Saving Bashar's Bacon

Michael Young | September 23, 2005

According to several sources, the latest being the Washington Post, Syria's Bashar Assad is trying to cut a deal to save his regime, which is likely to be blamed in an end-of-October United Nations report for the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. This would involve caving in to virtually every American demand on Syrian behavior in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the fate of the Golan Heights, and more. Yesterday, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Balad noted that a Saudi-Egyptian plan is in the works to reduce pressure on the Syrians.

Two thoughts come to mind: one, such a scheme will likely fail, since neither the U.S. nor France is willing to bail Bashar out, and the German investigator looking into the Hariri murder, Detlev Mehlis, is not someone likely to make deals (though U.S. sources suggest senior UN bureaucrats may be more willing to tone down his final report); and two, the Saudi-Egyptian plan (apparently presented to the Syrians by the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Bandar bin Sultan) is more likely an effort to engineer a peaceful transition away from Assad rule than an effort to save the president's skin.

Comments

|9.23.05 @ 5:27PM|#

Good.

|9.23.05 @ 5:47PM|#

This isn't so much aimed at Michael Young...

But, gee, isn't it funny these good things that keep happening in the broader Middle East.

It's almost as if there were some kind of grand plan.

|9.23.05 @ 6:37PM|#

Bob, I've got a question for you:

What the difference between the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria on the one hand, and the collapse of Iran's liberal resistance, the speeding up of its nuclear program, and the election of an Islamist hardliner to the presidency on the other?

Give up?

The last three have actually happened.

|9.23.05 @ 6:52PM|#

Iran = "broader Middle East". Thank for clarifying, joe.

|9.23.05 @ 7:34PM|#

Uh, yes, Iran is in the broader Middle East, jf. Sort of like Syria and Lebanon.

Are there any other Middle Eastern countries you'd care to disqualify from conversations about the Broader Middle East?

|9.23.05 @ 7:49PM|#

"Are there any other Middle Eastern countries you'd care to disqualify from conversations about the Broader Middle East?"

I'd like to exclude Turkey--it's spelled like a bird--and Saudi Arabia.

...Saudi Arabia just because.

|9.23.05 @ 8:04PM|#

Sorry, joe, it just seemed to me like you were concentrating on Iran to refute bob's "broader Middle East" statement.

Come to think of it, that's exactly what you did.

|9.23.05 @ 9:01PM|#

Yup. You got me. I pointed out an example from a larger set in order to examine the validity of a statement that was made about that set.

It's a "reality based" thing; you wouldn't understand.

|9.23.05 @ 10:37PM|#

Joe:

Perhaps the difference is that you can't connect Bush to or fault him for what happens in Iran (the nuclear program has been pursued for years, it was only US pressure that forced the Iranians to start play with the Europeans in the first place, the freedom movement in Iran needed to be crushed only after it was inspired by revolutions in other areas, etc.).

But you can make a reasonable case that Bush's decision to stop seeking stability-at-any-price as the main goal of US policy helped facilitate the Cedar Revolution, the subsequent Syrian withdrawal form Lebanon, Assad's internaitonal isolation, and make whatever threat the Syrian regime faces come about.

Reality-based enough for you?

Shannon Love|9.24.05 @ 12:20AM|#

Michael Young,

Why is the Hamari investigation so threatening to Assad's regime? Everybody already assumes that the Syrians did it. It is unlikely that anybody except the US will respond to the report with more than token economic sanctions. So why do see this as the straw that will break the camels back?

|9.24.05 @ 10:40AM|#

"Perhaps the difference is that you can't connect Bush to or fault him for what happens in Iran"

Of course not. The presence of a hostile army on a nation's border, combined with threats by that army's commander in chief, and the history of using that army to topple the governments he threatens, would certainly not result in a "rally around the flag" effect among the populace, allow the government to tar the opposition as disloyal, give the government a freer hand in squashing that opposition, or encourage the government to pursue a nuclear deterent.

