The west is failing the Syrian people

By David Gardner

Why would Assad voluntarily surrender chemical weapons? 

A cloud of improvisation befogs international policy towards Syria. Russia’s proposal to audit the Assad regime’s chemical arsenal, through international inspections that would eventually destroy it, has done little to disperse that. How could it? As things stand, the proposal looks plucked from extemporised remarks by John Kerry, the somewhat erratic US secretary of state, then filtered through Walid Muallem, Syria’s rarely visible foreign minister, by Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister who furnishes Syria with a diplomatic shield at the UN Security Council.

It is hard to know whether Mr Kerry’s rhetorical flourish – that the Assads could save themselves from a US missile strike to punish last month’s gas attack on eastern Damascus by surrendering their chemical weapons – is being retroactively spun into a considered strategy evolved on the sidelines of last week’s G20 summit in St Petersburg. Either way, the amateurishness of it all is unconvincing.

Barack Obama’s address to the nation on Tuesday does not change that. The president said the US would give the Russian initiative a chance. But the threat of military action would remain, even though a vote in Congress to support it has been postponed. And, Mr Obama swaggered: “The United States military doesn’t do pinpricks” – despite Mr Kerry’s defensive words that “what we are talking about doing [is an] unbelievably small, limited kind of effort”.

As ultimatums go, “come out with your hands up or we’ll attack you in an ‘unbelievably small’ way” is at the lower end of the shock and awe register. So far, the Russian démarche has issued two get-out-of-jail-free cards: one to the Assads, who have embraced this nebulous initiative in order to “derail the US aggression”, as Mr Muallem put it; the other to Mr Obama, who had shown humiliatingly little sign he could win a vote in the House of Representatives.

Vladimir Putin, president of a country that has always been a spoiler in the Middle East, can posture as a peacemaker, safe in the knowledge that this entire debate is at least as much about the credibility of the US and President Obama as it is about Syria, that it bolsters Russia and may shore up an Assad regime that is still eroding.

Beyond the Syrian tragedy around which this diplomatic dance is whirling, a ruthless despot and his authoritarian godfather are easily besting a US president in the court of public opinion. As America and its allies wing it, it requires a wilful rather than willing suspension of disbelief to imagine Russia has charted a way forward on Syria. There are four substantive reasons for incredulity, and one for despair.

First, why would Bashar al-Assad, a dictator who gasses his people to break a stalemate in a war he and his clan regard as existential and almost certainly cannot win, voluntarily surrender an arsenal he has been holding largely in reserve? Furthermore, Syria’s rationale for possessing chemical weapons the regime does not acknowledge, is to counter Israel’s stockpile of nuclear warheads that the Israelis do not acknowledge. While Syria has never signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) it now says it wants to join, Israel signed but never ratified the treaty. Israel has bombed Syria three times already this year.

Second, the only way Syria can credibly be forced to give up its chemical weapons under this initiative is if the UN Security Council passes an enforceable resolution. France is seeking a resolution backed by Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which would compel Syria to bring its arsenal under the CWC within a reasonable time-span – and license the use of force if it does not. Mr Putin rejects any threat of force or implication that the Assads gassed more than 1,000 people in last month’s attack.

Third, the logistics of decommissioning Syria’s arsenal amid a civil war with a hundred fronts are impossible without a ceasefire. Even with one, some chemical arms are already deployed. Would a regime that has used them declare these?

Fourth, if there were an agreement, and a ceasefire to implement it, then Syria would have got to the point where a negotiated outcome to the war became possible. That will not happen so long as the Assads remain in place in Damascus – which brings us full circle to why they used gas in the first place: to liquidate a threat to the capital.

The fifth reason – for despair – is that none of this addresses the mortal threat the Assads pose to the Syrian people and their neighbours. If by some process of geopolitical alchemy this initiative does prosper, does that mean the Assads have a licence to kill another 100,000 Syrians so long as they do not gas them? 

The Assads were schooled in a vicious academy of power, yet this initiative almost treats them as naughty boys caught doing something wrong. It is of a piece with last summer’s UN Geneva peace plan, which rests ultimately on the proposition that the Assads will volunteer for early retirement. The Geneva delusion was partly about keeping the Russians in the game. With this initiative, they look to be taking the game over.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.