Andrew J. Bacevich writes: As you contemplate the ongoing violence in Syria, here are the three things to keep in mind.

First, the United States undoubtedly possesses the wherewithal to topple the regime of Bashar Assad. On this score, the hawks are surely right. Whether acting alone, with allies, or through proxies, Washington over the past decade or so has demonstrated an impressive capacity to overthrow governments. Skeptical? Consider the fate of various evil-doers on whom we trained our gun-sights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

Second, once Washington has removed Assad as it did Saddam Hussein, the likelihood of the United States being able to put things right — creating a “new” Syria that is stable, humane, and grateful for American assistance — is approximately nil. Here the evidence supports the doves. Skeptical? Again, consider the course of events in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya once the evil-doers departed the scene.

These two points define the poles around which the policy debate in Washington incessantly revolves. In one camp are those who are fired by humanitarian concerns or persuaded that Assad threatens US (or Israeli) security. They are keen to put American muscle once more to work, and chastise President Obama for his reluctance to act. In the second camp are those wary of the United States once again stumbling into a quagmire. They commend Obama for (thus far) exercising restraint, fearing that American meddling will create more problems than it will solve.

This debate overlooks the third point, which obviates the first two: Whatever Obama does or doesn’t do about Syria won’t affect the larger trajectory of events. Except to Syrians, the fate of Syria per se doesn’t matter any more than the fate of Latvia or Laos. The context within which the upheaval there is occurring — what preceded it and what it portends — matters a great deal. Yet on this score, Washington is manifestly clueless and powerless. [Continue reading…]

Hassan Hassan writes: The details of the human carnage in western Syria over the weekend, in which hundreds of civilians were slaughtered apparently by pro-regime militias, remain shrouded in mystery. But sufficient testimonies, pictures and videos point to a deliberate act of sectarian cleansing in the Alawites’ heartland.

It is remarkable that the regime’s media, unlike in previous massacres, has neither condemned the killing nor blamed the rebels. Pro-regime Facebook pages even posted pictures of slaughtered children, claiming they were militants.

The carnage is meant to teach a lesson. But to understand what the lesson is, we must first understand the dynamics of the conflict in the country’s middle and coastal regions, often referred to as “tamas ta’ifi” – the sectarian dividing lines. [Continue reading…]

Jim Lobe reports: Ten years after right-wing and liberal hawks came together to push the U.S. into invading Iraq, key members of the two groups appear to be reuniting behind stronger U.S. military intervention in Syria.

While the liberals appear motivated by a desire to stop the violence and prevent its spread across borders, their right-wing colleagues, particularly neo-conservatives, see U.S. intervention as key to dealing Iran a strategic defeat in the region.

“…[T]he most important strategic goal continues to be to defeat Iran, our main adversary in the region,” according to Tuesday’s lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

“The risks of a jihadist victory in Damascus are real, at least in the short-term, but they are containable by Turkey and Israel,” the editorial asserted. “The far greater risk to Middle East stability and U.S. interests is a victorious arc of Iranian terror from the Gulf to the Mediterranean backed by nuclear weapons.”

The immediate impetus for the reunion between the country’s two interventionist forces seems related primarily to charges that Syrian security forces have used chemical weapons in several attacks on insurgents and growing fears that the two-year-old civil war is spilling over into and destabilising neighbouring countries.

Those fears gained greater urgency this week when Israeli warplanes twice attacked targets close to Damascus and reports surfaced that Lebanon’s Hezbollah has sharply escalated its role in actively defending the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Both developments appear to have emboldened hawks here, particularly neo-conservatives who have sought for more than two decades to make the overthrow of the Assad dynasty in Damascus a major priority for U.S. Mideast policy and now see the conflict in Syria as a proxy war between Iran and Israel. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: The internet in Syria appears to have returned after a nationwide blackout knocked the country offline for more than 19 hours.

Monitoring company Renesys noted signs of activity at around 14:30 GMT (17:30 local time) on Wednesday.

Local state-run media had reported earlier that a “fault in optical fibre cables” was to blame for the blackout.

