Michael Totten interviews Andrew Tabler.
MJT: There’s a whole chapter in your book about you and bunch of other journalists at a Syrian government conference.
Andrew Tabler: [Laughs.]
MJT: Writing about something like that would normally be a thundering bore, but this was fascinating. The authorities did everything in their power to make sure nobody understood anything or left the conference with any information whatsoever. Why do you suppose they spent so much time and effort making themselves all but impossible for mere mortals to understand?
Andrew Tabler: One of the ways the Syrian government defends itself is by obscuring everything that happens inside the country. Right now there’s a huge question about whether or not to intervene. The government can dispute whatever argument pro-interventionists have. This isn’t unusual for these kinds of regimes. Assad is a master at manipulating the press. Often times hardly anyone is even paying attention to Syria, though that’s changed now. At the time they could snow job us, but now it’s a lot harder, especially when so much violence is being captured on YouTube.
Yeah it’s difficult to spin away a youtube video of tanks in the streets firing their main armament at residential apartments.
I said it during the Libyan incursion and I will say it again. I don’t give a rat’s a$$ about another Middle Eastern pesthole. They can bloody well sort out their own affairs without us having to do their dirty work for them. Canada has NO security issues at stake in Syria.
And will somebody kindly burn that “Right To Protect” doctrine the UN has?
Experience should have taught us to be very careful about taking sides in these conflicts, since to date one side has been as bad as the other.
I’m no great admirer of Bashir el-Assad but it appears to me that the army is more under the control of his younger brother (I think, some close relation anyway) and that his choices are to abdicate but leave the same situation in place, or soldier on as figurehead leader. Maybe that’s giving him too much credit, but the repression is sectarian rather than a personal matter.
Also, as with Egypt and Libya, the alternatives to the imperfect government are not necessarily better and possibly worse, especially for the security of such people as Christians within Syria. There are also questions about what happens in Lebanon and with regards to Israel, once this matter in Syria is completed, which seems inevitable within the year.
This is, however, a much different situation than Libya. Intervention in Libya, whether you agreed with it or not, held only limited risks of immediate contagion and had only limited potential for future trouble, relatively speaking. But intervention in Syria could easily inflame a regional war, especially if our NATO presence became unpopular as with the mishandled Iraq regime change.
On the other hand, intervention might at some point make more sense than leaving the situation alone, depending on what outcome one was trying to influence. Any sort of militant anti-Israeli regime in Damascus would be a clear and present danger to regional security and even to Jordan, as well as destabilizing Lebanon and inflaming the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
There are probably no good outcomes on the table, as with Egypt, the devil we knew was probably better than the devils we don’t yet know (although Egypt was a considerably less demonic regime than the Assad family dictatorship).
I think when the smoke clears in the Middle East we will find the Moslim Brotherhood in firm control of the whole shooting match.
Heres a novel concept. Why don’t we leave fighting in Syria to good ole Syrian boys and girls. It’s their country after all. If the movement is as moral and just as we are lead to believe, the army which is composed of everyday Syrian boys will revolt, leading to regime change. We have no business over there, just like we had no business in Libya.
No, Peter, I don’t agree. Once you give the UN the idea that it can intervene in any country, you’ve established a principle that it can intervene in every country. Do you really want to see a UN intervention force enforcing Quebec’s right to separate?
As to good outcomes in Syria, it already has a militant, anti-Israeli regime. It makes little difference which gang of thugs runs the place.
The information on Syria has actually been utterly deplorable. The media has yet to rise above the level of “heavy fighting and people being killed”. Beyond the fact there is resistance to Assad, we really know nothing more.
How widespread is this resistance?
Who is it composed of?
Is there support for Assad’s regime (there must be but it isn’t getting much news play)?
We just don’t know.