In the Lion's Den

by Andrew Tabler

  During his nomination hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 16, 2010, Ford outlined the five things that the Obama administration sought with the Assad regime. First, the United States sought Syria’s help in stabilizing Iraq, which he specifically clarified as stopping the networks that fed foreign fighters into Iraq. Second, the administration wanted help in maintaining stability in Lebanon. The third goal was to gain Damascus’s support for peace talks with Israel, and the fourth was to obtain Syria’s cooperation with the IAEA. Finally, the United States wanted improvement of the deteriorating human rights situation in the country. Ford added that US sanctions on Syria would not be lifted unless Syria changed its position on those key issues.

  With Syria’s behavior worsening and engagement not going according to plan, Washington policy makers launched an informal review of US-Syria policy in the summer of 2010 as the Obama administration tightened sanctions on Iran and stories began to appear in the international press that Israel was contemplating striking Tehran’s nuclear program. The debate quickly fell into the old pattern. Advocates of a US approach based on engagement to foster Syria-Israel peace talks pointed to the strategic advantages of “realigning” Assad away from Iran and Hezbollah via a peace treaty, championing deeper diplomacy with no pressure or negative inducements as the best way to get Assad back to the negotiating table. This policy echoed the constructive engagement policy of the 1970s and 1990s, when Washington believed it had more ability to reward good behavior than punish Damascus’s problematic policies. Critics of this approach, most notably those in the Republican Party, said that the best way to deal with the Iranian problem and proxies like Hezbollah is to stop engagement and pressure Assad until his regime changed its behavior.

  But a look back at the cold war between Washington and the Assad regime showed that the neither peace talks nor pressure alone were likely to work. Basing a policy of engaging Damascus with only the goal of reaching a peace treaty and thus fundamentally changing the Assad regime’s behavior has historically had limited success. Unlike the case of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya, which Washington engaged successfully to end its nuclear program, the primary carrot Damascus seeks—the Golan Heights—is controlled by a third party, Israel. Because Israel and Syria are such bitter foes, and handing back the Golan would actually require an Israeli referendum, the best the United States has achieved to date is a “peace process” that allows Syria to carry on with policies that have grown worse over time. While brokering a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty should remain an important objective, the slow pace of the peace process combined with the growing list of problems with Assad’s regime make the possibility of “flipping” Syria into a Western orbit difficult at best.

  On a domestic level, the Assad regime continues to use Syria’s state of war with Israel to justify an authoritarian form of government that reforms with only half measures, generating one of the highest corruption rates in the world. Without a firm legal foundation, Syrians are forced to bribe the minority-dominated networks that dominate the regime. This corruption has become the mortar holding Syria’s regime together. Even in the event of a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty, unless Damascus institutes fundamental domestic reforms on the issues of human rights and rule of law, it is unclear how the United States can underwrite a treaty the same way it did in Egypt and Jordan.

  Basing a policy solely on pressure and isolation hasn’t worked well either, with US unilateral and multilateral pressure failing to change the Assad regime’s behavior. Following Rafik Hariri’s 2005 murder, US allies fell into line to compel the Assad regime to pull its forces out of Lebanon—a primary goal of the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SAA). It also relaxed its domestic repression and allowed signatories of the Damascus Declaration to organize openly. Economically, the withdrawal from Lebanon caused the Assad regime to follow through on promises to liberalize its finance sector and lift its ban on imported goods, bringing prosperity to Syrians—at least to those who could afford it. In all cases, Assad only changed course when faced with a dilemma of the lesser of two evils.

  Damascus was able to roll back some of these changes, however. Sensing its survival was at stake, the Assad regime was simply more ruthless and flexible than the United States and its Western allies in obtaining its objectives. To fight the United States in Iraq, the Assad regime made a tacit Faustian bargain with Sunni al-Qaeda networks who otherwise despise Syria’s minority Alawite-based regime. It was a deal many foreign-policy analysts said in the past was impossible. Syria deepened its relationship with Iran to unprecedented levels and provided Hezbollah with sophisticated arms from its own stockpile, including the Kornet-E antitank weapon, which Hezbollah used to decimate Israeli tank columns and command posts in Lebanon.

