Syria air strikes: There is no endgame in sight
The world is beginning to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis and Australia will now join the United States in bombing self-styled Islamic State (IS) in Syria in addition to Iraq.
Setting aside the legality of such action, all of this has been responding to the symptoms of the crisis. Nothing is yet being done to address its cause.
Allied bombing of IS in support of ground forces marked a strategic shift, but was responded to by IS changing tactics. After a year of bombing, the only significant outcome is that IS has occupied more territory in both Iraq and Syria.
The regional conflict has three complications, the first of which is that it is transnational, engulfing both Syria and neighbouring Iraq, with flow-on effects in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. A further complication is that it is, in part, a proxy war being waged by the United States and its allies, and Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A third complication is that neither the Syrian nor Iraqi governments have sufficient capacity to end the war. And, if they were successful, there would remain two governments that were the root cause of the current problem.
In short, without a major international intervention, the war in Syria and Iraq will continue for years, possibly for decades. The difficulty is that the one possible solution to the region’s problems will require not just global agreement but a commitment for perhaps a couple of decades.
As with the proxy war that plagued Cambodia, such an answer lies in a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) response mandated under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This would require the UNSC’s Permanent Five members, including Russia and the US, to reach agreement as to the shape of a post-conflict Middle East.
The US does not trust Russia and would be deeply reluctant to see it consolidate, much less extend, its strategic position in Syria. Russia similarly distrusts US intentions, particularly after a similar resolution on Libya in 2011 was interpreted well beyond its original intent to “protect civilians”.
However, basic to ending the regional war is that both Syria and Iraq require a major military presence on the ground to defeat IS, that the Assad regime must go, and that it be accepted that the experiment that was the state of Iraq has become unsustainable.
Somewhat similar to the Sykes-Picot Agreement between the UK and France in 1916 that led to the initial creation of Syria and Iraq, US and Russian interests will need to be satisfied, while calming concerns in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Russian strategic interests in Syria need to be acknowledged, while US influence in Iraq, or its successor/s, will similarly require acknowledgement.
Meanwhile, Russia could persuade Bashir al-Assad to retire to a dacha in the Urals. A UNSC-sanctioned multinational military force would then need to win the Syrian war on the ground, and provide protection to Alawites, Christians and other Syrian minorities from vengeful Sunnis who make up the base of IS.
Similarly, a multinational military force under the same UNSC sanction would be needed to contain the blow-back into Iraq, to defeat IS and to stabilise its broadly three competing groups, Shia, Sunnis and Kurds.
Given the deep fracturing of the two states and their histories of violence, deployment of a subsequent peace-keeping force would be required for several years. Experience has shown that post-conflict states are deeply susceptible to reverting to war without long-term, sustainable transitions to peace.
There would, in parallel, need to be an interim UN administration in both countries, to oversee the process of rebuilding the physical infrastructure and the institutional capacity of both states, and the return and resettlement of refugees. Eventually, the peoples of both states would have to consider and vote on new constitutions and, following that, new governments.
In the case of Iraq in particular, a new constitution would likely see a state highly devolved into its three constituent regions, a Shia south, Sunni middle and Kurdish north, if not the creation of two or three new states around such regions. Syria, too, would probably devolve regional authority along ethnic lines, with an Alawite-led east, Kurdish north and Sunni west.
Finally, an effectively permanent early warning and response framework would need to be established, to identify developing tensions before they again spill over, and the establishment of UN-backed resolution mechanisms.
There are few other paths to resolving the cause of the refugee outflows. Yet, to be frank, attempting, much less achieving, the above outcomes could reasonably be described as ‘ambitious’.
However, without some sort of global agreement on how to sustainably resolve this regional war, there is no endgame in sight. The question will then become not whether there is globally agreed action, but when it will come and, more to the point, how many years it will take to restore this part of the world to something resembling normality, and how many more lives will be shattered while we wait.