Assad on the Edge

July 19:  At least twice in my comments on Syria over the past several months I have dismissed the possibility that the Syrian opposition could summon the ability to storm the Assad regime’s “palace” and overthrow the regime by direct force. I have argued instead that the pressure mounted by the opposition was far more likely to stimulate some kind of coup that would get rid of the Assads and open the way for some sort of transitional arrangement, whether smooth or, far more likely, very messy. After the events of the past few days, and particularly yesterday’s decapitation of the regime’s core national security personnel, my certainty has diminished considerably.

One never really knows how brittle a regime is until it is tested by fire and iron. Most authoritarian police states, Arab and otherwise, are far less formidable than they seem, and indeed, the aura of their invincibility is a key asset in the longevity of such regimes that frequently makes up for their lack of genuine resilience and resolve. That, of course, is why such regimes are so careful about preserving their images, and also why they seem in retrospect to decay so quickly. That was certainly true of most of the communist satellite regimes in Eastern Europe, spectacularly so in the case of Ceauşescu’s Romania and very much the case, too, in the dissolution of the USSR itself. Yet we are continually surprised when this happens, even though we should know better.

No doubt there are all sorts of psychological reasons for the repetition of the embarrassing distance between our expectations and our experience of onrushing political reality in violent or revolutionary circumstances. I am not a psychologist, so I will spare you my pontifications on the matter. I will merely remind you of a marvelous remark by the late John Kenneth Galbraith who, writing about the onset of the Great Depression in October 1929, captured this psychological dynamic perfectly with the remark: “The end had come, but it is not yet in sight.”

The events of the past few days seem, if we can believe press accounts (no, I’m not trying to be funny), to have persuaded many governments, not least our own, that the end of the Assad regime could well be very close at hand. Several commentators have urged the Administration to accelerate its planning for the aftermath of Assad’s fall. One hopes that this planning has been going on for some time anyway, journalistic prodding or not, but just as hope is not a policy, neither can one take for granted the timeliness, coherence or adequacy of planning in the U.S. government. (And you are hearing this from someone who used to be a member of the Policy Planning staff in the Department of State.) Nevertheless, looking at press accounts and the better, more realistic expressions of punditry, it is possible to come up with a short list of things we definitely need to do.

The most prolific topic that has been discussed concerns Syria’s chemical weapons stocks. Not only has the U.S. government been thinking and planning about those weapons within its own confines, it has apparently been discussing the matter with other countries—Israel for one, which National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon visited this past weekend, and presumably Turkey for another. The fear, as many have expressed it, is that the regime might use these weapons on the opposition, not entirely unlike the way that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against his Kurdish opposition in the infamous Anfal campaign. That would be gruesome, but it would not really impinge on American national security interests except in an aesthetic sense. I think the real concern is that such weapons could fall into the hands of some extremely nasty and anti-American people. I hope that’s the real concern, anyway. It clearly is a concern and I hope we are addressing it effectively and realistically.

There has also been much expression about protecting minorities in Syria should the regime collapse, and specifically these concerns focus on the Alawi community. How exactly one prevents massive revenge killings in the absence of a substantial number of boots on the ground, I don’t know. In theory, we and others can extract any number of promises from members of the opposition, and in practice those promises are likely to end up meaning absolutely nothing. In international relations as well and many other facets of life, you have to pay to play. If you are not willing to invest real assets in a situation, you have no right to expect any significant influence over outcomes.

That is why, now many, many months ago, I made the point that the failure of the Obama Administration to engage itself in the Syria crisis would eventually leave it without much leverage to influence the outcome. (For those unaware of my previous commentary on this subject, let me immediately state that I never proposed American boots on the ground in Syria, so save your indignant wrath for someone else. There are other ways to lead than with bayonets.) That is why Administration partisans who are now getting ready to claim that the Administration’s standoffish attitude paid off handsomely, since Assad will fall and we will not have had to pay a great price to achieve that, are, in the vernacular, full of beans.

We are not spectators here. It is not enough to have the honor of cheering the downfall of a heinous and murderous regime. That is not the definition of a successful policy; that’s a way of thinking that belongs in the theater. What is happening in Syria, and what will happen if Assad should fall, affects American equities with respect to Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, the Palestinians, and arguably others besides. Limiting our thinking and our analyses and our planning to what will happen inside Syria, and focusing those limits on humanitarian and legalistic grounds, is very ill considered. It would represent an abdication of statecraft.

