CNN is now reporting that, apparently, the Obama administration is reconsidering its strategy to deal with the Islamic State in Syria (see Elise Labott, "Sources: Obama seeks new strategy review to deal with ISIS, al-Assad," on CNN (12 Nov. 2014), at: http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/12/politics/obama-syria-strategy-review/). The larger point emphasized in this account is that the administration has settled on the principle that, in order to provide a long term solution to the Salafist Sunni insurgency in Syria, the Ba'athist regime of Bashar al-Assad will have to be replaced with a multi-ethnic state, more amenable to the Sunni majority of Syria as a hedge against the appeal of Salafism. Such a change in the direction taken by the Obama administration is suggestive of a strong influence by the Erdogan government in Turkey, as well as that of the Sunni Gulf monarchies. In particular, Erdogan's government seems to have emphatically made the point that its primary interest for intervening in Syria is to enable the development of a strong Sunni opposition, grounded in the moderate Salafist Muslim Brotherhood. Moreover, by prioritizing an emphatically Sunni Arab opposition to Assad (and IS), in place a decentralized effort to support local anti-IS forces, particularly among Syrian Kurds, such a strategy focus would be less apt to play into increased Kurdish nationalism on both sides of the Syrian-Turkish frontier. Clearly, for the Erdogan government, the IS problem is, at most, a secondary matter to be dealt with alongside the greater necessity of regime change in Damascus. Likewise, for all other regional players in the allied coalition against IS, the need to remove Assad and dismantle the Syrian Ba'athist regime conforms to a larger agenda to isolate Iranian influence in the Arab world.
Just a few thoughts:
1. The Obama administration's strategy against IS in Syria was never well conceived in relation to the present capabilities of the moderate Syrian anti-Assad opposition - tacking on an additional prioritization to overthrow Assad will merely complicate a mission that the administration has never approached seriously with regard to the deployment and utilization of U.S. forces and local surrogates. Acknowledging, first, that the Obama administration annunciated a Syrian anti-IS ground strategy, utilizing surrogate Syrian forces that, largely, exist only on paper, the added mission to remove Assad now commits a reconfigured Free Syrian Army (that still only exists within the strategic imagination of White House military advisors) to two front offensive warfare. If the Free Syrian Army could hardly be said to exist in a tangible form in the struggle against IS and other radical Salafist forces in northeastern Syria (e.g. al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra), then is it any more realistic to expect that they should be counted on the remove Assad from power in Damascus, even with U.S. air support? If we are adding the goal of regime change in Syria, then we will have to put U.S. ground forces in to wage offensive war against the Syrian government and armed forces even before we are fully able to contemplate the necessary offensive role of U.S. ground forces against IS.
2. Any introduction of U.S. ground forces into Syria to achieve regime change would have to involve a long term (thirty to forty years or more) commitment by the U.S. to militarily occupy the country, constitute a moderate and inclusive government on the principle of democracy and equitable participation of all ethnic and sectarian groupings, and pacify any regional outbreaks of sectarian violence and secessionist efforts by Kurds, Alawites, or any other ethnic groups. At the present time, the only U.S. support for such an effort might exist within certain corners of uniformed military professionals in anti-insurgent strategy and with certain, predominantly Republican, members of armed services Congressional committees sufficiently myopic to believe that the U.S. population as a whole might be willing to commit to completing the job of nation building that failed in Iraq and is about to fail again in Afghanistan. It should be evident enough, after not only Iraq and Afghanistan but also the lingering failure of U.S. nation building in Vietnam, that, as a polity, we do not have the patience to enable military professionals to take decades, expending American lives and American tax money, to thoroughly reconstitute societies with no experience in multi-ethnic, secular democracy into nation states with citizens committed to unity and a better, peaceful future together under democratic practices. If we are not willing to go down this road, then we need to craft strategies to deal with IS that stand a better chance of success on much more limited terms.
