Understanding the Situation in Syria

If you’re among the enormous population of Americans whose eyes glaze over each time a news report or Presidential debate shifts to the ongoing conflict in Syria, don’t feel bad. You’ve got plenty of company.

The vastly-complex conflict is very difficult to keep up with or even understand, particularly if you don’t work in news, politics or foreign policy. I get asked a lot of questions on this subject, so here’s my best effort to condense the issue into one digestible column that you should be able to get your head around.

Let me start by saying that it would take a book–and a rather large one, at that–to fully explain all of the complexities, so I’ll obviously have to oversimplify quite a bit. Let’s start with the country, which is right in the heart of the Middle East in a strategically important international location. When you first consider the relatively-small Arab nation (around 22 million people) by name, it might not register as such, but notice its proximity to places like Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia and it becomes easier to imagine why so many world powers are interested in the outcome. While Syria has less oil than some of its neighbors, it is nonetheless an important area for transporting oil to strategic locations.

Syria’s President is Bashar Hafez al-Assad, a ruthless dictator propped up by phony elections. He came to power after the death of his father, who ruled the country as an equally-brutal dictator from 1970-2000, following decades of political instability in the country. During Assad the senior’s reign, the country was closely aligned with the Soviet Union and locked into an intractable anti-Western Cold War position. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, it became an important Russian ally and client state (Russia sells Syria pretty much all of its military equipment) and hosts Russia’s last remaining military outpost beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union. That’s the main basis of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interest in the conflict.

In 2011, an uprising of peaceful civilian protests swept the country. They followed similar waves in Egypt and Tunisia in a period referred to in the West as the Arab Spring. Assad responded to the protests with brutality. His military forces tortured, raped and murdered masses of protesters and their families in an effort to quickly and decisively quell the dissent and re-establish stability under his rule.

This led to an outcry for intervention in the West, along with a rebellion within Syria where many of Assad’s military leaders defected, working with a loose and fractious coalition of both untrained rebels and former soldiers to try and usurp him. The situation quickly escalated into a civil war that has led to millions of Syrian refugees seeking asylum all over the globe.

The United States initially backed the shaky band of rebel fighters, hoping that a moderate force could topple Assad and bring the conflict to an end and perhaps create a more moderate society. As usual, that proved much more difficult in practice than Americans tend to believe it will be in theory. For starters, the rebels are not in any way a unified force. There have been over a thousand different groups among them, commanding over 100,000 fighters. Loyalties have constantly shifted, while the word moderate has become all but impossible to define. Many of the rebel groups have also proven themselves to be every bit as barbaric as Assad.

Enter the jihadists. While the early rebels were fighting primarily for regime change and limited reforms, Syria soon became an ideological battlefield, first with the Al Qaeda-supported Nusra Front, then with the Iraq-related Islamic State (previously known as both ISIS and ISIL). Both began fighting with the goal of forming an Islamic state. The former concerned itself with doing so in Syria, while the latter fought for one that stretched across borders to include Iraq. They are not aligned with each other, creating yet another war within a war scenario.

Now you can see why it became so difficult to try and support a "side“ in any meaningful sense of the word, or hope for something that looks like a decisive victory that ends with a stable country and a better life for its people than they have or had under the brutal Assad regime. Russia initially opposed our efforts to aid rebels against Assad and lent him support with the goal of preserving his regime, arguing that he was the legal and recognized leader of a sovereign state and that his regime remaining in power would be the most stable outcome.

The emergence of a threat from the Islamic State gave Putin a thin argument to supply actual combat assistance in the form of air support, which began Sept. 30 of this year, in order to help fight the IS, though it’s been clear that most of Russia’s air strikes have targeted the rebel groups instead. Putin’s moves have been seen by some as a bold and effective effort to undermine the United States and weaken our position in the Middle East. But most foreign policy experts see it as a desperate clutch at one of his few remaining allies of consequence that is being done at tremendous domestic expense.

Support among the Russian people for the intervention is low, especially since their economy is in shambles, largely because of falling oil and gas prices in global markets, which the Ruble lives and dies on, as well as international sanctions imposed after his aggressive actions in Crimea. When the Ruble fell to nearly 70-1 against the dollar, Putin gambled on propping it up through a massive sell-off of its reserve currencies, which worked for a short amount of time. Oil prices rebounded, only to ultimately fail when they fell again later this year. One Russian Ruble is currently worth .016 U.S. Dollar. The Russian people are hurting, and they see Putin’s aggressive foreign policy–without any real sign of a potential payoff beyond making him seem more important in world politics–as a big part of the reason.

Meanwhile, Iran, which prizes Syria as an important ally in the region that also gives them strategic geographic access to their ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, has also been aiding Assad. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran's Republican Guard has 7,000 troops and volunteers operating in Syria and plans to expand its presence in the country through local fighters and proxies, and that as many as 20,000 Shiite foreign fighters backed by both Shiite Iran and Hezbollah are thought to be on the ground already.

This has obviously impacted American-Iranian relations and cut into already skeptical support for the Iranian nuclear deal. This is unfortunate because Iran is one of the best possible allies for us against the Islamic State, though their empowerment in the region is seen as a threat to Israel, our number one Middle Eastern ally.

