Tag Archives: Syria

Is Obama’s anti-ISIS operation really just intended to overthrow Assad?

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A New York Times report says President Obama will destroy Syrian air defenses if they respond to the U.S. attack on ISIS, and he believes this would end the regime.

As soon as President Obama said the operations against ISIS within Syria would consist of limited airstrikes, without Syrian coordination, I wondered what was going to happen if Syrian air defenses responded to the uninvited American incursions. Are we going to destroy them like NATO did with Libya’s air defense and detection systems in 2011? Because then that’s not a limited operation anymore, and it is a direct attack on the Syrian government and military.

Sure enough, that seems to be the working plan (edit: confirmed by U.S. officials today). A New York Times article over the weekend reported on a gathering of a “a group of visitors who met with [President Obama] in the White House before his televised speech to the nation,” based on accounts by “several people who were in the meeting.”

[…] he vowed to retaliate against President Bashar al-Assad if Syrian forces shot at American planes […] He made clear the intricacy of the situation, though, as he contemplated the possibility that Mr. Assad might order his forces to fire at American planes entering Syrian airspace. If he dared to do that, Mr. Obama said he would order American forces to wipe out Syria’s air defense system, which he noted would be easier than striking ISIS because its locations are better known. He went on to say that such an action by Mr. Assad would lead to his overthrow, according to one account.

 
The first part of that is one of the big reasons I was and am strongly opposed to any U.S. military intervention against ISIS inside Syria. The United States’ refusal to coordinate with the Syrian regime — which makes sense diplomatically and strategically perhaps, but not tactically — is at worst goading them into hitting back at the United States and at best setting up a situation where anti-aircraft might be deployed accidentally in the heat of the moment and the confusing fog of war. Even if the regime has no plans to fire back, someone could panic upon seeing approaching bombers on a screen and start shooting anti-aircraft batteries at them. This seems like a possibility particularly at the somewhat isolated major government air base and regime-held zone near the heart of ISIS territory (see map below), where central command might be harder to contact in an emergency.

And that’s if it’s by accident. Al-Arabiya, in their coverage of the New York Times report, reiterated the Syrian government’s public determination to treat as hostile any uncoordinated efforts against ISIS within Syrian territory (longer transcript quotes are at the bottom of this page):

In an interview with CNN over the weekend, Assad adviser Bouthaina Shaaban warned against any “act of aggression” by the U.S. against Syria, while voicing readiness to work with Washington to combat ISIS.

“We are ready to be part of any coalition against terrorism, and any strike on Syria without coordination with the Syrian government is considered an aggression against Syria,” she said.

 
Moreover, the Times report indicates that the President noted that regime targets would be easier to hit than ISIS targets anyway — which is an awfully big detour to make from the stated goal of the upcoming operation — and claimed that the destruction of the regime’s air defense systems would cause the regime to fall. This suggests that this entire action may become, intentionally or under its own momentum and collateral consequences, the backdoor route to reboot the administration’s increasingly difficult goal of regime change in Syria.

I wouldn’t suggest that possible motive, were it not for the President’s own speech announcing the policy, in which he re-affirmed an intention to supply money, training, and weapons to the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria. These rebels are badly, perhaps irreversibly, losing the Syrian civil war right now. Their only realistic hope of achieving victory at this point is if the Syrian regime and military suddenly collapses from some external and much larger force, such as a direct attack by the United States. So either this continued “aid to rebels” plan is a half-baked gesture or the impending operation — theoretically against ISIS, a third party — is supposed to end in a major military setback for the Syrian armed forces that is significant enough to reset the rebellion’s chances of success.

I still have no idea how the regime’s air defense systems being destroyed would, on its own, precipitate the fall of the regime to a light infantry rebellion that doesn’t seem to have had any aircraft in quite some time, if they ever did. But it would certainly make it a lot easier for an external military air power to make the decision to bomb the regime out of existence at a later date. And it might hamper the government’s ability to continue bombing rebel-held areas.

Whatever the plan here is supposed to be, it’s getting out of control before it’s even started.

Map of the Syrian Civil War as of September 13, 2014. Red = Regime, Gray = ISIS, Green = FSA, Yellow = Kurdish. (via Wikimedia)

Map of the Syrian Civil War as of September 13, 2014. Red = Regime, Gray = ISIS, Green = FSA, Yellow = Kurdish. (via Wikimedia)


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Nusra Front releases Fiji peacekeepers held in Syria

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Qatar has “negotiated” (paid the ransom?) for the release of 45 Fijian UN peacekeepers deployed in Golan Heights being held by Nusra Front, Syria’s Al Qaeda branch.