3. If Erdogan and the leaders of the Sunni Gulf monarchies are so committed, in principle, that success in Syria will not be achieved until Assad has been removed from power, then they should develop their own ground force strategy and commit their own ground forces to take on the Assad regime, simultaneously taking on IS, in order to ensure that Syria definitively pursues a course in which moderate Sunni opposition movements are capable of seizing power, restoring order, and constituting a state conforming to the broader foreign policy objectives of Turkey and the Gulf states, particularly with regard to Iran. Obama's apparent policy change on Syria allows our allies to get away with demanding regime change without carrying their weight in order to ensure that Assad is driven from power. I think that this point should stand for itself without much elaboration. I realize that Erdogan's Justice and Development Party/Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) has a substantial stake in the future of Syria, in view of Turkey's long shared border, the profusion of refugees in border areas escaping the civil war in northern Syria, fears that political destabilization among Syrian Kurdish populations will enflame Kurdish nationalism on the Turkish side of the border, and, emphatically, AKP's recent efforts to court moderate Sunni Salafist movements, particular the Muslim Brotherhoods, in an effort to steer Turkey toward a more conservative, if not precisely Islamist, social politics. Moreover, the Gulf monarchies have their own reasons to fear Iranian influence in the Arab Shi'a arc extending through Syria into Lebanon. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Bahrain obviously will support regime change in Syria in the realization that any successor to Assad and the Alawite dominated Ba'athist regime will undoubtedly be more friendly with the Sunni dominated Gulf states and hostile toward Tehran. This said, if Turkey and the Gulf states want to prioritize the removal of Assad, then they need to commit their militaries to the task of defeating the Syrian military and establishing a successor regime. It will not do to leave these tasks, either exclusively or to a predominant extent, in the hands of the U.S. Our principal goal in Syria as in Iraq at the present time is and must remain to degrade or destroy the military capabilities of IS.
4. The development of the Syrian civil war and broader Sunni uprising, together with the subsequent rise of IS and its conquest of parts of Syria and Iraq, has demonstrated, in my view, the irrelevance of the boundaries established by the Sykes-Picot Treaty after World War I and subsequent treaties establishing the boundaries of post-Ottoman states. Before we begin to discuss the future of either Syria or Iraq as if they were nation states with citizens sharing and embracing a common fate, we need to reconsider the principle of ethnic and sectarian pacification through homogenization as the most durable means of restoring the peace to the region. Again, the point here has to be that the amalgamation of diverse ethnic and sectarian groupings under the domination of "national" governments in Damascus and Baghdad, as if these consolidations command a degree of legitimacy transcending their short histories of rule since the post-World War I disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, has not produced a durable sense of integrative nationalism, a shared heritage in the political process (which has been overwhelmingly undemocratic in both Iraq and Syria for most of their histories), and a collective respect that the differences of individual ethnic and sectarian constiuencies to each nation contribute to the strength and unity of each. Insofar as these states have only nurtured a sense of collective distrust among constituent ethnic and sectarian groupings, it would be best for both countries to experience a reallignment and a redrawing of borders to promote relative ethnic and sectarian homogenization, whereby existing patterns of political domination exercised across ethnic and sectarian lines can be undermined. Emphatically, such a reconsideration may need to move beyond the limited framework of Iraq and Syria, insofar as particular ethnic groupings have a wider dispersion across the region to account for. I am, of course, thinking about the Kurdish problem for Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. How can we address the needs of Kurdish populations without acknowledging that the faultiness of Sykes-Picot borders raises concerns for groups inhabiting both sides of increasingly irrelevant political boundaries? At some point, Iraq and Syria will have to be redrawn to take account for Kurdish national aspirations, but such a reevaluation must, likewise, be performed in relation to eastern Turkey, the inevitability of which must incite a fair quantitiy of anxiety within Turkey's AKP.
5. In order to arrive at a post-Sykes-Picot Iraq and Syria, we need to develop institutional mechanisms for conflict resolution and management of the claims of all stakeholders in the region. Such efforts must attempt to balance the demands of regional actors (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, etc.), the U.S., EU, Russia, and China and achieve a compromise of the interests of all stakeholders in redrawing Iraq and Syria. Again, it is my contention that we are only going to realize a durable peace in Southwest Asia if we create new, deeply invested institutional mechnaisms for conflict resolution, through which all of the world's major powers and stakeholders in the region can defend their interests and negotiate compromise solutions that will undermine the possibilities for both civil war and international conflicts by outside powers.
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