Sadly, yes it can. The Syrian people are now caught in a nightmare of suffering and violence. The insurrection has taken too deep a hold to be crushed by internal military means. Even if The Assad government razes whole districts and slaughters the residents, protests will erupt elsewhere. Yet the protesters lack the power to challenge the authority of the regime nationally, with force enough to overthrow it.
The West and most of the Arab world has lined up with the rebels, yet nobody knows who they are exactly and what forces operate within them. Reliable reports of Islamic fundamentalists and Al Qaeda are widespread. In demanding regime change the West is taking a leap into the unknown. Is this wise?
The Assad government, built on the fascist model of the Ba’ath Party, is a monolith where Party and State are the same thing. If you destroy the party, the fabric of the state disintegrates; this does not mean just the disappearance of security police, it means power, health, fuel water and all vestiges of civilised living. Moreover the question is then, who has the keys to the chemical weapons store, the missiles and other military hardware of one of the region’s major military powers?
The Russian position, backed by China, is not to include regime change on the list of demands and to try and negotiate an end to violence. This, they believe will produce an adequate compromise and an outcome less traumatic, not only for the Syrian people but for the region as a whole. This blog has always seen merit in this approach, but so far it has not worked. The backing of Russia and China, was used by Assad to embark on a blitz of rebel areas of unprecedented brutality. The outcome appears to be something of a hardening of the Russian position towards Damascus and hints that backing for Assad personally is not guaranteed.
This may, just may, do more to force the Syrian government to stop its military repression than the the West’s embargoes and protests. At the same time the rebels need to come to reasonable terms. The whole cake is of no value if none are left alive to eat it. The continuance of the rule of the Ba’ath Party, but on the more liberal lines of the new Constitution, with Assad himself replaced by another and some enforceable guarantees of basic human rights, may be the best that can be achieved at this point. It would be a beginning rather than en ending, but if it ended the slaughter and the torture it would be a beginning of better times.
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