The Great Syrian Chess Match

Western powers, having ostracized Syria for a generation, can do nothing but sit back and cross their fingers as regional geopolitics play out.

Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait severed diplomatic ties with Syria in response to President Bashar al-Assad's ceaseless crackdown on anti-government demonstrators. The Telegraph's Con Coughlin figures that the Saudi's withdrawal of support could be the turning point that will eventually lead to Assad's downfall. With Egypt in post-revolution tumult, Coughlin says Saudi Arabia is the de facto Arab power now, and “has the ability to make or break regimes: the kingdom’s military intervention in Bahrain was the decisive factor in silencing the Shia opposition, while its long-standing contempt for Gaddafi proved to be the decisive factor in the Arab League’s vote in favour of military action.” Assad's targeting of Syria's Sunni majority – the sect to which the House of Saud belongs – has clearly ticked off the Gulf state, and with no one left in their corner besides Iran, Syria's rule under the Alawite minority seems destined to be replaced with a Sunni government. Coughlin then envisions that this new Sunni Syria would normalize relations with Israel, snuff out Hezbollah and be an all-around good neighbour, which while pleasant-sounding, is at best quixotic at this juncture.

Writing in the Toronto Star, Rami G. Khouri examines just what the Gulf states' schism with Syria means for Turkey and Iran. The ayatollah, of course, would like nothing more than for his little puppet state to survive this little uprising (1,700 dead and counting), as Syria “represents the one and only foreign policy achievement of the Iranian Islamic Revolution.” Iran is also the chief supplier of arms to the Assad regime – which intones that the uprising could draw out much longer provided ammunition and weapons keep flowing in from a Tehran desperate to maintain the status quo. For Turkey, Syria presents the biggest diplomatic challenge yet for a country whose “economic and political development in the past several decades has been one of the few success stories in the Middle East.” Military intervention is clearly off the table for right now, so Turkey's diplomatic corps has the unenviable challenge of getting Assad to stop the slaughter. While daunting, doing so would establish Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey as the pre-eminent broker of any further unrest in a region of the world that's seen far too much of it.

Finally, Michael Bell explains in The Globe and Mail that whatever happens in Syria, it's unlikely to end well for anybody, except perhaps arms manufacturers. “There are three possible outcomes to the current struggle for power, none of them comforting,” says Bell. The most likely, he imagines, is Assad surviving and Syria carrying on much as before. Outcome No. 2 would be the ragtag opposition taking over and the imposition of a Sunni majority government that will probably lead to retributive bloodshed (case in point: Iraq), while No. 3 is the dissolution of Syria along its manifold ethnic, tribal, and religious lines into semi-sovereign states, which, again, probably results in more bloodshed. “It’s quite possible that many in the international community view a reassertion of Mr. al-Assad’s power, as distasteful as it is, as the lesser of evils, in a situation where chaos seems the most likely alternative,” says Bell, which would help explain the glacial pace at which it's taken the international community to react to the uprising (Russia only passed sanctions against Assad this week, five months after the revolt began). Not to bring you down or anything before the weekend, but those cheerleading for a hasty exit from Assad would be wise to expect the worst, no matter who ends up controlling Damascus.