That is why some elements of planning not often mentioned in the press and among pundits turn out to be quite important. Only a few commentators I have seen have stressed the importance of returning Syrian refugees, mainly now in Turkey and Jordan, back to their homes as rapidly and as smoothly as possible. That is important more for political reasons in Turkey, and for economic reasons in Jordan, but it is important in both countries all the same.

Some planning is diplomatic in nature and really doesn’t have much to do with Syria as such. Yesterday, Russia and China both vetoed a proposed UN resolution calling for sanctions against the Syrian regime. That resolution was based on a Chapter 7 premise—Chapter 7 meaning that a resolution could in theory involve the use of force as necessary. Both the American and the British (and even the French) representatives to the Security Council lambasted the Russians, in particular, for an inexcusable and irresponsible act.

But this is just diplomatic theatrics. We have been pondering for some time now whether to introduce this kind of resolution just to force the Russians to veto it, as we certainly knew they would (especially if it was a Chapter 7 item). In the past as regards the Syria crisis we and others have kowtowed to the Russians in hopes that ultimately they would be useful in the Assad regime’s endgame. In giving the Administration the benefit of the doubt, I have even been able to devise a decent reason for this approach, but, clearly, the accumulating embarrassments attending this policy have become a political liability both for the President and for the Secretary of State’s legacy. Hence, I think, the decision to force the Russians to do what we knew they would do.

Susan Rice’s declamation that Russian worries about the actual use of Western force in Syria are nonsense entitles her, perhaps, to a nomination for best supporting actress in this year’s Oscar nominations. Her comment misses the point entirely, and of course she knows it: The Russians realize that we are not going to intervene militarily, certainly not now, but they can’t allow another Chapter 7 resolution after spending so much time accusing NATO of having abused the privilege of a Chapter 7 resolution on Libya. And if they were to shift positions now into something that looks like an anti-Assad posture, they would be accused at home of kowtowing to the United States. In Russian politics these days, that’s even worse than Americans being accused of excessive deference toward Moscow.

So does the Russian veto harm Russia’s image in the Sunni Arab world? Yes, it does so at least marginally. In some respects, then, should our maneuver be considered a diplomatic success? Perhaps. But these episodes cannot be scored on an individual basis. They have to be seen as part of a continuum. The real calculation here is whether the embarrassment we caused the Russians is worth the trouble they might give us the next time we need their support or cooperation in some far-flung place. I understand the politics of this, and I understand the satisfaction of shoving the Russians into an awkward corner. But I still think, all else equal, this was a shortsighted thing to do.

You can, by the by, get an idea of just how feckless the so-called international community at large really is in circumstances like the one going on in Syria by the outrageous amount of attention given in recent days to whether to extend the Annan mission or not.  That was the pretext, of course, for the introduction of this most recent resolution to begin with. That is what the otherwise serious men and women have been doing in New York, at Turtle Bay, for days and days now. The leader of this observer contingent in Syria, General Robert Mood, let it be known the other day that he was leaving the country anyway. He, at least, is under no illusion about the total irrelevance of UN efforts in Syria. The UN observer mission in Syria is about as relevant to the outcome there as half a dozen disorganized nine-year olds would be in the middle of an NFL game. What the rest of these supposed grown-ups at the United Nations think they are doing with their time I really do not care to know.

Finally for now, I want to make special note of the statement made yesterday by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. The Secretary said that things in Syria are now “spiraling out of control.” He may be proven right, in one limited sense I will come to in a moment. But taken at face value, this is a very strange remark when you think about it. Things have been out of control in Syria for quite a while now—long enough for probably 20,000 people, mostly unarmed civilians, to be murdered by their own government. The country is convulsed by what can only be called a civil war. Until the strategic assassinations in Damascus, it was a toss-up who would win this contest and how long it would take. Most observers agree, I think, that yesterday’s events presage a much quicker resolution, even if the level of violence accelerates sharply in the immediate future (as seems quite likely, and as it probably already has). It would therefore be more accurate, it seems to me, to say that those events promise rather the opposite of a spiraling out of control; they may well be a harbinger of an eventual new order, a new form of control, a new and possibly better normal in Syria.

