Syria's Unsolvable Stalemate

Is the best option just to sit back and watch the slaughter and hope for the best?

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's crackdown on protesting civilians continues with no end in sight and a death toll that's surpassed 1,400. Gary Gambill, writing for Foreign Policy, imagines the conflict will be “long, uncertain, and violent,” and that any hopes of a Tunisian- or Egyptian- style overthrow of the Assad regime are misguided at best. Assad is too entrenched, and his Alawite supporters too willing to carry out his orders, for him to consider stepping down or sharing power with no threat of reprisal. “Years of state repression have left the country with no organized opposition of sufficient stature to credibly promise anything to the regime,” writes Gambill, “while Assad's failure to honor past reform pledges makes most Syrians very skeptical that he can take bold action.” The best that reform-minded Syrians can hope for is some sort of negotiations brokered by a third party, likely Turkey, but anything short of Assad's removal is bound to be rejected by myriad opposition interests.

Over in London, Assad's cousin, Ribal al-Assad, is slated to address the British Parliament next week, which The Guardian's Chris Doyle responds to with justifiable horror. Ribal happens to be a critic of the Assad regime, but that's really only because his father, Rifaat, was exiled from Syria to London by Hafiz Assad, Bashar's father. Rifaat is just about the most hated man in all of Syria, as he led the 1982 massacre in Hama that killed some 30,000 civilians. But “to Ribal ... Rifaat is a democrat and has been calling for democracy since the 1970s,” says Doyle. “Perhaps nobody heard him over the sound of tank fire.” Now that Hama is once again the focus of Assad's retribution (dozens of activists have been killed there in recent days), “it will be an insult to all those who are bravely laying down their lives in the struggle for freedom” if Ribal graces Westminster. To say the least.

In The Globe and Mail, former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy calls for the UN Security Council to pass a resolution allowing the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for Assad's arrest. “Initiating an ICC investigation in Syria now would create a powerful incentive for Mr. al-Assad to refrain from further repression and to participate in a dialogue toward greater democratization,” writes Axworthy. We're skeptical that this would have any effect on Assad (to wit: Moammar Gadhafi responded to an ICC indictment by shelling more civilians), but, absent other options (and excluding military intervention, which no one is, or should be, calling for), it's at least worth a shot.