice versa is a realistic scenario.
Ethnically and religiously motivated violence has a long history in Syria as well as Lebanon. Historically, pogroms have occurred in the region every 40 to 50 years. To this day, the massacre perpetrated in 1860 by Muslims against Damascus’ Christians remains alive in the collective consciousness. The Christian quarter of the city at the time was completely burnt to the ground. Thousands were stabbed, shot or beaten to death.
Foreign troops would unavoidably become occupiers, swiftly becoming a focus for resistance from various Islamic movements up to and including al-Qaeda. In short, any intervention in Syria would stir up a geo-strategic hornets’ nest. The almost inevitable consequence would be proxy wars.
Syria’s popular uprising has long since been overshadowed by external influences. Syria’s alliance with Iran meant Saudi Arabia and Qatar were the first to call for military intervention. They know that the result of regime change would in all probability be the rise to power of the conservative and partly fundamentalist Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. Put another way, fellow believers. And they would in all certainty put an end to the strategic alliance with Tehran.
Riyadh, like Doha, is supplying the opposition via Turkey and Lebanon with arms and money. On its website, the “Free Syrian Army” boasts how it “completely annihilated” its enemy in this or that battle or how it waited in ambush to “slash their throats”. This is not enough to topple the regime, though it’s arguably sufficient to destabilize it.
Why does Damascus maintain such good relations with Tehran? The reason is to be found in the Middle East conflict. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria before annexing it in defiance of international law in 1981. For the Assad regime – father Hafez governed from 1970 until his death in 2000 when he was succeeded by his son Bashar – there were and remain two strategic aims: to keep at all cost their grip on power and to win back the Golan Heights. Since Western states have never seen good reason to take Israel to task over the question of the Golan Heights, the only remaining political alternative open to the Syrian leadership was the Soviet Union/Russia and, after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran.
For its part, Tehran has attempted to influence the region in line with its own thinking and in opposition to its Sunni rival Saudi Arabia. A Shiite crescent stretches out from Iran over Iraq and Syria and into Lebanon. Syria is currently the weakest flank. That awakes feelings of desire in Washington as well as in Riyadh. Indeed, successful regime change in Damascus carries a price tag: the destruction of Syria as a unitary state.
As with the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, the course and result of action at the front would be unclear and each party to the conflict would be at war with every other. Moreover, political and criminal violence would become indistinguishable. Numerous players would be tempted to exert external influence and to recruit local forces as their proxies: Iran and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq and Israel, and probably also the US and the Europeans. And this despite the fact that a sustained civil war in Syria would again tear Lebanon to shreds.
The bottom line is that there are no simple solutions for Syria. Kofi Annan, the special envoy to Syria for the United Nations and the Arab League, is well aware of this. His plan for peace in the country indirectly assumes that Assad will remain in power for some time yet. The opposition’s demands for his resignation are understandable but unrealistic. This is even moreso the case given that the opposition shares no common agenda as to what should happen post regime change.
Assad is facing a two-fold danger in the coming months. To start with there is Syria’s economic demise. Sanctions, but also the collapse of the tourist trade, which is one of the country’s most important sources of revenue, are bringing the country near to insolvency. Reserves are not even sufficient to last until the end of the year. Enormous losses in currency value and the accompanying drop in the standard of living will become a threat to Assad in the event that the Sunni commercial classes abandon their alliance with the regime.
At the same time, the threat of war against Iran hangs over the region. An attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would start a chain reaction of violence and counter-violence, which would draw in the entire Shiite crescent from Tehran to Beirut. Solidarity with Iran would be overwhelming in the region.
Any escalation in Lebanon would weaken the uprising in Syria. In the first instance, the thoughts of most Syrians would be with their own relatives in the Cedar State; regime change would be postponed. Up until now, Syria has secured its border to Israel along the Golan Heights against incursion. That may not remain the case. Should Assad open the border, perhaps for Palestinian refugees, thousands could be tempted to take this route to Israel.
It is not a good idea to attack Iran irrespective of what the grounds for this might be. The same holds for military intervention in Syria. The only practicable course is that sketched out by Kofi Annan: negotiation, compromise, patience. An end to the crisis is not in sight and thousands more Syrians may die as their president continues to hold onto power at any cost.