Deal for Everybody and Nobody

The US-Russia deal on Syria will neither bring peace nor will it punish the Assad regime. Yet, it is being dubbed a success because it makes world leaders, who have failed to stop the killing of more than a lakh people, feel good about themselves

At a Press conference in London on September 9, US Secretary of State John Kerry was asked if there was anything the Assad regime could do to stop Western military intervention in Syria, which at the time seemed imminent. America’s top diplomat replied somewhat oddly: “Sure”, he said, adding, “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it. And it can’t be done, obviously.”

The State Department downplayed Mr Kerry’s response saying that he was just being rhetorical. But Mr Kerry’s counterpart in Russia, a diplomat of far greater calibre, Mr Sergey Lavrov, seized the moment. He spoke to Mr Kerry in-flight and before the American had even landed in Washington, DC, the situation on the ground had shifted considerably: Russia had offered to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, its friend and ally in Damascus, to hand over to the international community his chemical weapons stockpile — and in the process, had suddenly averted war, at least for the time being.

After that 14-minute-long in-flight  conversation on Monday (September 9) between Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov, things moved at breakneck pace. With America having consented to the deal, Mr Obama called off the scheduled Congressional vote on military intervention; Mr Kerry, Mr Lavrov and their posse of security aides hurriedly met in Geneva on Thursday to hammer out the details; the deal was finalised on Saturday and quickly accepted by the Assad regime which, by the way, until then had not even acknowledged the existence of its chemical weapons stockpile.

The following Monday, UN inspectors confirmed that chemical weapons were used in the August 21 attack in east Ghouta that triggered this international response, but stopped short of pinning the blame on the Assad regime; on Tuesday, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council met in New York to discuss the deal and negotiations will continue over the next few days.

Anyway, a final resolution that can be presented before the entire 15-member Council is not possible unless the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Executive Council in The Hague approves a plan on how to deal with Syria’s chemical weapons. This plan is not expected until Friday at the earliest.

In the meantime, the deal, dubbed as the greatest US-Russia joint diplomatic effort since the unification of Germany, has already run into troubled waters. While the rest of the Western powers want military intervention in case of non-compliance to be part of the deal, Russia believes that such a clause would hamper the peace effort and make the Assad regime uncooperative — especially since there is no definite proof that it was Damascus that carried out the August 21 attack. Russia is also opposed to the draft resolution being covered by Chapter 7 of the UN Charter which gives the Security Council authority to enforce its decisions through the use of force or the imposition of sanctions. Instead, in case of non-compliance, it wants members to come back to the Security Council and seek a fresh mandate for military intervention. In all probability, UN diplomats will just draft a resolution whose deliberately vague language will appease all parties.

So let us assume that the UN Security Council will pass a resolution paving the way for the transfer and eventual destruction of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons. The question then is:How will it be implemented? The answer is President Assad will lead UN weapons inspectors to his stockpiles and then stand aside while they take over his weapons — even as a civil war rages in the backdrop.

If you are sceptical already, wait till we get to the details. First, there is no clarity on what will be covered under the chemical weapons tag and what kind of delivery systems will be neutralised since many of these systems also deliver conventional weapons. Second, there is no solid intelligence on the quantity of chemical weapons stocked in Syria and/or their exact locations. There were supposedly 42 sites before the war but now the regime has been moving the weapons all over the country. Third, after the chemicals have been located, it will still take several months, if not years, to destroy them (think of the nightmarish Iraqi experience). And it will require boots on the ground — apart from the UN inspectors, the Pentagon estimates at least 75,000 troops will be needed to secure the sites. Finally, of course, all of this will have to happen in the middle of a civil war wherein UN inspectors and foreign troops will be walking right into the heart of the Syrian battlefield with the Assad regime as their guardian angel.

This overt dependence on the Assad regime is one of the biggest pitfalls of the deal because Damascus has proven itself to be unreliable and untrustworthy. In the past three years, it has repeatedly made promises to buy time from the international community and then violated them. There is no reason to believe that President Assad will now cooperate with the West. Even Muammar Gaddafi, who voluntarily gave up his chemical weapons to end Libya’s international isolation, had put away a secret stash that was discovered unguarded in the middle of the desert after his death in 2011.

For all practical purposes, this Syria peace deal is ready to crash even before it gets off the ground. So why are world leaders scrambling all over the globe to bring this together? The answer is simple: Because it makes them, all of them — Messrs Putin, Obama and Assad — look good.

The deal is a diplomatic coup for Mr Putin who has resurrected Russia’s image from a Cold War relic to a 21st century superpower that is capable of protecting its allies and resisting the US-led West. It has also helped him reiterate Moscow’s influence in West Asia where it had been relegated to the position of a bit player vis-à-vis Washington.

Interestingly, Mr Putin had first suggested the deal to Mr Obama at the G-20 summit in St Petersburg (before the Kerry-Lavrov talk) but neither the US President nor British Prime Minister David Cameron, with whom the matter was also discussed, saw any merit in the idea. But clearly, the Russian President was a few steps ahead — which explains why at a Press conference soon after, he referred to a possible peace deal without giving any detail.

As for President Obama, the deal is the desperate face-saver he needed to extricate himself from the ‘Red Line’ narrative in which he had foolishly entwined himself. It also means he no longer has to go to a war he didn’t want to in the first place — that Nobel was beginning to feel heavy.

Finally, for President Assad, the deal allows him to also breathe easy now that the chances of a military intervention have been drastically reduced. It also means he can continue with his daily massacres, as long as he doesn’t use chemical weapons again — which works just fine for him.

In fact, the deal has effectively taken the spotlight away from the killings by conventional weapons and focussed it narrowly on chemical weapons. This brings us to the only losers in the deal: The people of Syria, who will continue to be butchered by both the regime and the rebel forces.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on September 19, 2013)