Force and diplomacy aren’t antithetical

I’ve had a number of people ask in the past 48 hours whether proceeding on the diplomatic track to collect Syria’s chemical weapons will strengthen Bashar al Asad.

The answer in the short term is “yes.”  Whenever the international community negotiates with a ruler whose legitimacy is in question, it shores up his hold on power.  Especially so in this instance, as Bashar will soon be responsible for declaring, collecting and turning over Syria’s chemical weapons, making him appear indispensable to a process Russia and the United States have dubbed A number 1 priority.

Neither will want him pushed aside while this process is ongoing.  If he were to disappear suddenly, the process would at best come to a halt and at worst disintegrate, making accountability for the chemical weapons difficult if not impossible.  Even the Geneva 2 formula–full delegation of executive authority to a government agreed by both the regime and the opposition–might be a bridge too far so long as the chemical weapons are not fully under international control.

This of course means that Bashar, whether he intends to use the chemical weapons again or not, will want to prolong the process as much as possible.  The opportunities for footdragging are many.  He is already demanding that the US give up the threat to use force as a condition for his turning over the chemical weapons.  He can delay his accounting for the weapons and their locations for a month under the convention he has said he will sign.  He can stall the deployment of weapons inspectors.  He can claim that security conditions make collecting the weapons, said to be distributed to 50 or so sites, impossible.  He can make working conditions for the inspectors hellish.

It will be Moscow’s responsibility to deliver Bashar and ensure he performs.  I really have no doubt about Russia’s ability to do this.  Syria depends on Russian arms and financing.  Even a slight delay in deliveries of either would put Damascus in a bind.  But Moscow too will have reasons to delay and prevaricate.   The Americans, if they are to get anything like full implementation of a serious agreement on chemical weapons, will need to keep alive a credible threat to use force if Bashar fails to meet expectations.

This push and shove between the diplomacy and force is the rule, not the exception.  It went on for more than two years after the UN Security Council authorized the use of force in Bosnia.  It went on for months in the prelude to the Kosovo bombing, with several diplomatic failures to end the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo preceding the eventual use of force.  Even in Afghanistan, the Taliban were given an opportunity to deliver Al Qaeda into the hands of the Americans.  Force was used only after diplomacy had failed.  President Bush’s supporters would claim this was also true for Iraq.

The problem in Syria is that the issues there go far beyond chemical weapons.  In addition to the mass atrocities committed with conventional weapons, there are two vital US interests at stake:  regional stability and blocking an extremist (Sunni or Shia-aligned) succession in Syria.  Secretary Kerry is trying hard to keep the door to a Geneva 2 negotiation open, because only a negotiated political transition has much of a chance of avoiding state collapse, which will threaten regional stability, and extremist takeover.

Russia and the United States share these interests in a negotiated political transition, but so far Moscow has remained wedded to Bashar al Asad, no matter how many times Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov claim they are not committed to him personally.  What Kerry needs to do is convince the Russians that Bashar remaining in power is a real and serious threat to Russia, as it will encourage jihadi extremists to extend their fight to the Caucasus and cause state structures in the Levant to fragment.

The military balance will be an important part of Russia’s calculations.  While President Obama has stayed largely silent on support for the Syrian opposition, frustrating Senator McCain and other Republicans who have wanted to see intervention, there are lots of indications that he is ratcheting up a military supply and training chain that moved slowly over the summer.  The faster the Syrian opposition can pose a serious military threat to the regime, the sooner Russia will be inclined to reexamine its support for Bashar and its hesistancy about Geneva 2.