skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Bashar Assad is 'beating the odds'
FLC
[Karon-TIME]
"...As bad as things may be, President Bashar al-Assad and his entourage know
that for them, things could be a whole lot worse. Sure, the regime has lost
control of vast swathes of territory that appear to be intractably under the
control of insurgents. But if the rebels are able to control much of the
countryside, they remain hopelessly outgunned in the head-to-head fight for the
major cities, with no sign of any heavy weapons deliveries from their allies
abroad, much less a NATO cavalry riding to the rescue as it had done in Libya.
The rebels continue to be plagued by divisions, and Western powers are
increasingly anxious over the influence of salafist extremists within the armed
insurgency.
The expected collapse of Assad’s armed forces has failed to
materialize, and defections to the rebel side have slowed to a trickle. Instead
of signaling an imminent denouement, the incremental gains and losses of each
side along the shifting front-lines suggests a strategic stalemate, in which
neither side is capable of delivering the other a knockout blow.....
... for
all Turkey’s bluster — and NATO’s obligatory vows “to protect and defend Turkey
if necessary” — the fact that the provocative shelling from the Syrian side
continued for six days suggests that Assad is calling the bluff of his old
friend, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A majority of the Turkish public
opposes sending troops into Syria; the war has already imposed an economic
burden on Turkey through the cutoff of trade and the refugee crisis, and it has
also boosted the fortunes of the separatist PKK insurgency among Turkey’s Kurds
as well as raising tensions with its Alawite and Alevi minorities. The Western
powers without whose active involvement most analysts concur Turkey might find
its capabilities stretched by a solo Syria intervention show no appetite for
that option.
Alarmed by the sense that Washington is preparing for a scenario
in which the Syria war drags on for many months yet, some of Turkey’s recent
moves may point to a growing urgency in
Ankara about quickly resolving the Syria crisis, rather than living with the
consequences of a long war. Foreign minister Ahmed Davutoglu last weekend
publicly nominated Assad’s deputy president, Farouk al-Sharaa, as an acceptable
figure to head a transitional government, a suggestion quickly rejected by rebel
groups.
... The political consensus in Washington opposes direct military
intervention in Syria, even if there are differences over the question of
facilitating arms transfers to the rebels.
Insulating Jordan could even be a
two-way street, not only preventing the Syrian military from conducting
cross-border operations but also preventing anti-Assad insurgents using it as a
sanctuary from which to stage attacks: The
salafist current in the Syrian insurgency would, in the long-term, pose as much
threat to the Hashemite monarchy as to the Assad dictatorship, and Jordan
hardly wants jihadists operating on its own soil, even if their immediate target
is in Damascus......
Things are hardly looking good for Assad at this point.
... Still, he’s far from beaten, and if anything, ... Assad also coolly
assessed the regional and international strategic balance and concluded that he
could count on strong backing from Iran and Russia against any attempt to
dispatch him a
la Gaddafi...."
No comments:
Post a Comment