In “How Assad’s Enemies Gave Up on the Syrian Opposition”, Aron
Lund
follows many other analysts in his account of how the West 'gave up' on Syria’s
rebels. The implication is that the West
tried to back them against Assad, but at long last found this well-meaning
effort both futile and ill-advised. The project produced a big mess!
That's at least highly misleading. The following argues that West never
seriously supported the rebels, so it can hardly be said that support should
never have been extended in the first place.
1. Lund has a New
York Times report stating that there were "flights shipping military
equipment to Syria". Here he misspoke: without any sinister intent, he asserted what
he knows is false. Not one single flight
went to Syria. All flights went, as the
article states, to Turkey or Jordan.
2. This is of the
highest significance, because it means that only a still-unknown proportion of
the 3500 tons shipped actually ended up in rebel hands.
3. What we do know is
that there were many complaints that only a trickle of those arms made it
across the border: the deliveries were constantly and severely restricted to
bend rebel groups to the wishes of Turkey, and - especially - Jordan and the
US. For example:
“We need between 500-600 tons of
ammunition a week. We get between 30-40 tons. So you do the calculations.”
4. The overwhelming
majority of the arms used are of Soviet design.
Even ammunition tracked to outside sources is not linked to identifiable
US-backed shipments. Some of this
material certainly did come from the CIA operation, but there are no videos nor
any first-hand testimony of large deliveries crossing the Syrian border. In short there is no evidence that, contrary
to repeated rebel claims, they received large amounts of CIA-supplied weaponry,
as opposed to black-market purchases from numerous sources.
5. There is also no
evidence, indeed no claim, that CIA training made a substantial
difference. The later Pentagon train-and-equip
program leaked small quantities of arms; the trained units were consistently
steered away from fighting Assad.
6. Even if large
shipments actually ended up in rebel hands, these shipments did not afford the
rebels air cover: there were no useful MANPADS or other anti-aircraft
weapons. And of course in contrast to
the Western-backed Kurdish forces, no one gave the rebels air cover or close
air support. This, predictably, proved
decisive.
7. Without such
support, the claim that Western supplies ever played a pivotal role in the
course of the war is implausible. The
rebels, in better days, obtained massive quantities of arms from the black
market and captured régime depots. These
seem quite sufficient to account for the rebels' periods of success.
8. In short the
whole idea that the US and the West made any serious effort to overthrow Assad
is a non-starter. Western backers may
indeed have planned to overthrow him.
But between the plans and the implementation lay an almost impenetrable
barrier of reluctance to support the rebels who might have brought him
down. This barrier proved much more
consequential than the plans or even the arms delivery flights that supposedly
exacerbated the conflict.
9. Where did this
reluctance come from? Lund rightly
says: "Though the Syrian president
was now widely reviled as a war criminal and held responsible for tens of
thousands of civilian deaths, the likely alternatives seemed to be either
stateless, jihadi-infested chaos or some sort of Talibanesque theocracy.
International enthusiasm for the opposition plummeted."
