The Syrian Conflict

The Role of Russia, Iran and the US in a Global Crisis

Ghaidaa Hetou

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429790911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the global impact of the Syrian conflict, and the roles of Russia, Iran and the US in its wake. It looks closely at origins of political turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region by analysing the growing influence of Russia and Iran – militarily, economically and diplomatically – juxtaposed against US defense and national interests.

The book:

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• challenges the conventional scholarship to show how non-democratic states such as Russia, Iran and China exhibit a consistent strategic intent in their foreign-policy-making;
• underlines the convergence of Syrian foreign policy with Russia's (the USSR before 1989) and Iran's regional outlook post-1979;
• takes stock of the shifts in the US foreign policy in MENA in light of new realities.

Drawing on detailed fieldwork and archival material, including National Security Archival documents, this book is a tour de force in understanding global politics and contemporary history. It will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of politics and international relations, political theory, foreign policy, Middle East studies, and peace and conflict studies.

1
Introduction

Syria against all odds

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

– Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, First Statement as Prime Minister, House of Commons May 19, 1940

Syria against all odds captures the essence of Syria’s political history spanning over seven decades. Ever since the French mandate of 1923, and the polarising times of the Cold War era, statehood and national identity in Syria have been contrived in the midst of a succession of regional crises. Syria against all odds continues to be a relevant headline during the existential crisis that started innocently in March 2011 with protests in Dar‘a, in a governorate south of Damascus. This book starts out with an eyewitness account of the proverbial calm before the storm. It then proceeds with an in-depth investigation into the roles of Russia and Iran, Syria’s two main allies, and their strategic interests in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as both have been essential factors helping the political establishment in Syria weather a perfect storm: a war by proxy that has amplified and prolonged a civil war between 2011 and 2018.

Between the summer of 2010 and January 2011, I conducted field research in Syria in preparation for my doctoral thesis on Syrian foreign policy between 1970 and 2010. Interviews and discussions with government officials and academics, however scripted or supervised they were, occasionally included invaluable moments of frank assessment. In hindsight, a few events stood out in that summer of 2010 as being indicative of the ideological dilemma that Syrian officials, the public at large and the Ba‘athist indoctrinated establishment faced since 2000, when President Bashar al-Assad assumed the presidency after his late father Hafez al-Assad. One event in particular, a talk and Q&A hosted by the Cultural Center of Dar‘a with the Syrian deputy foreign minister, illustrates Syria’s predicament.

In the summer of 2010, the straight highway connecting Damascus to Dar‘a passed a newly established academic institution and housing complexes. Bashar al-Assad’s influence on development and infrastructure could be traced along the peripheries of Damascus and other major Syrian cities. His infrastructure modernisation attempt tapered off decidedly, however, when one approached the vast countryside. It was there, in the countryside of Syria, particularly outside of Damascus, where I also held countless conversations with teachers, taxi drivers and shop owners who reminisced about Hafez al-Assad’s bygone days, while surrounded by the optics of an era frozen in time. The cultural centre in Dar‘a in summer of 2010 was hosting the Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Miqdad, an articulate, ambitious and experienced Syrian diplomat, for a talk and a Q&A session with predominantly Ba‘ath Party members of Dar‘a. I managed to reach the cultural centre and speak with the director and few guests for half an hour before the scheduled event. The conversation with the director of the culture centre took a surprising turn when his guests were unexpectedly frank in their criticism of the central government, ‘How can they (Bashar al-Assad’s government) accuse us, the inhabitants of Horan, of being non-Arabs, … they have lost their minds’, was the main criticism at that time. This, according to these gentlemen, implied that Damascus was intentionally undermining Dar‘a, including the city’s requests for funds and investment. As all Syrians know, an accusation of being non-Arab is akin to losing credibility and claim to equal citizenship. Expectedly, the tension carried out into the event of the deputy foreign minister. A tit for tat squabble tacitly and delicately questioning the credibility of each side’s argument was on full display during the two-hour talk and Q&A with him. The asymmetric exchange between the representative of a pragmatic central government and what seemed to be a crowd of ideologically purist Ba‘ath party members was symbolic of Syria’s difficult, almost impossible path to change and reform. A few attendees made it their mission to put Syria’s increasingly contradictory foreign policy between 2005 and 2010 under a magnifying glass, and the deputy foreign minister remained on the defensive. One gentleman asked, ‘Why are we friends with Qatar although it hosts the largest American military base in the region’? Another added, ‘We say we are against the Iraq invasion, and stand in solidarity with Arab neighbours, but yet display political hypocrisy’. To some of these questions, the deputy foreign minister replied, ‘This is not a question, but a statement. You have to understand that you don’t have access to all the information the central government has access to’. Miqdad also reminded his audience that ‘there is a complexity of interests in the region that we are trying to prioritise, while staying true to Ba‘ath principles’. The palatable tension in the auditorium was frequently interrupted by a Bedouin female poet who orated a couple of short patriotic allegiances to Syria and Bashar al-Assad. Towards the end, as if prompted by a spontaneous spur of overwhelming nationalism, she skillfully recited poetry in a lovely Bedouin rhythm that praised Bashar, Syria’s saviour, and everyone clapped.

