"Conspicuously absent from the debate about ISIS and U.S. intervention—both in the mainstream and in the leftosphere—are Syrian voices," writes Danny Postel, co-editor with Nader Hashemi of The Syria Dilemma. In their book, the co-editors make an effort to bring more Syrian voices into the debate.
Sadik J. Al-Azm, an emeritus professor at Damascus University, has been one such voice in the American media. In a recent piece in the Boston Review, he gives his thoughts on some of the Western discussion's blind spots regarding the conflict in Syria.
He explains first that Syrian intellectuals, too, failed to predict the intifada, even though signs were present. "Like many in Damascus," he says of the late 2000s, "I found myself beginning, almost unconsciously, to weigh every word according to the religious affiliations of passing acquaintances and close friends alike." Intellectuals predicted, variously, a buyout-style wresting of power from the Alawi state by the "Sunni bourgeoisie," the intervention of the "rule of law" in Syria as a barrier to corruption, and that the domination of the Sunni majority by the regime "made any kind of organized popular opposition unthinkable."
All of these predictions, Al-Azm writes, proved false. However, Western analysts have also failed to understand many aspects of the crisis, in particular "how a largely peaceful, youthful civilian protest movement turned into an armed revolution in less than a year."
More after the jump:
There was nothing sudden about the transformation of the peaceful protests into armed “civil conflict.” It was the result of the abandonment of the protestors by the international community in spite of the escalating violence perpetrated by the Assad regime, the solidarity of Syrian soldiers with ordinary people, and the predictable influx of armed extremists to a desperate situation.
The west, Al-Azm suggests, has effectively adopted a "let it bleed" policy to Syria, letting its various enemies kill eachother in the desert at the expense of Syria's future. What's more, in spite of having seized (
some of?) Assad's chemical weapons, this intervention will not cut out the root cause of Sunni extremism in Syria: Assad's Alawi regime itself.
The realpolitik mindset of the international community reduces the crisis in Syria to ridding Assad of his chemical weapons and then reinstating him, despite accusations that Obama and Kerry have heaped on him: criminal, murderer, tyrant, and even a new Hitler. Syrians understand this.
The issue, Al-Azm says, is that the international community's (ie, the Western powers') tendency to view the conflict in Syria, first and foremost, as part of larger international movements and the rising tide of extremism, prevents analysts from paying attention to the in-country dynamics in actual Syria.
As in the past, at present the international community sublimates Syria to the ethereal levels of grand geopolitics, a pawn in the game of nations. Little attention is paid to the internal springs and dynamics of the revolution itself, something I am trying to emphasize. . . . With Syria and its intifada absorbed into grand-strategic conflicts, the reality of the people’s oppression is at best neglected; at worst it becomes irrelevant.
Al-Azm's piece, then, tries to shed some light on those "internal springs and dynamics," and makes a compelling plea to Western analysts and members of the media: pay more attention to Syria's internal dynamics. Intervention, he suggests, is inevitable, but "the question is whether that intervention will be guided by a proper understanding of the war."