4

THE AMBIVALENT WESTERN APPROACH TO THE SYRIA CONFLICT

The Western approach to the Syrian uprising was from the very beginning dominated by an overdose of wishful thinking, because precedence was given to supposedly democratic and moralistic ideals over realpolitik. Many Western politicians apparently based their positions on their day-to-day domestic political reflexes, rather than on the long-term vision and result-oriented pragmatism that was needed to work towards genuinely helping to solve the conflict. Most Western politicians early on became fixated on the idea that the conflict could only be resolved if President al-Asad was removed from power. Many really thought that the regime would fall within a relatively short time. Some expected al-Asad to have gone by the summer of 2012. The strength of the regime was completely underestimated, partly out of ignorance and lack of knowledge of the Syrian regime, as well as because of misplaced optimism.¹ Those who predicted that there was a realistic chance for the al-Asad regime to survive for a longer time ran the risk of being accused of being pro-Asad,² or even of being against democracy. Ideological arguments sometimes prevailed over realistic ones.

Objective reporting about developments in the war in Syria turned out to be a sensitive affair. It became only too easy for academics, journalists or politicians to be labelled or accused of either being proor anti-regime. Even the United Nations and its Special Envoys for Syria were from time to time accused of being one-sided after the slightest move that could be interpreted as partial, whether correct or not.

Academics and journalists who, during an earlier stage in the Syrian Revolution, observed that during the bloody events the opposition was not only peaceful but also occasionally used violence and attacked the army and security forces with arms were strongly criticised by the opposition and others, if only because that might give some credibility to the regime’s story of its being attacked by so-called ‘armed terrorists’ and could help shatter the image of the strictly peaceful opposition, a peacefulness which provided the opposition with a strong kind of moral legitimacy.

Another point was that many people had a tendency to mix up so-called objective thinking with wishful thinking. On top of that, at least in the case of present-day Syria, people in the West generally did not want to be seen as providing any analysis that might perhaps be interpreted as being against, or critical, of those courageous Syrians who had good and peaceful intentions and who were opposing the al-Asad dictatorship, but had not yet succeeded in achieving their aims of a more democratic Syria. Criticism of the violent Islamist radicals who started to overshadow the peaceful opponents of the regime was easily interpreted as criticism of the whole opposition, including those who were peaceful.

Western politicians generally had clear thoughts about what they did not want, but no realistic or clear ideas of what they wanted in al-Asad’s place. They wanted a kind of democracy in Syria, but a violent ousting of al-Asad could not realistically have been expected to result in such a desired peaceful democracy.

Many of the decisions or positions taken by Western countries were too little, too late. Politicians did not always keep up with the realities on the ground and so-called ‘politically correct’ slogans continued to be used even though the situation on the ground no longer fully justified them. The Syrian opposition that originally had only expressed moderate and modest demands continued to be described as peaceful and democratic, even long after more radical forces, including Islamists and Jihadists, had hijacked its platform and the Syrian War was already well on its way. Subsequently, the concept of peaceful opposition became more of a myth than the reality it was in the beginning.

Sami Moubayed has noted that senior figures of the Syrian opposition were sceptical of Jabhat al-Nusrah when its creation was announced in early 2012, and at the time

were desperately trying to prove that no Islamists existed in the Syrian rebel community – only secular soldiers who had defected from the Syrian army. If Jabhat al-Nusra was real, then it threatened to do away with all that they had been working for since March 2011.³

Inside Syria it was generally the military opposition forces who had taken over, whereas outside Syria various civilian opposition groups were politically active and predominant. For a long time, the civilian opposition outside the country was generally not much respected by these military opposition groups, and neither did the military recognise the opposition groups outside of Syria as representing them. It took several years of struggle before better contacts and political coordination started to emerge between the civil opposition outside Syria and the military inside the country. The Riyadh opposition conference in December 2015 led to substantially better contacts between military and civilian opposition groups.

THE WEST CREATING FALSE EXPECTATIONS

Most Western countries closed their embassies in Damascus in 2012, intending to send a message of strongest condemnation to al-Asad from the United States, the European Union and other Western countries. The symbolism, however, was probably wasted on the Syrian president, who was unlikely to have lost any sleep over the withdrawal of the Western community. He had other priorities, notably the survival of the regime. The withdrawal of ambassadors certainly did not contribute to helping to find a solution, but rather the opposite. Finding a solution to a serious conflict appears to be more difficult without adequate channels of communication. Isolation generally does not help.

