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PDFThe administration believes the protesters have yet to form a “coalesced movement” strong enough to force the Ba’athists out, but an opposition appeal to the army to lead an Egypt-style transition could help “create a fracture” within the regime, analysts suggest, as cracks emerge in the façade of a unified ruling elite.
The White House issued an Executive Order which provides the administration with what it calls “new tools to target individuals and entities” complicit in human rights abuses.
“Our goal is to end the violence and create an opening for the Syrian people’s legitimate aspirations,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. “These are among the U.S. government’s strongest available tools to promote these outcomes, and we are seeking support for similar actions by other governments.”
Obama has been criticized for refusing to call for President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, but the White House is still “not ready” to call on Assad to resign, said an official, because Obama and his advisers “do not want to get out in front of the Syrian people.”
Most analysts insist that the minority Alawite regime is unified and resilient, bound by patrimonial ties and business interests.
“We haven’t seen the kind of splintering between the political leadership and the military that we saw in Tunisia and Egypt,” said Mohammad Bazzi of the Council for Foreign Relations. “Syria is a different case because the military establishment, the leadership of the military and the security forces is largely Alawite … the sect that Assad comes from. And they’re beholden to him and … see their survival as intertwined with Assad’s.”
The regime also has a degree of popular support based on social welfare paternalism and fear of sectarian violence. The Ba’athists have built a base of support on the back of a statist “social market economy” in which large swaths of citizens are government employees or dependent on social services
Yet cracks have emerged in the façade of unity this week, with reports of military desertions, dissension and infighting, and mass resignations from the ruling Ba’ath Party.
The Obama administration appears to be concerned that the opposition lacks the leadership, strategy and critical mass needed to oust the regime.
“There really isn’t a coalesced movement yet or official organizers of the protests,” an administration official said. “It’s almost an organic thing. The more violence happens, the more the cycle continues, the more people hit the street.”
Some observers expect the sanctions to foment divisions within the ruling elite and a network of opposition activists today called on the military to copy Egypt’s armed forces and initiate a democratic transition.
“The best option is for the leadership of the regime to lead a transition to democracy that would safeguard the nation from falling into a period of violence, chaos and civil war,” said a statement signed by 150 politicians and activists inside Syria.
“We’re giving the president a test today and tomorrow, to demonstrate whether he is in control and he has still authority over the people around him,” said Ausama Mounajed, a London-based spokesman for the initiative, which is also being coordinated by U.S.-based exiles Radwan Ziadeh and Najib Ghadbian.
The proposal identifies Defense Minister Ali Habib, a member of the ruling Alawite minority, and army Chief of Staff Gen. Dawud Rajha, as credible transition leaders.
“They’ve chosen an Alawite figure and suggested that he could lead this, which could possibly create a fracture within the regime,” said Dubai-based analyst Riad Kahwaji. “You are making the Alawites take a long look at whether it’s worth it to keep the Assads any longer in power.”
Bashar may be overestimating his regime’s strength, says his father’s biographer.
“You have to put yourself slightly into their shoes,” says veteran Syria analyst Patrick Seale. “They have been on their guard, fighting back, trying to form defensible alliances for the last several decades and facing sanctions, isolation.”
The government’s repressive response to demands for reform has led to more than 450 deaths since the protests began in mid-March, says the country’s National Organization for Human Rights.
The United Nations Human Rights Council today “unequivocally” condemned the crackdown and called on the UN to send a commission of inquiry to investigate “all alleged violations of international human rights law.”
The individuals and entities subject to the new sanctions, listed in an Annex to the Order, are Mahir al-Assad, President Assad’s brother and brigade commander in the 4th Armored Division, which led the repression in Dara’a; Atif Najib, Assad’s cousin, and head of the Political Security Directorate for Dara’a during March 2011, when protesters were killed; Ali Mamluk: director of the General Intelligence Directorate, responsible for repressing dissent and monitoring citizens, and complicit in the violence in Dara’a; and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Qods Force through which, the order states, Iran is “providing material support to the Syrian government related to cracking down on unrest.”
The new sanctions appear to indicate a slight but not strategic shift in the administration’s approach to Syria.