Oddly, one of the (presumably unmet) demands reported by the Fijian troops was that Nusra Front wants to be de-listed as a terrorist organization…which, you know, is a tough sell when you’ve just kidnapped United Nations troops and held them for ransom. Nusra Front is a member of the disparate assembly of Sunni Arab rebel forces opposing both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s three-way civil war. They are likely to benefit inadvertently from President Obama’s and Congress’s proposed increase of weapons and funding for anti-ISIS/anti-Assad forces.

In related news, Philippines peacekeepers who had refused to surrender at two separate locations on the same day the Fijian troops were captured managed to break out successfully, with some help from Irish peacekeepers. The UN forces are stationed permanently in Golan Heights, between the Israeli-occupied zone and the Syrian zone, in an arrangement implemented in 1974. The increasing active danger due to the Syrian civil war, including these hostage episodes, has prompted a number of peacekeeper-supplying nations to withdraw or consider withdrawing their troops from Golan Heights.

Still image from a Nusra Front video of Fijian peacekeeper hostages shortly before their release.

Still image from a Nusra Front video of Fijian peacekeeper hostages shortly before their release.

Assad versus the ISIS administrators: The next stage of Syria’s war

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I’ve been arguing for several months now that the durability of ISIS over the long-run is going to be a lot less about ability to rapidly take over territory with mobile light infantry than about ability to hold the territory they already have. Beheadings, massacres, and general intimidation can keep people docile for a while, but in the end every territorial administration — whether a state or a non-recognized/non-state actor — has to balance that with substantial provision of basic services, governmental functions, and food access. Otherwise people just get hungry enough and angry enough to overthrow you no matter how many gunmen you have on payroll.

Fluid terrorist organizations that move easily between physical locations and do not attempt to run a state can basically do whatever they want and be as vicious as they want. But organizations that set themselves up in a defined physical space (a territory) and attempt to take over or establish a new state (or pseudo-state) quickly find that the administration capacity question is what makes or breaks their ability to remain in control.

Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and al-Shabab in southern Somalia, have all proven that they can gain a ton of local support by providing government functions effectively and providing food and services to their constituent populations effectively (particularly when compared to the alternative vacuum). They are so good at the “welfare” part of the welfare state that they can take actions that directly or indirectly cause harm to their populations and they will still remain highly popular within their territories. For example, as I examined previously, al-Shabab has spent millions of dollars since 2011 on serious, long-term agro-infrastructure development in southern Somalia to reduce famine risk and create and independent local food production capacity that breaks the cycle of dependence on food imports.

ISIS has declared itself to be “The Islamic State” and has carved out an entirely new administrative district, Forat Province, based on the Arabic name for the Euphrates River, which spans part of eastern Syria and western Iraq. They have clearly established themselves in the territorial-control model of terrorist organizations.

Contrary to much of the breathless media reporting focusing on their rapid traversing of desert highways, the expansion of ISIS is far from unstoppable or perfectly stable. Already they have reached the point where they have disrupted local administrative functions so heavily that they need to slow down and resume bureaucratic operations to keep everything spinning smoothly enough for people to remain accepting of their rule in the places they’ve already captured.

In particular, the core of the ISIS sphere of control poses a lot of challenges for the organization. A lot of local community leaders in eastern Syria are economic mercenaries, exploiting the civil war’s chaos, with only the thinnest of allegiances to ISIS, who will turn on them without a moment’s notice if a better opportunity comes along that ISIS can’t outmatch.

According to reporting from Reuters, however, ISIS has actually been making some disturbingly long strides in eastern Syria in terms of rebooting the administrative activities after their initial wave of terror: Read more

Further indications that the “Syrian opposition” leaders are a joke

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The New York Times this weekend published a “human interest”-type story on Ghassan Hitto — a longtime U.S. resident, Texas executive, and almost lifelong Syrian Kurd exile — who briefly became the first interim “prime minister” of the exiled pseudo-government of the Syrian opposition in Istanbul, Turkey.