All this does not mean that if Western efforts for dialogue with the Syrian regime had been taken up much more seriously at an early stage, there would have been any guarantee of success. But in 2011, when much less blood had been shed (with first ‘only’ hundreds of dead, but later hundreds of thousands), a compromise would arguably have been less difficult to reach than it was later. It appears to have been a missed chance, which, given the extremely serious circumstances and therefore heavy responsibilities, should at least have been taken, as a result of which the Western countries involved might have had a ‘cleaner political conscience’.

In 2011, I noted that continuing to insist on prosecuting the hard core of the al-Asad regime and having real justice done (before any political solution was achieved) was bound to only further increase its determination to survive. It would also contribute to increasing the possibility of a destructive sectarian war, which would cost many more lives without any certainty at all of achieving a better and more democratic Syria as a result. Of course, as part of day-to-day politics it was easier for foreign politicians to increase sanctions and to ask for justice to be done. This would give them more popularity in the short run, but they also carried the co-responsibility for further bloodshed and all its victims, if they did not at least try to help find a solution more constructively. The key question remained at the time: how to end dictatorship so as to help Syria obtain the better future it deserves, while at the same time saving as many Syrian lives as possible.⁴

With some hindsight, it might be concluded that serious dialogue with the al-Asad regime would probably have been to no avail, similar to the experiences of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Arab League and others. But nothing was ventured and therefore nothing gained.

When arguing that all efforts to convince the regime that a political solution would have been preferable to a military one would have been in vain, it might logically have been concluded that in that case the main alternative would have been to bring the regime to its knees by militarily defeating it. But the opposition was not supported sufficiently by its allies to help achieve this, as a result of which the war dragged on with severe bloodshed, and direct foreign military intervention was not seriously considered either.⁵

With this combination (no sufficient foreign military support for the opposition, and no foreign direct military intervention) the Syrian Revolution was doomed to failure, certainly as long as the regime received sufficient military aid from its allies Russia, Iran and Hizballah, combined with their direct military interventions in Syria. All this caused the military balance of power to shift in favour of the regime. For the countries supporting the Syrian Revolution all of this was no reason, however, to change their principled policies towards the conflict in Syria.

Richard Haass has noted in this respect that the ‘lesson of the last five and a half years must be taken to heart: those who engage Syria with limited will and limited means must set limited goals if they are to accomplish even a limited amount of good’.⁶

Yet, even after more than half a decade of bloody war, and well over 400,000 dead, many Western politicians still tended to be blinded by wishful thinking, as a result of which they kept approaching the conflict in Syria from the supposedly moral high ground. They did not want to accept the above-mentioned basic principle, that with a limited will and limited means only limited goals could be achieved. They either ignored these basics or pretended not to be aware of them.

By continuing to maintain so-called ethically and politically correct points of view concerning justice without, however, providing the necessary means to help realise their just aims, various Western and Arab politicians indirectly helped the war to continue with all its victims, refugees and destruction. Many maintained that they wanted to help the Syrian opposition, but in effect their so-called ethical correctness obtained an unethical dimension, by wanting to remain principled. Through not being pragmatic enough to achieve their professed principles, these actors ensured that the bloodshed and multi-dimensional destruction were bound to continue, ‘against better judgement’.

A pragmatic attitude, which might have helped achieve a political solution, could have been considered of higher ethical value than political positions that theoretically might have been ethical, but in practice did not achieve much more than a continuation of the bloody war.⁷

In their seemingly unwavering conviction that the opposition would in any case be preferable to al-Asad, many Western countries overlooked the fact that the al-Asad regime was supported by a part of the Syrian population, perhaps some 30 per cent, including a substantial part of the Arabic-speaking minorities (like the Alawis, Christians and Druzes). This support should not be interpreted as the existence of real sympathy for the regime, but rather as the prevalent feeling among many that an alternative regime could be even worse. Many Syrians for the time being preferred to preserve their livelihoods under the existing dictatorship, rather than having their livelihoods, their shops and spare sources of income and belongings (if any) destroyed as a result of the internal war, let alone having themselves and their families killed, or forced to become refugees. Many were just as afraid or uncertain, if not more, of what an opposition victory might bring as they were of the regime’s way of ruling in the past.