However, experts dismissed this explanation as “unlikely”.

David Belson, of Akamai, said: “Our monitoring shows that Syria’s international internet connectivity is through at least four providers, and published submarine cable maps show connectivity through three active cables.

“As such, the failure of a single optical cable is unlikely to cause a complete internet outage for the country.

New York Times: Syria’s access to the Internet was cut on Tuesday. The most likely culprit, security researchers said, was the Syrian government.

Syrian Internet traffic came to a halt just before 3 p.m. Eastern time. Google reported a drop in Internet traffic around that time, as did the Local Coordinating Committees, an antigovernment activist group in Syria.

Four physical cables connect Syria to the Internet — three under the sea, and the fourth over land through Turkey. For outsiders to cause Tuesday’s outage, security experts say, they would have had to physically cut all four cables simultaneously.

That does not appear to have happened in this case, according to security experts. Instead, someone with access to the physical connections dropped the Border Gateway Protocol, or B.G.P., routes into Syria in such a way that any information trying to enter the country was not able to find its way.

“It’s akin to someone removing all the street signs into Syria,” said Matthew Prince, the founder of CloudFlare, an Internet security firm that distributes large volumes of traffic across the Internet. The firm put together a video illustrating Syria’s outage.

The same technique was used to shut down the Internet and mobile phone service last November. Syrian government officials said terrorists, not the government, were responsible for that outage, but evidence pointed to government involvement. [Continue reading…]

Majid Rafizadeh writes: My cousin, Ramez, was dead before the echoes of the gunshot that killed him stopped ringing. His 4-year-old daughter, Zeynab, watched him fall on a narrow street in Damascus, but she never heard the shot because she is deaf. She held onto his lifeless hand until a second bullet tore into her chest. She survived.

I tell this story to make it clear that my family and I have experienced the civil war firsthand. Ramez was just one of several family members who lost their lives in the battle against Bashar Assad’s police state. My mother, sister and brother, alongside millions of other war-torn Syrian refugees, were forced to flee to Lebanon and then on to Baghdad.

But despite the seriousness and severity of the situation, I don’t believe that the United States should intervene militarily in Syria. Any direct or indirect intervention by the U.S. would exacerbate Syria’s internal conflict and increase the number of people being displaced and killed.

One argument advanced by those advocating U.S. military intervention is that it would advance America’s national interests and security in the region. If the U.S. were to help topple Assad, the argument holds, Iran would lose its most consistent regional ally. In addition, they say, the next Syrian government would probably be led by Sunni Muslims, and therefore more likely to align itself with Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, than with Iran.

But these arguments ignore an important history lesson: Iran has a track record of finding a way to benefit from instability in neighboring countries. The protracted civil war in Lebanon during the 1970s and ’80s, for instance, created a ripe environment for Iranian leaders to nurture one of the strongest nonstate actors in the region: the militant group Hezbollah. And after the 2003 U.S.-led intervention in Iraq, Iranian leaders were able to create a powerful Shiite Muslim proxy there.

The Iranian leadership’s tactical strategy has always been to clandestinely invest in local groups that can serve as proxies for its interests, capable of fighting not only regional governments but also world powers such as the U.S. and its Western allies. [Continue reading…]

Wadah Khanfar writes: Last week – clearly and officially – the war in Syria widened to become an extraordinary regional conflict. First, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, formally acknowledged that his forces are indeed fighting alongside those of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile, in Iraq the confrontation between the government of Nouri al-Maliki and demonstrators in the Sunni provinces entered its bloodiest phase. And then, as the week ended, we saw the Israeli bombing of targets inside Syria. The entire region is now undergoing the most important geopolitical shift since the political map of the Middle East was redrawn after the first world war.

We are now reaping the consequences of the international community’s hesitation over Assad’s regime. This hesitation created the space for Assad to continue to brutalise his people. While Russia and Iran continued to supply the Syrian regime with weapons, the US and EU imposed sanctions that had a negative impact on the Free Syrian Army; especially regarding anti-aircraft weapons. It was feared these weapons would fall into the wrong hands, but at that time the Syrian revolution was purely internal: jihadists had no real presence. With the increase in regime brutality and international apathy, the situation on the ground began to change in favour of jihadist groups.