My main takeaway from this article is that this story further supports the notion that not only is the Syrian opposition’s civil “leadership” (from the Syrian National Coalition to the “Syrian Interim Government” once headed by Ghassan Hitto) pretty much a complete joke with almost no experience in governmental functions, but it also has virtually no connection to events on the ground.

Whether the myriad rebel groups opposing the Assad regime were winning or losing the war, it made no difference to the so-called leaders drawn practically from everywhere but Syria. And they were so disconnected to the fighters that they never had any ability to influence them in the other direction either. They are — and have been from the start — utterly unrepresentative and irrelevant, yet have been more or less treated as the legitimate government-in-waiting by many (anti-Assad) government officials around the world.

It would almost be funny that this man, who had left Syria decades three earlier as a teen and still wasn’t back, at one point called himself “the prime minister of Syria,” if it weren’t so pathetic. Here are some excerpts from the Times profile:

Mr. Hitto, most recently the director of operations for a Texas-based telecommunications company, became interim prime minister of the Syrian opposition coalition a few days later. What was supposed to have been a two-week trip had evolved into something far more complicated.

Mr. Hitto, who had spent most of his life in the United States, had taken on the task of forming an alternative government to that of President Bashar al-Assad.
[…]
When people involved in the opposition government floated him as a candidate for prime minister, he was skeptical, he said. He had never before held public office. And the alternative government, based in Turkey and filled with expatriates, was still struggling to gain legitimacy.
[…]
His son Obaida was similarly reluctant to leave Syria, even though his father said that on the inside, he would become an immediate target for Mr. Assad’s men.

He questioned why his father wanted to work with the opposition coalition, voicing an oft-heard criticism among fighters and activists.

“I was in Syria where people were coming under shelling and didn’t have anything to eat,” Obaida recalled over Skype. “And there was the opposition coalition; people outside in hotels, smoking cigarettes.”

Though Mr. Hitto ultimately won over his son, who relocated to Istanbul to attend meetings with his father, the perception of the expatriate coalition as a collection of dilettantes and dreamers was one of the many obstacles he faced as he took office.

Back in Dallas, Mr. Hitto was known as a pragmatic community taskmaster, the man you put in charge to make sure the soccer field or mosque gets built. He had a history of activism, whether fighting for the legal rights of Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, or establishing a group in Texas to help Syrians in need.

But persuading the disparate members of his pseudo-government to agree on anything — while trying to win over rebel leaders who were skeptical of his background in the United States — proved to be impossible. He resigned after less than four months.

 
It brings to mind the bizarre coalition of embittered, one-upping, tough-talking Iraqi exiles (some of whom were hand-picked by the CIA a decade before) with almost no constituencies or followers left on the ground in Iraq, who managed to convince the (willingly hoodwinked) Bush-Cheney Administration in 2002 — against U.S. intelligence advisories — that Iraqis would uniformly welcome American troops as “liberators” and that assembling a new government would be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

It’s amazing how often the governments of the world rush to proclaim some, essentially, randos with good sales pitches as the once and future kings of the countries whose governments they wish to change. The idea that leaders should have some sort of backing or base of support domestically seems like an alien concept to many.

In the case of Syria, this is just more evidence that there’s no point in the United States trying to support the “opposition” anymore, whether against Assad or against ISIS, because there isn’t one. And by more and more accounts from reporters, there probably never was a real one to begin with.

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August 27, 2014 – Arsenal For Democracy 97

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AFD-logo-470

Topics: Big Idea – How to regulate the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world; US, ISIS, and Syria; Interview with freelance writer and Ferguson protest eyewitness Jamie Nesbitt Golden. People: Bill, Persephone. Produced: August 24, 2014.

Discussion Points:

– Big Idea: Are “sharing economy” services like Uber and Airbnb helping people avoid important safety regulations and local taxes?
– What would be the consequences if the U.S. intervenes militarily against ISIS inside Syria?
– How much focus should be on Ferguson versus the wider problem nationwide?

Part 1 – Sharing Economy:
Part 1 – Sharing Economy – AFD 97
Part 2 – US, ISIS, Syria:
Part 2 – US, ISIS, Syria – AFD 97
Part 3 – Jamie Nesbitt Golden:
Part 3 – Jamie Nesbitt Golden on Ferguson – AFD 97

To get one file for the whole episode, we recommend using one of the subscribe links at the bottom of the post.