According to Dr Sami Khiyami, former Syrian ambassador to London, living in exile, the Syrian negotiators in Geneva (2016) of both the regime and the opposition together

represent at most less than 30% of unconditional supporters among the Syrian people. The vast majority of Syrians unjustly described as grey, is certainly not silent but split into two major groups, the first (expected to be the larger) disapproves the regime but dislikes the opposition (chaos and oppression driven) even more. The second disapproves the opposition but dislikes the regime (corruption and oppression driven) even more.

Needless to say that in the absence of true freedom of political activity and expression and considering the prevailing congested situation, any attempt to conduct elections will lead to a coerced (love–hate) alignment of these two major groups to the respective conventional antagonists, government and opposition. This fact is being used by the two presently negotiating parties to claim questionable popularity and representation.

The obvious strategy is to allow these two major (majority) groups to lead the society to peace by providing them with a true representation of their popular weight. The negotiating teams currently meeting in Geneva will de facto join the process at a later stage.⁸

Did the Western countries still have options to help solve the conflict?

Western military intervention with ‘boots on the ground’ seemed to be out of the question. There was no political appetite for it, certainly not when taking into account earlier experiences in, for instance, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. When the Syrian regime reportedly used chemical weapons in summer 2013, thereby crossing US President Obama’s so-called ‘red lines’, neither the United States nor the United Kingdom reacted militarily, although it had been suggested they would. This seriously undermined Western credibility and demonstrated that their threats had no teeth. Later, when chemical weapons were reportedly being used again, nothing was done either, except for issuing statements. It was only in April 2017 that the US, under Obama’s successor President Trump, reacted with a limited cruise missile attack on a Syrian airbase, shortly after the Syrian regime had reportedly used chemical weapons in an attack on Khan Shaykhun, in Idlib province.

The deal agreed upon in September 2013, to have the chemical weapons arsenal of the Syrian regime removed by mid-2014, meant that the countries that had maintained that al-Asad had lost his ‘legitimacy’ in fact considered him to be ‘legitimate’ again for at least the period concerned. At the same time, any Western military intervention seemed to be off the table. Nevertheless, it can be concluded that the deal to remove the chemical weapons arsenal was achieved because of the threat of military force. Military strikes themselves might not have achieved it, except perhaps if these had led to the fall of the regime.

The Western countries’ declared aim of arming the opposition, thereby strengthening their chances of forcing the regime into political negotiations, or even winning the war, turned out to be rather restricted when it came to reality. When the EU arms embargo against Syria was lifted at the insistence of the United Kingdom and France in 2013, there was – contrary to expectations – no great change as far as arms deliveries to the opposition were concerned. It turned out that there was no political will to really arm any part of the opposition to such an extent that they had a real chance to win the battles against the regime, even where the predominantly secular side was concerned. Questions were raised about which of the many opposition groups should be armed and with what aim, as the Western countries obviously wanted to avoid the possible establishment of an Islamic extremist dictatorship. But was there any guarantee that arms provided to others would not end up in the hands of Islamists and Jihadists? And were the arms really intended to help topple the al-Asad regime? Or was providing arms mainly intended to help the opposition in defending itself ? Or mainly to fight IS, Jabhat al-Nusrah and other Jihadist organisations? Was it a humanitarian gesture? No clear US or EU strategy was visible, except that defeating IS had priority. The more radical Islamic groups, like Ahrar al-Sham, al-Jabhat al-Islamiyah (later Jaysh al-Islam), Jabhat al-Nusrah, IS and al-Qa’idah, had in the course of time become stronger than the Free Syrian Army. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar focused their support also on Islamist armed organisations like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam.

What the West clearly wanted to see was a moderate democratic secular pluralist successor regime, but such a possibility was not a realistic prospect; certainly not in the foreseeable future. As far as the secular armed groups of the FSA were concerned, they gradually also became more radicalised, as a result of the prolonged bloody war. The Islamic current in Syria had become stronger during the Syrian War, and secularism had correspondingly become less popular.

