The Syrian economy is struggling increasingly with fears of foreign currency flight and crumpling investor confidence. This week, Syria's central bank announced further restrictions on selling foreign currency to stem its outflow, limiting Syrian citizens to purchasing no more than $100 each only twice a year.

The official exchange rate remains at S£47.5 to the dollar, but the black market dollar rate has soared to S£52.5. Western diplomats in Damascus deduce that national foreign currency reserves are depleting rapidly.

Plus there are signs that the Syrian middle class is starting to lose faith in Assad. If Assad can't provide them with what Assad rulers have given them for 40 years, namely, economic stability, they will abandon him. He therefore stands to lose the support of Damascus, the capital, with a population of 4.3 million and the financial hub of Aleppo (six million inhabitants). They may well throw their support by the popular uprising against the regime.

Even Bashar Assad could hardly survive mass desertion of some 80 percent of the population. (The rest are Alawites and Kurds.)

Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, who has lived many years in Syria, one of the few Western academics with real insight in complexities of Syrian politics, wrote in an article published 9 August:

Syrian businessmen are a conservative and self-interested lot. They have a refined disdain for peasants and tribesmen alike; neither are they big on leftists, philosophers, religious fanatics, or zealots of any stripe. Indeed, Syria's merchants and capitalists have rather high regard for themselves and few others. In their eyes, they are the true guardians of the Syrian nation….

Before they will help overthrow the Assads, they need a safe alternative. They are not going to embrace -- not to mention fund -- a leaderless bunch of young activists who want to smash everything that smells of Baathist privilege, corruption, and cronyism. After all, who are the CEOs of Syria?

It is suggested however that responsible leadership that would inspire trust in the middle class could only come from the Syrian military.

Therefore, if the Assad regime is squeezed hard at home, the Americans, Saudis (supports the opposition inside Syria) and Turks continue to the turn the screw on him – as separate items in this issue have described – and the economy crashes, the next event in Syria may be a military putsch to push the president out.

Some questions awaiting answers therefore are:

1. Will Asad be overthrown in a military coup and meet the same fate as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in Cairo?

2. Will the Alawite, Sunni, Christian, Kurd and Druze generals manage to work together or will they fight? If the latter, Syria faces the nightmare of religious and ethnic civil war.

3. How much support will a military junta muster from the middle class? And will the people fighting for democracy accept their authority?

Arming the anti-Assad protesters is option

In 2007, a year after the Israeli-Hizballah war in Lebanon, Israeli military officials described Syria's anti-aircraft arsenal as the densest in the world, because Damascus never stops buying more and more Russian hardware. One estimate puts its stock at 200 batteries of assorted types.

In the four years since that conflict, Syria has taken delivery of Russian Pantsir-S1 (NATO-coded SA-22 Greyhound), which is a combined short-to-medium range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapon.

It has a maximum range of 20,000 meters and can hit flying objects at heights of up to 15,000 meters—including all types of aircraft, helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles, cruise missiles and air-to-ground precision guided weapons. The system is also effective against stealth aircraft.

Since air and ground offensives against the Syrian army are both out of the question - apart from a limited incursion of Turkish military forces into northern Syria to establish a narrow buffer zone - the military options are reduced to outfitting the opposition fighting the Assad regime in Syria with the tools and manpower for beating back his army.

According to this plan, NATO and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) emirates are to furnish the Syrian rebels weapons for self-defense against Syrian armored assaults. Instruction in their use will take place in Turkey or in the buffer zone - provided Ankara goes through with this plan.

Sunni Muslim "volunteers" on tap

For the second time in its short history, the Saudi royal house is raising an army of several thousand young Muslims dedicated to the Saudi brand of Sunni Islam for beating back alien and competing influences and interlopers.

Whereas in 1985, Saudi Arabia worked hand in hand with the American Central Intelligence Agency, this time Riyadh is acting on its own for an enterprise frankly designed to frustrate and delimit the pro-democracy uprisings the Obama administration is espousing in the Muslim world, the Middle East and North Africa. The GCC states will also round up thousands of Muslim "volunteers" to fight alongside the rebels in Syria. They would be detached from the international Muslim Legion Saudi Arabia is recruiting and funding.

The bones of an arms supply apparatus have been in place for four months from two main sources: European countries and NATO have been spiriting arms into Syria – albeit irregularly and with no way of determining their end-users. Saudi intelligence has been running a more organized GCC supply line bringing the protesters larger quantities of arms through Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan.

