Could the war in Syria have been avoided?
In his valuable book “Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria”, Ambassador Nikolaos Van Dam pose this question: “Could the war in Syria have been avoided?”
He sees that:
“if the opposition forces had not been supported in the way they were, the revolution might possibly have been suppressed earlier with fewer victims, and the regime might have continued its repressive rule for another indefinite period.”
This is exactly what happened in countries like Egypt. In Egypt, the demonstrations could even topple the regime, which was able to maneuver and recovered quickly.
I am not trying to express an appreciation to the maneuvers and recovery of totalitarian regimes. There are 2 cases in which I wouldn’t write this book: If the countries which supported the Syrian opposition went to the last step, i.e. toppling the regime, or if they didn’t support the opposition in the first place, leaving the Egyptian scenario to take its natural place in Syria.What the west and Turkey did was eliminating this option. Their role was devoted to guaranteeing that the revolution spread in the Syrian body to the extent that removing the revolution means amputating the whole body. What happened in Syria is exactly what the Ambassador chose for his book title “destroying a nation”.
Van Dam thinks, if a scenario like the Egyptian on has happened in the Syrian case, that:
“some day, in the future, there was bound to be renewed effort by those people who had suffered from atrocities of al-Asad regime to have a violent reckoning”. Egypt lost some of its courageous sons, whose number is estimated, in the worst case as less than 0.0001% of its population. The economy suffered a bit, then all was recovered. If the story ended or there would be other upcoming episodes, that is another discussion. The majority of Syrians wouldn’t regret paying their lives with pleasure as a price to enter history gloriously as a nation that achieved its freedom with its blood. This was their ambition, part of their dignity and their self-esteem - that was their goal. Further, a heavy media wave before and during the revolution prepared them for that as I will explain later.The catastrophic part of the story: the price was paid, but the glorious freedom didn’t come. The Syrians lost their nation, but they didn’t rid of the regime.
The dialogue about difference between the Egyptian and Syrian cases is not about a film we watched and sat in a luxurious cafeteria to wish it was written or directed other way. The difference is counted with millions of human victims, “predictably so because I predicted it seven years ago, that there was no way to do this, and it would make a complete chaos” so Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
These was not merely a mistake nor could it be explained as an estimation error. The intelligence forces which managed this operation were, simply put, the most sophisticated intelligence organizations in the world- namely the CIA, jointly cooperating with French, British and of course Turkish, Saudi and other organizations.
Instead of leading these bodies to work on toppling the larger regime, they directed them to smaller bodies. They turned their back to the regime, which in turn ignored them. Both the regimes and these bodies worked on turning the lives of Syrians into hell. This continued until these groups left the areas they occupied back to Turkey, handing these areas to the regime with so-called: “peace agreements”. These were just stage plays, exactly like the battles in which they fought against the regime. The regime gave each of these groups the chance to gain temporary victory. These groups had destroyed the rebellion and gave the regime more popularity. Everything else for the regime that was lost is marginal and can be recovered.
“Donor countries (like United States and Turkey) sometimes simultaneously gave contradictory instructions to Syrian military commanders in battles with the Islamic State, threatening to stop their military aid if their instructions were not followed up. Syrian commanders also complained about the lack of relevant military intelligence, which could have been provided in time by their foreign supporters, and about lack of sufficient ammunition (which they occasionally described as a kind of “drip-feeding”). Opposition commanders sometimes felt betrayed.”“Western criticism of the military opposition, concerning a lack of coordination, was therefore unjustified insofar as this was a result of a lack of Western military coordination”
He sees that:
“if the opposition forces had not been supported in the way they were, the revolution might possibly have been suppressed earlier with fewer victims, and the regime might have continued its repressive rule for another indefinite period.”
This is exactly what happened in countries like Egypt. In Egypt, the demonstrations could even topple the regime, which was able to maneuver and recovered quickly.
I am not trying to express an appreciation to the maneuvers and recovery of totalitarian regimes. There are 2 cases in which I wouldn’t write this book: If the countries which supported the Syrian opposition went to the last step, i.e. toppling the regime, or if they didn’t support the opposition in the first place, leaving the Egyptian scenario to take its natural place in Syria.What the west and Turkey did was eliminating this option. Their role was devoted to guaranteeing that the revolution spread in the Syrian body to the extent that removing the revolution means amputating the whole body. What happened in Syria is exactly what the Ambassador chose for his book title “destroying a nation”.
Van Dam thinks, if a scenario like the Egyptian on has happened in the Syrian case, that:
“some day, in the future, there was bound to be renewed effort by those people who had suffered from atrocities of al-Asad regime to have a violent reckoning”. Egypt lost some of its courageous sons, whose number is estimated, in the worst case as less than 0.0001% of its population. The economy suffered a bit, then all was recovered. If the story ended or there would be other upcoming episodes, that is another discussion. The majority of Syrians wouldn’t regret paying their lives with pleasure as a price to enter history gloriously as a nation that achieved its freedom with its blood. This was their ambition, part of their dignity and their self-esteem - that was their goal. Further, a heavy media wave before and during the revolution prepared them for that as I will explain later.The catastrophic part of the story: the price was paid, but the glorious freedom didn’t come. The Syrians lost their nation, but they didn’t rid of the regime.
The dialogue about difference between the Egyptian and Syrian cases is not about a film we watched and sat in a luxurious cafeteria to wish it was written or directed other way. The difference is counted with millions of human victims, “predictably so because I predicted it seven years ago, that there was no way to do this, and it would make a complete chaos” so Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
These was not merely a mistake nor could it be explained as an estimation error. The intelligence forces which managed this operation were, simply put, the most sophisticated intelligence organizations in the world- namely the CIA, jointly cooperating with French, British and of course Turkish, Saudi and other organizations.
Instead of leading these bodies to work on toppling the larger regime, they directed them to smaller bodies. They turned their back to the regime, which in turn ignored them. Both the regimes and these bodies worked on turning the lives of Syrians into hell. This continued until these groups left the areas they occupied back to Turkey, handing these areas to the regime with so-called: “peace agreements”. These were just stage plays, exactly like the battles in which they fought against the regime. The regime gave each of these groups the chance to gain temporary victory. These groups had destroyed the rebellion and gave the regime more popularity. Everything else for the regime that was lost is marginal and can be recovered.
“Donor countries (like United States and Turkey) sometimes simultaneously gave contradictory instructions to Syrian military commanders in battles with the Islamic State, threatening to stop their military aid if their instructions were not followed up. Syrian commanders also complained about the lack of relevant military intelligence, which could have been provided in time by their foreign supporters, and about lack of sufficient ammunition (which they occasionally described as a kind of “drip-feeding”). Opposition commanders sometimes felt betrayed.”“Western criticism of the military opposition, concerning a lack of coordination, was therefore unjustified insofar as this was a result of a lack of Western military coordination”
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