Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, has an insightful reading of how things are unfolding in Syria. “This is much more than a crisis,” Paul Salem told Al-Ahram Weekly in his office in downtown Beirut. “What is happening in Syria is a disintegration of the state on two fundamental levels.” “First, there is the disintegration of the national process as the country has already broken apart into communities and sectarian ghettos. Second, there is the disintegration of the modern nation, meaning that the state is not seen as legitimate by all the players.” Salem viewed all this as a strong indication that the Sykes-Picot arrangements outlined by Britain and France some 90 years ago, which divided the Arab provinces of the former Ottoman Empire, were finally coming to an end. This applied to the three key states of the Mashreq: Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. “We have seen what is happening now in Syria take place previously in Iraq and Lebanon, where we witnessed the disintegration of the modern nation and the failure of the state. In the three countries, the state does not control all of its borders and territories, and it is not seen as legitimate by all the political players. In Lebanon, there is a little difference from Iraq and Syria, since while the state is seen as legitimate it is not given any authority,” Salem said. Salem, an academic and political analyst, has written extensively on the Syrian crisis and its implications for the regional political order, as well as on Lebanon. He has published numerous books on Middle Eastern affairs, including Building Cooperation in the Eastern Middle East (2010) and The Arab State: Assisting or Obstructing Development? (2010). The Syrian conflict, Salem explained, was a long drawn-out one, and the players were beginning to be rooted in sectarian and ethnic identities rather than in national identity. In parallel, there was “a balance of force” on the battlefield. “It has become clear that neither the regime nor the opposition can win the day, so the situation has settled into a long-drawn-out war between groups, forces and communities over a disintegrated Syria, and this may take years to settle.” Drawing lessons from the Lebanese civil war, Salem expected that the Syrians “sooner or later” would have to come up with political arrangements that would reflect the new reality that the regime was no longer accepted by the population. “Like what happened in Lebanon, you would need a new constitution and a new pact, and whatever this new pact is it will probably have to reflect a weakened, polarised and sadly much more sectarian and ethnically divided Syria. The country will probably resemble and have many of the problems Lebanon and Iraq have, and unfortunately it will have a lot of foreign influence too, as we have seen here in Lebanon.” Syria's future could resemble that of Lebanon or Iraq because, as Salem pointed out, the region as a whole was marked by similar ethnic and religious diversity, including the coexistence of Shias, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds and Turcomans. “That is the political situation we have fallen into, for better or for worse,” he said. However, it is not all doom and gloom. Salem described what he saw as a small silver lining in terms of what was good about the massive transformations the region was undergoing. “At the end of the day, the government and the regime in both Syria and Iraq were of course imposed by force, and we saw where that led,” he commented. While some might argue that in Syria things were more peaceful and united, Salem argued that the situation was unsustainable. “A good possible outcome is that at the end of it, maybe in five years or in 10 years time, the Syrians will be able to sit down together without a gun pointed at each others' heads to discuss a new democratic and constitutional power-sharing process, with people's consent and agreement. This for all its problems is a better place to start then a military coup, something that has been repeatedly tried and look where it has led.” Regarding the Geneva II Conference that is due to be held sometime in July to discuss the Syrian crisis and is the fruit of US-Russian agreement, Salem also saw this as a good starting point. “It is very important, though it has come rather late, that the US and Russia have finally realised that they should try to cooperate on Syria. Their non-cooperation was partly responsible for the downward spiral of what has happened, encouraging both sides and partly being to blame for the lack of positive action.” While Salem was sceptical about the outcome of the Conference because of what he saw as a “lack of seriousness” on the part of the regime and opposition to negotiate, he said that back-channel mediation could prepare the parties for such negotiation. “This negotiation process should start, but it might take years to conclude, and a process of politics and pressure should be adopted as a result. In other words, if the regime is not feeling the pressure, it won't engage in political negotiation and the same thing is true of the opposition. Geneva will not be a success in terms of the Syrians [opposition and regime] reaching a resolution, but it could herald the beginning of attempts at conflict management and conflict resolution.” A ceasefire would be a particularly valuable achievement of the Conference if one could be reached. “Every day of the fighting represents a further 80 deaths and a few thousand injured, and it is shocking to have seen two years of battle with no ceasefire. I should say attempts towards a ceasefire, since ceasefires always fail, and there has to be a continuous attempt to stop the firing.” “In Geneva, even if you do not see good negotiation, you may at least see progress on two key issues: the ceasefire and aid, because the human suffering is still incredible.” In assessing the strength of the Syrian regime, Salem said that it had proved to be “very strong and not on the brink of falling. The regime has not split. What the late president, Hafez Al-Assad, constructed is pretty impressive. This is not an Alawite regime either: there are Sunnis, Christians, and Kurds in it, and even the Sunni defections have not been impressive. At the end of two years of crisis, the regime is still strong, united and in control of