What is the “limited sense” I alluded to just above? Most casual observers probably think that if the opposition forces Assad from power and he either escapes the country or, more graphically, is captured and executed, then the civil war will stop, the blood will cease flowing, and the business of putting together a new arrangement can begin in a relatively placid security environment. Maybe that will be true, but I doubt it. Even now, as I write, I would not at all be surprised if a number of senior Alawi figures are moving people and assets out of Damascus and back to Latakia, even to the Assad family hearth in the town of Qardaha. Why would they do that? Because that is where, they suppose, they would have to make a last stand. Latakia and Qardaha are thus roughly equivalent to Bani Walid in Libya.

Could the Alawis really hold out in Latakia for long after having lost Damascus? Could they roil the entire country from that base? With surreptitious help from some Iranians, yes, they probably could, for quite some time. Certainly if gangs of armed Sunnis seeking revenge for four decades of mistreatment head their way, they are going to fight back as best they can. Large numbers of Alawis have been in the military and Interior Ministry employ for years, and they know how to mete out violence with the best of them. Think of these possibly soon-to-be retired military and intelligence types as very roughly equivalent to the Iraqi Army and Baath Party elements that L. Paul Bremer so foolishly pushed into insurgency, and you will see what I mean. If Syrian chemical weapons are on the move, as some reports have indicated, five will get you ten that Latakia is where most of them are headed. No, a dramatic departure of Assad from Damascus does not ensure a permissive environment for creative transitional politics in Syria. Rather, it may just introduce a new phase of the civil war. Let American planners, please, beware.

ME AfterNotes

July 12

The past several days have elapsed without my having made a comment here on matters Middle Eastern. That does not mean nothing has been going on, but nothing has happened of such a dramatic nature as to focus any extended comment. Reality does not always pour forth with punctuation marks, so that it seems to flow on with no particular shape. It is only after the fact that one can look back and see the significance of such events. All that said, let me offer some brief comments on recent developments.

As to Egypt, the past week has been portentous and relatively quiet all at the same time. Mohammed Morsi’s call for parliament to meet, despite its having been dissolved by the SCAF via its puppet, the constitutional court, surprised even his own colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood. The MB is, if anything, a very disciplined organization in Egypt, and it typically operates through the Islamic principle of ijma—consensus. So it is hard to know, at least from this side of the ocean, what to make of Morsi’s suddenly Lone Ranger decision-making style. Stuck as he is in a likely protracted struggle with the military, he cannot afford to alienate his own colleagues—especially since everyone knows that he is a front man for the more charismatic MB leadership represented by Khairat al-Shatar.

In the event, the parliament did meet for about 15 minutes, and a fair number of pro-MB demonstrators hit the streets in Cairo in support. That is, in my way of thinking, significant. There were police at the doors of the parliament building, and had the SCAF so ordered, it could have prevented parliamentarians from entering the building and holding their brief session. They did not do so, despite having met in emergency session and presumably, therefore, having made an explicit decision not to provoke violence at this point.

It is true that the court immediately declared Morsi’s order to the parliament illegal. But he and the parliamentarians went ahead anyway. The MB lawyers, and other lawyers, were quick to point out that the SCAF lacked the legal right to shut down the parliament in the first place, just as it lacked any right to strip the President’s office of most of its powers in the days just before the election.

All of this gets back to a statement I made some weeks ago, which is thatdespite having the trappings of a modern state, Egypt is actually a very frail institutional imitation of a modern state. It does not have rule of law in the Western sense. It remains not a tribal but a strictly patrimonial, which is to say pre-modern, polity. Willful men dominate pliable and weak institutions. And the legal morass we have seen in recent days stands as irrefutable evidence of the fact. When various Egyptians claim that this or that act is illegal, and others claim the reverse, there is no reliable recourse to determine who is correct. Legal issues thus collapse down to raw politics, and raw politics in turn has a tendency to collapse down into might makes right.

It is possible to find many Egyptians, including those who do not support either the military or the Muslim Brotherhood, who are not aware of or will not accept this judgment. Egyptians are a proud people, and they have been taught over many decades to think of themselves as the most modern and progressive of all of the Arabic speaking countries. That was part of the Nasserist narrative, and it stuck hard through the educational system and the government-controlled media. There were times, moreover, when it appeared that the Egyptian judiciary had acquired a semblance of genuine independence. But in recent years that independence has been a rapidly wasting asset.