Now the violence will not remain confined to Syria. Lebanon has become an extension of the Syrian theatre of war, and the announcement by the Shia Hezbollah in support of Assad’s Alawite regime raises the level of sectarian polarisation there to unprecedented levels. If the sectarian confrontation in Iraq continues to escalate, the situation will become yet more dangerous: Iraq, with its strategic position overlooking the oil-rich Gulf, Iran and Turkey, is a powder keg that could ignite the entire region.

The real danger is that sectarian conflict in the region will become entrenched. Many in Iraq are now calling for the creation of three regions on sectarian and ethnic grounds: a Shia region and a Sunni region, in addition to the Kurdish region that already enjoys substantial independence. In Syria massacres of Sunnis in the heavily populated Alawite coastal region in the past week have been carried out to terrorise the remaining Sunnis into leaving. This is an important step towards the establishment of an Alawite entity if the regime loses its control over Damascus. This would lead not to stability and prosperity, but the continuation of bloody feuds.

The borders of the Middle East states established by the Sykes-Picot agreement were illogical and impractical, and have never enjoyed any legitimacy in the minds of Arab people. They were never able to evolve into stable nation states, unlike neighbouring Iran and Turkey. In response, the pan-Arab movement emerged demanding unity, a dream which enticed the region’s people but never materialised on the ground.

It now seems the Sykes–Picot agreement will not last to see its first centenary. But we should not look for an alternative that is worse: more artificial borders would be a recipe for permanent conflict. A solution is possible through the revival of the spirit that has distinguished the Middle East throughout its history. Four peoples have coexisted in the region since ancient times – Arabs, Kurds, Turks and Iranians – in an open social and economic environment. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Iran’s Shiite leaders warned of regional sectarian conflict after reports that Syrian rebels raided a Shiite shrine in a suburb of Damascus last week, destroying the site and making off with the remains of the revered Shiite figure buried there.

It was impossible to independently verify the report, which appeared on a Facebook page on April 28. Through the course of the civil war, the Syrian government and the rebel opposition have proved adept at manipulating social media to implicate each other in atrocities, trading accusations that cannot be substantiated.

The shrine of the revered Shiite figure, Hojr Ibn Oday — also known as Hajar Ben Adi al-Kundi — in the Damascus suburb of Adra was a popular pilgrimage site before the hostilities mostly ended religious tourism in Syria. Pictures posted on Facebook seemed to show that the sanctuary had been ransacked and the remains of Mr. Oday exhumed.

The caption next to the photo reads: “This is the shrine of Hajar Ben Adi al-Kundi. It’s one of the Shiite shrines in Adra al-Balad. The heroes of the Free Syrian Army scavenged the grave and buried him in an unknown place. Praise be to God and God grant victory to the Free Syrian Army.”

The caption gives credit for the exhumation to a man named Abu Anas al-Wazir, or Abu al-Baraa, a leader of a military group called the Islam Brigade of the Free Army.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who considers himself a binding figure between Sunnis and Shiites, called the event “bitter and sad,” and blamed foreign intelligence agencies for the destruction of the shrine.

Iranian and Syrian students protested Monday in Tehran, shouting “death to America” and “death to Israel,” while pro-government speakers blamed Britain as a former colonizer for “sowing the seeds of discord between Sunnis and Shiites.” [Continue reading…]

Marc Lynch writes: When Bashar al-Assad gave his first major speech in response to the outbreak of protests in Syria in late March 2011, the Arab Twitterati’s response was an amused, “one down, two speeches to go.” That was the script followed by Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak: The president flounders about with a series of unsatisfying reform offers in the face of massive, cascading popular mobilization, and then, after the magical third speech, disappears forever. If Assad opted instead to unleash military force against his people, then Syria would presumably switch over to the Libya script — a U.N.-authorized, NATO-led military intervention.

