What is now clear about events in Syria is that the government of Bashar al Assad may have already come to terms with the inevitability of its demise. Its preoccupation, it seems, is with what might be the most favourable circumstances under which it surrenders its grip on power. A point has been reached where the Syrian ruler, his family and his key henchmen understand that their own personal survival is now at stake. After the protracted reign of terror that they have unleashed on the people of Syria it is not conceivable that they will survive the end of the conflict as long as they remain in the country. For the time being, holding on to power while seeking a way out for themselves would appear to be their only option.
Accordingly, such undertakings as President al Assad has given in the matter of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s plan to end thirteen months of violence and to commence talks on Syria’s political future can hardly be taken seriously – at least not at this stage – since the Syrian ruler understands only too well that the survival of his regime is bound – sooner or later – to become part of that agenda. His immediate concern would more likely be with the terms and circumstances under which the 41-year-old regime that began with his father finally surrenders its grip on Syria. Its chosen approach to dealing with that particular problem has been to play for time, so to speak, and in that regard it still remains in control of a powerful and still largely loyal military with which to keep in check the forces that have aligned themselves against the regime. Loss of the military option would in effect remove the most important instrument with which to buy the time which the regime seeks to calculate its options as far as plotting a path out of power is concerned.
What we are currently witnessing is the agonizing meltdown of an entrenched dictatorship that is prepared have the Syrian people pay whatever price it chooses to exact for regime change. It has seen the manner in which the tyrants in Egypt and Libya have had their power snatched from them and it does not favour either of those options.
President al Assad may be the figurehead and conduit for the current diplomatic engagement but there is now sufficient evidence that it is not he but the entire al Assad clan, with its iron grip on the military that is calling what one might call the ‘real shots.’ That is the reason why the merits of such commitments as he seeks to give on the diplomatic front are, in a sense, disconnected from the real events inside Syria. President al Assad may be engaging Kofi Annan in discussions the tone of which are circumscribed by the rules of diplomacy, but those engagements are far removed from the entirely different set of rules – or perhaps, absence of any rules whatsoever – that characterize the increasingly violent and vicious campaign being waged by his military machine to subdue what has now become a committed opposition that exists in strongholds such as Homs and elsewhere in Syria. The regime has learnt – particularly from the experience of Egypt – that whatever the outcome of the diplomatic pursuits, regime change is inevitable. That understanding is what continues to shape the way in which it governs. The current thinking of President al Assad, his family members and the Alawite clan that controls the key institutions of state and, crucially, the military, bares all the repulsiveness of a regime that clearly values its own survival above the fate of Syria, and that is what has, up until now, made the diplomatic effort to end the crisis largely ineffective.
At this juncture it appears that what happens on the ground in Syria, much more than what occurs on the diplomatic front, will determine the direction in which the struggle of the Syrian people goes. There may have been some level of defection from the Syrian military and some amount of consolidation of the popular opposition to the government; on the other hand and in the absence of the kind of external military support that was available to the Libyan uprising, for example, there has not been, up until now, a shift in the balance of military force that might serve to narrow the options of the al Assad regime, forcing it to take the diplomatic option more seriously as a means of negotiating itself out of power and ensuring the physical survival of at least some of its principals.
Here, the examples of the post-conflict humiliation of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the inglorious end of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, present themselves in a manner that is sufficiently stark to worry President al Assad and his family as to what their own fates might be except they can surrender power on their terms.
With hindsight, perhaps, the diplomatic effort to end the crisis in Syria might have commenced much earlier since it is the deepening of that crisis and the nature of the corner into which the al Assad regime has backed itself that now makes diplomacy the difficult pursuit that it is. Its value, insofar as bringing the Syrian government under regional and international pressure and isolating the regime, though important, must be measured against the price in bloodshed and destruction which the Syrian people continue to pay while the regime weighs its options, unmindful of the high price which it continues to exact in the process.