It had been argued that delivering arms to the predominantly secular opposition (as far as this still existed) might provide a counterweight to the regime, to such an extent that it would be strong enough to help force a negotiated settlement.

The thesis that the regime would have been prepared to negotiate when under enough pressure seemed doubtful, however, for the war was a struggle for life and death in which the regime’s main aim was to survive, not to share powers with others that could lead to its downfall. According to Patrick Seale, ‘the arming of the opposition seems not to have advanced the opposition’s cause but to have given the regime the justification for crushing it’.⁹

David Lesch has concluded that the Syrians (i.e. the regime) did ‘not like to be told what to do – or even to have something strongly suggested’, let alone by outside powers. And that

the regimes of Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad have always refused to make concessions from a perceived position of weakness: they will only do so from a perceived position of strength. Cracking down hard on demonstrators while offering political reforms are two sides of the same coin. This is the Syrian way – under the Assads.¹⁰

The problem was that after 2011, Bashar al-Asad did not want to negotiate from a position of relative strength either, at least if this could lead to a sharing of real power with the opposition. Nevertheless, mutual negotiations would have been the better, or least bad option, taking into account all death and destruction. The question remained, however, whether the party that thought it could win the battle would ever be prepared to negotiate, except perhaps for tactical reasons.

In the meantime, Western politicians continued to pay lip service to what they considered to be the predominantly secular opposition – but as long as they did not provide them with the necessary means to gain the upper hand in battle, their moral support did not have any decisive value on the battleground. While they may have cleared their ‘political conscience’ by expressing support for the opposition, they were, in reality, unintentionally contributing to prolonging the war and helping al-Asad move towards partial (or total) victory, particularly after Russia started to intervene militarily on the regime’s behalf in September 2015.

Western leaders on various occasions called for measures against the Syrian regime, measures which they could have known in advance were not going to be implemented. But to do nothing or not to react at all was, politically speaking, not an acceptable option for democratic governments. Nevertheless, it can, rationally speaking, be argued that in some cases it would have been wiser to do nothing rather than to do the wrong thing with disastrous consequences.

Politicians were expected ‘to do something’. Expressions like ‘shouldn’t we intervene there?’ or ‘how can you just sit by and watch how people in Syria are being oppressed and slaughtered?’ became quite common, but not much was done in practice to drastically help change the situation of the Syrian population on the ground.

Peter Harling has noted in this respect that ‘all the policy talk about “what can we do?” will remain empty until its meaning becomes “what can we do for millions of Syrians?” and not “what can we do to rid ourselves of the problem?”’.¹¹

Various Western countries at first were fixated on the departure of President Bashar al-Asad and started to support the opposition; then they started to focus on the Islamic State, which was more dangerous for them than the regime had ever been, because of the terrorist attacks of IS in the West; and finally, they started to focus on the issue of the many Syrian refugees coming to Europe. All these issues were linked, of course, but in order to be able to solve the refugee problem, for instance, the core issue of the Syrian War had to be tackled first.

On several occasions Western leaders called for the imposition of no-fly zones in Syria to protect the opposition and population from air-based regime attacks, but nothing came of it. This was partly due to the fact that imposing a no-fly zone implied direct military confrontation with the Syrian regime, which no Western country had the intention of doing (and after September 2015 it would also have implied military confrontation with Russia).

The creation of safe havens was suggested repeatedly as well. Creating a safe haven somewhere in a border area would imply occupying Syrian territory, however, and therefore military confrontation with the Syrian regime. As a result, safe havens were not imposed by foreign powers either.

Western leaders on various occasions also called for setting up humanitarian corridors to help the population gain access to food aid. This also turned out to be unsuccessful.

In February 2014, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2139, demanding that all parties allow delivery of humanitarian assistance, cease depriving civilians of food and medicine indispensable to their survival, and enable the rapid, safe and unhindered evacuation of all civilians who wished to leave. It demanded that all parties respect the principle of medical neutrality and facilitate free passage to all areas for medical personnel, equipment and transport.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the adoption of this resolution but noted that it ‘should not have been necessary’, as humanitarian assistance ‘is not something to be negotiated; it is something to be allowed by virtue of international law’. The relevant resolution was a success only on paper, because it was clear that humanitarian corridors could only be imposed against the will of the Syrian regime by direct military confrontation which, predictably again, no country was prepared to undertake.

