NEWSLINK: Is Russia About To Ditch Syria? The Truth Is That It May Not Matter
[Is Russia About To Ditch Syria? The Truth Is That It May Not Matter – Forbes.com – Mark Adomanis – Dec. 4, 2012 – click here for full article]
Forbes.com covers Russian policy on the Syrian civil war and Russian relations with embattled Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad:
Russia has been hinting for months that it might be prepared to try a new diplomatic angle with Syria, but very little (if anything) has actually changed. Russia is still supplying the country with weapons, and according to some news reports hard currency, and it is still concern-trolling about the plan to put Patriot missile batteries in Turkey….
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… like I said back during Russia’s torturous and unending process of gaining WTO membership, I’ll believe it when I see it and until Vladimir Putin goes on TV and says “Assad’s dead to us” I’ll operate with the assumption that Russia is still behind him.
Some of the ongoing concerns at present include whether even an Assad departure would spell a resolution of the conflict, and the impact or plausibility of military intervention:
I’ve never seen anyone try to deal with the seemingly obvious point that if Assad leaves the Alawites might not simply give up but, instead, become even more radicalized and violent. There is a heavy bias towards the “Assad as the root of all evil” hypothesis, and an assumption that if he is somehow removed from power than things will just work themselves out. Now I can’t pretend to know exactly what will happen if Assad is deposed, but considering the United States’ experience in post-Saddam Iraq, and the fact that the Alawites have greatly benefited from Assad’s largess, it certainly seems possible that they will not become sober and compromise-minded but hell-bent on revenge and bloodshed. It’s probably a bit hackneyed to see the Alawites as exactly analogous to the Sunni in Iraq, but it seems a reasonable enough comparison.
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I don’t think my position of skepticism regarding intervention is the only acceptable one, and I think that it’s perfectly fair to think that Assad ought to be deposed by military force. Some of my best friends are interventionists, and all that. However, if you’re going to go the humanitarian intervention route you can’t have “overthrow Assad” as the stopping point. In fact, overthrowing Assad has to be the beginning of a very lengthy process of political reconciliation in an extraordinarily tense and dangerous environment.