Let’s end the empty talk about Syria

In every conflict, there are clarifying moments of horror, episodes that cast into stark relief the reality of the forces at work and the complex obstacles to peace. The massacre of Al Houla, where more than a hundred civilians were murdered with savage intimacy, is such a moment in the Syria crisis – but not for the reason that you may think. It will not trigger an air war or an invasion; it will not lead to the forcible removal of the Assad regime by Western troops; and it will not tip the balance of choices among the regime’s supporters. Syria has now entered a cavern of civil conflict from which there is only the slightest of hope of escape – and achieving it requires a far more honest reckoning with the realities of power, and the West’s strategic priorities, than is currently on display in the Western debate over intervention in that country.

Nader Mousavizadeh is CEO of Oxford Analytica, the global analysis and advisory firm. Previously, he was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a special assistant to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and a UN Political Officer in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Elected a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum, he is the co-author, with Kofi Annan, of Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, andthe Editor of the Black Book of Bosnia. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, he received his MBA as a Sloan Fellow at the Sloan School ...

The Assad regime is a predatory, deeply illegitimate entity that will stop at nothing to retain power. It needs to go, one way or the other, sooner rather than later. To say this, however, is the easy part. There is little moral or strategic accomplishment in such a declaration – though you’d imagine otherwise from the bombast and bluster with which the end of the regime has been urged by Western politicians, diplomats and commentators. Far more difficult – and therefore carefully and comprehensively dodged by the self-appointed avatars of Western conscience – is constructing a credible way to transition power in Damascus to a broad-based government in the absence of the use of force.

From the criticism of Kofi Annan’s mission expressed by some commentators – and the damning with faint and cowardly praise heard from the very Security Council members who pleaded with him to take on the role as envoy – you’d imagine that the former United Nations Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize winner is the only thing that stands in the way of a blossoming democracy in Damascus. The truth is almost certainly the opposite. When the Security Council went to Annan 14 weeks ago and asked him to set aside his philanthropic activities in Africa to take on this perilous mission, nearly a year had gone by with the world condemning the crackdown in Syria – all to no effect. The world, including the United States, was out of options – and out of ideas – when it turned to Annan to create a process that would seek an end to the killing in Syria.

What Annan did by creating his six-point plan was, in reality, to pave the path for Assad’s exit. Either, on the one hand, Assad would be forced by intense, creative diplomatic pressure backing Annan’s diplomacy to accept and implement the six-point plan – and in that case, the only logical conclusion to a proposal that calls for a broad-based rule would be a new government in which Assad, by definition, would have no place. Or, on the other hand, Assad would maneuver and manipulate his way around the plan’s demands, and thereby unleash the kind of sectarian fighting that his minority clan will win only until the day it loses, and then gets destroyed. So far, both sides have played their predictable roles: Western powers unwilling to think beyond conventional ideas in their attempts to apply material pressure on the regime; and Assad, dogged and deeply delusional, maintaining his fantasy of an elected government in Damascus besieged by a jihadist-Western conspiracy.

If Assad is unlikely to change his stripes, it is high time for the West to engage the conflict on terms that reflect the complex requirements of a successful removal of Bashar al-Assad from power. What Assad recognizes, first of all, is that there is zero appetite in Western capitals, or the Middle East, for an armed intervention in Syria of the kind we saw in Iraq or Libya. He knows that Russia will continue to block the legal foundation for enforcement action in the Security Council as long as he’s offering them a better deal than the West is prepared to do. And he understands that as long as the West looks to the external opposition for coherent leadership of the transition he can sleep easy in his bed.