Revolutions in Review: Syria

I blogged some months ago that it appeared the opposition had been able to force a stalemate with the Syrian regime. Even in a stalemate, Bashar’s days would be numbered. But now it appears the rebels are winning. At any rate, even the journalists can see that at best for Bashar, it’s already a stalemate.

My view can be demonstrated with some confidence by matching up accepted principles of military science with news from the front. Let’s begin with some Che would recognize.

·         The opposition forces have the support of the people in the countryside. This confers several military advantages. For one, they will never starve unless the people themselves are starving. For another, spontaneous, immediate intelligence of enemy movements in the controlled territory. Lastly a source of recruits.

·         They are arming themselves with the weapons of the regime. That is, weapons taken from the soldiers of the regime by movement or combat.

·         They have the initiative against enemy columns penetrating the countryside. The columns are subject to ambush – rather they were subject to ambush. It’s doubtful the regime has sufficient resource to pursue this line of attack – the penetration of opposition-held territory – at all anymore. And this indicates it’s no longer a guerilla war anymore.

All the foregoing has been true for some time now. Which brings us beyond the principles of guerilla warfare to more general principles of military science.

·         Because now the opposition forces have the initiative at the point of attack. That is, not only the ability to attack enemy bases, but also to dictate the strategic focus of combat – I mean the struggle for Aleppo. And this suggests further…

·         …that lines for purely military supplies have been established and are in regular operation. The first step in this direction was to acquire border posts along lines of transportation – a step of great strategic importance that the regime could not prevent and cannot recover (even by expanding the war, qv). Clearly a strategic offensive of some weeks’ duration could not have been undertaken without reasonably secure lines of supply.

·         It’s equally true the offensive could not have been sustained without command and control resources significantly better – seemingly by an order of magnitude – than those the Libyan opposition was able to defeat Gaddafi with. Insofar as they’ve contributed to this result, the defections are striking the regime where it hurts.

·         On the flip side, the regime’s resources of heavy weapons can hardly be increasing. The opposition’s monitors would have noticed if more tanks, helicopters, fighter-bombers were being brought in. Each one lost, one-by-one, is irreplaceable. So for the same reason and to the same extent that the opposition’s supply of ordnance is improving – territorial control of entry points and routes – the regime’s situation must be deteriorating.

·         Anecdotal evidence also suggests the regime forces face morale problems. I suppose a man would fight desperately rather than face his accusers with blood on his hands. But desperation is its own morale problem.

Speaking of desperation, mistakes have been made. On still another set of general principles, they tend to weaken the position of the party that makes them.

·         Use of auxiliaries. The Hezbollah from Lebanon have a strategic interest in Syria: it’s on the line of supply from Iran. So they’re not fighting for the regime. Moreover, as soon as they conceive the line of supply to be lost, they’ll abandon the fight. This kind of conflict of interest, as Machiavelli knew, makes auxiliary troops unreliable.

·         Use of mercenaries. The Chechens have no strategic interest in Syria. If they’re fighting there, most likely, it’s only to obtain money and arms for their own struggles, which, as Machiavelli knew, is even more unreliable for the employer.

·         Expanding the war – especially one you are losing. Shelling Turkey was a bad mistake. Though their response has been measured, it has been persistent, and they determine the measure. If you wanted to shell the opposition’s supply lines, why choose one that comes through your border with a member of NATO?

·         Dispersal of forces. It remains to be seen, but my hunch is the late barrage on Homs is a diversion intended to draw troops out of Aleppo. If so, first of all, it’s an admission that the opposition troops are free to move, cannot be prevented from moving, from front to front, combat to combat. Second, an artillery barrage is one thing, armor is another. The former has destructive power, the latter has striking power. If it’s a diversion, it’s recklessly, and if it has no striking power uselessly, destructive.

It’s too bad the U.S. won’t let the Saudis and Qataris give the opposition weapons effective against aircraft. The military leaders of the opposition think this kind of thing would be decisive. Of course, a rocket that can shoot down a helicopter or fighter can, in the wrong hands, also shoot down an airliner. But that is the policy of fear; we’ve been following it too long.

What if the Free Syrian Army had taken counsel of their fears? Obviously they haven’t.

Narrowing Visions

Speculative philosophy’s field of vision over Syria is narrowing.

From the one side, the actions of the great powers, not-so-great powers, and international and regional organizations of states, have limited Syria’s power of self-determination. Both sides in the struggle have asked for help, but with help necessarily comes interference. More precisely, bringing in outside entities subjects the struggling parties to the interests and determinations of those entities, and limits their freedom to act just to that extent.

From the other side, nothing seems to matter to the outcome of the revolution so much as how long Bashar can manage to continue to live. It could be months; it could be many months; it could be years; but it won’t be many years.

Here’s why….

·         Alawite disaffection. Such reports started coming some weeks past. Thus even his natural sources of strength are drying up.

·         Middle class/administrative class disaffection and agitation in Aleppo and Damascus. Formerly a source of strength, if only negative strength, now some of them are willing to express positive disagreements with the regime.

·         The continuous defection of men and officers of every rank, including the very highest, from the military. Somebody said on TV the other day he’d counted 13 general officers among the defectors.

·         The traditional, and now renewed, enmity of the Turks.