Bashar al-Assad’s challenging decade

By 2010, curious disruptions to the traditional independent Syrian foreign policy, and shifts in domestic patronage between the old guard and the new incoming nouveau riche, were increasingly visible and unsettling for Syria’s populace, including its traditional Assad loyalists. While Bashar al-Assad inherited a stable country in June of 2000, regional instability between 2000 and 2010 made maintaining stability in Syria a government priority. Regional turmoil was spurred by the 2003 US invasion and regime change in Iraq, the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister, in 2005, the subsequent passing of the US’s Syria Accountability Act, Syrian troop withdrawal from Lebanon and intermittent domestic calls for democratisation. These developments left the Syrian government in a chronic crisis mode.

To mitigate regional and international pressures after 2003, the staunchly secular Syrian government showed some leniency to social displays of religious piety. Prayers and the wearing of hijabs became acceptable behaviour among Syria’s bureaucracy. Syria further adjusted its regional relations and enlisted the help of Turkey and Qatar to mediate its interest in Lebanon, hosted unofficial talks with Israel and opened Syria’s economy to the export flows between Asia and Europe. These manoeuvres, despite official claims to the contrary, put Syria’s political, historical and ideological commitments, including its alignment with Iran and Russia, in question. It also alienated a large percentage of the population, including the Assad government’s traditional base of loyalists, who were gradually stripped of import protectionism and government subsidies.

This contradictory period between 2005 and 2010, an anomaly in Syrian foreign policy since 1970, is what was addressed and criticised by Ba‘ath party members and others at the Cultural Center in Dar‘a during their discussion with the deputy foreign minister in the summer of 2010. Since then, however, and due to the outbreak of demonstrations and violence across Syria in March 2011, Syrian foreign policy reverted to its traditional alliance formation, reconfirming a steadfast allegiance to the Iran–Russia–Hezbollah Resistance axis. Emerging from the foggy period of 2005–2010 with a clear-eyed solidarity with Iran and Russia, the Syrian government’s subsequent reception of military and economic support from Iran and Russia between 2011 and 2018 is why, in large part, it is still standing today.

Iran and Russia’s strategic outlook

The general consistency of Russia and Iran’s worldview, strategic outlook and threat perception, since 1979, and for the Soviet Union prior to that, should not be a surprise. Russia and Iran have displayed a long-term, strategic calculus in their foreign policy, matching economic, cultural and military means to adaptive ends. Yet past Western governments’ assessments of the foreign policies of Iran and Russia, and other nations they deem ‘authoritarian’ non-democratic states in general, continues to be unrealistic, dismissive and distortive in nature.

Western surprise at the long-term Iranian and Russian military and economic support for Syria, and erroneous expectations of a quick collapse of Syrian authority in 2011, has been, and continues to be, a result of a fundamentally flawed assessment of non-democratic states’ foreign policies. The Syrian crisis assumed an important symbolic position in the past seven years since 2011 as the dynamics in MENA have evolved, and most US and European research output has understandably focused on proximate issues: the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, the outflow of refugees, the plight of internally displaced people and transnational jihadists movements. Yet, it gives less credence to the possible long-term objectives of Russia, Iran and China. Western research tends to ignore a broader, and as I argue, more strategic question that I address in this book: Why have Russia and Iran invested so heavily, whether militarily, economically or diplomatically, in the Syrian crisis, to the point of deliberately defying the United States and its allies?

Six years ago, at the onset of the Syrian Civil War, US policy-makers foresaw none of the developments of Iran and Russian intervention in Syria after 2011. Rather, the 2011 US assessments understood the Russian government to be focusing on instability in the near-abroad. They dismissed, for example, the 2010 Russian Defense Doctrine as lacking and ‘demonstrating ambiguity in military thinking’.¹ The 2011 American assessment of Iran perceived an economically sanctioned, diplomatically isolated country engulfed in internal instability after the 2009 demonstrations, a country that might play the role of a spoiler but incapable of strategic statesmanship. The Russian invasion of Crimea, military operations in Syria and Libya, and Iran’s increased influence in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen largely defied US predictions.

Part of the miscalculation, I argue, stemmed from a liberal democratic maxim that places rational and utility maximisation decision-making processes exclusively within liberal democratic institutions.² The logic of this assumption is that non-democratic states exhibit an irrational foreign policy primarily because of domestic weaknesses, which subordinate foreign policy-making to the resolution of internal power struggles. What constitutes domestic weaknesses in this liberal view point is lack of democratic institutions and inclusive political pluralism. Accordingly, effective autonomous foreign policy-making is an oxymoron in non-democratic states, because they lack legitimacy, democratic institutions and popular support by definition.³

Conventional wisdom in International Relations (IR) dismisses the foreign policies of authoritarian non-democratic states as irrational, ideologically motivated or primarily geared towards regime survival. Hence, discussions about national interests, national security, strategic calculus and strategic outlook would not usually apply to such states’ foreign policies, precisely because those regimes are thought to be occupied with an immediate concern: regime survival. I argue that this stance risks downplaying – or worse, ignoring – the strategic intent of foreign policy-making in non-democratic states, and thus basing policy on distorted assumptions. The aggregate effect of such willful ignorance is then channelled into unrealistic assessments and policy prescription among some of the most powerful states, namely the United States and Europe, whose policies and actions are not only consequential but also carry lasting legacies in the MENA region.

