{"id":25520,"date":"2018-07-16T23:13:53","date_gmt":"2018-07-17T03:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/?p=25520"},"modified":"2018-07-16T23:14:20","modified_gmt":"2018-07-17T03:14:20","slug":"25520-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/25520-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Winning in Syria and the Middle East – By David W. Lesch and Kamal Alam"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

David W. Lesch<\/p><\/div>\n

Winning in Syria and the Middle East<\/strong>
\nBy David W. Lesch and Kamal Alam
\nFor Syria Comment<\/em> – July 16, 2018<\/p>\n

The common perception today is that Russia has won in Syria, having supported the government of Bashar al-Assad, which is now steadily reasserting its control over previously lost territory. As a result, Russia has inserted itself as the<\/em> power broker in Syria, if not the entire Middle East.\u00a0 The summit between Presidents Trump and Putin on Monday in Helsinki, where the subject of Syria was high on the agenda, seems to have consecrated Russia\u2019s victory. Countries tend to gravitate toward winners, not losers.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Kamal Alam<\/p><\/div>\n

The United States, on the other hand, directly and indirectly intervened in multiple conflicts in the Middle East since 9\/11, first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, followed by involvement in a series of upheavals brought on by the Arab Spring:\u00a0 Libya and Syria most notably. No one would say the US has won in any of these cases\u2014far from it.<\/p>\n

On the surface, this is difficult to comprehend.\u00a0 After all, the US has by far the most powerful military on earth. The image of Russia\u2019s only aircraft carrier limping toward, breaking down, and being towed in the eastern Mediterranean in support of Assad\u2019s forces was a stark reminder of this reality.\u00a0 So how did Russia win\u2014and why did the US fail over and over again?<\/p>\n

There is one outstanding difference in the Russian versus American military interventions in internal national conflicts in the Middle East:\u00a0 in Syria, the Kremlin supported the entrenched state. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the US supported opposition forces seeking the overthrow of the entrenched state.<\/p>\n

For the sake of argument, let\u2019s say the US and NATO reversed their policy and actually wanted Libyan President Muammar Gadafi to remain in power against the opposition forces unleashed by the Arab spring. Is there any doubt that with US military support he would still be in power today?\u00a0 Perhaps he too would be mopping up pockets of resistance much as Assad is doing today in Syria.\u00a0 However illogical or immoral it may have seemed at the time to most in the West, let\u2019s say Washington wanted Assad to stay in power seven years ago when the Arab spring hit Syria. Would not the US be the one crowning its success there, not Russia? Ironically, the US supported the Iraqi state against ISIS\u2014and won.\u00a0 But the US is not going to get much credit for solving a problem it largely created when it dissolved the state via the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its chaotic aftermath.<\/p>\n

The US can overthrow just about any government in the world or keep one in power if it sets it mind to it.\u00a0 That\u2019s how overwhelming its military might is. The US could have removed Assad if we really wanted to.\u00a0 The problem is that the Middle East security state, by its very nature, constructs a ruling apparatus and governance system that is pervasive. It is one that becomes very good at preventing the development of any viable, coherent opposition movement, usually through a combination of divide and rule tactics and repression.<\/p>\n

If the government is overthrown, as it was in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, there is very little left to take its place. New governments were brought to power by external forces, therefore lacking indigenous legitimacy, with little experience in politics (especially democratic politics).\u00a0 What inevitably results is rampant instability, with more people as time goes on willing to accept the return of authoritarianism if it will keep the lights on, the grocery stores stocked, and suicide bombings at a minimum.<\/p>\n

In Syria, the Assad government had more legitimacy than most gave it credit for\u2014or at the very least it was adept at convincing a number of groups in a war weary population that it was their best bet moving forward.\u00a0 This was particularly true of minority groups in the country as the Sunni Arab-dominated opposition became more jihadist as the war deepened.\u00a0 Although the top echelons of the Syrian military and intelligence apparatus are disproportionately composed of Alawites, there are also a number Greek Orthodox, Druze, Sunnis, Catholics, and Armenians in decision-making positions, offering and reinforcing in practical terms to many Syrians an alternative model to the monotone jihadist one. Compared to many other armies under pressure from the Arab spring uprisings, the Syrian military remained relatively cohesive and continued to fight. And perhaps it is not so much that the Assad government had more legitimacy then we imagined from the outside, it is that the largely fractured opposition had less. Recall that the Syrian government recognized by most in the West (and in the Arab world) in the early days of the civil war was led by the Syrian National Council, made up mostly of exiled Syrians who lacked any sort of legitimacy inside the country among the armed opposition actually doing the fighting and dying.\u00a0 This seemed to mimic the famously disastrous playbook the US employed in Iraq, i.e. relying on exiles who lacked standing among the real power brokers in the country itself.<\/p>\n

In addition, the Assad government had a myriad of existing patron-client networks, network building knowledge, and well-honed co-optation tactics, especially with prominent Sunni families and tribes established over decades of constructing a neo-patrimonial state. It will be difficult for the Syrian government to re-establish and maintain its patrimonial position in a clientelist network altered by the socio-political landscape of over seven years of war\u2014and the concessions it made to keep many Syrians on its side\u2014but this networking dynamic proved to be vital in terms of the scores of local reconciliation agreements the government entered into with opposition elements, largely negotiated by members of the government\u2019s intelligence apparatus.\u00a0 The longer the state hung on and provided even a modicum of state services, and the more it advanced militarily after the Russian intervention, Assad\u2019s perceived legitimacy began to grow simply because he was seen as the only viable alternative to many Syrians. And he is being increasingly seen as the only viable alternative by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others, who are now more focused on making sure the Iranians are kept at bay in Syria rather than removing Assad.<\/p>\n

Officials in these countries have been taking a diplomatic beeline to Putin to accomplish this. On this issue, all roads lead to Moscow. Instead of having to create a government out of a jumbled mess as the US attempted to do in Iraq and Afghanistan (and to a lesser degree in Libya), a halfway functioning state is already in Syria through which Russia has regained a central position in the country and in the region. This is not to say that the US should always back the entrenched state in similar circumstances, but recent history clearly suggests it should better understand the challenges of going against it.<\/p>\n

David W. Lesch<\/strong> is the Ewing Halsell Distinguished Professor of Middle East history at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, and author of the upcoming book Syria <\/em>(Polity Books, 2019).<\/p>\n

Kamal Alam<\/strong> is a Visiting Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Winning in Syria and the Middle East By David W. Lesch and Kamal Alam For Syria Comment – July 16, 2018 The common perception today is that Russia has won in Syria, having supported the government of Bashar al-Assad, which is now steadily reasserting its control over previously lost territory. As a result, Russia has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[614,17,205,30,615,38,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-lesch","category-for-rels","category-intervention-2","category-iraq","category-kamal-alam","category-russia","category-us"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nWinning in Syria and the Middle East - By David W. 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