In 2016, various countries even set a deadline (or a kind of ultimatum) for 1 September that year, announcing that they would start food drops from the air inside Syria, if the regime by that date had not lifted the food and humanitarian aid blockades imposed on various Syrian areas over land, particularly those under opposition control. But it was an empty threat, because foreign aeroplanes flying with this aim over Syria without permission of the central government would run the serious risk of being shot down. And if humanitarian aid was to be delivered by air, aid convoys over land would have been allowed as well, more so as it was more efficient and less costly. Earlier in 2016, food drops by air had been made by way of an exception in the region of Dayr al-Zur, but this concerned an area that was to some extent under regime control, and therefore it had, in this particular case, been in the interests of the regime to allow it.

Most actions by Western countries were reactive, with no clearly defined plan or aim for the future beyond removing President al-Asad and his regime from power. The absence of this type of analysis was surprising, particularly given the fact that a future regime could, for example, if it were to be a radical Islamist dictatorship, turn out to be just as bad as the regime in power.

Most Western policies were no more than declaratory, with few tangible positive results that could lead to a political solution for the opposition on the ground. The good intentions that were widely expressed were generally not followed up by decisive concrete actions, because the Western countries had, to a great extent, tied their hands because of domestic and international politics.

A key question that ran throughout the debates around the Syrian crisis was: is justice to be done? The answer was: yes, of course, but at which cost? It was easy to say, for instance, that President al-Asad was to be tried for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. But this did not help in finding a solution. The idea that al-Asad would ever be able to leave Syria alive for such a court case was extremely unrealistic. Some people did even imagine that President al-Asad would start to behave and think differently once he was more aware of the future possibility of being tried at the ICC. It all appeared to be wishful thinking.

Calling for justice was good in itself, as was the documenting of all the war crimes that had been committed. This had to be done, of course, but not over and above efforts to proactively work towards finding a solution and preventing the further bloodshed that would undoubtedly continue if no serious negotiations were facilitated among Syria’s various clashing factions. The call for justice needed to be part of wider efforts to create peace, rather than only focusing on who were guilty of the crimes committed against the Syrian people in the recent past. A political solution had to be found before justice could be done. It could not be the other way around.

The West in fact created false expectations, and gave the opposition hope for more Western support, which, in the end, was not provided.

By branding the rule of President al-Asad as illegitimate, Western countries may have been morally just, but they thereby prematurely blocked any opportunity they might have had to play a constructive role in finding a political solution to the crisis. The question was what should have priority: being morally correct or helping to find a solution?

Domestic political factors were apparently considered more important. US ambassador Robert Ford had reportedly opposed calling for al-Asad’s departure, arguing that the United States would not be able to bring it about, but his counsel was overruled.¹² According to Christopher Phillips, ‘the domestic cost of not calling for Assad’s departure was perceived as getting too high’ in the United States:

The need to be on the ‘right side of history’ again was raised, and some feared embarrassment should Assad fall before Obama called for his departure …

It was not unreasonable for the Syrian opposition and their regional supporters to rejoice and expect future help … Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia would proceed to act in Syria on the assumption that eventually the United States would step up … Yet much was based on limited knowledge or capacity to follow through on powerful rhetoric, such as Obama’s demand for Asad’s departure, without the intent to enforce it. Yet such positioning served to escalate the divisions within Syria, with each side believing their external patrons were behind them. Rather than act to deter conflict, external actors helped to fan the flames of war.¹³

The solidarity visit of US ambassador Robert Ford and his French counterpart Eric Chevallier to the opposition movement in Hama in July 2011 looked sympathetic from a Western point of view, but in fact led to the end of the possibility for the United States and France or other countries to play any role as mediator in the conflict. Their visits rather created false hopes among the opposition that essential Western support was forthcoming – and in the end it was not as forthcoming as had been suggested.

In some ways, the situation looked similar to that of southern Iraq in 1991, when the United States and others encouraged the Shi’i community to rise up against the rule of President Saddam Hussein, but did nothing to help them when their uprising was bloodily suppressed.