There are still many observers who believe that, in the fullness of time, the generals will step aside willingly. All they need, say these optimists, is an assurance that they will remain indemnified against legal challenges pertaining to their behavior in office and some assurance through the writing of a constitution that the Egyptian state will remain a secular state—and one that allows the military, pre-AKP Turkish-style, to intervene in politics in extremis to keep it that way. This point of view was expressed in a very peculiar article, to my way of thinking, on the July 4 front page of the New York Times. In the article by David Kirkpatrick, called “Judge Helped Egypt’s Military to Cement Power”, the judge in question, one Tahani al-Gebali, who is Deputy President of the Supreme Constitutional Court, claims that she advised the generals not to cede authority to civilians until the Constitution was written. In other words, she claims to have been a key player in what many Egyptians have since referred to as a para-judicial coup.

I say the article is peculiar because Kirkpatrick seems to take al-Gebali more or less at her word, but her word fashions an extremely self-flattering image, one in which she sets herself up as both wise and powerful. In her account, it is the generals who saw the light through her wisdom; they are the students, she the teacher. You will pardon my skepticism, but I have a hard time believing this. And you will please pardon my trespass on the edges of political correctness, but Egyptians (and, of course, not only Egyptians) have been known on occasion to tell very tall tales posing as fact-in-being in which they are the stars. Humility and fantasy dance a dialectic in Arab culture in ways that Westerners often have a difficult time understanding, and, having already gotten myself in trouble just for saying that, I am sure, I will say no more about it except this: It is, anyway, mostly to those who have experienced this first-hand that I am speaking.

By my count, I would say score one for Morsi over the SCAF. Certainly, those who see the military as eventually backing down in the current struggle, sometimes frenetic and sometimes slow-motion, will interpret what has happened as evidence for their view. I am not so sure. The SCAF still has its hands firmly on the courts, the administration, the money and probably a solid majority of Egyptians—and that is not to speak of the soldiers and the guns. It may be that Field Marshal Tantawi and his colleagues are leery about the prospect of presiding over an Egypt whose economy is tanking and whose general social situation is deteriorating. There are those who believe that the SCAF is perfectly happy to allow Morsi and the MB to take the blame for failing to deal with an impossible situation. Maybe so for the time being, and maybe the failure of the Islamist civilian phalanx will provide the perfect pretext for the military’s recent assertion of supreme authority. But none of this means, in my view, that they have any intention of relinquishing actual authority to civilians, especially Islamist-dominated ones. Why should they? Who’s going to make them?

This slow-motion struggle punctuated by occasional frenetic activity poses real difficulties for U.S. policy. Apparently, our Secretary of State is headed to Cairo this weekend. I don’t know what for; I can’t imagine a more awkward situation to stick oneself in. I suppose that Secretary Clinton will be speaking out of one side of the American “mouth”, the public side that extols the promise of democracy. I suppose, too, that the Secretary of Defense will be operating the other half of our mouth, privately keeping contact clean and clear with the military. This is the way one needs to operate with what I have called a serviceable hypocrisy, which is the only imaginable prudent thing to do in such circumstances. The United States can neither get rid of Islamist populism in Egypt nor ensure the establishment of a mature democracy. It is a time to recall Talleyrand’s famous advice that diplomacy is the art of foreseeing the inevitable and expediting its occurrence to one’s advantage. The problem here is that we don’t know what the inevitable looks like yet, so it’s very hard to expedite it. Well, that’s why Secretaries of State get paid the big bucks.

The upshot of all this is that  a house divided between an Islamist-inclined population and a military-bureaucratic regime cannot stand for very long. The question, however is what does “very long” actually mean? In Cairo there is a vast cemetery called the City of the Dead in which a great number of poor people actually live. When I first saw this many years ago I could barely believe my eyes. It is the sort of thing that leads a typical Westerner to say to himself, “This cannot go on”—or words to that effect. But it does go on, and on. There is a different sense of time in the Middle East than there is in the West. The current Egyptian political cohabitation could last for years, changing shape irregularly; or it could come crashing down next week. We just don’t know. I don’t think anybody in Egypt knows either.

