Wednesday, February 11, 2015

The Guardian view on Bashar al-Assad’s BBC interview: the lies of a tyrant



The Syrian dictator is profiting from the west’s lack of strategy, while the bloodshed he unleashes leads a country to ruin

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A handout picture dated February 8, 2015
 Syrian president Bashar al-Assad (R) gives an interview to the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen in Damascus. 'Watching Mr Assad smugly commenting in an almost casual way about this ongoing calamity sounded like an exercise in denial.' Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Bashar al-Assad’s BBC interview may not have broken any new ground regarding what the Syrian leader thinks about the tragic situation in his country or in the wider region. But it did portray a man of utter cynicism and terrifying self-confidence.
The crisis in Syria is approaching its fourth anniversary. It started in March 2011 with a popular peaceful uprising against Mr Assad, which six months later morphed into a civil war after the regime began using snipers, machine guns and tanks against the crowds. The death toll now stands at over 210,000. There are around 3 million refugees in neighbouring states and a third of the 22-million-strong Syrian population, trying to flee the fighting, is internally displaced.
Watching Mr Assad smugly commenting in an almost casual way about this ongoing calamity sounded like an exercise in denial. There were no words of empathy for a population that his troops have massacred, leaving whole cities, including Homs and Aleppo, in a state of ruin reminiscent of such 20th-century horrors as Guernica or Dresden. Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Syrians have been detained and tortured, some to death, in Mr Assad’s dungeons. Behind the slick images of an interview in a presidential palace, a whole country is being methodically and ruthlessly sacrificed to the interests of the Assad dynasty. This is a leader who feels, or wants to appear to feel, able to discuss regional politics like any other regional leader. This is an impression that is both flawed and problematic.
It is flawed because Mr Assad lies, for example about such things as the well-documented use of barrel bombs, a lethal improvised weapon of mutilation expressly intended to kill and terrorise civilians. And it is problematic because it continues to demonstrate how far the policies of the US, as well as its western and Arab allies in the coalition against Islamic State (Isis), remain insufficient to do anything to resolve the stalemate.
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But, worse, Mr Assad is emerging with the political advantage. As the anti-Isis coalition focuses on horrific killings such as that of the Jordanian pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh, the military strategy of the coalition all but leaves Mr Assad to his own devices: there is nothing to counter his targeting of civilian areas and of what still remains of Syria’s moderate opposition,supposedly benefiting from US training programmes run out of Turkey and Jordan. It is telling that Mr Assad didn’t make the slightest reference, in the BBC interview, to the so-called Geneva process aimed at reaching a “political transition” in Syria. That talk has dried up, just like the western calls for Mr Assad to step down. Meanwhile, Russia provides a facade of diplomacy by organising rounds of talks involving no one significant from the Syrian opposition.
The US continues to argue that there is no question of normalising relations with Mr Assad, nor of considering him as an ally against Isis. Yet the underlying impression is that the whole Assad question has been put on the back burner, as if that would enable a swifter victory against Isis. That narrative casts the military effort against Isis in Syria and Iraq as a fight against extremism. Yet extremism was deliberately fed by Mr Assad from the start, when he released jihadi prisoners from his jails and then avoided targeting Isis in places such as Raqqa, its stronghold on Syrian territory. Mr Assad can happily bathe in the ambiguities of claiming that the US-led coalition, through third parties, regularly informs his forces of air strikes.
When the turmoil began in Syria, Mr Assad reacted by declaring that he would bring the whole Middle East to a state of chaos. He has contributed to doing just that. He is getting away with it. Everyone knows that there is not, and may never have been, an easy solution. But sticking one’s head in the sand and hoping the war on Isis will bring peace to Syria is a delusional approach. Syrian civilians are not helped when the west has no credible strategy to offer beyond air strikes on Isis and letting military data be communicated to the Assad regime. Nor are the Sunni constituencies that the coalition is supposed to rally against Isis ever going to be convinced of the efficiency of the strategy if Mr Assad, supported by Iran and Russia, is allowed to portray himself as part of a common fight. He is, as ever, part of the problem, not the solution.

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