This really asks two questions. The first is whether Assad has a
long term winning position at all and the answer to that is surely
negative. The second is to ask what is Iran thinking? Even if a
short term victory is possible, they lose because everyone else will
be engaged in quickly overturning that victory.
At best though, they will drag out the war for possibly a decade and
consume their human assets while doing so in a clear cut Sunni Shite
war. Once again, the only problem that either the USA or Israel has
is that one or the other actually wins.
I never quite saw how the USA or Europe could successfully intervene
here, especially after the rebels asked them to stay away. I still
see no way and think standing back as we did in the Iran Iraq war
largely works mostly because it bleeds of a real and present danger
in Hezbollah at least.
Once again, Israel wins another stunning victory on its northern
borders. The natural result will be a strengthened Lebanon able to
secure its borders against a chastened successor Syrian State. This
will lock down the Northern border. At the same time, the successor
Syrian state will likely be happy to settle the Golan Heights issue.
In fact we now see Israel as having strategically secure boundaries
with equally secure border states whose interest at least coincide.
It is still unfinished but the probability is improving steadily.
Strategically, for the first time since the Roman Empire, Egypt has a
secure blocking force on its East flank that has no desire to conquer
it. For that reason alone, sense will prevail. Jordan is finding
its friendship with the USA very useful and a resolution with the
Palestinians will open up the whole Levant to Jordan. In fact, I
really think it is now up to Jordan to fix it and I think they can.
In fact, the needs of the surrounding Arab middle classes will demand
this to happen.
Economically we have the equivalent of a New York surrounded by
suburbs of immigrants wanting to share in the good life. The
Jordanians need only set up the conduit to industrial development in
Jordan itself and parts of Palestine to suck up the manpower.
Syria is Iran's
Stalingrad
by Gary C. Gambill
Foreign Policy Research Institute
June 2013
The growing infusion
of Iranian-backed Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite fighters into the Syrian
civil war is causing some veteran pundits to panic. Vali Nasr, dean
of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins
University, warns that "Iran is beating the U.S. in Syria."
Former Bush administration deputy national security adviser Elliot
Abrams sees "a humiliating defeat of the United States at the
hands of Iran."
Nothing could be
further from the truth. Setting aside the matter of how Washington
can be losing a war it is not fighting, the claim that Iran is
winning is dead wrong. The Islamic Republic's headlong intervention
in Syria is akin to Nazi Germany's surge of military forces into the
Battle of Stalingrad in the fall of 1942 – an operationally
competent, strategic blunder of epic proportions.
To be sure, the influx
of thousands of foreign (mostly non-Iranian) Shiite fighters into
Syria in recent months has enabled pro-regime forces to regain some
ground in the Damascus suburbs and a belt of territory linking the
capital to Homs and the coast. The town of Qusayr, critical to both
rebel and regime supply lines into Lebanon, fell on June 5.
That's a shame, but
the Iranian surge won't prevent the overwhelmingly Sunni Arab rebels
from eventually prevailing on the battlefield. Sunni Arabs have a
5-to-1 demographic edge over the minority Alawites who comprise most
uniformed and paramilitary pro-regime combatants, and a 2-to-1
advantage over all of Syria's ethno-sectarian minorities combined.
The rebels are strongly supported by the overwhelming majority of
Arabs and Muslims worldwide who are Sunnis, and their four principal
sponsors – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan – have a GDP
well over twice that of Iran. Russia continues to do business with
the regime, but it won't intervene decisively enough to
change the math.
Like the vaunted
German Wehrmacht in the Stalingrad kessel, Iran's expeditionary
forces have been thrown into a tactical military environment for
which they are woefully unprepared. Although Hezbollah wrote the book
on guerrilla warfare against conventional militaries, it has little
experience fighting battle-hardened insurgents on unfamiliar terrain
– and it shows. At least 141 Hezbollah fighters werekilled in
the span of just one month fighting in the battle for Qusayr, many of
them elite commandos who cannot easily be replaced.
