[/caption]
Bashar al-Assad made a decision in the early days of the uprising that the state that his father had built, and the position that it provided for both his own family and his long historically neglected minority sect in Syria, the Allawites, was too big to fail.
As well, the Assad regime has had a long running history of enmity with the conservative Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which has been at heart of these protests. It’s not surprising that the protests first started in the plains surrounding Hama, the conservative Sunni Muslim heartland of the country, which experienced the bloody decade of the 1980s when Hafiz al-Assad cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama and other parts of the country.
Even before the attempted assassination on the life of his father by the Muslim Brotherhood and senior members of the Ba’ath party in the 1980s, the Brotherhood had been in deep opposition to the secular state that the Ba’athists built in Syria from 1963. Bashar al-Assad is keenly aware of the time when members of the Muslim Brotherhood stabbed his father in the back as he rallied against the urban notables and the Muslim Brotherhood who had dominated Latakia’s politics in the 1950s.
Sitting in Damascus, the President could not help but notice as long-standing secular regimes fell from Tunis to Cairo to the Muslim Brotherhood. Even though in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he confidently stated Syria was different, the immediate brutality of the response indicates that Assad understood the perilous regional climate for regimes such as his if the protests had the opportunity to gain traction.
It’s not surprising then that the President has chosen to employ every tool of his regime to stay in power and has exploited the negotiations with the Arab League and the UN to buy time to re-gain control of Syria. Assad knows that if his regime were to fall, his family and his sect would lose everything.
While Damascus’s violent response to the protests has only produced a debilitating cycle of violence in the country, Bashar al-Assad has so far managed to stall regional and international intrusions within Syria through endless negotiation and retaining support from China and Russia. Similar to his father (but not lacking at times the finesse of his father), Assad has been able to exploit loopholes within the agreements and shape them to his favour.
The current peace plan is as much a creation of Bashar al-Assad’s as it is the UN’s. It requires disarmament on the part of the opposition, but requires very little on the part of the government beyond withdrawing troops from the cities. The ceasefire is monitored by an insufficient amount of monitors, which gives space to the myriad security services within the state to hunt down the opposition, and it only requires negotiations for a more democratic government, but does not require the President to step down or hand over his power.
Unsurprisingly, this peace plan has only deepened Bashar al-Assad’s confidence that his regime can stay in power. While the international community has made numerous calls for the cessation of violence and deploring the Assad regime, no leader is prepared to launch another Libyan style intervention, let alone substantially arm the opposition who they largely distrust due to the increasingly violent nature of the opposition.
The opposition has played well into the Assad regime’s narrative, because the regime’s use of violence has forced the opposition to use violence, which supports the regime’s arguments that they are fighting an insurgency not a peaceful movement for democratic change. While Washington is aware that the regime conditioned the oppositions’ response, Obama and his Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, is equally wary of supporting a violent and disunified opposition beyond rhetorical calls of support and logistical support because such opposition could undermine American and Israeli interests in the region.
Looking to the future then, it is very hard to see Syria’s future negotiated through diplomacy or peace initiatives. The only real change to this violent status quo will be the triumph of one side over the other, but at the moment, neither side has any intention of backing down.
