Why there will be no foreign military intervention in Syria

John Hubbel Weiss writes: Despite its rhetoric condemning the Syrian regime, there is … reason to doubt that Washington really wants Assad to fall. Assad’s regime is “the devil we know,” and one with demonstrated weaknesses: Witness its expulsion from Lebanon and its defeats by Israel. At the same time, it has a professional and mostly loyal army and an identifiable and mostly loyal power base in one-fifth of the population: the Alawite and Christian minorities.

The Free Syrian Army and other adversaries of Assad are far less professional and unified, with a possibly far more volatile power base, the country’s Sunni Muslim majority.

Nor does the American and UN response to the Sudanese government’s atrocities give Syrians cause to hope for a rescue. Senators Lieberman and McCain have called for giving military support to the Syrian rebels. Despite the fact that in Darfur alone the Sudanese government under Omar al-Bashir has caused the death of nearly a 100 times more civilians and created 80 times more refugees than Assad has done in Syria, the United States has never seen fit to arm Darfur rebels.

Elie Wiesel has called for Assad to be charged with crimes against humanity. Although such a charge would serve as a gesture of moral concern and solidarity with the Syrian people, it would probably not deter the Syrian president from continuing his attacks. After all, an International Criminal Court indictment for genocide has not caused any change in the intensity of Sudanese president Mr. Bashir’s 22-year-long string of atrocities against the people of Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, Abyei, the South, and elsewhere in Sudan.

It is more than likely, therefore, that an assessment of American and international policy toward intervention in the Libyan and Sudanese cases will do little to shake the Syrian government’s confidence that it can continue down a path of the most ruthless repression.

The Syrian people themselves, with an enduring courage that has prompted a growing but still small number of high Syrian officers to abandon the regime, are the only ones who will convince Assad it is time to choose a less murderous path.

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2 thoughts on “Why there will be no foreign military intervention in Syria”

  1. dickerson3870

    FROM THE WEISS ARTICLE AT CSM, THIS HAS TO BE THE LAUGH OF THE YEAR:

    . . .it is unlikely that there will be any armed foreign intervention in Syria as there was in Libya.
    The tactical situation in Libya made intervention relatively easy: Essentially all that was needed to prevent a massacre of civilians in Benghazi was to interdict Muammar Qaddafi’s forces along a single road running eastward along the Mediterranean shore to that city. This was done, and lives were saved. Such a situation does not exist in Syria . . .

  2. Paul Woodward

    Whether that’s a laughable oversimplification of the course of the NATO intervention, the point the writer is making about the ease of intervention is valid. The war was indeed primarily a running skirmish along a single coastal road enabling NATO to offer the rebels air support to make territorial advances. Had it primarily been an urban war where air support was of much more limited tactical value, it’s unlikely NATO would have been persuaded to intervene. And absent that intervention, the likelihood is that the situation in Libya now would look much more like the situation in Syria.

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