Don't Buy the Crocodile Tears

C.J. Chivers and Steven Erlanger each have important, informative stories in today's paper on the now two-year old uprising in Syria. If you've been overwhelmed in trying to keep up with the coverage, which is daily and substantial in the New York Times, as I have, this morning is a good time to dip back in.

Chivers, who usually provides a boots on the ground perspective, as he does in today's offering, "In Syrian Clash Over ‘Death Highway,’ a Bitterly Personal War," dissects rebel efforts to harry convoys aimed at resupplying government outposts:

As spring arrives in Syria, the civil war closes out its second year in a mosaic of vicious and widely scattered battles, like this one, where the Damascus-Aleppo highway crosses an open agricultural plain in the south of Idlib Province. 

Since late last spring, antigovernment fighters have wrested much of northern Syria from Mr. Assad’s control, overrunning military checkpoints and several bases, and pushing the army back. But the rebel tide, largely led in northwestern Syria by Islamic groups, moves slowly, checked by weapon shortages and by a lingering archipelago of government positions where the army and loyalist militias have settled in with powerful weapons, equipped for a long fight. Each of these military positions, and the roads between them, have become minifronts, an almost uncountable set of bloody battlefields where rebels try to silence government outposts, which are mostly arrayed around Syria’s main cities.

It's clear from Chivers' story that the rebels fighting the Assad government are mujahedeen. Not a good sign for a pluralist state post-Assad. I read a report on Counterpunch from a guy writing from Syria who says that public opinion has turned against the rebels and is aligning now with Assad. This is important to keep in mind when reading Erlanger's story, "Seeking to Aid Rebels in Syria, France Urges End to Arms Embargo." France and Britain, colonial behemoths of yore, are demanding that the European Union end its arms embargo of the rebels:

The European Union pact on the embargo and on sanctions against Syria must be renewed every three months. France is moving for the next review to be held this month, rather than in May. “We have to go very fast,” Mr. Fabius said, urging that the union try to shift the balance of forces in Syria in favor of the opposition before many thousands more people die.

Whenever leaders of great states start shedding tears over the plight of the people get ready to be bamboozled. I interpret this to mean that things must not be going well for the West; that the Counterpunch story must be accurate. The French and British argue that if the West arms the rebels to the teeth this will force Assad to the bargaining table; that right now Assad holds the upper hand because of assistance from Russia and Iran.

I don't see escalation solving the problem. One thing about Assad's Ba'athist Syria is that prior to the Arab Spring it's been an island of calm in a turbulent Middle East. You crack that state apart definitively, which is the gamble the old colonial powers seem to have now fully embraced, and you'll have a situation much worse than the blowback generated by Gaddafi's ouster; it'll be like having an Afghanistan in the heart of the Middle East. This is the direction in which we're headed; as Erlanger reports, Lebanon is already getting sucked in:

The Syrian government threatened Thursday to launch attacks on Lebanese territory to stop Lebanese anti-Assad militants from entering Syria, demonstrating how difficult it has become for Lebanon to stay out of the war consuming its larger, closely connected neighbor. The threat — the most pointed warning yet to the Lebanese government, which is divided on the Syrian conflict — was delivered in a diplomatic note that Syria’s ambassador to Lebanon, Ali Abdul Karim Ali, presented to Lebanese authorities, Syria’s state news agency, SANA, reported. 

At the same time, concerns are growing that the Lebanon-based militia Hezbollah, with Iran’s backing, is increasing its efforts to bolster the Assad forces. In a speech to a security gathering on Thursday, Israel’s chief of military intelligence asserted that Hezbollah was training a popular army in Syria that numbered 50,000 men, which Iran and Hezbollah could use to protect their Syrian interests if Mr. Assad fell.

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For a great example of the kind of reporting C.J. Chivers does, check out this video of a firefight in Misurata, Libya from the civil war there two years ago.