Despite – or perhaps because of – the barbaric repression perpetrated by President Assad of Syria upon his people, with an estimated 3,500 having been killed since the popular uprising there began some eight months ago, the opposition to the regime is getting stronger.
On Wednesday, a group of army defectors called the Free Syrian Army reportedly fired machine-guns and rockets at an air force intelligence base outside Damascus. Clearly, the fact that the army seems to be splitting in this way is a significant development and suggests that Syria – where Assad remains backed by Russia and China -- is now heading inexorably for a civil war and an appalling bloodbath.
Why is the army peeling off like this? Maybe, as has been suggested, because it simply cannot stomach the unspeakable atrocities being inflicted upon the population, including upon women and children.
Maybe also it has been galvanised by the behaviour of the Arab League, which has amazed the world by abandoning its habitual passivity in tacit support of the repressive status quo and instead suspending Syria and threatening sanctions if Assad does not allow international monitors into the country.
There are a number of reasons why the Arab League, led by Qatar, has suddenly sprung into life like this. First, the revolutionary energy unleashed by the ‘Arab Spring’ needs to be managed if other regimes are not also to go down like dominoes.
Furthermore, as Amir Taheri explains in the Times (£) today, the League is filling the vacuum left by the collapse of the US under President Obama as a global power broker -- most obviously of all in his appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also his failure to deal with the Islamist regime in Turkey which is currently eyeing up Syria as a strategic prize.
The League wants to stop Turkey’s President Erdogan from his apparent wish to dominate the region as a second Ataturk; even more desperately, it wants to halt Iran’s steady march to regional domination through a ‘Shia Crescent’ stretching from the Gulf to the Mediterranean and encompassing Syria and Lebanon.
The conclusion by the Arab states that the US is now a ‘weak horse’ and thus must be circumvented should itself be a source of intense worry for the free world at this self-induced and dangerous marginalisation of its supposed leader -- not least because this has also pushed a number of relatively quiescent Arab states into cosying up to Iran, on the basis that if no-one is going to defeat the ‘strong horse’ then they have no alternative but to clamber into its saddle instead.
The Arab League initiative highlights in turn the utter uselessness of the UN, where last month the Security Council failed even to pass a resolution that merely hinted at sanctions against Syria.
And it also shows up the perverse grandstanding of the UK, US and France which almost certainly will end up having helped replace the relatively tamed Mubarak of Egypt and Gaddafy of Libya by Islamists committed to war and terror against the west while doing virtually nothing about Assad of Syria, who as Iran’s satrap has long posed a mortal threat to western interests from both terrorism and Syria’s own attempts to build a nuclear weapon.
Indeed, even worse than that the Obama administration has once again been strengthening the Islamists by backing the Syrian National Council which is dominated by Islamic radicals. Such stupidity is almost beyond belief, since the Syrian opposition is in fact more likely than other ‘Arab Spring’ countries to replace the status quo with a relatively reformist regime rather than an Islamic tyranny. This is because only some 60 percent of Syrians are Sunni Muslims, and they are opposed by the Alawite, Christian, Druze, and Kurdish minorities who are deeply suspicious of Muslim rule.
So would the fall of Assad be good for the west? Because of all these complexities and imponderables, that question is very difficult to answer. Yes, it would weaken Iran and provide the opposition to the regime there with a much needed boost. Nevertheless there is still a risk that, however terrible Assad is for the west, what follows him may be even worse.
But on balance, since Assad is an undoubted mortal enemy of western interests it cannot be in those interests for him to stay in power. As ever in the Arab and Muslim world, there are no good outcomes – only less bad ones.
