Special envoy Kofi Annan told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that his struggling peace plan is the last hope to prevent Syria from plunging into an all-out civil war. But the reason his cease-fire and political-dialogue plan has not yet stopped the fighting, despite the truce that was formally agreed to a month ago, is that Syria is, in fact, already engaged in an increasingly bloody civil war -- with Thursday's massive car-bomb attack in Damascus simply the latest atrocity.
Some 15 months after Syria’s rebellion began, it is clear that President Bashar Assad has effectively eluded the fate of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Instead, Assad has chosen the path former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. Syria today appears to be more of an echo of the Balkan wars of the early ’90s, than of the Arab Spring. This brutal civil conflict pits rival communities against one another on a sectarian basis, while Western powers appear paralyzed as peace initiatives brought on by foreign diplomats flounder and cease-fires are violated. The death toll has passed 9,000 and continues to climb, but despite the urgent language in foreign capitals, the prospects for foreign intervention remain remote.
Almost two decades ago, amid the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serb forces under President Slobodan Milosevic and his Bosnian-Serb protégés launched a war to carve up Bosnia and expand territory under Serbian control through a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing. After years of brutal violence and ineffectual peace plans, NATO began to enforce a no-fly zone in 1994 and eventually stepped up its intervention to force the parties to accept an unhappy power-sharing agreement signed in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. He may have started the war, but Milosevic had made himself indispensable to the peace. (Justice had to wait some five years more before Milosevic was overthrown and sent to face a war-crimes trial at The Hague.)
Faced with a popular uprising, Assad decided that he’d rather be Milosevic than Gaddafi, unleashing his security forces and sectarian civilian militias, and provoking the opposition to turn to arms. Syria's battle lines were drawn on sectarian lines, and that made Assad indispensable to peace, with the Annan plan requiring not that he step down, but that he enforce a cease-fire. The regime continues to attack opposition strongholds, of course, but its narrative and diplomatic position is reinforced by ongoing violence from the other side, particularly the more jihadist element. And the regime is confident of prevailing on the terrain of violence, its military capability being vastly superior to that of its opponents.
Unlike Gaddafi, Assad is benefiting from strong diplomatic support from Russia and China, which oppose any foreign intervention, as well as military and economic aid from Iran. The U.S. and Europe are focused on their economic crises and election season, their appetite for expeditionary warfare exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who championed the NATO intervention in Libya, has just been voted out of office, and François Hollande has made clear that France won't support military action in Syria without Security Council authorization -- which China and Russia will prevent. The fact that the Syrian refugee camps in Turkey are taking on the feel of more permanent installations underscores a sense that Syria's most powerful neighbor is not about to invade to topple Assad, either.
A protracted war looms, with the limits of Annan's mediation effort plain to see. The Bosnia example suggests that the crisis in Syria can continue in its present form for quite some time -- low-key sectarian warfare could continue for many years, as it did in neighboring Lebanon for almost two decades.
There was a note of resignation in White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s choice of words, last week, when he noted that “if the regime’s intransigence continues, the international community is going to have to admit defeat … It is clear and we will not deny that the plan has not been succeeding thus far.” Carney’s point, of course, is that admitting failure would require that the international community come up with an alternative. But there’s not much sign of a substantially different plan B emerging anytime soon. In Bosnia, of course, it took years [EM] and even then, the solution was not so much a happy ending, as it was making the best of a bad situation.
