With Assad, or without him?

Russia and Iran will be keen to see Bashar al-Assad step down as soon as his seven-year term is up in 2014, according to Professor Fawaz Gerges, the director of the Middle East centre at the London School of Economics.

He said that the way Russia and the United States viewed their proposed Syrian peace conference was “a matter of nine/eight months of negotiations”:

This would coincide with the end of President Assad’s presidential term, 2014. My take on it is the United States and Russia are viewing 2014 as the tipping point of a real political transition, whereby the end of Assad’s term, elections would take place, and the transfer of authority to a transitional government might take place.

With Assad, or without him?

Without Assad. The Russian and Iranian leaderships have made it very clear that Assad will stay in place until 2014. I take it that both the Russian leadership and the Iranian leadership basically would like to see Assad go: a face-saving formula: he stayed, he fought, and then a new government would take his place.

The question is: what kind of government, what kind of transitional government? What kind of reforms would be implemented within the security forces, in particular the army … and the balance of power between elements of the regime and the opposition itself, and this is really where the talks and the hard work and the details become very complicated.

I asked Gerges what he thought of William Hague’s theory that the threat of arming the rebels would be enough to force Assad to the negotiating table.

My reading of the state of mind of President Assad and his conduct over the last two years tells me that I don’t expect Assad to respond in the same way that Mr William Hague believes him to. I think had the decision been taken a year ago it would have made a probably critical difference.

The Syrian conflict has now gone too long. It’s an open-ended war by proxy. Assad is fighting a war to the bitter end. He views this war as existential. His regional supporters are deeply involved on his side. Russia is deeply invested in the survival of the Assad regime, if not Assad himself. I doubt it very much whether the European threat of sending arms to the rebels will make a qualitative difference, in particular because the United States remains opposed to arming the rebels.

He said the “game-changer” would be if the US decided to get involved, either directly or by arming the rebels – but he agreed this was unlikely. “Obama does not want another military adventure in the Middle East … He believes that Syria is the responsibility of Europe and the Arab world.”

What did Gerges think of the theory that any weapons meant for the “good guys” among the rebels might make their way to Islamist insurgents such as the al-Nusra Front.

One of the lessons we have learnt over the last 50 years when it comes to civil wars and regional conflicts, is once you send arms to a particular country, to a particular faction, the supplier will have no control over where the weapons go and where they travel … I doubt it very much that Britain and France would have control over where the arms go once they enter Syria.

But he felt Britain had no intention of actually sending arms at this point, and the decision to lift the embargo was a “political tool, a threat”. And he added:

Mr William Hague has made it clear more than once that Britain knows the risks that these weapons could and would fall into the wrong hands. But Britain is willing to take risks given the escalation of this conflict, and given the huge human toll that the use of massive force by Bashar al-Assad has exacted on the Syrian population.