What we do know are three things. First, at its heart Egypt has become a deeply Islamist society. To the conservative side of the Muslim Brotherhood are very healthy Salafi movements. There will be competition amongst merely radical Islamists and radically radical Islamists coursing through Egypt’s future. This competition is likely to make more difference in the long run than anything Egypt‘s relatively small number of democrats and liberals do. The thinking displayed by these Islamists does not bode well for the development of liberal institutions of any kind, at least as the term liberal is understood in the West. Despite efforts by some in the West—and amazingly even by some in the American intelligence community—to characterize the Muslim Brotherhood as a secular democratic organization, President Morsi apparently believes that 9/11 was not the work of Arab terrorists, that neither a woman nor a non-Muslim should ever be President of Egypt, and that the laws of men can never supersede the laws of God. Some secular democrat.

Second, we know that as long as Egypt stands in political limbo its economy will suffer. The longer this limbo persists, the more desperate the situation will get for many people, especially those living in urban areas. As Egypt’s population continues to increase at a rapid clip, the country falls farther and farther behind. Should the Islamist and Salafi elements prevail, it is quite likely that constraints on investment from abroad and modern banking will only make the situation worse.

Third, we know that as long as Egypt’s political convulsions persist, Egypt will be inward looking. The traditional major role Egypt has played in the region will be in eclipse, creating a vacuum into which others will try to move. This will create full employment for diplomats and strategists, but it will create headaches for everyone else.

***

There isn’t too much to say about Syria: another day, another defection from the Assad camp. Most recently this has been the Syrian Ambassador to Iraq, another Sunni who used to ride high in the Alawi-dominated Syrian regime and Baath Party. Nawaz Fares declared to reporters from Al Jazeera and Reuters that he had decided to leave because “the regime has turned [the Syrian Baath Party] into an instrument to kill people and their aspiration to freedom.”

I am not aware of a comparable word in Levantine Arabic to the Hebrew-Yiddish locution “hutzpah.” But if there is such a word Ambassador Fares’s remarks occasion a time to use it. Did it just occur to him that the regime is killing its own people? Did it just occur to him that the Syrian Baath Party is no friend of freedom? Has it not occurred to his new friends that one does not rise so high in the ranks of a criminal regime without having either committed or being complicit in its crimes? Here in Washington we have a superabundance of acronyms and initials. One very useful example is CYA, usually used as an adjective. For those who do not know, CYA means “cover your ass.” It is a ubiquitous maneuver in politics and bureaucracies, and those who do it skillfully are admired from within as often as they are excoriated. I wonder what the Levantine Arabic phrase is for “cover your ass”, because that is exactly what Ambassador Fares is trying to do.

His predecessor as Sunni defector, Manaf Tlass, has so far been smarter than Fares. Not only has he not said anything; no one seems to know where he is. He might still be in Turkey, or he might be in Paris where his father and sister live, or he might be in Dubai where his brother lives. No one knows. When I commented on his exit from Syria last week, I never said a word about his having joined the revolutionary opposition, which struck me as so unlikely that I never bothered even to comment on it. I did say that, given his record of betrayal to the Sunni community, he would have to watch his back lest revenge be taken against him. Now today comes a very peculiar, once again, New York Times article called “Syria General’s Absence Raises Doubts on Defection.” As I understand the English language, one can defect from a place or a regime without necessarily joining up with its opposition. When a high-ranking general leaves his post and leaves the country, that is a defection—period and full stop. The assumption in this weird man-bites-dog story is that, of course, someone like Tlass would join the opposition, so it is news fit to print when, gosh oh gee, things appear to turn out otherwise. Well, no, that’s only news to the completely clueless, who don’t seem to realize that the Tlass family has no natural or safe home anymore in Syria. What are these people thinking? Wait, let me rephrase that: Are these people thinking?

The other news about Syria concerns the indefatigable, and equally hapless, Kofi Annan. Annan wants more pressure from the Security Council on Syria. He knows he’s not going to get it, but he asks anyway. He now goes so far as to suggest that his mission be redefined as an Article VII-backed mission, one that would justify the use of force. This is absurd: If the Russians took pains to block a lesser empowered mission, they are certainly going to block an escalation to Article VII—and it took about twenty minutes for the Russian representative to say so in so many words. And now flip to the back of the front section in theWashington Post and there we find David Ignatius saying, among other things, that “it’s depressing how little headway Annan has made, despite broad international agreement that Assad should go to Damascus.” (Big sic here: Ignatius could not possibly have meant “go to Damascus”; he must have meant “go from Damascus.”)

