The Economist On Converting Damascus

The Economist pitches in on the Future of the Syrian regime. It says “[Syria is] A suitable case for behavior modification, not regime change”

(the Illustration above is contributed by The Beirut Spring and was NOT used by The Economist’s Articles in question)

Today’s Economist Issue has two articles about Lebanon and Syria (their online versions require a subscription). The first is a leader, in which it argues that it would be imprudent to seek regime change in Syria. The second is a more general article that describes the What-happened-so-far-and-where-we-are-now of the matter.

The Leader, after explaining why Bashar is “A remarkably inept dictator”, had this to say:

Given that even a not very good dictator is a bad thing, should America and France, which took the lead in squeezing Syria’s army out of Lebanon, now engineer the downfall of the regime itself? That would be a gamble. Mr Assad has purged his country of an effective opposition. It is therefore impossible to know who might take his place if he fell. A clone might emerge from his inner circle, or Syria could be convulsed by a Sunni revolt against the Assads’ minority Alawite clan. In neither case would the Syrian people or their neighbours necessarily benefit. Syria, after all, is not the republic of fear Iraq was under Mr Hussein. Unlike his father (who had some 20,000 people, mostly civilians, slaughtered in the city of Hama in 1982), the younger Mr Assad has not been a mass-murderer, even if he orders the occasional assassination.

Better to use Mr Assad’s present weakness as an opportunity to change Syria’s behaviour, not its regime. In particular, Syria should be made to stop interfering in Lebanon, which its proxies continue to intimidate even though its army has withdrawn; end its support for the Iraqi insurgency; and close the offices of the Palestinian rejectionist organisations that use Damascus as a base from which to organise attacks on Israel and undermine the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas.

The Economist also expects that Russia will not keep on protecting Mr. Assad if he doesn’t cooperate fully with the investigation in the future:

In the Security Council this week, the Russians gave a frosty response to a draft resolution from America, France and Britain that would empower Mr Mehlis to complete his investigation and pave the way for sanctions if Syria refuses to co-operate. The Arab League also said it opposed sanctions — for now. But this may not, and should not, be the last word.

Although Syria was a Soviet protégé, and has friends in its foreign ministry, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, may come to see the folly of protecting a dictator who repels the many Arabs who are tired of their leaders behaving like mafia bosses. To bring Mr Putin on board, however, America would be well advised to pipe down and let France, whose president was a friend of Mr Hariri’s, make the running in the Security Council. If the Syrian regime collapses of its own accord, or at the hand of its own people, so be it. But the world has no appetite for more American-led regime change. Loose talk about that will do more to help than to hurt the deservedly friendless Mr Assad.

In my opinion, the most important part in The Economist’s second article is what it had to say about the Mehlis Report:

The UN report, compiled by a German prosecutor, Detlev Mehlis, presents this background in telling detail. Having established a motive, it goes on to describe a range of incriminating evidence. Most compelling are mobile-phone records that reveal the existence of a wide-ranging conspiracy to eliminate Mr Hariri. These include not just records from a set of callers, linked to the Lebanese and Syrian intelligence agencies, in the immediate vicinity of the crime. One caller, an official in a Syrian-backed Lebanese Islamist sect known as the Ahbash, put in a mysterious direct call to Lebanon’s president only minutes before the blast.

The most damning evidence, however, is more controversial. Mr Mehlis cites two Syrian witnesses as having actually observed the preparation, in a Syrian camp, of the car bomb used for the assassination. But one of these witnesses is a Syrian defector with a history of telling tall tales. He is now being held in France, not as a witness but as a suspect in the murder. Syria has seized on such inconsistencies to challenge the legitimacy of Mr Mehlis’s report, claiming that the investigation has been politicised.

This very much goes against the follies we are still hearing around us of a “politicized report” or a “vague non specific report” (Hassan Nassrallah should be saying this right now as I type in Hezbollah’s celebration of Jerusalem Day)