Obama has been criticized for refusing to call for President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, but the White House is still “not ready” to call on Assad to resign, said an official, because Obama and his advisers “do not want to get out in front of the Syrian people.”
Critics have accused the administration of prioritizing realpolitik and pursuing a policy of engagement in the vain hope of enticing Damascus away from Iran, Hamas and Hizbollah, its allies in the anti-Western axis of resistance. But the violent crackdown against pro-democracy protesters appears to have killed any expectations of change from within the regime.
“It seems like the effort to pull Assad into the West’s orbit and break him away from Iran, and get him to restart peace negotiations with Israel—it seems like that moment has passed, as soon as he decided to start shooting his citizens,” says The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza.
His recent article on the administration’s foreign policy portrayed Obama’s senior officials as consistently divided between pragmatic realists and idealists, a trade-off dismissed as “nonsense” by foreign policy maven Robert Kagan.
“It is not pragmatic to cling to the status quo in a revolutionary era,” he writes, observing that pragmatists’ calculation of U.S. interests proved to be fatally flawed and myopic in defending the Shah of Iran and Hosni Mubarak.
Lizza suggested that Obama’s deliberately pragmatic, non-ideological perspective necessarily entailed a reactive rather than strategic response to events – described by one veteran analyst as a “whack-a-mole” approach.
But other analysts believe a “boutique strategy” or case-by-case approach is appropriate given the differing dynamics and circumstances in each country and the range of U.S. strategic interests across the region.
President Obama should publicly state that while “there is not – nor should there be – a single template for responding to the individual circumstances of each nation experiencing unrest, the US does have significant and specific interests at stake,” argues New York University professor Alon Ben-Meir:
In doing so, Obama needs not forfeit America’s political ideals, but he must advance a strategy to safeguard the US and its allies’ interests while reestablishing America’s moral authority to lead. …..Calls for an Obama Doctrine in the region have become louder, urging clarity behind the United States’ regional strategy and goals. However, it is not that US policy has been misguided; rather, it is that the White House’s messaging has been sluggish and ineffective. While it has demanded that the universal right of peaceful protest be ensured in all places, it must also be clear that America’s actions will be dictated by its strategic interests and priorities and those of its allies in the region.
The administration is wary of policy being driven by the news cycle and appears reluctant to adopt ostensibly principled positions that may be interpreted as binding precedents, constricting policy-makers’ room for maneuver when considerable flexibility, dexterity and creativity will be essential during what is likely to be a long-term process.
“We’re in the early chapters,” says Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, who cites four guidelines shaping the administration’s approach:
First, the Arab revolt is a “historic” event, comparable to the fall of the Ottoman Empire or the post-1945 decolonization of the Middle East; second, “no country is immune” from change; third, the revolution has “deep roots” in poor governance, demographics and new communications technology; and fourth, “these are indigenous events” that can’t be dictated by America, Iran or any other outside power.
A senior Obama adviser, quoted by Lizza, suggested that the administration’s foreign policy doctrine can be characterized as “leading from behind” – a position informed by two assumed axioms:“That the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.”
The declinist orthodoxy is neither new nor convincing, according to Georgetown University’s Robert J. Lieber, as “America’s staying power has been regularly and chronically underestimated,” by the pundits.
Economic and political cycles matter less than America’s beneficial structural characteristics:
These advantages include America’s size, wealth, human and material resources, military strength, competitiveness, and liberal political and economic traditions, but also a remarkable flexibility, dynamism, and capacity for reinvention. Neither the rise of important regional powers, nor a globalized world economy, nor “imperial overstretch,” nor domestic weaknesses seem likely to negate these advantages in ways the declinists anticipate, often with a fervor that makes their diagnoses and prescriptions resemble a species of wish fulfillment.
New York University’s Ben-Meir agrees that the White House is mistaken in giving credence to the declinist myth.
“Genuine leadership from the United States can and must be applied if the broader Middle East is to navigate through the Arab awakening to establish a more secure and stable region, which remains central to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he contends.
President Barack Obama has imposed stiff sanctions against senior Syrian officials and leaders of security forces responsible for a violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests. But the White House is refusing to call for President Bashir al-Assad to resign because Obama and his advisers “do not want to get out in front of the Syrian people.”