This is really unfair, and quite possibly dishonest. Ignatius seems to be blaming Annan for the absence of progress. He seemed to be implying, too, that Annan has had all the international support he needed to get things done. The technical term for such an assertion is “pure crap.” The truth of the matter was stated clearly in a Washington Post editorial on July 7, written after last weekend’s Paris meeting on Syria, I am pretty sure by Jackson Diehl (though of course editorials of this sort are not signed). Under the title, “A Scapegoat fore Syria?”, the editorial states that the Obama Administration, and specifically the Secretary of State, is blaming Russia for a failure whose real source is the fecklessness of the Obama Administration. The editorial concludes: “So which government is preventing effective action on Syria, and which will pay the price? Ms. Clinton’s attempt to pin the blame on Russia looks like a diversion.”

So the Secretary of State blames the Russians, and now along comes David Ignatius and blames Kofi Annan. What a farce, what a sad, sad farce. Many, many weeks ago I called attention to the Obama Administration’s supine attitude toward Syria, though Jackson Diehl does not need my help in coming to such conclusions. More recently I have tried to put a better face on a policy whose difficulties have been legion from the beginning, supposing that a confluence of U.S. and Russian interests might arise in future at the moment of the Assad regime’s endgame. But while I have disparaged the Annan mission all along, suggesting that it was liable to be counterproductive, I never blamed Annan himself for any failure or malfeasance.

***

While almost no one was looking, Libya finally managed to pull off its delayed election. Islamists did not win, leading to a chorus of optimism about the never-ending hope the so-called Arab Spring. There was a good deal of pre-election violence, emanating mainly from the eastern part of the country (Cyrenaica), whose people feared (another) power grab from the west (Tripolitania). But election day itself was not so bad as all that, and the turnout was not so bad either.

But it’s a little too early to celebrate the result. Islamism did not win, true; tribalism won instead, and that does not bode well for the continued unity of the country. Mahmoud Jibril is from the Warfalla tribe, Libya’s largest. I have not done a detailed analysis region by region of the election results, and I have no intention of doing one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the vote broke down vividly by region and tribe. Libya is one of the most tribal of all the Arab countries, and it is not clear that the habits of national unity, in development only since 1951, are strong enough to overcome tribal fissures that go back many centuries.

In that regard it is well worth quoting an amazing—and almost certainly partly mistranslated—remark that appeared in David Kirkpatrick’s July 6 dispatch from Libya, “Before Vote, Old Rivalries Threatened Fresh Start in Libya”:

. . . several admitted an intention to vote for a candidate who belonged to his tribe or family. “We are racist and each will vote for his own tribe—and not only his own tribe, but the family within the tribe closest to his,” said Abdel Salem Ijfara, 57, a member of the Warfalla tribe from Bani Walid.

In some respects the choices in Libya are fairly stark: either a unified country under Islamist control, or a fractured one under disparate, highly decentralized tribal control. This situation is not surprising, for Islam in its very origins demonstrated a capability for unifying otherwise fractious tribal elements; that was Muhammad’s signal achievement.

From the American point of view this is not a very propitious predicament. We either get a unified anti-Western and illiberal government, or we get a failed or failing state that could furnish gray zones for all sorts of nefarious types. I therefore continue to insist that the NATO operation that got rid of the Qaddafi regime constituted an act of poor judgment, and I am not even factoring in the tragic recentdestruction of many beautiful ancient shrines in Mali, where the mayhem is a spillover effect from the Libya campaign.

***

Finally for now, let me note briefly that possibly the most important recent development in the region seems not even to have made the American elite press at all—at least not yet. In Israel a committee, the Levy Committee, has recommended that all of the non-authorized settlements and outposts in the West Bank be retroactively made licit. The Knesset has not accepted this report, yet, but given its makeup it is quite likely to do so unless someone makes a fuss to prevent it. In many ways the settlements have worked to subtly undermine the rule of law in Israel over the years, but this represents a whole new level of damage.

The argument made by the committee seems to be that high authorities actually knew what was going on, and made no effort to stop these unauthorized settlements and outposts from being set up and very little effort to dismantle them after the fact, despite promises to do so—so that in its view that is tantamount to authorization. This is going to create a real problem, however. The Israeli government, or rather successive Israeli governments, have occasionally made a big deal out of illegal housing construction by Arabs in Jerusalem and the greater Jerusalem area. Why shouldn’t the same argument apply to this “illegal” construction: High Israeli political and administrative authorities knew what was going on all along, but decided for various reasons to generally ignore it. Following its own logic, all this construction should now be retroactively legal. But of course the Levy Committee would never reach such a conclusion. All of this stinks out loud.