Iran's mobilization of
Lebanese and Iraqi Shiites to fight for their distant theological
cousins in Syria is unlikely to keep pace with such losses, or with
the increased influx of foreign Sunni Islamists sure to come in
reaction to it. In the wake of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan
Nasrallah's May 25declaration to his Shiite followers that the
Syrian war is "our battle," the Qatar-based spiritual
leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, issued
a fatwa calling on all Muslims with military training
to fight in Syria (something he never did with respect to Israel) and
characterizing the conflict as a worldwide struggle between "100
million Shiites" and "1.7 billion [Sunni] Muslims."
Of course, divisions
among both the rebels and their external sponsors have greatly slowed
the march to Damascus. Because Syrian President Bashar Assad's
ultimate defeat is a foregone conclusion, all of the major players
(the United States included) are focused more on bolstering their
equity within the eventually-to-be-victorious rebel camp than on
hastening its advance. But the eventual aggregation and coordination
of sufficient rebel manpower and resources to decisively defeat
pro-regime forces (first in Damascus, later in the rest of Syria) is
inevitable so long as none of the players bow out or switch sides.
Iran's only hope of
avoiding this path is to make the humanitarian cost of a decisive
rebel military victory so horrific that the international community
will step in and force the rebels to accept a Lebanon-style "no
victor, no vanquished" political compromise. This would leave
pro-regime forces intact and well poised to subvert the post-war
transition, much as Hezbollah's militia survived and thrived
following the end of Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war.
But this scenario
necessitates a rebel leadership willing to accept, and united enough
to enforce, a ceasefire that leaves pro-regime forces in control of
large swathes of the country during the transition process. With
Jabhat al-Nusra and other militant jihadist groups in Syria
continuing to grow in strength, neither condition will obtain for the
foreseeable future.
Iranian Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could have cut his losses early on by allowing
the Assad regime to die a natural death and building bridges with its
successor. Such an accommodation would have greatly impaired Iran's
ability to transport heavy weapons to Hezbollah, but its Lebanese
proxy would still have remained Israel's deadliest security threat
for years to come. Hamas, which effectively severed its
alliance with Tehran as a result of the Syria conflict, would
probably have kept at least one foot in the Iranian axis. Khamenei
likely declined to take this path for the same reason that Hitler
refused to disengage from a no-win military confrontation in
Stalingrad – a deeply metaphysical confidence in ultimate victory.
This delusion will
cost him a great deal more than Syria. Even before the surge, Iran's
massive infusions of cash into Syria (12.6 billion dollars, according
to one estimate) and stepped up training of pro-Assad forces had
greatly inflamed animosity toward the Islamic Republic and its
proxies throughout the Arab-Islamic world. After years of
successfully mobilizing Arabs against Israel (as recently as
2008, polling still showed Nasrallah to be the Arab world's
most popular public figure), Tehran has managed to incite even
greater hostility to itself in a fraction of the time. A
recent surveyby James Zogby shows that Iran's favorability
ratings have fallen to an all-time low in majority Sunni countries
(dropping from 85 percent to 15 percent in Saudi Arabia between 2006
and 2012, for example). Syria, he writes, has become the "nail
in the coffin" of Iran's standing in the region. The inflamed
sectarianism wrought by Iran, according to a detailed study
by Geneive Abdo of the Brookings Institution, is likely to supersede
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "as the central mobilizing
factor for Arab political life."
In addition to
sabotaging its regional hegemonic ambitions, intervention in Syria
may also have dire domestic political consequences for the Islamic
Republic. The regime's involvement in a chronic sectarian conflict is
sure to steadily alienate its own restive Sunni minority, while the
strain on its sanctions-riddled economy will only get worse. Most
importantly, the ignominious collapse of its claim to pan-Islamic
leadership erodes one of the main pillars of its legitimacy in the
eyes of Shiites. There are no silver linings.
While
Abrams insists that the United States should be working to
"deter" Iran "from sending more fighters to help save
Assad," he's got it all wrong. The Obama administration should
copy the late Soviet General Georgy Zhukov and focus not on combating
the foolhardy Iranian surge, but on exploiting the strategic and
political flanks left exposed by it.
Gary C. Gambill is a
frequent contributor to Foreign Policy, The National
Interest, and The National Post. Formerly editor of Middle
East Intelligence Bulletin and Mideast Monitor, Gambill is an
associate fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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