  On the domestic scene, the regime reached out to Syria’s majority Sunni Muslim community in unprecedented ways that changed the nature of Hafez al-Assad’s secular Syria. It also launched the biggest crackdown on the Syrian opposition since the regime’s brutal repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. The Assad regime used all these factors to divide the United States and its allies on what to do when things did not go according to plan—most notably during the 2006 Lebanon War. Assad’s plan of “flexibility and steadfastness”—which was announced at the Baath Party conference of 2005 but implemented in the aftermath of the October 2005 report on the murder of Rafik Hariri—allowed Syria to pragmatically adopt and adjust policies to resist and reverse Washington’s pressure campaign.

  Washington’s ability to deal with Damascus’s responses improved substantially after the United States launched the “Surge” and “Awakening” campaigns in Iraq. Washington also showed great skill by cooperating with Israel in its firm but nuanced response to Syria’s nuclear reactor at Al Kibar. But in Syria and Lebanon, the United States was simply not creative or flexible enough to counter Assad’s moves. An unfortunate ancillary side effect of American isolation was Washington’s inability to respond to the Assad regime’s skillful use of the chaos of sectarian bloodshed in US-occupied Iraq and war in Lebanon to rally the Syrian people around the flag and arrest domestic pressure on the regime. Washington’s lack of a response to Hezbollah’s “takeover” of west Beirut in May 2008 and the subsequent veto power given to the Party of God over the Lebanese state showed that when push came to shove in Lebanon, the Bush administration was unwilling—and perhaps ultimately unable—to push back. It also was unable to develop a diplomatic strategy to arrest Hezbollah’s rise in Lebanon.

  When US engagement finally resumed in 2009 in the name of creating tension between Iran and Syria, the Assad regime’s deepening of relations with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon clashed directly with the Obama administration’s objective of using a Syrian-Israel peace treaty to reorient Syria away from Iran. Insisting that he sought peace with Israel but was unwilling to give up Syria’s close relations with Iran and Hezbollah, Assad attempted to have his political cake and eat it too.

  But then the winds of change blew through Syria. In January 2011, antiregime protests in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes. Suddenly the strongly held notion in Washington and throughout the world that autocratic Arab regimes were stable was called into question. Dramatic scenes spread around the world of knife-wielding regime thugs riding horses and camels and assaulting pro-democracy protestors, who were using Facebook and Twitter accounts via smartphones to demand civic and human rights, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Clearly, there was a gap between these regimes’ anachronistic and brutal idea of governance and the protestors living their lives in the twenty-first century.

  True to form, Assad reacted with hubris. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2011, Assad claimed that his regime was impervious to the kind of protests that brought down the governments of Ben Ali and Mubarak, because his policies were so “closely linked to the beliefs of the people.”14 He quickly lifted the regime’s Internet firewal
l—which blocked Facebook and Twitter—as a sign of his domestic legitimacy, seemingly daring antiregime activists to test him.

  And they did. On March 15, a small antiregime protest broke out in front of Damascus University, followed by unrest in the southern Syrian city of Der’a, the capital of the southern Houran region of Syria from which my business partner, Leila Hourani, and her family hail. The protests were instigated when security officials arrested a group of children aged ten to fourteen for scrawling on a wall, “The people want the fall of the regime”—a slogan seen widely in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. After failing to convince the regime to release the children, their families flooded the streets of Der’a to demand their release. The regime responded with force on March 18, killing six and injuring scores of others.

  On March 21, the regime sent a delegation of high-level officials native to Der’a, including deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad, to engage with local tribal leaders and quell the violence. The children were released and the governor of Der’a was sacked, but the regime continued to use force to disperse demonstrators on March 22, killing another six. While the protests were non-Islamic in nature, on March 23 the protestors also chanted “No to Iran, no to Hizballah!” and “We want a leader who fears God!” The latter of these slogans constitutes a reference to the Assad family’s roots in the Alawite faith, the heterodox offshoot of Shiite Islam that dominates the Syrian regime.