Manaf Tlass

July 6:

The news has come that Manaf Tlass, an intimate Republican Guard friend of Bashir al-Assad, has defected to Turkey. As the press is saying, this is the most significant inner-circle defection since the beginning of the Syrian uprising. It could well be a sign that the inner circle is cracking in the belief that Assad cannot prevail. But it would be slightly premature to read too much into Tlass’s departure.

One reason for that is that Tlass is a Sunni, not an Alawi or a Druze or an Ismaili or a member of one of Syria’s several Christian minorities. Moreover, his father Mustafa, the former defense minister under Assad the father, left Syria some time ago, as did Manaf’s older brother Firas. (The father is said to be in France, the brother first in Egypt and now probably in Dubai, and no one doubts that the two of them, having parlayed their political positions into para-business activities of the very profitable sort, left the country with a great deal of money parked in various European and Caribbean banks.) The Syrian regime therefore might have seen this coming, assuming it had the luxury of time to think about such things in the midst of crisis. The point is that the defection Sunni ally of the regime, even a very prominent one, does not mean that the Alawi core is ready to shatter. Prominent Syrian Sunni families have regional options for retirement and recreation that powerful Syrian Alawis do not. The latter are far more likely to be blood-on-the-saddle bitter-enders.

As for the Tlass family, Syria, at any rate, is not a safe place these days for Sunni allies of the hatred Assad regime—and it would be hard to find more loyal and effective Sunni allies of the Assads than Mustafa Tlass and family. The elder Tlass was a key ally when Hafez al-Assad’s younger brother Rifaat tried to take power away from Hafez’s children following his 1983 heart attack. Mustafa also once bragged that he was the man who gave the order to attack U.S. and French troops bivouacked around Beirut in October 1983. And those who have been following Syrian affairs for some years will remember that not only was Mustafa Tlass an extremely useful Sunni front man for the regime, but that he was also its propagandist-in-chief. Tlass, fancying himself an intellectual, wrote articles and books that, for example, justified the blood libel against the Jews and propagated the myth that modern-day Jews don’t come from the Levant but are rather latter-day Khazar converts. The wilder and more anti-Semitic it was, the more Tlass believed it and proclaimed it.

This history will not endear the Tlass family to the majority Sunni community in Syria today, to put it mildly (although I suspect many of them could see it in their hearts to look past the anti-Semitic elements). He and his sons are sectarian traitors and are considered big-time thieves. As such, their lives are forfeit.

***

You will not be surprised to learn that government intelligence experts, in the United States and elsewhere, are delving deep into the details of family and other related business circumstances concerning the Syrian elite in order to guess and hence be prepared for what that elite is likely to do in the coming weeks and months. At least that is what government intelligence experts should be doing about now. Supposing, just for a moment, that they really are doing what they should be doing, what does their thinking probably look like? And what are the policy implications thereof?

The first thing to understand is that the Alawi community in Syria, which composes somewhere between 10 and 12 percent of the country’s population, is not monolithic. There are four tribal confederations: the Kalbiyah, Khaiyatin, Haddadin, and Matawirah. Within each confederation are several clans. The Assad family comes from the Numaylatiyya clan of the Matawirah confederation. Endogamous marriage patterns have generally dictated that cousins from within clans, and certainly from within confederations, marry one another. As long as this was the case (and it has been the case for many centuries), some fairly serious tensions existed among the confederations, and even sometimes within confederations, depending on how people were planted in the land in Latakia province, the home of the Alawis from time immemorial. (Some anthropologists believe that the Alawis are the direct descendants of an ancient Canaanite tribe.) In a society based largely on sedentary agriculture, with animal husbandry mixed in, marriages very often had to do with building or consolidating or extending clan-based real estate empires, the inner core of power, wealth and, ultimately, the capacity for self-defense.

Since the Alawis have been in power, roughly since November 1970, there has been some diffusion of Alawi settlement outside of Latakia, notably in the Damascus area. What exactly has happened to traditional marriage clan patterns over the past forty years is fairly esoteric knowledge that only specialists in Syria can be expected to know. I don’t know, but my guess is that marriage patterns have broadened somewhat among the Alawis, especially including the Damascus-based families closest to the core of the regime. Intelligence analysis of the patterns of influence with the regime needs to know who has married whom in order to make sense of the influence networks within the elite. In the past, the CIA has been notably obtuse to such data: What we didn’t know and didn’t bother for a long time to find out about tribes in Iraq is a case in point. You will never find Jordanian intelligence making that mistake, and it’s probably not entirely a coincidence that the largest CIA analytical station in the region in located in Amman. Do I know for certain if U.S. intelligence personnel studying Syria are using this significant asset we have in our relations with Jordan? No. I just know that we should be.