It’s been a long time since anyone invoked the magical third speech. Two years, more than 70,000 dead, and millions of refugees later, it’s painful to remember that easy joking about the inevitability of change. It reminds me of the famous preface to the third and final edition of Malcolm Kerr’s The Arab Cold War: “[S]ince June 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days … it was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon,” Kerr wrote. “The June war was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame … leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves.”

Washington today is consumed by another round of its endless debate about whether to intervene in Syria, this time in response to the regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons. I have little to add to the thousands of essays already published on this, beyond what I’ve already argued. I might add that defending American “credibility” is always a bad reason to go to war. The reputation costs of not enforcing a red line are minimal, and will evaporate within a news cycle; military intervention in Syria will be the news cycle for the next few years. The United States should act in Syria in the way that it believes will best serve American interests and most effectively respond to Syria’s horrific violence, not because it feels it must enforce an ill-advised red line. [Continue reading…]

Dexter Filkins writes: Just after midnight on April 25th, a Syrian medical technician who calls himself Majid Daraya was sitting at home, in the city of Daraya, five miles from the outskirts of Damascus, when he heard an explosion. He ran outside, and, on the southern horizon, he saw a blue haze. “I’ve never seen a blue explosion before,” he remembers thinking. Seconds later came another blast, and another blue haze. Majid, who used a pseudonym to protect his identity, told me that his city had become a violent and unpredictable place; for five months, it had been the scene of heavy combat between forces loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the rebels who have been fighting for more than two years to drive him from power.

Within a few minutes, Majid said, his eyes began to burn, and he felt sick to his stomach. He decided to walk to the local hospital, where, as an anesthesia specialist, he spent most of his daytime hours. When he arrived, dozens of people were streaming in, choking, vomiting, crying, saliva bubbling out of their mouths. About a hundred and thirty people were treated for similar symptoms; ten of them, Majid said, were in “dangerous” condition, though none died. The victims were suffering from chemical poisoning, but there wasn’t much that the doctors could do except try to alleviate the symptoms. “We don’t have medicine to cure that kind of poisoning,” Majid said, in a telephone interview. (We had been introduced by the Syrian Support Group, a pro-opposition organization in Washington, D.C.) “The people were terrified, because no one could help them.”

On the way home, Majid saw birds and other animals—goats, chickens, stray dogs—writhing on the ground. Others were dead. “All these birds and chickens were dead around us,” he told me. “I can’t describe the fear that people felt.” A statement by the rebel-led city council said that the regime had used sarin and possibly chlorine gas. The council members held the Syrian government responsible and called on the international community to “find out the truth about the killing machine.” Majid directed me to a macabre gallery of photographs and videos, posted online by opposition leaders in Daraya. “It was poison gas,’’ he said. “It affected the birds and the animals and the humans in the same terrible way.”

Since March, there have been reports of at least four similar attacks, including one in Ateibeh, a contested area near Damascus, and one in Khan al-Assal, a town outside Aleppo. The reports indicated that the attack in Khan al-Assal had killed twenty-two people and injured forty-eight, and that the one in Ateibeh had contaminated as many as twenty-five people. Majid’s account could not be independently confirmed. An American intelligence official told me that he had learned of the purported attack, and others, by monitoring rebel Web sites. Like the other attacks, the one in Daraya was shrouded in ambiguity. What was the gas that Majid described? Was it a substance banned by international treaty, like sarin or VX? Or was it something less virulent? Had the attack been ordered by Assad, or had it been carried out by a Syrian military unit operating on its own authority? (Although the regime has accused rebels of such attacks, American officials believe that they don’t have chemical weapons.) And, if the incidents reported by Majid and other Syrians did amount to a use of chemical weapons, what could be done to prevent the next one?

On several occasions, President Obama has declared that if the regime used chemical weapons, or even prepared to use them, it would be crossing a “red line.’’ But the Administration has taken care not to make the line too sharp, referring not just to chemical weapons but to “a whole bunch” of chemical weapons, used in a “systematic” way. And though Obama has said that such attacks would be a “game changer,” he has stopped short of saying that they would be cause for military force.