The plan evolving now is to rationalize the system with a central depot in Turkey for supplies from all the various sources and a mechanism for determining who receives them.

They will also divert to the anti-Assad campaign in Syria some of the thousands of the Pakistani military and security personnel Riyadh has imported in recent months for propping up Sunni emirs in the Persian Gulf, notably Bahrain.

Washington's security and intelligence agencies have discovered that expanded military cooperation among the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states can be a useful vehicle for helping the Syrian people fight its ruling regime.

The plan evolving now is to rationalize the system with a central depot in Turkey for supplies from all the various sources and a mechanism for determining who receives them.

Ingredients for Mid East war held ready to hand

It is taken into account that, in the course of the five-month uprising to unseat him, Bashar Assad has always managed to stay a step or two ahead of his enemies and will continue to do so.

Before the grand plan for injecting thousands of volunteers and masses of weapons into Syria is up and running, he is expected to preemptively employ the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah for heating up the Lebanese-Israel border or even spark an all-out conflagration between the two long-time foes which would quickly ignite the Golan border between Syria and Israel.

In Washington, Syria watchers in the National Security Council and the Pentagon don't rule out Turkey being drawn into this multiple conflict. Once Turkey allows Muslim "volunteers" and weapons to transit its territory, Damascus will reduce Ankara to enemy status.

Assad may content himself with a minor military operation against Turkey sufficient to prevent its troops creating a Turkish-protected buffer zone inside northern Syria. On the other hand, if Iran pitches in with reprisals against Turkey, as it has threatened to do more than once in recent weeks, sources in Washington see the possibility of Saudi Arabia stepping in to hit Iranian military targets in the Gulf and inside Iran.

And the inflammable Middle East will again be embroiled in a full-scale regional war.

Saturday, Aug. 13, US President Barack Obama phoned Saudi King Abdullah at his palace in Jeddah. What followed was their first conversation in seven months of frigid relations after their bitter row of Feb. 9 over the US president's role in toppling Abdullah's friend Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Obama and Abdullah refrained from communicating – or coordinating their actions - through the critical months of the Arab Revolt, leaving routine contacts to national security advisers, ministers and counterterrorism officials.

That the Saudi King was ready to take President Obama's call about the Syrian crisis was a measure of the supreme importance the Saudi royal family attaches to the popular uprising against President Assad having the right outcome.

After listening to Obama's account of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's discussions with Bashar Assad in Damascus on August 9, and the conclusion he and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan reached in their phone call two days later, Abdullah made his own position clear:

Saudi Arabia, he said, had three objectives in Syria:

1. Assad's ouster from power, to which end the oil kingdom was willing to invest all its financial and intelligence resources, is the first priority and the key to the other two goals which are:

2. The destruction of Hizballah as a military and political force in Lebanon because its armed militia is an integral part of the military might of Syria and Iran.

The Saudi king was clear about not ruling out military intervention to overthrow Assad and obliterate Hizballah.

3. The undermining of the Islamic Republic of Iran's imperialist and nuclear ambitions.

Possible Caveats

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin assigned a top diplomatic troubleshooter, with going to Damascus and advising Assad on ways and means of subduing the revolt against his rule without incurring the backlash of US and European diplomatic and economic sanctions, and save Syria from following the Libya scenario.

In the days since US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on world countries to boycott Syrian oil and gas and halt weapons supplies to Syria, Russia, China and Iran have stepped up their arms consignments to the regime in Damascus.

Russian experts are advising Assad on the weapons most effective for suppressing the revolt against him and how to dodge Western and NATO sanctions.

The Chinese have sent a special delegation to Damascus which coordinates its steps with the Russians.

Moscow has a bone to pick with the West, because its offer to mediate solutions for the crises in Libya and Damascus did not entail overthrowing Muammar Qaddafi. The Russians claim that NATO's urrent attempt to overthrow Qaddafi was not part of the deal. Syria under the Assad dynasty is the second biggest market for Russian arms after Libya. After losing Qaddafi, Moscow is making sure Assad does not go the same way.

And I suspect that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu soon also might fall silent what their recent threatening military action to cut Assad down, concerns.

Assad may try and blow up the emerging Saudi-led bloc

Recently Arab News has been in unusual praise for Turkey not heard for many years from Saudi Arabia – a development which may turn out to be one of the few achievements Obama administration's Middle East policies can boast in recent months.

