Syria: popular revolution or manipulation from abroad?

Massacre by terrorists in Syria. (Photo: Reuters)

Article by Philippe Labrecque on The New Political Centre at 11 March 2012

MEDIA WORKGROUP SYRIA – 22 November 2012 – In an article published by The Spectator, journalist Rod Liddle asks an important question: what is the actual proportion of Syrians that support the uprising? It is a query which seems to have been largely ignored by the discourse over Syria and the measures that the international community should take against the Syrian government.

As Liddle points out, it is difficult to imagine the Christians or the Alawites backing the so-called Free Syrian Army against Bashir al-Assad: the rebels were heard chanting “send the Christians to Beirut and the Alawites to coffins.” The Patriarch of the Christian Orthodox Church in Syria spoke out recently and explained the choice his community has to make between the lesser of two evils: the Baathist regime’s dictatorship or the rebels and their Islamist penchant. Does anyone blame the Patriarch for choosing Assad? As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointed out, uprisings are not organically arising all over Syria. While the battle for the city of Homs, which the government seems to have won, is characterised by violence and massacres, the rest of the country is utterly silent.

When Clinton recognizes that as many as ten thousand Islamist militants (closely or loosely linked to Al-Qaeda) who fought in Iraq and perhaps in Afghanistan might now be in Syria, she makes a rational analysis based on realism: the Syrian uprising was hijacked, if not provoked, by foreign actors and their objectives. Objectives not in line with the Syrian people’s views, but which serve a certain pan-Islamic Sunni vision of the region inspired by Saudi Arabian ideology. What is less rational and frankly frustrating is that after publicly acknowledging that Syria may very well fall prey to fanaticism, Clinton takes the moral high ground over China and Russia for not backing the United Nations security council’s punitive resolutions against al-Assad, which would weaken the Syrian regime.

Instead of adopting a condescending attitude in relation to China and Russia, Clinton and the West should ask why are Qatar and Saudi Arabia so keen on supporting the rebels in Syria with weapons.  Do we naively believe that such theocratic kingdoms are not trying to serve their own strategic objectives by supporting the overthrow of a nationalist secular regime, one which represents the exact opposite political philosophy of the two monarchies? Indeed, to believe that some countries would act in a way that is clearly against their own interests represents how broken strategic thinking is in Europe and the United States.

Now that Libya seems to be heading towards a fragmentation into small self-proclaimed autonomous states, and territories and Kaddafi’s former weapons have now spread all over the Sahel, fuelling violence, we should have learned that to simply support self-proclaimed revolutionaries against dictators may yield mixed results as well as serve other states and organizations’ interests. The West remembers painfully Bush’s quest for democracy and its resulting quagmire in Iraq, just east of the Syrian border. No one, but the French government perhaps, wants to embark on a foreign intervention either through a military presence on the ground or an air-superiority mission like we witnessed in Libya. But others are not refraining from foreign intervention, and have already decided that Syria is worth such action.

While the West is timid while China and Russia object to an intervention on the basis of protecting the concept of sovereignty and self-determination, Ben Laden’s old posse (backed by the oil-rich theocracies) is more than willing to continue its holy war, after fighting twice in Afghanistan and once in Iraq. The debate over intervening in the Syrian conflict has been settled by these nomad holy warriors before we even ask ourselves that same question of intervention. Whether there ever was an actual popular uprising that then morphed into a revolution by Syrians against their oppressive regime may not matter if or once Assad falls and a new theocracy replaces the old dictatorship.

Once again, just like in Libya, we will realize too late that the Syrian ‘uprising’ was anything but a grass-root movement for democracy, and that the puppeteers of the conflict are not the Syrians at all. George Orwell, in his classic 1984, uses the character of O’Connor to express the fatality of revolutions as the latter observes that revolutions are not held to overthrow a dictatorship but to establish one. With the case of Syria, we are witnessing foreign actors trying to use, if not fabricate, a movement that would overthrow a dictatorship in order to replace it with their own form of dictatorship. Whether there is a popular revolution or not in Syria is now not only a question Syrians should ask themselves, but one worth probing by the whole world, as the fate of the revolution in Syria will greatly impact a pivotal region of the globe.

Philippe Labrecque.