  Perhaps more notable than the scale of the protests was the protestors’ demographic base. The tribal Sunni population of the Houran region has played a key role in stabilizing the Assad regime. For hundreds of years, tensions had flared between Syria’s Alawite community and its Sunni majority. The flash point for this simmering conflict had last occurred in February 1982, when the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood threw Hafez al-Assad’s security forces out of the northern Syrian city of Hama. The regime responded by shelling the city, killing an estimated thirty thousand people, and arresting thousands of suspected Muslim Brotherhood supporters all across Syria, many of whose whereabouts remain unknown to this day. To stabilize the regime, Hafez gave it a veneer of Sunni legitimacy by co-opting tribal Sunnis from the Houran region and the Jazeera region of eastern Syria—as well as the Sunni Damascene and Aleppine merchant trading families—to join the regime’s core of Alawites, Druze, Ismailis, and Christians. The protests in Der’a began to crack and break away that Sunni veneer.

  In response to the 2011 uprisings, Assad delivered a speech before the Syrian parliament on March 30, 2011. Despite multiple reports that Assad would announce sweeping reforms, the president instead gave a defiant speech with no specific details. Nearly two dozen times, Assad blamed the protests on a vague conspiracy of some type coming from the United States and Israel, and he dismissed the notion that an “old guard” or other hard-line faction was holding him back from launching domestic reforms. The protests quickly spread to other Sunni areas and cities, including Homs, Latakia, and Banias on the Syrian coast. The regime reacted with lethal fire as well as the deploying of Shabbiha (Ghosts), bands of Alawite thugs and militia that threatened and terrorized Sunni communities. Sectarian tensions increased, and Sunni refugees from the village of Tal Khalak, which is surrounded by a constellation of Alawite villages located along the Lebanese frontier southwest of Homs, fled into Lebanon. By late April, around one thousand Syrians had perished, and the regime had arrested another ten thousand in what had quickly become its biggest crackdown under Bashar al-Assad, dwarfing its arrests following the 2000 to 2001 Damascus Spring and the 2005 Damascus Declaration.

  The unrest created a problem for the Obama administration in terms of how to punish the Assad regime for the crackdown. The Bush administration, for all its emphasis on democracy promotion, had not included provisions for human rights. On April 29, the Obama administration issued Executive Order 13572, which declared the Syrian regime’s “continuing escalation of violence against the people of Syria, including through attacks on protestors, arrests and harassment of protestors and political activists, and repression of democratic change” a national emergency. The administration targeted Assad’s brother Maher, the commander of Syria’s Fourth Armored Division who played a key role in suppressing protests in Der’a; Atif Najib, Assad’s cousin and head of the Political Security Directorate; Ali Mamlouk, chief of the General Intelligence Directorate (GID); and the organization itself. Unexpectedly, the administration also sanctioned Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Quds Force (IRGC-QF) for “providing material support to the Syrian government related to the crackdown.” While the nature of that support was unclear, it was widely rumored in policy and activist circles that Iran had provided software to track Facebook and Twitter users, thus helping to explain the apparent reason for Assad’s magnanimous gesture of lifting his regime’s Internet block on both platforms.

  Then, in a speech on May 19 that outlined US policy on what had become known as the Arab Spring, Obama chided Assad by saying the Syrian president had to lead a transition to democracy or “get out of the way.” The same day, Obama issued another order sanctioning Assad himself, vice president Farouk al-Shara, prime minister Adel Safar, interior minister Mohammad Ibrahim al-Shaar, defense minister Ali Habib Mahmoud, military intelligence chief Abdul Fatah Qudsiya, and Political Security Directorate head Mohammed Dib Zaitoun for responsibility for the crackdown.

  Assad responded with more force and defiance, and the protests spread to Syria’s Idlib governorate in the country’s northwest region. In the village of Jisr al-Shughour, protestors under the threat of government forces picked up guns and, along with support from unknown gunmen, forced the regime’s forces from the town. As the Syrian army approached Jisr al-Shughour, nearly eleven thousand refugees fled over the border into Turkey. When the regime forces arrived, they claimed those defending the village were takfiri extremists—Sunni Islamists who deem non-Sunnis apostates.

  Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had a long history of positive rapport with Assad, unleashed rare public criticism of the president, describing the crackdown as “barbaric” and saying that his telephone conversations with Assad indicated he was “taking the issue lightly.” Rumors soon spread that Erdogan said Assad had to ask his brother Maher to leave the country and implement reform or risk Turkey’s wrath.

  In response, Rami Makhlouf—who, only a few weeks before, had threatened in a New York Times interview that the regime would essentially fight to the death and warned that “if there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be stability in Israel”—announced that he would divest his shares in the country’s lucrative mobile-phone carrier, Syriatel, as well as real estate investments, and he would donate the proceeds to charity.15 Then, on May 20, Assad delivered a speech at Damascus University in an attempt to quell three months of antiregime protests sweeping Syria. While recognizing some of the protestors had legitimate concerns, Assad continued to blame the demonstrations on a “conspiracy” of “outlaws,” “vandals,” and “takfiri extremists.” Perhaps most offensively, Assad refused to recognize the regime’s brutal crackdown on the protesters. He also dismissed “rumors related to the president and his family”—a reference to reports that Maher was leading efforts to snuff out the demonstrations.

  But the fact that Assad dedicated his speech to themes of reform demonstrates that the Assad family was beginning to see the need for change under the pressure of growing antiregime protests and international pressure from Turkey, France, and the United States. Assad promised to address corruption (which, Transparency International’s figures show, has skyrocketed under his reign), a new law for elections, increased media freedoms, and local administrative reform. Assad also dangled the prospect of constitutional reforms in response to a “new political reality in Syria.”

  Instead of immediately implementing the measures by presidential decree—which he could easily do under Syria’s presidential system—he chose to push responsibility for the decision into various committees a
head of a “National Dialogue” that he vaguely said would roll out sometime in the next two months.

  All the measures Assad outlined had been under consideration by the regime for years, so it was unclear how much discussion would be required for passage, other than that of Assad’s willingness to sign the measures into law. In addressing the issue of why reform in Syria has been so slow, Assad said there was “no reason”—a reference to his speech on March 30 in which he dismissed the notion that a group of hard-line or old-guard figures were holding him back. Finally, Assad indicated that Syria’s parliamentary elections, which were originally set for August, might be rescheduled before the end of 2011.16

  As Washington officials struggled to come up with a further policy response to the Syrian uprising, it was clear that any strategy they chose going forward had to cut through the ambiguity and duplicity that was the hallmark of Bashar al-Assad’s reign. In speeches on March 30 and June 20, he blamed the unrest sweeping his country on foreign “conspiracies” and refused to announce any specific reforms, indicating that he was not about to change his ways—at least not without a push from the outside.17

  Assad had spent the last eleven years promising political “reform,” but he had never delivered on the promise. This pattern is a well-established one. He talks about peace with Israel and at the same time sends Scud missiles to Hezbollah. He promises to keep his hands off Lebanon but worked with Hezbollah to bring down the government in Beirut. He says that as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty he wants a nuclear-free Middle East, but he stonewalls International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors investigating the rubble of his North Korean–designed nuclear program.

  Until the uprising, the Obama administration had engaged Assad with the primary goal of restarting peace talks between Syria and Israel while trying to mitigate the regional damage from Syria’s worsening policies. Washington has attempted to test Assad’s intention and ability to reorient his country away from Iran and toward the West in Syria-Israel peace talks by putting him on the horns of a dilemma: Either you get back the Golan Heights, or you keep supporting Hezbollah—but not both. Those well-intentioned efforts failed to break the gridlock. Israel watched Assad’s transfer of weapons to Hezbollah, doubted his peaceful intentions, and refused to make the risky political decision to rejoin talks. With Washington unable to deliver Israel to the negotiating table, Assad was not compelled to show his hand.