Too Many Cooks: The Syrian Demise
With Syria at full boil, it’s becoming clearer who exactly will be burned once this pot finally explodes: everybody.
The Assad/Alawite regime is cooking in a stew of its own penchant for brutality, which has been folded into the cleverness of the United States and Saudi Arabia in crafting a strategy for hijacking “Arab Spring” anti-authoritarian uprisings for counterrevolutionary purposes.
To be clear: This is not a critique based on some notion of pacifism or national purity. Non-violent resistance is a powerful tactic that can be quite effective in broadening political support, but revolutionary movements do not have to abjure the use of force to maintain their ethical legitimacy. It is virtually impossible to imagine a successful revolution that does not use force to defend its gains and to advance its objectives. Nor are revolutionary movements (or besieged governments) obliged to abjure foreign support in order to maintain national legitimacy. Whether foreign support undermines a movement’s national legitimacy depends on the political content and consequences of that support – for our purposes, whether it advances or derails the purported objective of creating a renewed national polity that radically increases the democratic power, social well-being, and fundamental rights of the people. This, in turn, depends on whether foreign allies accept the limits of their supporting role, and refrain from taking over or directing the course of the movement they claim to support. Seen from the outside, in the course of frantic struggle, how this is unfolding can only be a judgement call, based on what one knows about the relative power, political cohesion, and the actual consequences of past and present actions, of the various players.