In Syria, over the past nine months, agents of President Bashar al-Assad’s security apparatus have killed more than five thousand citizens, according to the United Nations. That’s an average of about twenty citizens a day since March, when peaceful demonstrators took to the streets to protest the Assad family’s forty-year dictatorship and the slaughter began. Videos uploaded to the Internet at the time showed throngs of defenseless men, women, and children, many of them waving olive branches, scattered by gunfire. Some videos showed Assad’s men (there are seventeen distinct security forces at his service) hunting down stragglers; other videos showed fallen bodies, bleeding and dead; and later, when people gathered to bury those bodies, there were more videos, of Assad’s forces opening fire on the funerals. There is no independent press in Syria, and foreign reporters are rarely allowed in, but as the protests and the crackdown continued through the summer and fall, the videos kept coming, denying the state the power it gets from invisibility. Shot on cell phones, the clips convey the terrifying pandemonium in the streets and linger insistently on its aftermath: a relentless array of cadavers—heads and torsos punctured, ripped, smashed, and spilling—memorialized in forensic close-up.
So the whole world watched, and the whole world knew. The gore made the protestors’ case against Assad so unambiguous that in November the Arab League, which had always defended him, suspended Syria from membership, imposed economic sanctions against the regime, and demanded that he end the crackdown. When Assad went right on killing, the League threatened to take its case against him to the U.N. Security Council, unless he agreed to withdraw all armed forces from cities and towns, to release all political prisoners, to allow peaceful protest to proceed unhindered, to grant the international press free and full access to the country, and to accept an observer mission to monitor his compliance with these conditions.
But Assad’s word is meaningless. In anticipation of the Arab League monitors’ arrival this week, the death toll in Syria increased sharply, as his tanks rolled through restive cities and towns, bombarding residential neighborhoods. There were reports of air strikes, too. Hundreds are believed to have been killed in the past fortnight—the bloodiest days since the strife began—and many more were wounded, or imprisoned, or both (torture and rape are standard operating procedure in Assad’s reign of terror). In a rare report from the Syrian frontlines, a reporter from Der Speigel described the scene in Homs, the country’s most embattled city, writing that government snipers were hunting civilians indiscriminately in broad daylight.
On Monday, the day before the Arab League monitoring team finally began its mission, more than thirty Syrians were reported killed by government forces, roughly half of them in Homs. But on Tuesday, when the first handful of monitors visited the city, the military had withdrawn most of its tanks from the streets—and after a quick look around, the mission leader, General Mustafa Dabi of Sudan, declared it “a very good day.”
This seemed a peculiar choice of words, since video clips, shot by locals, showed Dabi and his team attempting to have conversations that are drowned out by the sound of gunfire as government forces shot at demonstrators, killing a half dozen of them, according to multiple reports. But then, Dabi himself seems a peculiar choice to lead the Arab League mission, since he has spent his working life as an enforcer for the Sudanese dictator, President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted by the international criminal court for crimes against humanity in Darfur. In fact, Dabi was Bashir’s military intelligence chief, and in that capacity he was responsible for establishing the janjaweed militias, which perpetrated many of the worst atrocities in Darfur. Assad could hardly have invented a man he’d rather have policing his crimes. On Wednesday, Dabi elaborated on his first impression of Homs: “Some places looked a bit of mess, but there was nothing frightening,” he told Reuters. “The situation seemed reassuring so far.”
It would make little sense for Dabi to attack and alienate the Assad regime from the get-go, but his words enraged anti-government activists, who have feared all along that the monitoring mission would be a farce, serving only as window-dressing on Assad’s campaign to crush the opposition. After all, if Assad were to abide fully by his agreement with the Arab League, he would effectively surrender control over large, and largely rebellious, swathes of the country. That is something nobody can imagine him accepting, and so far he has met none of the agreed-upon conditions. On the contrary, he has shown every indication that he will seek to give the monitors the run-around, and co-opt them as best he can.
Of course, it’s not in the Arab League’s interest to be abused and made to look ridiculous; and some of its most powerful members—the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, for instance—have made it clear that they regard Assad as having forfeited any legitimacy by killing so many of his people. But such expressions of principle by the Arab old-guard are highly opportunistic. Saudi Arabia, for instance, was happy to help the regime in Bahrain with the violent suppression of protestors, because the Saudis regarded those protestors as representatives of Iranian-backed Shiite power. In Syria, it is Assad who is close to Iran, and the opposition is predominantly Sunni. Similarly, Syria’s powerful northern neighbor, Turkey, wants Assad gone, and is keen to insure that whoever replaces him will not be beholden to Tehran.
The political question for the Arab League, then, is not simply how to ease Assad out, but to consider who or what might take his place. The Syrian opposition as yet lacks unity, and the breadth of its popular support is uncertain.
The fear of a protracted and devastating Syrian civil war that could engulf and destabilize the entire region is acutely felt, particularly with the looming prospect of an escalation of the conflict between Israel and Iran (and Iran’s proxy forces, Hezbollah and Hamas). That’s hardly a reason to shore up Assad, or send in General Dabi to tell everyone “Nothing to see here!” while the dictator massacres his people. But it does mean that, despite the bite of economic sanctions and the sting of diplomatic isolation—Russia and Iran are the only significant powers that still stand up for him—Assad still has to be reckoned with as a stabilizing figure.
On Tuesday, as Dabi’s team began its mission, the State Department issued a statement that began: “We condemn the Syrian military’s escalation of violence in Homs, Daraa and other cities prior to the deployment of the Arab League monitors.” The statement concluded: “If the Syrian regime continues to resist and disregard Arab League efforts, the international community will consider other means to protect Syrian civilians.” But what does that threat mean? Surely nobody in Washington is proposing to fly against Assad, as we flew against Qaddafi.
Early this year, when the U.N. Security Council came together to authorize the military action to prevent “by all necessary means” the Qaddafi regime from slaughtering Libyans, supporters of the resolution spoke of it as a watershed moment, when the principles of humanitarian intervention—or the doctrine known as R.2.P. (the responsibility to protect)—had, after decades of minor advances and major setbacks, found their fullest formal expression in international law. Even Russia and China were on board, and—most importantly—the Arab League had given the resolution the nod, which was taken as the ultimate stamp of legitimacy to a war waged in an Arab land by Western powers. But within a few days, it was clear that the war in Libya was not simply a humanitarian protection operation, but an investment in a civil war that could only end with regime change, and with that the Arab League disavowed the operation, and the Russians and Chinese, too, let it be known that they had not signed up for such an adventure.
So, for all the high-blown rhetoric of epoch-defining principle and precedent that followed the passage of the Libya resolution at the Security Council, it’s now clear that Libya was a one-off. Rather than making it more likely that the international community would again draw together so completely to protect people from death at the hands of their dictator, the inevitable mission creep of the Libyan operation has made it less likely. War is, as it always was, not a humanitarian but a political undertaking. Qadaffi was uniquely reviled, and uniquely disposable, and disposing of him was the easy part of the revolution (as it was with Mubarak in Egypt). With Assad it’s trickier—and the Syrian people remain hostages of that trickiness.
Photograph: Benainous/Hounsfield/Gamma