Using the Syrian crisis to energize the rise of a Sunni Muslim bloc against the Shiite-led Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah alliance - and then for patching up the US administration's quarrel with Saudi Arabia, if only very partially, would be a major feat for Obama diplomacy. King Abdullah is still not ready to go all the way in confronting Iran, including military action.

The prevailing view in Washington and most Middle East capitals, is that Assad might take the lead in steps for breaking up the Sunni grouping before its institutions and modes of operation are firmly established.

His most obvious course would be to catch his enemies, the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, off guard with a surprise attack on one of Syria's neighbors.

The Arab ‘Spring’, but where is it going?

The first 9 months of the Arab Revolt have produced the overthrow of just two rulers, Zin Ben-Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt; two with one foot out, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen; and two still at the helm, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa in Bahrain and Bashar Assad in Syria. The focus has shifted from anti-regime protest to civil war and cross-border conflicts amid a busy game of musical chairs.

In fact I foresee the wheel of revolt turning back to its starting-point this year - or some time in 2012 and slamming into the royal houses of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Some other assessments go so far as to include the Turkish and Iranian regimes in the next cycle. Instability on the Palestinian scene is a given.

Also, among Europeans and within the U.S. State Department and the Obama administration is an ideology of human rights — the idea that one of the major commitments of Western countries should be supporting the creation of regimes resembling their own. This assumes that there is powerful discontent in oppressive states, that the discontent is powerful enough to overthrow regimes, and that what follows would be the sort of regime that the West would be able to work with.

However the issue maybe isn’t entirely whether human rights are important but whether supporting unrest in repressive states automatically strengthens human rights. An important example was Iran in 1979, when opposition to the oppression of the shah’s government was perceived as a movement toward liberal democracy. What followed might have been democratic but it was hardly liberal. Indeed, many of the myths of the Arab Spring had their roots both in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and later in Iran’s 2009 protest movement, when a narrow uprising readily crushed by the regime was widely viewed as massive opposition and widespread support for liberalization.

The world is more complicated and more varied than that. As we are seeing in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass support. Nor are the alternatives necessarily more palatable than what went before or the displeasure of the West nearly as fearsome as Westerners like to think. Libya is a case study on the consequences of starting a war with insufficient force. Syria makes a strong case on the limits of soft power. Egypt and Tunisia represent a textbook lesson on the importance of not deluding yourself. The pursuit of human rights requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances are. It is important to remember that it is not Western supporters of human rights who suffer the consequences of failed risings, civil wars or revolutionary regimes that are committed to causes other than liberal democracy.

The misreading of the situation can also create unnecessary geopolitical problems. The fall of the Egyptian regime, unlikely as it is at this point, would be just as likely to generate an Islamist regime as a liberal democracy. The survival of the al Assad regime could lead to more slaughter than we have seen and a much firmer base for Iran. No regimes have fallen since the Arab Spring, but when they do it will be important to remember 1979 and the conviction that nothing could be worse than the shah’s Iran, morally or geopolitically. Neither was quite the case.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people in the Arab world who want liberal democracy. But maybe it means that they are not powerful enough to topple regimes or maintain control of new regimes even if they did succeed. More on that the coming week.

This process has already started to happen among the rebels in Libya and with the strengthening of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Syria will continue struggling to stamp out protests, but neither the fractured protest movement nor the regime has the resources to overwhelm the other, and any dramatic shifts in the situation are unlikely this year. The Syrian regime will devote increasing attention to rooting out dissent among the upper ranks of the Alawite-dominated military; this dynamic will need to be watched closely for signs of serious fracturing within the regime. The regime will find relief in the likelihood that Syria’s opposition will remain without meaningful foreign sponsorship through the end of the year.

Yemen will remain in political crisis this year as Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his clan continue efforts to regain their clout in the capital and undercut the opposition. Street battles in and around the capital between pro- and anti-regime forces can be expected, with Saleh’s faction retaining the upper hand yet still unable to quash the opposition.

In Libya friction among the various factions competing for control will increase in later this year, as the loose alliance of anti-Gadhafi militias seeks to eliminate the regime loyalists’ final strongholds. I do not foresee a drawn out insurgency by pro-Gadhafi forces into the next year, but even if the National Transitional Council (NTC) declares the country’s liberation the next few months — an act the NTC has said is a precondition to any formation of a transitional government — the resulting political wrangling will leave the country without a unified leadership that can move Libya forward toward elections.

Home