The West must act more effectively in Syria

February 22, 2012
Laura Hughes

The recent Arab League monitoring effort in Syria was a failure, and the Gulf Co-operation Council have disengaged their support from the recently extended observer mission.

Syria has categorically renounced an Arab League resolution calling for an Arab-UN peacekeeping mission to intervene and confine the conflict.

If Syria slides into civil war, if the repression continues and intensifies, the consequences will reverberate across the globe. Syria is bordered by Jordan, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey. If agitation spreads to these nations, the Western world’s foreign policy agenda in the region will undergo vast upheaval.

It will be a long civil war, with a government unable to fully suppress the opposition and an opposition unable to place enough pressure on the oppressor to make concessions.

Syria is a country that has actively advanced the growth of Iranian influence into the Arab world, has provided headquarters for Hamas, and has supported Hezbollah with the transfer of advance missile systems. The West should, as the Arab League proposes, lend “political and material support” to the opposition, but they should not interfere militarily in Syria.

Supporting the ill-equipped rebels will intensify the chances of a sectarian civil war. Western intervention poses far greater a challenge than it did in Libya.

Syria is almost 30 times as densely populated as Libya, and the Syrian army is better equipped and five times larger than the Libyan army was. Furthermore Syrian opposition forces are fragmented; there is no unified credible chain of opposition command.

The Syrian situation is incomparable with Libya. There the Transitional National Council, the Arab League, and the United Nations endorsed intervention.

Repeated Western intervention in the Middle East is fuelling the rhetoric of extremist Islamic ideology. Intervention is rallying the disillusioned into the ranks of radical Islam.

How then should the West intervene? The current sanctions against Syria are devastating the country’s economy, whilst the main facilitators of the regime – the army and the Aleppo and Damascene business communities – remain intact. Sanctions should be targeted at the country’s main players, their assets frozen and travel bans imposed. Assad’s regime should be taken to the ICC by the international community and held accountable, just as Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi was in February 2011.

The Western world must rally around a resolution endorsing an arms embargo, and a visible UN representative should sit permanently on the Syrian National Council.

The Obama administration has been slow to act. Iran meanwhile is pouring vast resources into the country, including Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps encampments, weapons and advisers.

The leaders of Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia must take an active role in facilitating an end to this repressive regime; Western military intervention is not the answer. More must be done – the current international inertia will not engender reform.

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