Warning: Syria is much stronger than Libya
Editor’s Note: Shashank Joshi is a doctoral student at Harvard University and an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
By Shashank Joshi – Special to CNN
In Syria, the Assad dynasty is teetering. Protests have breached the
two largest cities, around 2,200 citizens have been killed, and oil and
gas sanctions will soon cripple the public purse. Civil war isn’t
guaranteed – there’s a slim chance that loyalists dump President Assad
and cede a little power to widen their base – but, as Hussein Ibish writes in The Atlantic,
‘with the Libya model presenting itself … as an alternative stratagem,
the drift towards conflict is starting to feel palpable’.
So palpable, in fact, that some – like Michael O’Hanlon on this site
– have begun surveying the West’s military options. That is why it is
important to be clear about why Syria differs from Libya in important
ways.
For a start, the UN Security Council would be unlikely to pass a
resolution authorising force. Russia, a veto-wielding member of the
council, enjoys access to a Mediterranean naval base in the Syrian city
of Tartus and is a major supplier of arms to the country. Russia has
already lost $4 arms billion in foregone sales to Libya – no wonder
Moscow is loath to see another customer vanish. Chinese arms sales to
Syria have been equally buoyant, tripling between 2006 and 2009.
More broadly, Syria lies at the heart of the Arab world. Although
protests and regime violence have already destabilised the country and
sent refugees northward to Turkey, outside intervention would have
unpredictable consequences for neighbours Israel, Iraq, and Lebanon.
Although Saudi Arabia has criticised Assad and withdrawn its ambassador,
it’s unlikely that the Arab League would repeat its endorsement of a
no-fly zone.
It’s not inconceivable that these legal and diplomatic hurdles would
be overcome. Barriers to intervention in Libya looked insurmountable
until the last moment.
But Syria is an altogether different target in military terms, too.
First, it’s simply more powerful. Syria’s armed forces are four times
the size of Libya’s, and its personnel per capita and total military
spending are both one-third higher. President Assad can draw on
thousands more tanks than could Colonel Gaddafi (including twice as many
advanced T-72s) and a thousand more artillery pieces.
Although Syrian air defences are only slightly better than those of
Libya, the country does probably have several hundred more portable, and
hence elusive, shoulder-launched anti-aircraft weapons. NATO is
technically capable of destroying fixed air defence sites, but how
resource-intensive would that be? A single Tomahawk cruise missile costs
around $1 million, meaning that the (largely American) effort to
destroy Libya’s SAM sites cost up to a quarter of a billion dollars.
That is a miniscule proportion of the US defense budget ($685 billion
for 2010) but, in a time of shrinking European military spending, this
and associate costs could make NATO’s second-tier members think twice
about another humanitarian campaign within a year.
These calculations should also factor in retaliatory capacity.
Whereas Colonel Gaddafi was forced to ineffectually lob Scud missiles at
empty desert near the rebels, Syrian forces could hit out at Israel
both with their own missiles and through the Lebanese militant group
Hezbollah. Libya was unable or unwilling to mount terrorist attacks
abroad, but Syria could be less reticent.
A second problem is that the Syrian opposition, despite its formation
of a National Transitional Council along Libyan lines, remains deeply
divided. This is a political problem because uncommitted Syrians and
ambivalent regional powers (like Turkey) see little viable alternative
to Assad.
But this is also a military problem.
Libyan rebels were divided by tribe, region, ideology and ethnicity.
But Syria’s rebels are even more fractured. Lebanon’s prolonged civil
war – in which the US, Syria and Israel all intervened – is a cautionary
tale: backing one party to a multifaceted conflict is more complex, and
possibly counterproductive, than working with a rebel alliance like
Libya’s which is at least loosely held together by a political structure
and lacking sectarian divisions.
In Libya, Benghazi served as a secure rear area for rebels and a base
of operations for Western military and intelligence officers. Syria has
no such safe havens, and its centers of protest span the entire country
from north to south. Hama, a city that has comparable resilience to
government assaults, is the site of daily killings and located far from
accessible international borders or the coast.
Finally, it is worth thinking through the implications of a loyal
army. Syria’s elite units and officer corps are dominated by the Alawi
sect, to which the Assad dynasty belongs. They have neither
disintegrated nor turned on Assad. In Libya, a very large portion of the
army, particularly in the east, melted away at the beginning of the
conflict. In Syria, defections are much more sporadic, and that’s
despite months of severe violence against unarmed protesters. That means
any armed rebellion would face far worse odds of success, and
intervention in support of such a rebellion would involve a longer and
more serious commitment.
None of this is guaranteed to avert war. If refugee flows reached
unacceptable proportions, or a civil war began to seep outside the
country, the US might judge that strategic – rather than simply
humanitarian – interests were at stake. But we should be under no
illusions that a war in Syria would look identical to the one being
wrapped up in North Africa.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of Shashank Joshi.
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