important parts of the country.” But while the regime has proved a strong player, at the same time the maximum it can now hope for is to rule a “partial state” with little recognition. “Any gains or points the regime scores are not because of its strength. They are more because of the weakness of the opposition,” Salem said, which had turned out to be incompetent and unable to make inroads into the regime. “The opposition scares off the Syrians, the region and the world, and it is doing a great service to the regime because the choice now is between ‘us', the criminals, or ‘them', the super-criminals. Many Syrians now say that if the alternative is chaos, civil war and Al-Qaeda, maybe the regime is the better option.” The battle over Syria had to do with what he described as “a serious pipeline issue” also, since Iran's ambition was to secure its oil and gas dominance of the region by carving out a transit pipeline through Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. Qatar wanted to export gas over land to the Mediterranean through Syria, and Turkey wanted gas and oil to arrive overland in Anatolia. “I would not say it is the cause, but it is one of the causes of many countries' interest in Syria,” Salem said. “Whoever wins Syria wins the battle of the pipelines and dominates offshore gas as well. It either goes to the Russians, and consequently the Iranian camp, or it goes to America, NATO and Turkey.” In Europe, the US and Israel there are growing concerns over the nature of the Syrian opposition and where it is heading. According to Salem, Israel has changed from wanting the regime to go to preferring that President Bashar Al-Assad remains in power. “By the end of 2011, when the opposition group Jabhet Al-Nusra came into being and Al-Assad proved strong enough to fight back, Israel changed to being in favour of his remaining in power,” Salem said. The Israeli strike on Syria was meant to send Al-Assad a message, and not to indicate a game-changer against Hizbullah, he said, and it was clearly seen as such by the regime, since this was the first time that Israel had hit a Syrian Republican Guard position. While the picture is not clear as to how Israel may react to conflict on the Golan Heights, Salem believes that the Israelis will be happy with an arrangement that keeps Al-Assad in power in a strategic corridor from Al-Nabak to Al-Qusair to the coastal city of Lattakiya while the opposition factions are located to the north. The result would be that Al-Assad remained in control of the Golan Heights and a quiet southern Lebanese front. “What I do not understand is Hizbullah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah saying in his speech that he would take game-changer weapons from Syria. This undoubtedly would trigger a war with Israel,” Salem said. Nasrallah's escalation can only be understood within the context of brinkmanship, he added, a way of telling his audience that “we are fighting Israel” while not risking full-scale war. Salem also explained the reasons that were keeping Lebanon stable despite the conflict in Syria. The political partners in Lebanon did not want to see military confrontation in the country, he said, and they wanted to retain the balance of power. Hizbullah was dominant in terms of military power, as was proved in 2008. A third factor was the heavy Sunni presence in the north of the country, where there were few Shias, making Sunni-Shia confrontation unlikely. Lebanon was also the only Arab country where there was democracy and freedom, Salem said. No one wanted revolution, because everyone was already in government. “The Sunni leadership and parties hail from the upper bourgeoisie, and they have a vested interest in keeping the country stable, while the big bosses, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, US, Turkey and Iran, also have a genuine interest in keeping Lebanon stable,” Salem said. However, recently the country had entered a different phase, since with the collapse of the last government the policy of neutrality had also collapsed, particularly since Hizbullah had said that it was fighting alongside the regime in Syria. “The common ground on the crisis in Syria has also come to an end,” explained Salem, as a result, which could explain why the political partners in Lebanon could not reach agreement on the other important items on the political agenda, including the electoral law and a new cabinet. “The constitutional institutions and security institutions have been weakened. The country is on the brink of an abyss, so we have to shore up the country to stabilise things.” In 2006, Salem served as a member of the National Commission for Electoral Law Reform in Lebanon, and he thinks that extending the term of the country's parliament would be a lesser evil despite the fact that it is illegitimate since at least this would give some predictability to events. A second important step would be to revive the national dialogue process in order to discuss fundamental issues about strengthening the country's political and constitutional institutions, parliament, senate, and the passage of a new electoral law and where the country stands on the Syrian conflict. Salem said that what was going on in Lebanon was not just another “normal crisis”. It was not just about forming a new cabinet or reaching consensus over the new electoral law. “There is recognition that the country has reached a critical point 23 years after the Taef Agreement was signed and provided new common ground for the political partners. A lot of water has gone under the bridge. The region is changing rapidly, the sectarian tensions cannot be ignored, and the state institutions are not in good shape,” he said. The collapse was happening as a result of the sectarian divides, and these included those in Syria and Iraq as well. In Lebanon, the long-term Lebanese formula would survive, but the details of how to go about implementing it were changing and would need to be addressed through national dialogue. Salem said that if both Syria and Iraq could reach the limited success of Lebanon, this would be a great accomplishment in itself. “In a tough neighbourhood, with little or no resources or effective infrastructure and the country being infiltrated by foreign powers, the Lebanese formula has proved to be a success against all the odds,” he said.
