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http://www.nowlebanon.com Leaving Syria to fate Using chemical weapons in Syria is a red line, US President Barack Obama said yesterday. "That's an issue that doesn't just concern Syria. It concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us," Obama said, also acknowledging the possibility that militant groups might acquire some of those weapons. "We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people." The statement came the day the United Nations ended its months-long observer mission in Syria, because “none of the sides abided by their commitments.” Syrian opposition members as well as analysts fear that the conflict has now been left to fate. The apathy of the international community, especially Western countries, cannot bring anything good for Syria and the region, they say, as the conflict is likely to spread to other countries and boost anti-Western sentiment among the Syrian opposition. According to Michael Weiss, research director at the Henry Jackson Society in London, Western countries’ reluctance to intervene in Syria not only leaves room for the regime to continue to kill its own people, but also for radical factions to pour into the country. “The inevitable is going to be a mess, and I don’t see signs of preparation for it,” he told NOW. In the best-case scenario, the rebels would be organized enough to establish a new system of law and order in Syria. The worst-case scenario is that the regime expires in a spectacular fashion—using chemical weapons or starting a massive ethnic cleansing campaign in the coastal region in order to create an Alawite state. “The whole state would collapse. It would be a failed state because the post-Assad era will be what the post-Saddam era was in Iraq. There will be sectarian conflict, war lords’ disputes, militias that are not willing to let down their weapons and radicalized factions like Salafists, Islamists, jihadists,” Weiss said. Despite the dangers, there has been no concrete action on the international level to stop the bloodshed, nor to prevent the regime from using its chemical weapons. Although the US Department of Defense has stated that 60,000 troops would be needed to secure the Syrian military’s chemical weapons storage facilities, and while US diplomat for the Mideast Beth Jones was sent with an interagency delegation to Turkey to begin work on plans for worst-case scenarios in Syria, President Obama stressed that he has not ordered any armed American intervention yet. There is not much hope from the UN either. “The UN Security Council is in a deadlock situation,” Imad Salamey, professor of Political Science and International Relations at the Lebanese American University, told NOW. “Due to divisions, the UN cannot play a significant role in Syria. They can send a mediator like Kofi Annan or Lakhdar Brahimi, but that won’t do much good.” He added that withdrawing the observers may give the appearance that the UN is giving the Assad regime room to do whatever it wants. “But we also have to stress that the observers were nothing but false witnesses, used and manipulated by the regime to provide evidence in its favor and to cover its tracks,” Salamey explained. “If the UN wants to play a role, it needs to be a serious one.” Weiss agrees. “What can [the UN] do? They had to observe a cease fire that never existed, to implement a peaceful negotiated solution that was impossible from day one,” he said. “[New UN envoy] Brahimi will accomplish nothing. There will be no kind of negotiation until the [combat] forces are equal. The rebels are not fighting to reach some kind of sustainable condition to talk their way out of there; their aim is to march on Damascus. Even if they can’t do it now and they are still stuck in this war of attrition, feeding upon the regime’s resources, clearing away layer upon layer both politically and militarily—every time the regime deploys columns of troops in a city, part of it defects,” he said. “It’s all in accordance with the Western logic: ‘This isn’t our problem, we wish it would go away. Remove all the minimal military presence you have on the ground and see which way it goes,’” Weiss concluded.
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