A Conversation on Syria's Future with George Friedman and Robert D. Kaplan
Video Transcript:
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, Stratfor cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Video Transcript:
George Friedman: Hi I'm George Friedman. I'm here with my colleague, Robert Kaplan, and we're going to be discussing Syria today. Robert, we've been in a situation for over a year in which Syria has been in a fairly stable, violent pattern. In other words, everything stayed within a certain norm. Do you think that's continuing? Are we starting to break out?
Robert Kaplan: I think it's changing. I think we're starting to see something new, something which is vaguely reminiscent of the early days of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, where you have for instance Sunni villages contiguous to Alawite villages and forces come in from the Alawite village and perpetrate a massacre, a small massacre of sorts. What this does is it not only sets one group against the other but it implicates the Alawite community with the actions of the president, Bashar al Assad, so that the community has less and less of a political space to break from al Assad himself so that all the Alawites are together in this. So we have a hardening of sectarian divisions that is, you know, attrition of the same adds up to big change and what we've been seeing is attrition of the same gradually. People may not think in a sectarian manner, particularly in a place like Syria. But once the killing starts, there's a tendency to revert to sectarian identities.
George: It's safety. But one of the differences -- one of the really interesting questions from my point of view is -- in 1975, the Lebanese army start to crumble. It ceased to be a force. I'm still focused on the Syrian army. It has to an extraordinary extent maintained its organic unity, able to carry out the atrocities that everyone speaks of. It's a very interesting question of if you go to a Lebanese model and you have a powerful united Syrian army, that looks really different. How does that play out?
Robert: Each crisis…it won't be like Iraq, it won't be exactly like Lebanon…it will have its own peculiarities based on history and landscape and politics of the place. But there could be dangerous misconception here. The media tends to buy the notion that if we can only get rid of Assad at the top, things would automatically get better. Well maybe so, but maybe not. What may also happen is that if you decapitate the ruler or force him aside, then the whole structure of government and the military and the intelligence agencies break down. And they break down in a pattern of different intelligence arms, different military arms, different ministries form their own militias so that decapitating the leader could increase or amplify, you know, the drift toward war and chaos. It's not necessarily, absolutely true that getting rid of Assad will stem the killing.
George: Well we have two examples. One is the example of Saddam Hussein, where the assumption was that his demise was somehow lead to a better situation or peace at the very least didn't happen. I'm most reminded in 1978-79 in Iran. The Shah was clearly a repressive tyrant. The assumption was that if we replaced the repressive tyrant what would come out would be a liberal regime. That isn't what came out of it. What did come out of it in the end was a different sort of repression that we still live with. There seems to be a kind of assumption that doesn't get supported in history: that in toppling a tyrant, you're going to get to liberalism. You get to chaos, and sometimes you get to something much worse. Sometimes you get liberalism but there's no guarantee.
Robert: There's an over-fixation with personalities and saying that everything that is bad or good is because of this one individual. We could talk about China in this way. There's this assumption if only China were a democracy, our problems with it would be substantially better. But there is an alternative assumption that these rulers in China now in terms of predictability and a cordial relationship is the best we're likely to get for decades. It's not a given that Syria would improve after Assad is removed. It could very much get worse, and there's something else to keep in mind. Because of Iraq, because of Afghanistan, the American public has no staying power for any military intervention in Syria. If we were to intervene and if we didn't solve the problem substantially within a few weeks, there would be no staying power for finishing the job, and that would make it a demonstrably worse situation.
George: There to me is an interesting connection between the neo cons and human rights groups who regard each other very opposed ways. Both of them seem to feel that there's times when you must intervene, militarily stop an atrocity. Saddam. Gadhafi. And neither seemed to anticipate the consequences. So you went in, you overthrew Gadhafi and we see now all sorts of instability mounting.
Robert: The whole south of Libya is now ungovernable. It's led to a coup d'etat in Mali, where there's been significant killing. The country has fallen into chaos.
George: And this goes to your point that there is an idea and it is not unique to any one ideology. It's crosses them, which is that there is a surgical stroke that can be taken that removes this party or this person or something else and that what will replace it will be more desirable. The tragedy of this and many other situations is that what comes after could be many times worse.
Robert: Yes. Keep in mind that Bashar al Assad's father, Hafiz al Assad, was essentially the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world. He kept stability for decades but didn't build any civilian institutions -- he didn't use his time. He had stability for a few decades but didn't use the time to build a modern state. So what was left after his rule and now after a decade of his son's rule is you have a country of regionally, geographically based sectarian communities that really challenge, you know, the assumption that you could have a civil society without a strong leader on top.
George: It's an interesting thing from my point of view. When we look at these regimes: Libya, Syria, Iraq. They all draw their intellectual heritage from Gamal Abdel Nasser to that Nasserite movement that was secular, socialist and anti-militarist.
Robert: And anti-Western.
George: And anti-Western, very much pro-Soviet in many ways. But what's interesting is that these regimes have created a reality that isn't easily transcended and we saw that in the Saddam regime, we saw that in the crumbling at the Gadhafi regime, all of which are very old regimes -- they've been there a very long time -- and now we're seeing it in Syria. And underneath it as you said what is there is a fragmented society with many divisions and so long as the military holds together, it can be put off. When the military comes apart, you get a situation like you had in Iraq.
Robert: And this is also a very old regime, cause though he's technically only been in power a decade, his family has been in power for 42 years at this point, so it's a very old Cold War error regime. And yes Syria does in a positive sense represents the trade cosmopolitan of the Near East, of the Levant, of the eastern Mediterranean. But that doesn't necessarily congeal into a polity.
George: And what we're really facing is a situation where if the army holds together, brutality will rein. If the army fragments, civil war can break out. That civil war can be exploited by elements in Iraq and can also very easily spill over again into Lebanon. The problem is that there are certain circumstances for which there are no solutions. You know I think for Americans in particular it's uncomfortable, of all ideologies -- the idea that there is no solution that you can impose.
Robert: The only possible solution is the way to negotiate the way out of the leader and have in place people from the current regime that would govern and negotiate themselves for some transfer of power. Now that is much easier said than done.
George: It also raises the question of the Hague and the Court…
Robert: Right.
George: ...and how much authority anyone has to guarantee Assad anything and whether he'll trust it.
Robert: And not just him; it's the dark characters around him who have been perpetrating these atrocities.
George: And so back to the question very quickly. Are we about to see a breakout from the pattern to something better or worse. And you're basically saying…
Robert: It's a slow motion breakout in a worse direction.
George: Okay. Well thank you very much, Robert. Thank you for being with us today.