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Syria: Fight the inertia of “no good options” policymaking

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The United States is flailing rapidly toward an ill-conceived military intervention in Syria against ISIS, as I predicted last week, apparently under the inertia of the cop-out analysis known as “there are no good options.” This troubling declaration is a common hand-wave used in Washington to justify stumbling into catastrophic decisions without much of a rational or clear-headed decision-making process, before or after it happens, to silence public criticism.

I really dislike the whole “there are no good options” school of foreign policy punditry and officialdom, because even when there are a lot of bad options and no good ones, that doesn’t mean you should immediately pull the lever on the more horrendous end of the spectrum.

And a spectrum of bad ideas is exactly what we’re looking at here. Doing nothing in Syria continues to be on the less bad end of the spectrum, as I explained at length in last week’s analysis (and in many prior posts). Simply put: Airstrikes in Syria opens a door we are not prepared to walk through, but if this starts, we may well be dragged. Any direct U.S. military intervention in Syria should be avoided, to prevent that.

Additionally, as I examined in a recap of the Wall Street Journal’s investigation of the Assad-ISIS relationship, the Syrian regime has carefully positioned ISIS (and itself) over the course of a year such that the United States may be forced to align with Bashar al-Assad, if it intervenes, at the cost global humiliation and anger of many allies and the Washington Beltway. Already, even just with the start of unauthorized U.S. surveillance flights over Syria, the trolling has begun.

Syria on Monday signaled its readiness to work with the United States in a coordinated campaign against ISIS. But it warned the White House that it needed to coordinate airstrikes with the Assad government or it would view them as a breach of its sovereignty and an “act of aggression.”

 
Let’s look, too, at an article, by Peter Beinart at The Atlantic, entitled “The Problem With Bombing ISIS.” I have a lot of problems with this article’s framing, but the core premise is correct, in my opinion. A crucial deciding factor of when to intervene in a situation needs to be who fills the vacuum after a U.S. military intervention (if successful!) and whether they are better than the dislodged power, for the people ostensibly being helped:

From Somalia to Kosovo to Libya, the problem with America’s humanitarian interventions has never been ascertaining the nastiness of the people we’re fighting against. It’s been ascertaining the efficacy and decency of the people we’re fighting for. That’s a particular challenge in the case of ISIS in Syria.

 
In Syria, that’s either going to be Assad or other jihadists in al Qaeda’s Nusra Front or in the so-called “Free Syrian Army” (if they somehow bounce back from the brink of defeat): Read more

Syrian regime finally turns on ISIS (after helping it rise)

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Assad government has dropped its “blind-eye” strategy and flipped to start attacking ISIS head-on. The Journal has assembled a very comprehensive explanation of how Bashar Al-Assad’s government in Damascus manipulated mutually opposing rebel factions to weaken coherent opposition to the regime and enable them to crush the US/Western-backed side of the three-way war. They describe this new review as being “pieced together from interviews with Syrian rebel commanders and opposition figures, Iraqi government officials and Western diplomats, as well as al Qaeda documents seized by the U.S. military in Iraq.”

Here’s a concise account by an Assad supporter in Iraq about the evolution of the strategy:

Earlier in the three-year-old Syrian uprising, Mr. Assad decided to mostly avoid fighting the Islamic State to enable it to cannibalize the more secular rebel group supported by the West, the Free Syrian Army, said Izzat Shahbandar, an Assad ally and former Iraqi lawmaker who was Baghdad’s liaison to Damascus. The goal, he said, was to force the world to choose between the regime and extremists.

“When the Syrian army is not fighting the Islamic State, this makes the group stronger,” said Mr. Shahbandar, a close aide to former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who said Mr. Assad described the strategy to him personally during a visit in May to Damascus. “And sometimes, the army gives them a safe path to allow the Islamic State to attack the FSA and seize their weapons.”

“It’s a strategy to eliminate the FSA and have the two main players face each other in Syria: Assad and the Islamic State,” said Mr. Shahbandar. “And now [Damascus] is asking the world to help, and the world can’t say no.”

 
Backed into a corner, we saw senior UK officials just today having to deny that Britain would switch to supporting the Syrian government again, in response to ISIS. So while the world may still “say no” to Assad, they’ve certainly be put into an awkward position.

Back to the Wall Street Journal account, we learn that the government in Western Syria has finally turned its attention toward the threat in the east: Read more