The Middle East today is in as big a mess as I have seen in a lifetime. By most measures, it still continues to worsen, as ever-new enemies to the US pop up onto the scene. It is attracting polarised youthful jihadists from both East and West ready to fight the US — all high on the blood-aphrodisiac of beheadings and bombings. The US and most other countries understandably seek to suppress the present savage civil conflicts raging in Iraq and Syria — now exemplified at its worst in the spread of the violent Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). If so, Washington had best look first to ending the civil conflict in Syria, the most efficacious way to start unravelling the Middle Eastern knot.
After the popular movements of the Arab Spring overthrew the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan and Yemeni leaderships in 2011, it looked as if the Bashar Al Assad regime in Syria would certainly be the next to fall. The US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other regional states gambled that a small push from the outside would suffice to overthrow Al Assad — never mind who exactly would succeed him. The gamble failed and Al Assad has proven remarkably adroit in clinging to power, initially against domestic armed opposition, but then against foreign armed opposition backed by the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others. The Syrian conflict enticed radical jihadists from around the Muslim world to fight against Al Assad. Many of these groups are sympathetic to Daesh forces and have facilitated the spread of Daesh into Syria — although there are some jihadists who are in fact hostile to Daesh, tactically if not ideologically.
It is beyond the capabilities of US intelligence, or any other western state for that matter, to gain the complex strategic and tactical insight and the instinctive feel to successfully manipulate the conflict in the directions America wants. These conflicts are riven by extremely intertwined ideological, personal, regional, religious, tactical and tribal differences that outsiders cannot control in any convincing fashion. Thus, Washington has been reduced to the crude instruments of bombing and providing support to jihadist attacks against other jihadists. Nobody has a scorecard. And it all grows worse.
Washington’s fear of Daesh has now come to supersede the fall of Al Assad as the primary US goal. Yet, it is nearly impossible to succeed in Syria when many of the forces America supports against Al Assad also support Daesh, directly or indirectly. Al Assad is not going to be overthrown in the foreseeable future. He is hardly an ideal ruler, but he is rational, has run a longtime functioning state and is supported by many in Syria who rightly fear what new leader or domestic anarchy may come after his fall. He has not represented a genuinely key threat to the US in the Middle East — despite neocon rhetoric. The time has now come to bite the bullet, admit failure and permit — if not assist — Al Assad in quickly winding down the civil war in Syria and expelling the jihadists.
We cannot both hate Al Assad and hate those jihadists (like Daesh) who also hate Al Assad. We fight, crudely put, with Al Qaida in Syria and against Al Qaida in Iraq. But restoration of order in Syria is essential to the restoration of order in the Iraqi, Lebanese, Israeli and Jordanian borderlands. Permitting Al Assad to remain in power will also restore a Syria that historically never has acted as a truly “sectarian” or religious state in its behaviour in the Middle East — until attacked by Saudi Arabia for its supposed Shiism.
America has little to lose and much to gain in such a reverse in policy vis-a-vis Al Assad. If Washington persists on overthrowing him by force, it will perpetuate the disastrous status quo — an anti-jihadist campaign that the administration has already acknowledged may be morphing into a new open-ended war for years to come — all the while generating tens of thousands of new jihadists fighting new jihads that America cannot bomb out of existence.
An end to the Syrian conflict and a return to the old order there will make it easier for Baghdad to develop policies aimed at drying up Daesh on Iraqi soil. Turkey, long a prisoner of its own failed gambit to overthrow Al Assad, will also gain from restored order in Syria: An end to the refugee flow and a chance to get back to serious negotiations with the now newly empowered Kurds. Yes, it would be nice to bring democracy to Syria, but we surely know now from experience that the overthrow of dictators by force — especially by outside force — rarely ushers in peace and demonstrably better leadership. The US has, in fact, all along been more driven by zeal to destroy an Iranian ally than it has by visions of democracy in Syria itself.
At this point, the most urgent task at hand is to bring an end to war, to raging cross-border conflict that only brings anarchy, deeper polarisation, more international armed interventions, heightened emotions, rage and recruitment videos for globalised jihadists. But wait, won’t Russia and Iran both benefit from an eventual reaffirmation of Al Assad’s power in Damascus? Absolutely. Does that make it the wrong choice then? Should we instead continue to throw good money after bad in the feckless campaign to get rid of Al Assad? To continue to bomb and bomb and try to find the least bad jihadist group that will meet the exacting qualifications of hating both Daesh and Al Assad and loving us?
— Global Viewpoint
Graham E. Fuller is a former senior official at the CIA. His latest book is Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East.
