Sadly the shelling of a city full of civilians is an all too familiar occurrence in international affairs. Add Homs to a list that includes: Sarajevo, Baghdad, Grozny, Tskhinval(i) and others. These are sites of what some call ‘urbicide,’ a lesser known term originating, like ethnic cleansing, from the Bosnian maelstrom in the mid nineties. The shelling, by Russian made T 72 tanks and artillery, appears to be indiscriminate and designed to intimidate and terrorize. The reporting of the BBC’s Paul Wood has been compelling.
I’ve read various op eds on the crisis and heard a variety of perspectives from that of Richard Haas on the BBC (its tragic but we can do little), to Anne Marie Slaughter (establish a humanitarian zone) (both former heads of the US State Department’s Planning Policy office) to Seumas Milne in the Guardian.
The arguments of Haas are standard ‘realist’ fare, which constructs the world in the tragic terms it uses to describe it. Realism can be analytically useful (see below) but its blind to its own ethnocentric assumptions too much of the time. I have always enjoyed listening to and reading Haas though I often disagree with the terms of his analysis. His War of Necessity, War of Choice is a good read that works well in the classroom.
Milne represents the European leftist position that is deeply critical and suspicious of international interventionism. His argument that intervention would cause more loss of life is the same he made in Libya. He is correct, in the short-term. But what would the loss of life had been, over the long term, if Gaddafi had succeeded in re-establishing his hold over all of Libya? Here we face an immediate direct violence versus long term structural violence tradeoff. That country currently has serious divisions and very disturbing practices — torture, disappearances and the cleansing of a town associated with Gaddafi loyalists — but it also has the chance to create structures which promise a better life for most of its people in the long term. Its struggle has entered phase two, though it is inevitably marked by the shadow of phase one.
What about Syria? Milne also condemns the hypocrisy of US and British ‘moral posturing’ on Syria given their track record in Iraq, Afghanistan and their support of Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights. Haas’s realism accepts that moral hypocrisy is a common feature of international relations (for example, consider Russia’s outrage against the Georgian shelling of Tskhinval(i) with GRAD missiles, the same practice they used against Grozny). Moral hypocrisy is in the eye of the beholder, however. There is also the potential hypocrisy of not doing anything in Syria in comparison to Libya. Both of these arguments, however, seem more like posturing and venting. The realist displays his masculine unsentimentality while the skeptical leftist displays his resentments and suspicions. Neither help address the terms of this case.
Milne’s point is that the Syrian crisis needs to be understood on three levels: as a popular uprising against an authoritarian regime, as a grimly violent sectarian struggle, and as part of a Western proxy war against Iran which Russia and China are seeking to check. The explication of levels of analysis is helpful but his brief categorizations are not necessarily so. First, this does indeed appear to be a popular uprising. The critical question here is the following: do the terms of the positive and heroic ‘Arab Spring’ narrative blind us to important localized dimensions of the Syrian crisis? I think it does. Homs is a longstanding area of difficulty for the Alawite-based and Damascus centered regime. We have to be critically sensitive to the localized dimensions of this struggle. Localized geopolitics, localized geopolitics!!! This was vital, remember, in Libya.
The second critical question is: to what extend has the nature of the predatory state apparatus created by the Assad regime, and its merchant political economy, been built on ethnic foundation or on regime-based foundations? If it is the former, the prospect of civil war is very high. If it is the latter, there is a greater chance of regime fragmentation and defections which could lead to a relatively rapid end-game. This is an empirical question and pits regime versus ethnic versus place-based consciousness. Are there Alawite leaders opposed to the regime? Are the Sunni merchants in Damascus and Aleppo loyal to the regime? Are all Christians and Druze? How deep are their loyalties?
This raises a third critical question: to what extent are the military units defending the regime isolated from the general population and from the “collective effervescence” of the uprising? Recent indications suggest the pace of defection has quickened in recent months and weeks. (Certainly, the squabbling within the growing Syrian opposition is manifestly clear) If so, then modern media are penetrating the enveloping story about terrorists fed to the soldiers doing the shelling. Here I’d like to know more about the penetrative power of non-local Arab language media in Syria.
A fourth critical question follows: what type of actions, at this stage, can be the most helpful in immediately ending the shelling and more generally furthering the process of regime transformation in Syria? Obama and European NATO members have ruled out the use of airpower. But Turkey is a member of NATO and shares a border with Syria.
This is where Anne Marie Slaughter’s suggestion is worth considering. She had previously made this suggestion as part of an elaboration, in the Atlantic, of whether Syria meets the criteria for a R2P intervention. Here is the key paragraph:
An alternative, which in my view is still possible notwithstanding Saturday’s vote, is a military intervention by troops from various Arab League countries and Turkey to create safe zones for civilian protesters and all soldiers who wish to defect from the army. The sponsoring countries would have to make clear through every means possible within Syria itself that the goal of the intervention is to protect the population until a political settlement can be reached. That would not include arming the FSA. The point would be to stop the killing rather than to enable it on both sides. The choice between these scenarios (assuming political will exists among Syria’s neighbours for taking up arms rather than sending them to FSA) should depend on which strategy saves more lives and is least destabilising to the region.
I find this position more ‘realistic’ than sitting back and doing little. It also nudges forward the norm of ‘responsibility to protect’ and creates the possibility for transformational change in Syria. Turkey’s role is absolutely central. This needs to be a regional-led effort, with Euro-Atlantic institutions playing a supportive role, and getting civilians out of the area into proper medical facilities. Milne’s third level — the proxy game over Iran — is certainly there but it may also be over-reading this situation in the way that certain geopolitical narratives do. Do what one can to respond to manifest and immediate human security needs: that is a reasonable and legitimate foundation for any foreign policy actions in the region. Lets act.