As if the situation were not complicated enough, there’s also Saudi Arabia to consider. The most complicated ally of the U.S. has their own border dispute with Iranian-backed Yemen rebels to contend with. Saudi Arabia, an important oil supplier to our country and world markets, is also a brutally-oppressive nation that is arguably more responsible for supplying radical Islam with its jihadists than any other country via its Wahhabism (an ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam) and their ability to spread the most radical strain of Islamic practices through state schools sponsored by the Saudi Kingdom.

In an oddly self-defeating circle, the Kingdom–in an effort to pacify its subjects–provides not only stipends and dirt cheap oil to its citizens, but unlimited education. The most common degree sought is in Islamic fundamentalism, the kind which typically indicts the Kingdom as infidels and will likely lead to its ultimate fall. Clearly they are not an ideal ally to have, but with nearly four decades of no relations with Iran and problems with Iraq both before and after Saddam, Saudi Arabia was the oil-rich Middle Eastern nation easiest to get along with considering our relationship to Israel.

Finally, there’s also Turkey’s involvement. Turkey has the second largest military force in NATO and is an important U.S. ally in the region. The country was warm to the idea of supporting Assad being deposed, but it wasn’t until an attack by the Islamic State in its own country that it became interested in joining the fight against that group.

However, Turkey complicated the matter by launching simultaneous airstrikes against both the IS and Kurdish insurgents near its own southern border (with whom they've had an on again off again feud for the past 30 years). However, these Kurds, though considered a terrorist group, are actually supporting Kurds in northern Syria who are fighting against Assad, meaning that Turkey is essentially attacking two opposing sides in the Syrian Civil War while weakening the side that the U.S., its NATO ally, has been supporting.

This week, however, the Obama administration announced that the U.S. would abandon efforts to train a rebel force that could depose Assad, acknowledging that while that would be the preferred option, the half-billion dollar experiment to do so has proven the goal to be unattainable. President Obama, like most foreign policy experts, doesn’t see a viable path to get rid of Assad and end up with something better, while fearing that facilitating the rise of an Islamic State-led country could leave us and the rest of the world with something much worse.

The situation seems eerily similar to the one in Iraq circa 2002. Iraq was under the influence of a brutal dictator who was terrorizing his own citizens via rape, execution and torture. Like Assad, he even used chemical weapons against his own people. However, just like Iraq, Syria is a country that (in its modern incarnation) is less than a hundred years old and was foolishly drawn by Western colonial powers with no regard for natural borders related to religious, ethnic and cultural lines.

As in most colonial countries, including other quagmires like Rwanda and the Sudan, ethnic or religious minority groups were given rule in order to perpetuate stability through requisite brutality–an age old colonial tactic used by most Western powers. The most stable of these nations were held together with a brand of violent oppression that most Westerners find horrifying once some sort of elevated conflict reveals it to an otherwise disinterested world. We imagine that there must be a better way, until we try to provide one (usually involving military conflict) and find out how easy it is to make things worse, because power vacuums created by the absence of such dictators usually wind up being filled by those willing to be even more brutal in their efforts to rule.

This dynamic has led to the United States allying itself with forces that have ranged from uncomfortable to embarrassing to shameful, as in our Afghanistan presence, where the U.S. Military has sanctioned the practice of its allied forces kidnapping child sex slaves that they keep chained to their beds to be raped on the very military installations we share with them–somehow telling ourselves that our bad guys aren’t as bad as the other ones.

War in such cultures rarely provide the sanctuary of a worthy side to support, and less often do they seem to result in something better than we found. Politicians can argue over things like a no-fly zone, increasing/reducing support to various factions, posturing with President Putin or sending a message to Iran, but the bottom line seems to be that Syria is a battleground with very little upshot to be seen in any plausible outcome. It also comes with the possibility of heightened tensions escalating the conflict into a World War III scenario that involves, at the very least, a three-faction war between the United States/Israel/NATO, Russia/Iran/Syria, and the Islamic State.

The message might be to tread lightly and consider all actions carefully. We also might want to be mindful of forces that want to use the tension and imposed fear of a fight them there or fight them here scenario as a reason to ratchet up military spending even further, in order to ensure that our never ending state of war against someone keeps feeding the military industrial complex’s bottom line.

Syria might not get much better. As Fareed Zakaria has very effectively argued, a long, bloody realignment to restore majority rule in those post-colonial countries–i.e., Iraq–may be an inevitable outcome throughout the region. The very unfortunate position for the U.S.–including both Democrats and Republicans–is that the best likely outcome in Syria would be an iron-fisted dictator keeping the country from falling into the hands of the Islamic State. Yet, how exactly do we go about all of a sudden doing an about face and supporting a monstrous dictator we've been vilifying for years while spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to depose?

That’s how much of a mess this thing is. The Islamic State is worse than Assad and a much bigger threat to U.S. security, but a secure Assad will also strengthen Russia and Iran in the region, while weakening the U.S and Israel. Come up with a way to keep I.S. out without keeping Assad or engaging Iran and Russia and you’ve solved perhaps the most important foreign policy question of the last five years. Meanwhile, the Russians, Iranians and Saudis have it no easier because an I.S. victory is just as dangerous to them, while an Assad preservation without the U.S. is next to impossible. If there were ever a time and place for diplomacy, this would seem to be it.