For All Sides, Syrian Peace Will Involve Dealing with the Devil

November 3, 2015 Topic: Politics Region: Middle East Tags: SyriaBashar Al-AssadDiplomacy

For All Sides, Syrian Peace Will Involve Dealing with the Devil

Peace hasn’t taken root in Syria over the past four years—but not for a lack of effort.

Whatever his faults—and they are plentiful—Putin has been clear-eyed about this, not least because several thousands of Islamist fighters, largely from Russia’s war-ravaged North Caucasus, have joined the jihad against Assad’s Ba’athist state. Putin sees the difference between ISIS and the heavyweights within Jaish as minimal at best. Yes, most of Russia’s airstrikes have so far targeted opposition strongholds in Idlib province, not ISIS bastions, but the immediate threat to Syria’s government emanates from the northwest, not from areas controlled by the Islamic State, which are mostly in the north and east. And in Putin’s eyes, if the Ba’ath regime collapses, the result will not be a stable Syria born from a peace settlement but a latter-day Libya.

The theory that Putin plunged into Syria’s mayhem to shift the spotlight from Ukraine, though commonplace, doesn’t hold water. Moscow’s close ties with the various Syrian governments started in the mid-1950s. Syria was the first Arab state with which the Soviet Union signed an arms deal, in 1954; the Russian navy’s access to Tartus dates back to 1971; Syria and the USSR signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation, including on the security front, in 1980. Putin doubtless seeks to protect this longstanding strategic investment. Yet that objective cannot be achieved if Syria splinters or militant Islamist gain control of it, and he seems puzzled that the West cannot see that it has a shared interest in preventing these outcomes.

Recall that the United States became militarily engaged in Syria not for humanitarian reasons (no country was prepared to intervene, despite some 200,000 people having been killed since 2011) but only once ISIS entrenched itself there and in Iraq. Washington’s objective remains preventing ISIS and like-minded movements from winning in Syria and Iraq and turning the two countries into platforms for launching terrorist attacks against the West. One can debate the wisdom of trying to achieve this goal through military means, or argue that the threat has been inflated, but that’s beside the point: that fear happens to be what drives President Obama. And it will drive his successor as well.

There are, of course, many details to be worked out concerning what cooperation with Russia would mean beyond “deconflicting” to prevent clashes between American and Russian warplanes in Syria’s skies. But just as Moscow and the United States had overlapping interests in averting a nuclear-armed Iran, so do they now in Syria, as Eugene Rumer argues persuasively in a recent piece. Neither wants a jihadist regime to control Syria; both believe that their security will be undermined if that happens

If the three changes identified above do occur, the latest attempt to bring peace to Syria may move further than the earlier ones did. But success is another matter entirely.

All of the peace plans for Syria—including those of Henry Kissinger and Jimmy Carter—envisage, as a starting point, a transitional government pending elections. But in view of the social and political polarization within Syria, the hatreds generated by the horrific death toll, the consequent desire for vengeance and the absence of a moderate alternative, who can (realistically) expect the radical Islamists and the discredited Ba’athist regime—even without Assad—to agree on the details of an acceptable settlement and the principles that should guide the creation of a new Syria? They will come to terms only if Iran and Russia twist the arms of Assad and his senior lieutenants, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey pressure the Islamist groups they back to dine with the devil.

Negotiations, to say nothing of an agreement, between Syria’s warring parties remain a distant prospect. But there can be no forward movement absent some fundamental reappraisals by the countries involved in this latest attempt to end the slaughter.

Rajan Menon is Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the Colin Powell School of the City College of New York / City University of New York and a Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace at Columbia University. His most recent book (coauthored with Eugene B. Rumer) is Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order (the MIT Press, 2015); his next book, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Sebastian Wallroth