Ford’s actions were universally praised in the United States and elsewhere in the West ‘as a courageous act that drew attention to the plight of the protestors, and in so doing helped prevent what some had been predicting: another massacre like the one in Hama in 1982’.¹⁴ But it is more probable that their actions achieved the opposite.

The notion that the Syrian dictatorial regime could be pressurised into refraining from violence against its perceived internal enemies through some ambassadors’ show of solidarity with the Syrian opposition also showed some naivity in Western thinking.

When more than five years later, the Syrian regime reconquered the eastern part of the city of Aleppo in December 2016 – which had been under the control of military opposition forces for more than four years (and lay in rubble as a result) – the greater part of the international community, including the Western and Arab Gulf countries that had supported most of the military opposition forces, could not do much more than stand idly by, and issue statements of the strongest condemnation and moral outrage concerning the bloodshed and atrocities that had reportedly taken place. They were powerless to intervene politically or militarily, because they had already excluded any military intervention in Syria several years before, and no longer had any real influence over the Syrian regime (with which they had broken off relations years before), nor over its allies Russia and Iran, to change their policies concerning Syria. Moreover, they apparently had not provided the military opposition groups with enough military support to be able to win the battle for Aleppo. Various Western politicians had warned, several months before the regime’s recapture of Aleppo, that another ‘Rwanda’ or ‘Srebrenica’ could occur. Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Bert Koenders, for instance, warned on 31 July 2016 that

not unlike Rwanda or Srebrenica, there is a real risk that the name ‘Aleppo’ will become synonymous with the world’s failure to act. Disaster can only be averted through international pressure. The UN, the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) and other states should be more vocal in calling for the Assad regime to lift the siege.¹⁵

In practice, however, nothing could be done by the international community to substantially change the situation on the ground, if only because Russia, having the co-chair in the ISSG, was fighting on the side of the regime and wanted to serve its own strategic interests. No declaration in the United Nations, or elsewhere, could help change that.

A ‘politics of outrage and indignation’ or ‘naming and shaming’ were clearly far from enough to help bring a solution to the conflict. By way of an alternative, French presidential candidate François Fillon suggested during his election campaign in mid-December 2016, after the defeat of the military opposition in Aleppo, that Europe should undertake a diplomatic initiative to bring to the negotiating table all parties to the Syrian conflict that would be able to stop it, without exception. This was contrary to the French conventional policy followed from the earlier stages of the conflict, of refusing any direct contact with the Syrian president; they only kept demanding his departure. Fillon commented that Europe had to choose and could ‘not just continue to be indignant … Europeans were not responsible for the crimes committed in Syria, but one day history will say they were guilty of not doing anything to stop them’.¹⁶ Reactions to Fillon’s statements were in the first instance generally not positive, and the moral high ground and political principles of those criticising him at first instance kept prevailing over the pragmatism that was needed to help in finding a solution to the conflict.

The regime and the main opposition groups had already been in Geneva several times with the aim of negotiating under the auspices of the United Nations, but real negotiations did not take place. If Fillon’s initiative was intended to widen European contacts so as to include the al-Asad regime with the aim of influencing the policies of Damascus, it was something new.

In 2012, leading figures in the Syrian National Council (SNC), like Burhan Ghalyun and Basma Qadmani, still spoke of their preference for military intervention, as if it was a realistic possibility. Christopher Phillips has noted that as

rebels formed militias, many based their strategy on taking sufficient territory not to fully defeat Assad, but to persuade the US to finish him off … Yet far from dispelling this assumption, the rebels’ regional allies actively encouraged the opposition to expect US military intervention.

As Basma Qadmani later recalled, ‘the regional powers were absolutely confident that intervention would happen … I recall very well, they were always reassuring the opposition, “it is coming, it is coming definitely, the intervention is coming”’.¹⁷ All this showed the paradox of perceived US power in the region: ‘regional leaders simply refused to countenance the possibility that, after decades of muscle flexing, the US would not eventually step in’.¹⁸

It took a long time before the opposition started to be sufficiently aware that they had become the victims of the false expectations created by their so-called friendly supporters, who did not want to openly confront them, and themselves, with the realities of the situation.