Joseph Holliday, a former Army intelligence officer who has studied the conflict for the Institute for the Study of War, in Washington, suggested that the regime was attempting to use the weapons in a way that would frighten the rebels but wouldn’t cross the red line. “Assad has been extremely calculating with the use of force, increasing the levels of violence gradually, so as not to set off alarm bells,” he said. “First it was artillery. Then it was bombing. Then it was Scuds. A year ago, he wasn’t killing a hundred people a day. He’s introducing chemical weapons gradually, so we get used to them.” The attacks in March and April took place in areas that were either contested or held by the regime, and they killed relatively few people, at a time when, elsewhere in the country, a hundred people were dying every day. “If it’s not a big attack, it’s not easy to determine whether chemical weapons have been used,” a Senate aide told me. “The cloud disperses—there’s no mushroom cloud. Maybe Assad bombards the area afterward to cover up the evidence.” Indeed, some experts said that the regime was using the attacks specifically to gauge the resolve of Obama and the West. “Assad appears to be testing the tactical value of his chemical arsenal,” Gary Samore, who until February was President Obama’s chief adviser on weapons of mass destruction, said. “But he’s testing the political limits, too.”

Senior Israeli officials and Republicans in Washington, as well as British and French intelligence officials, have argued forcefully that the regime used chemical weapons. The Administration’s response has been characterized by caution, indecision, and reluctance to speak publicly about the subject. Officials said in late April that they believed chemical weapons had been used at least twice, but that they could not definitely tie the attacks to Assad. The White House said that it was not entirely clear who was in control of the weapons, leaving open the possibility that the attacks were accidental or unauthorized. “Given the stakes involved, and what we have learned from our recent experience, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient,” the White House wrote in a letter to congressional leaders. Instead, the Administration would rely on the United Nations, which planned to send in experts to test soil and take samples from victims. Assad refused to allow the experts into the country.

A White House aide told me, “There is no question in our minds that the regime would be willing to use these weapons, is able to use these weapons, and is increasingly likely to use these weapons as things continue to go badly for them.” But, at a recent meeting at the State Department, according to a person who attended, “No one wanted to say that Assad had crossed the line, because no one wants to deal with it.” [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria has sought to distance itself from comments made by one of its members that there was evidence of the nerve gas sarin being used by rebels.

Carla Del Ponte said testimony from victims and doctors had given rise to “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof”.

But the commission stressed that it had not reached any “conclusive findings”.

The commission’s press release says:

The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic wishes to clarify that it has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties to the conflict. As a result, the Commission is not in a position to further comment on the allegations at this time.

The Chair of the Commission of Inquiry, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, reminds all parties to the conflict that the use of chemical weapons is prohibited in all circumstances under customary international humanitarian law.

In line with its mandate, the Commission is currently investigating all allegations of violations of international law in the Syrian Arab Republic and will issue its findings to the Human Rights Council on 3 June 2013, as mandated by resolution 22/24.

Update: See Louis Proyect’s comment below. Carla Del Ponte has herself been a target of an earlier investigation over her handling of witnesses during Balkan war crimes cases. “During her eight years as chief prosecutor,” she was “a combative and divisive figure,” Ian Traynor wrote in 2010.

Sir Geoffrey Nice, who was a deputy prosecutor at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague, says: “Given her behaviour in the Haradinaj case, her colleagues should be very cautious when considering any of her contributions in the investigation [in Syria].”

Reuters reports: U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria’s civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

“Our investigators have been in neighbouring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

“This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,” she added, speaking in Italian.

Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, gave no details as to when or where sarin may have been used.

Reuters reports: The United States was not given any warning before air strikes in Syria against what Western and Israeli officials say were weapons headed for Hezbollah militants, a U.S. intelligence official said on Sunday.

Without confirming that Israel was behind the attacks, the intelligence official said that the United States was essentially told of the air raids “after the fact” and was notified as the bombs went off.
[…]
While the air raids raised fears that America’s main ally in the Middle East could be sucked into the Syrian conflict, Israel typically does not feel it has to ask for a green light from Washington for such attacks.

Officials have indicated in the past that Israel sees a need only to inform the United States once such a mission is under way.