Much of the
aid that the White House is supplying to the opposition is
intended to provide the rudiments of civilian infrastructure in
liberated areas, including electrical generators and Internet
connections. But the President's critics argue that the United
States needs to become more deeply involved with rebel groups,
so that it has allies in Syria. The U.S. has few friends it can call
on to gather intelligence, secure chemical weapons, or even
provide a welcome to American troops in the event of a military
operation; after Assad falls, there is little guarantee that the new
leaders will be sympathetic. Mc Cain told me, "If you
believe—that's one the Administration and all of us agree on—that
Bashar al-Assad's departure is inevitable, then every day that goes
by this conflict will get harder, and the harder it's going to be to
clean up when it's all over."
Still,
Obama's aides argue that nothing will prevent the war from continuing
after the regime falls. Along with the shabiha, Assad has mobilized
the Popular Committees, a nationwide militia made up largely of
minority groups loyal to the regime. Both forces—together
with Assad's regular Army, of about seventy thousand active
soldiers—appear prepared to continue fighting if the rebels
take Damascus. White House officials and intelligence ex perts
say that much of the post-regime planning is being done with the help
of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah; they, too, are
prepared to fight on after Assad.
According
to the most common pre diction of the war's eventual end, Assad
will lead Syria's Alawites to an enclave on the Mediterranean coast,
which includes the major ports of Latakia and Tartous, where the
Alawites predominate. Amer ican officials say that Assad is
trying to lay the groundwork. The regime has ethnically
cleansed several Sunni-majority villages on routes that lead to
the coast. And, according to the American intelligence official, the
regime appears to be stockpiling weapons and supplies in the
area. Perhaps most suggestive is the tenacity with which it has
held on to the city of Horns, which lies on the highway between Damascus and the coast. Homs would give an Alawite rump state unimpeded
access to Hezbollah, and to Iran. "Homs is the key," the
official said. "If they can hold it, then they can have the
Alawite enclave on the coast that's linked to Hezbollah and backed by
the Iranians, and the Russian ships could still come into the port."
It was in Homs that American officials spotted the regime training
the shabiha in the use of chemical weapons.
Joshua
Landis, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of
Oklahoma, who has written extensively about Syria, doubts that the
Alawites will be able to build a state on the Mediterranean—"Assad's enclave of evil," he calls it—though he
expects that Assad will destroy Damascus in the attempt. Instead, he says, the capital will likely fall to a newly empowered
Sunni majority, who will undertake a large-scale expul sion of
Alawites from the country. 'When this is over, you are not going to
want to be an Alawite in Syria," he said. "Once the Sunnis
take power, they are going to want the coast, and right now the
Alawites have it. The elegant solution, for them, is ethnic
cleansing. It's elegant because the alternative is killing all the
Alawites. The Sunnis will pick one little town, maybe two, and kill
everyone. The rest of the Alawites will not stick around and
wait to see what happens. They will all go to Lebanon."
In
May, the senior American official who is involved in Syria policy met
me at his office in Washington. When I asked him to predict Syria's
future, he got up from his desk and walked over to a large map of the
country which was tacked to his wall. "You could have a
situation where the more secular rebel groups could well be fighting
the more Islamist-oriented groups," he said. "We are
already getting that in places like Deir ez-Zor, in the east. In
Aleppo, they fight each other." Pointing to an area near the
Turkish border, he said, "We see fighting between Kurdish and
Arab militias up in the north." Elsewhere, there were Druze
militias, members of a small religious community most often
associated with Lebanon. 'They have had some clashes with the Free
Syrian Army. And here is my favorite. Christians are now setting up
their own militia.
"What
does that sound like? Leba non. But it's Lebanon on steroids."
He walked back to his desk and sat down. "The Syria I have just
drawn for you—I call it the Sinkhole," he said. "I think
there is an appreciation, even at the high est levels, of how
this is getting steadily worse. This is the discomfort you see with
the President, and it's not just the President. It's everybody."
No matter how well intentioned the advocates of military intervention
are, he suggested, getting involved in a situation as complex and
dynamic as the Syrian civil war could be a foolish risk The cost of
saving lives may simply be too high. "Whereas we had a crisis in
Iraq that was contained— it was very awful for us and the Iraqis—
this time it will be harder to contain," he said. "Four
million refugees going into Lebanon and Jordan is not the kind of
problem we had going into Iraq." In a year, he estimated,
Lebanon alone could have four million refugees, doubling the
population of the country. "Jordan will close its borders, and
then you will have tens of thousands of refugees huddling down close
to that border for safety."
The
rapid growth of Al Qaeda in Syria is deeply troubling, he said. "In
February, 2012, they were tiny. No more than a few dozen. Now,
fast-forward fourteen months. They are in Aleppo. They are in
Damascus. They are in Homs." In Iraq, he said, "They didn't
grow so fast and they didn't cover all the big cities. In Syria, they
do." Also, he pointed out, there were no chemical weapons in
Iraq, as there are in Syria. "We will have a greater risk, the
longer this goes on, that the bad guys—they are all bad guys, but I
mean terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Islamist extremist
groups—will acquire some of these weapons. How do you plan for
that? The longer the war goes on, the more the extremists will
gain." Indeed, the longer the war goes on, the greater the
threat that it will engulf the entire region.
The
official said that the United States' quandary was clear enough:
"Iraq was a searing experience—to see our kids out there, out
on those checkpoints, and they don't speak Arabic, and they don't
know what the fuck is going on around them. I know there is a debate
on military intervention. I cannot recommend it to the
President unless there is a very clearly defined political way back
out. People on the Hill ask me, 'Why can't we do a no-fly zone? Why
can't we do military strikes?' Of course we can do these things. The
issue is, where does it stop?" ♦
Labels: Deir-ez-Zor, refugees to Lebanon, shabiba
