Fred H. Lawson - Global Security Watch—Syria

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FRED H. LAWSON

Copyright 2013 by Fred H. Lawson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lawson, Fred Haley, 1952

Global security watchSyria / Fred H. Lawson.

p. cm. (Global security watch)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780313359576 (hardback) ISBN 9780313359583 (ebook)

1. SyriaStrategic aspects. 2. SyriaForeign relations1971 3. SyriaPolitics and government2000 I. Title. II. Title: Syria.

DS98.6.L39 2013

956.91042dc23 2012035439

ISBN: 9780313359576

EISBN: 9780313359583

17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

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Geoffrey Schad drew up an initial version of the Chronology for a projected reference volume on Syria that I had hoped the Syrian Studies Association would put together. Mary Ann Wight wrestled the map into shape. I am grateful to both for providing readers with important information in readily accessible ways.

During the first week of July 2012, the Syrian navy carried out large-scale exercises involving warships, attack helicopters, and land-based missiles. The purpose of the maneuvers, according to Syrian state television, was to defend Syrias shores against any possible aggression.

Taken together, these snapshots illustrate the broad range of threats that confronted Syria during the summer of 2012. Some of these threats came from outside the countrys borders, as Syrian officials never missed an opportunity to point out. President Bashshar al-Asad told German television on July 8, for instance, that the violence that had engulfed Syria was the work of gangs, different kinds of gangs, whose activities were sponsored and funded by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United States. The likelihood of an armed clash with Turkey did indeed seem high at that particular moment, barely a week after the Syrian armed forces had shot down a Turkish reconnaissance aircraft that was flying just outside Syrian airspace.

Other threats facing the country were largely internal. A severe and persistent drought had decimated agricultural production in the years after 2008 and had driven thousands of rural laborers to shantytowns on the outskirts of the cities in search of work and sustenance. An influx of imported manufactured goods from Turkey, and increasingly from the Peoples Republic of China as well, had ruined local industry and left large numbers of workers, especially in the inefficient state-run companies, with little hope of secure employment. As in other countries of the Arab world, policies that deregulated the market and encouraged the expansion of private enterprise severely disrupted long-established patterns of production and accumulation without generating sustained growth in their place.

Strategic and economic threats paled in comparison with the popular discontent that exploded into violence in the spring of 2011. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, where the military and security forces for the most part restrained themselves in the face of widespread public disorder, Syria exhibited a more familiar and predictable pattern in which troops and proregime thugs almost immediately resorted to force to disperse and punish the protesters. Scattered groups of soldiers who refused to comply with orders to shoot at unarmed civilians formed popular militias and turned their meager weapons against the authorities. By the eighth month of the uprising, Syria had descended into civil war.

Students of security studies have suggested two different ways to make sense of all this. One way is to explore the connections between foreign and domestic threats. The most influential example of this kind of analysis is Steven Davids discussion of external and internal balancing. David argues that highly vulnerable leaderships can be expected to be equally worried about foreign and domestic threats and will take steps that can counteract both kinds of threats simultaneously. Specifically, leaders do their best to break up the coalition of external and internal forces that challenges their position, most often doing so by split[ting] the alignment against them and focus[ing] their energies on their most dangerous (domestic) opponents. To do this, David continues, they appease the international allies of their domestic opponents. David labels this strategy omnibalancing.

Students of Middle East politics have found Davids concept of omnibalancing to be highly attractive. Most leaderships across the region confront serious threats from foreign and domestic challengers, usually at the same time; great powers have often formed close partnerships with local actors to carry out their global objectives; states in the region are widely believed to be recent creations that lack fundamental legitimacy as political entities; and the very term omnibalancing has connotations that resonate with the complex alliance behaviors that can be observed in this part of the world. The notion has therefore been applied to countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia,

Applications to Middle Eastern cases tend, however, to use the concept of omnibalancing in ways that drain it of most of its explanatory power. On one hand, the concept has been extended far beyond its original theoretical domain and has been applied to all kinds of foreign and domestic outcomes, not just to why states sometimes change strategic partners. Hillel Frisch, for example, uses omnibalancing to explain why so many monarchies continue to exist in the Arab world.

An alternative way to comprehend the multiple threats that confront contemporary Syria is to differentiate between state security and regime security. This analytical distinction inspired a substantial academic literature during the early 1990s but failed to generate a sustained research program. Early proponents of the concept of regime security hypothesized that leaders exert greater effort to retain power than they do to defend or further the interests of the country as a whole. As domestic challenges gain momentum, the incentives for a beleaguered leadership to put its own political survival above those of the nation become too strong to resist. This line of argument, like the concept of omnibalancing, was developed with special reference to comparatively weak, poor states and was quickly adopted by scholars concerned with the Middle East.