It is also clear that a fairly huge amount of money has been siphoned away from the Syrian economy over the years to benefit Alawis both in their home province and elsewhere. That money has probably softened some or most of the old antagonisms among the confederations and the clans. But people have long memories in this part of the world, so it would probably be presumptuous to think that the calculations going on now among the Alawi no longer reflect traditional fault lines. Besides, it’s amazing what people can remember when times get really dicey.

Those calculations, at least in deepest privacy, have got to include plans to protect one’s closest kith and kin, should the regime begin to collapse. This is why specialists should certainly want to know how authority and power are linked among the confederations in the current Syrian regime. If they are not roughly symmetrical, then one might expect those farther from the center to be more willing to move against the Assads in a desperate attempt to save their own skin from the hordes of Sunnis and other Syrians who very probably want to harm them. It is very unlikely that any reconfiguration of Alawi power could prevail without the Assad clan, so that talk of a smooth transition to a new government, with many current non-Assad family individuals still in place, has always struck me as unrealistic. But looking at the matter from inside the broader Alawi community, the idea of an internal Alawi-led coup against the Assads, however risky, has got to look better than all the alternatives, should push turn into shove.

***

From the very beginning of this mess in Syria, it has always been more likely that external pressure would generate an internal coup of some kind rather than that the revolution would succeed in storming the presidential palace. I still think that is the case. And that may explain at least some aspects of the otherwise strange and seemingly pusillanimous American policy, which has for months now been depending on Russian pressure to get rid of Assad and company.

There is no need to rehearse here all the reasons why the Kremlin has not been eager to get rid of a long-standing ally, and how it has managed in its public diplomatic stance to appear to be riding the same horse in two different directions. If there were ever an over-determined decision, this is it. But since the Obama Administration is determined, whether for good reasons or bad, to do nothing overtly kinetic in Syria, it makes a kind of sense to think that, if and when the Assad regime begins to crumble from within, Russian policy will quickly shift in order to prevent the United States from taking credit for Assad’s fall. The reasoning inside the Administration may be that, this being the case, a vocal Russian shift might stimulate a coup in Damascus faster than would otherwise be the case. We are also aware that the Russians have better contacts with, and better intelligence on, people deep inside the Syrian regime than we do. They may actually be able to turn or bribe some people that we do not have access to, if they decide the time is right to do that. So potential Kremlin influence in the endgame is not necessarily limited to Russian rhetorical panache.

It may further be argued (and here we get more to the strategic essence) that the possibility of a Sunni-led revolutionary government in Syria, which could lead willy-nilly either to an Islamist government, or to a new phase of civil war, or to both, is something that we and the Russians can agree to oppose and even prevent, insofar as that is possible. In other words, while U.S. and Russian interests do not now converge significantly over Syria, they might converge to at least some extent in the future.

I don’t go often out of my way to put the best face on Obama Administration foreign policy, because usually I don’t think it deserves it. But in this case, and at this time, it doesn’t hurt to think this through as objectively as possible. Syria has always been a very hard policy problem, much harder than Libya and very different from Egypt. Under such circumstances even a far-fetched idea can sound pretty good if there aren’t any less outlandish competitors in the mix. It is, after all, not unheard of for policymakers to say: “Well, we don’t have any attractive options right now, so we ought to set ourselves up to acquire one or two in the future.” Such forward-looking planning in American foreign policy is much less common than it ought to be, but it is not completely absent. I am in the mood to give the Administration the benefit of the doubt until I am persuaded otherwise—not that, as I have argued in the past, domestic political considerations are not critical in understanding the Administration’s overall posture with regard to Syria. In any event, time will tell—along with memoirs and leaked documents.

As for Manaf Tlass, he probably should be very careful deciding which eatery to visit in Turkey. In Turkey today there are undoubtedly lots of Syrian refugees, not to speak of members of the Free Syrian Army, who ardently hope he chokes to death on his next kebab.