By Barry Rubin
Here’s an interesting mystery of the day: Why are Iranian leaders starting to criticize their close ally, Syria, and imply that the regime there needs to make reforms or even leave office altogether?
There are three theories:
–This represents a split among Iran’s rulers on what to do about Syria. I don’t see evidence of that.
–Iran is worried about being isolated from Sunni Muslims, who are the large majority in the region, since this group is overwhelmingly supporting revolution in Syria. By being seen as too Shia Muslim, Iran’s regime could lose its bid to be the leader of revolutionary Islamism in the Middle East. Already, Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group, has come out against the Syrian regime and is moving into the Egyptian (Muslim Brotherhood) orbit. That argument makes sense.
–Iran’s leaders think that the regime of dictator-President Bashar al-Assad is going to fall and don’t want to be on the losing side. That argument makes sense also. Let’s remember that Iran has good intelligence assets in Syria so they would know what they are talking about. Two months ago, Israeli intelligence changed its assessment to predict Assad’s downfall.
This could take some time and I would expect Assad to remain in power into 2012. The Syrian military can go on like this for some time. Remember that the Syrian elite believes that to lose power would mean their deaths and their families’ impoverishment. The Alawites—and probably many of the Christians—fear communal violence against them if the Sunni Muslim moderates or Islamists (or both) come to power.
So for the regime to fall, the Syrian military and the regime’s militia would have to collapse, be militarily defeated, or split. And those things won’t happen easily. If the revolution goes on long enough this might be invitable. But, unfortunately, a lot more people are going to die before that takes place.
Most likely this is a deception, in other words, yes, the Iranians are hedging their bet to gain popularity among Sunni Arabs, they’ve seen Hezbollah lose support because of their loyalty to Assad. But, this is just for public consumption, behind the scenes, they will will support Assad & murder Syrians to maintain him in power. They don’t want to lose Syria to the Sunni bloc, this would be quite a defeat. Anyway, Assad & his Alawite supporters won’t listen to anyone, this is a fight to the bitter end. One thing you can be sure of, when Assad finally falls & the Alawite minority is massacred by their Sunni brothers, the whole world will turn it’s head & ignore it. I bet you the New York Times headlines this as ”Democracy Comes to Syria” & Obama will make a speech claiming credit – while Alawite blood turns into a river.
I agree… its Iran trying to save face and the downfall of the well-entrenched Assad dictatorship will have repercussions in Iran itself. In the end no dictatorship is immortal. The regimes in Syria and Iran have demonstrated they can kill thousands of people to remain in power but they cannot effectively crush the opposition out of existence. In a way the social media has given protesters in closed societies an outlet to the world that didn’t exist before. And the greatest oxygen for anti-regime protests today is YouTube.
Gosh, Barry, you’ve overlooked the most obvious reason of all: Obama’s outstretched hand offered the Iranians the chance to join “the community of responsible nations” and the Iranians have decided to make that their new goal.
I believe that could be the reason. Of course, I also believe in the Tooth Fairy.
Barry, I favour your third option. In the ME, strength is the only thing that matters. When Assad was strong, all the OIC thugs were on his side. Now that he is weak, they are abandoning him for the next strong man. Their priority now is to make sure that the next man is their friend.
Looking forward to reading more. Great blog article.Much thanks again. Will read on…