Now, causing a nation's populace to become angry at the assassination of a popular leader - that's the sort of thing that's probably caused by a war in a country hundreds of miles away.

BTW, nobody in Lebanon uses the term "Cedar Revolution." It's a term invented in Washington, and marks the speaker as one who has no clue about Lebanese politics.

Also, the student and popular protests in Iran were at their peak in the 1990s and early 00s, and died out after the Iraq invasion.

If you'd like to be reality based, perhaps you should base your suppositions on reality.

|9.24.05 @ 11:02AM|#

I'd like to read Michael Young's answer to Shannon's question, too. It's not like his regime has been held together by the respect for its morality among the populace.

gaius marius|9.24.05 @ 1:35PM|#

mr young assumes, i suspect, like any good neocon hack, that the report will become the pretense for the yearned-for rebirth in destruction of an american invasion -- at the very least, some invigorating bombing. then he projects this view on assad (whether assad holds it or not), envisions assad quaking like a child before the american hero-monster and handing over the keys to mideastern utopia (which, of course, all good neocons know, syria holds).

|9.24.05 @ 1:40PM|#

Young has also demonstrated a remarkably capacity for confusing what he would like to see happen with the most likely scenario in the objective world.

Like when he reported that the massive Hezbollah demonstration in Beirut was a demonstration of their political irrelevance.

|9.24.05 @ 2:01PM|#

Why does everyone keep pointing to the Cedar Revolution as some big sign of success? At this point all it appears to have done was allow Hamas to cement their control over southern Lebanon and expand into northern regions. Lovely that they got tired of being pushed around by Syria, but it doesn't mean very much if the new government is naturally friendly to Syria's interests.

I mean, Holy Christ, doesn't anyone actually follow up on consequences before they cite actions anymore?

|9.24.05 @ 2:04PM|#

Hamas should have been Hezbollah.

What? It's early here.

|9.24.05 @ 2:26PM|#

Well, Shem, that's hardly all that's happened.

|9.24.05 @ 2:45PM|#

Like when he reported that the massive Hezbollah demonstration in Beirut was a demonstration of their political irrelevance.

Yeah, he sure looked dumb when Hezbollah cleaned up in elections in May, didn't he

|9.24.05 @ 8:47PM|#

Bashar Assad is the archetypical two-faced bastard. Always the double game. Time someone called his bluff!

|9.24.05 @ 11:18PM|#

So why do see this as the straw that will break the camels back?

That's a very good question. Sanctions don't have an excellent track record for bringing down dictatorships. See Cuba for a particularly egregious example. And apparently sanctions weren't quite doing the trick in Iraq.

|9.24.05 @ 11:34PM|#

Well, Shem, that's hardly all that's happened.

Yeah, but it *has* happened. Pretending that it doesn't so that people can protect some panglossian notion of Middle-Eastern improvement is fast growning thin.

|9.26.05 @ 1:52AM|#

Why is the Hamari investigation so threatening to Assad's regime? Everybody already assumes that the Syrians did it.

That is a good question. Michael, can you explain for those of us who aren't so in tune with the ME?

theOneState|9.26.05 @ 2:40PM|#

Why is the Hamari investigation so threatening to Assad's regime? Everybody already assumes that the Syrians did it.

Do you really need Michael Young to answer that? This isn't very complicated. It makes perfect sense that a UN report under a respected investigator would alter the available options (on all sides) if the report was conclusive.

One reason it would be so harmful to the Syrians is, obviously, that they receive support of other govts (like Iran) and tolerance from many others (like Saudi Arabia and most of Europe) so long as they can hide behind deniability. The number of countries willing to tell them "we got your back" will drop to zero if the report indicts them.

Also if the report makes it clear that folks in the *highest* levels of government are responsible or even just knowledgible, it reveals them in a way that cannot be accomplished as long as nobody knows for sure what happened.

It makes it much harder for fence-sitters to remain seated and gives anti-Syrian forces momentum.

The difference b/c assuming they did and it knowing they did it is the difference b/n retiring a free billionaire and retiring broke to the Hague.