As perceptions guide bargaining and decision-making in an anarchic world order, a number of international relations scholars have emphasised the importance of being aware of ‘the other’s’ and ‘adversary’s’ perceptions.⁴ In this book, I argue that Russian and Iranian decision-makers evaluate external threats as well as internal constraints when crafting foreign policy. Indeed, they make rational choices among politically acceptable policies to maximise return on economic, diplomatic or military operations, with the strategic objective of preserving or expanding their national interests in MENA. Each considers their decades-long cooperation as a Grand Alliance with a long-term outlook in MENA, with a purpose of weakening Western influence and intervention in the region. Advancing a coherent US policy, which would address Russian and Iranian assertiveness in Syria, requires an understanding that the motives of Russia and Iran are not reactive but consistent with their outlook and national interests in Syria and the MENA region at large.

Models of alliance formations have expanded beyond capability aggregation and have explored the durability of asymmetric alliances, between security-seeking and autonomy-seeking states, for example. James D. Morrow, a political scientist, argues that asymmetric alliances between militarily weak and strong states last longer than ones with symmetric capabilities.⁵ The durability of the Iran, Syria and Russia alliance has produced its own comparative advantage. The decades-long durable investments in support of specified missions, defence, intelligence sharing, military consultations economy, infrastructure and so on accumulated alliance assets specificity,⁶ a product of a shared worldview between Russia, Iran and Syria. These shared assets and decades-long durable investments re-enforced the binding security relationship among these allies, which in turn raised the cost of disbanding. This book accounts for state calculations and the assessments of domestic and external threats in this durable alliance formation.

By tracing how Syrian foreign policy converged with the regional outlook of Russia (USSR before 1989) and Iran after 1979, I explain why and how Iran and Russia have become invested militarily, economically and diplomatically in the Syrian crisis. This relation has consistently proven beneficial for Syria, Russia and Iran through periods of isolation, economic sanctions and internal instability. The worldview and strategic interests of Russia and Iran in MENA has continued to provide justification for their intervention in Syria far beyond answering a call of an ally in need. This explains why they are both committed to preserving Syria’s state apparatuses, particularly the military, security and foreign policy institutions, as these would guarantee Syria’s continued role within the strategic trajectory of Russia, Iran and by extension China’s interests in the region. Russia and Iran are determined to ensure their vital interests in exercising military mobility towards the Mediterranean, protecting their energy and gas logistics, and increasing their niche in MENA security and defence markets despite the fact that the United States’ policy in the region has mellowed on regime change initiatives since 2011 and has been focusing intently on counter-terrorism. The increased regional role of Russian and Iran will continue to negate US interests, while maintaining the optics of diplomatic talks and tactical collaboration with the United States on security matters.

Iran and Russia have been pursuing a mission in MENA that aligns with that of China, pushes against Western intervention in the region’s internal affairs and resists Western dominance and monopoly over territory, resources and the defence market. The fallacy of arguing for separating Russia from Iran, or driving a wedge between Russia and China, is a harmful one. This fallacy rests on the assumption that what joins these states is just an interest calculus. This assumption leads to the belief that one can convince Russia that its interests can be more aligned with those of the United States, and undermine the possibility that Russian, China and by association Iran will maintain a united military and economic front. There is nothing that can persuade Russia, Iran and China to align with the United States, or accommodate US interests, unless maybe if the political system in either country changes fundamentally. What joins these states is a principled and ideological conviction that their influence must replace and drive out US hegemony and presence in MENA.

The problematic West in the eyes of Syria, Iran and Russia

Since 1979, after the overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty in Iran, a thematic and concerted worldview shared by Russia (Soviet Union at the time), Iran and Syria has bonded them together. Two purposes undergird this worldview: the rejection of Western hegemony, and the search for authentic political and economic independence. All three nations have demonstrated this worldview in their foreign policies and strategic outlook in MENA, a historically contested region among the great powers. Iranian and Russian officials have habitually objected to the recent military regime changes implemented by the US and Western states in Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011) in public forums or at the United Nations. Historically, however, both nations’ sovereignty, in addition to that of Syria, has been undermined by Western powers. Modern Russian grievances against the West, as voiced by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev for example, point to the deliberate undermining and collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe and US meddli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Syria against all odds
• 2 Resisting the powerful: Iran and Syria post-1979
• 3 2011: the onset of the Syrian crisis and Iran’s role
• 4 Russia and Syria since 1956: an alliance built on defiance
• 5 Russia’s intervention in Syria
• 6 Russia, China and Iran: a changing world order
• 7 The United States: implications of new realities in MENA
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index