And that’s just lately. I didn’t think Bashar could make himself any stronger by pursuing his course of violence, but he certainly made himself more alone. Is it at all possible be could leave anything resembling a regime behind him? No: what’s left of his apparatus will evaporate in a cloud of disassociation.

Thus the determinations of individual subjectivity place another limit on speculative philosophy. How does Bashar manage to deal with it all? What sort of man is he really? …but who cares?

The revolution cannot rely on a purely military solution via either the occupation of territory or the annihilation of Bashar’s forces in the field. Similarly, one of the points of shooting down the Turkish jet was to warn the West about intervention with air power. But the revolution can force, maybe are near to forcing, a stalemate. And that gives time, though it may be a very bloody time, for the indicated result.

“Chaos in his wake”

…at least that’s what some people would like to believe or make others believe the juvenile Bashar would leave behind if he felt compelled to give up his despotism. Certainly, at any rate, chaos runs before him.

How does this sound to the Syrian middle class? To whomsoever of the big bourgeoisie as are not connected to the regime by blood or marriage?

In his speech last week, the juvenile Bashar bragged that 64,000 “saboteurs” were known by name to the government, and that a third of them had already been apprehended. Not only did this give the lie to the journalists who thought only 10,000 perhaps were imprisoned, it ought to make anyone who isn’t yet nervous, oughtn’t it? – including those who might think they hadn’t even performed any acts of “sabotage.”

Of course the terms are at best undefined and at worst cruelly distorted. Strictly speaking, there aren’t 64,000 professionally trained “saboteurs” in the whole world. But if they are just people who would like to reform the government –and revolution entails dialectical negation – why then, yes, revolutionaries are saboteurs.

Really, Bashar, you make it sound like it’s a bad thing.

Then what of the “concessions” up to now? They render the current round of promises meaningless.

Item: One of the juvenile Bashar’s concessions is to change a preposition in the constitution, so that, instead of his party being given “leadership of state and society,” it would be given merely “leadership in state and society.”

But who would take the trouble to organize a political party – assuming that is what the new preposition authorizes – if one were assured in advance that the party could never come to power?

Meantime…

…the revolution is stronger numerically – by all observations it gains adherents faster than Bashar can kill or frighten them – but is it becoming broader-based?

Specifically, what would make the petit bourgeoisie flip to the opposition?

Or again, when does the momentum of the revolutionary opposition begin to look like a winning bet to those who have been sitting on the sidelines and probably feel like they have a lot to lose?

What they have to lose

I’ve been impressed by the consistent inability of this revolution, unlike others in the Arab Spring, to reach the streets of the capital. It’s always and only – but now more frequently – no further in than the suburbs.

There are reports of opposition action in Aleppo, by some measures the largest city in Syria. This wouldn’t threaten the operation of the government directly, but if continued would threaten the ability of the regime to run the economy – wouldn’t it?

The former U.S. ambassador too Morocco told the BBC that the Syrian economy was about as big as Pittsburgh’s. Though I’m not in a position to contradict him, I’m not sure what lesson he would like to draw from that fact. Also not sure whether that means the Syrian middle class is too small to make a middle class revolution.

His more interesting observation was that Damascus is to Aleppo as London is to Birmingham, or Washington to New York: the one the seat of government, the other a center of industry and commerce. It takes petit bourgeoisie to run both types of places; that is where they live. So it’s my impression that the relative size of the economy will not be decisive, but the final decision of the middle classes will. They perhaps have more to fear personally from arrest without charges or trial than from the actions of saboteurs, and Bashar’s concessions are as meaningless to them as they are to everyone else. Yet, if the revolution keeps going, the so far unmoved or perhaps just paralyzed petit bourgeoisie will begin wishing it would end. All they want is the comfort and convenience of making and enjoying their own money in peace. Even though the revolution is a threat to that, the bigger threat is having it go on indefinitely.

And so, the failure to offer concessions worth bargaining over may be perceived as a failure to do what the regime is supposed to be doing for its middle class allies: ensure stability and a chance to make money. Worse still for Bashar, the concessions it would take to restore calm to the situation are precisely those that would benefit, of all the classes, the petit bourgeoisie most.

What they have to gain

Surely the petit bourgeoisie have the most to gain from ordinary political freedoms like parties, votes, and elected officials. They have the education, leisure, and cash to make the most of these opportunities. It’s always been so. I suppose in Syria there are as many people like this – petit bourgeoisie properly speaking: professionals, middle managers, officials, small businessmen, small farmers, teachers, merchants, small investors – as there are anywhere else in the Arab world. That’s one of the reasons it’s considered the lynchpin of stability there, and not just because of the Assad family and the juvenile currently at its head.

And now it appears that the failure to make credible and substantial concessions – and really only fundamental ones would now be perceived to be substantial – is dialectically speaking a double-edged sword the juvenile Bashar is holding over his own head. Clinging to power is a nasty position to be in – not a position of strength. But that is the tendency of the despot’s current tactics. There’s no evidence he has a strategy.

Postscript: Why Bashar is a juvenile

…because he doesn’t know, as Prime Minister Putin observes, “In the modern world it is impossible to use political instruments of 40 years ago,” a sentence in which the term “political instruments” is a euphemism, and the validity of which Putin himself probably learned the hard way himself, rather less than 40 years ago.