Symposium-Q: Should the United States seek regime change in Syria with Saddam Hussein's defeat?

Insight on the News Posted May 28, 2003 By By James Miskel

NO: Syria is surrounded by U.S. allies and poses no threat to the region or to the United States.

There are many good reasons for not seeking a regime change in Syria. So many good reasons, in fact, that one wonders whether the idea really is being seriously pursued or merely being trumpeted on the assumption that the regime in Damascus will be more likely to play ball with the United States if it thinks the idea is being seriously pursued.

Given the obvious power and effectiveness of the U.S. military as demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq - two locations where many in the West and the Middle East mistakenly were confident that the military would find the going slow and the casualties high - thoughtful people in Damascus and indeed throughout Syria would be justified in worrying that when the next shoe drops, it will land on them. Thoughtful people in Washington will, however, eventually conclude that, absent an unlikely provocation by Syria, the costs of dropping that shoe on Damascus will outweigh the benefits.

So much remains to be done in both Iraq and Afghanistan to solidify the achievements of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the ousting of the Taliban that it makes no sense to undertake another "makeover project." Winning the peace in Iraq and Afghanistan is turning out to be an extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming enterprise, and there is a lot riding on it. Two things in play are American prestige and credibility in the region. If we do not win the peace by institutionalizing representative governments and reviving the local economies, reform in this volatile and important region will be set back - regardless of the regime presiding in Damascus.

There continues to be fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, the pace of military operations in Afghanistan actually seems to have been picking up in the last month. It has been 15 months since the Afghan Interim Authority headed by Hamid Karzai took over from the Taliban regime, and in another 15 months there probably still will be fighting outside Kabul and its environs.

Pacification may or may not take as long in Iraq, but it would be wise to assume that it will take at least 15 to 30 months after the Iraqi interim authority is installed. Unfortunately, there also are signs that enthusiasm for the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan already may be flagging. U.N. reports indicate that only 20 percent of the aid requirements for the current fiscal year have been met by international donations. Adding a third makeover project in Syria will only make the funding problem in Afghanistan worse and could draw resources away from the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

So, why throw a third ball into the air while we still are struggling to juggle reconstruction balls in Iraq and Afghanistan? With three balls in the air, the odds of one or all of them being dropped would escalate sharply. A far better approach would be to concentrate on the job at hand in Iraq and Afghanistan. Syria should be put on the U.S. military's back burner until after reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan is solidified.

Another consideration is that a forced regime change in Syria will confirm many of the reservations that governments in the Middle East and elsewhere have about how the United States uses its awesome military power. International anxiety about American motives and power would not (and should not) worry us overly much if Syria were posing a clear and present danger to the United States or its allies. But that does not seem to be the case today.

Actually, Syria lately has been behaving more responsibly than it has in the past when it stoked the fires of civil war in Lebanon and aggressively promoted anti-Israeli terrorism. If press reports are to be believed, Damascus has been cooperating in the war on terrorism and has begun to turn back fleeing Iraqis at the border. The cooperation selectively may be targeted at terrorists whom Damascus is willing to throw overboard in order to protect its key client groups, such as Hezbollah. It is, however, enough of a step in the right direction to warrant forbearance at least until after other ways of influencing Syria have been attempted.

Forcing a regime change in Syria while Damascus actually is helping round up terrorists would send a very peculiar signal to the rest of the world about the benefits of cooperation with the United States. There are a number of nations that are working with us in the war on terror despite the rampant anti-American sentiment within their borders. This is the burden of leaders in Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Regime change in Syria could well make genuine cooperation by such countries more difficult by fueling anti-Americanism. It also could lend weight to the arguments of those among the leadership who resist the political risks of cooperating with the United States in the first place.

Having a more pliant regime in Damascus probably would improve our ability to fight the global war on terrorism, but this would be true only if that new regime were capable of policing terrorist groups. That's the rub. No new regime will be as effective as the current one in doing this job.

Now that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq has fallen, Syria is politically, economically, and geostrategically isolated. Its isolation has given it the look of a country that virtually was designed for containment and nonmilitary forms of pressure. This means that many if not most of the important benefits that could accrue from regime change in Damascus very well might be achieved through other, lower-cost means.

Geostrategically, all of Syria's most powerful neighbors are U.S. allies (Turkey, Israel and now Iraq). To make matters worse from the Syrian perspective, U.S. military forces already are in Turkey and probably will be stationed nearby in Iraq for a considerable period of time. Syria's small coastline also can be intensively patrolled by the dominant naval force in the Mediterranean, the U.S. 6th Fleet. Thus, in a very real sense, Syria virtually is encircled by U.S. military and intelligence assets. Under these circumstances there is very little that Syria can do directly to threaten U.S. interests or destabilize its neighbors without running the risk of quick detection and decisive retaliation. Classic deterrence theory suggests that this threat of retaliation will keep Syria in its box at least until postwar reconstruction is completed in Iraq and Afghanistan and the United States stands down military deployments in the region.

Neither of Syria's other two bordering nations, Jordan and Lebanon, have enough strategic independence after the fall of Saddam in Iraq to defy U.S. efforts to hem in Syria, and neither is economically robust enough to prop up Syria in the face of sanctions. Turkey is Syria's principal source of the single most important economic commodity - water. Water scarcity already is a problem in Syria and the shortage will only get worse as the population continues to grow and urbanize.

Syria's political ideology - the Ba'ath Party's fusion of socialism, secularism and pan-Arabism - has been a desiccated husk for decades. Ba'athism is a spent shell, and there is no reason to worry that it somehow might catch fire across the region and inflame opinion in neighboring countries. In terms of President George W. Bush's argument that the West is not at war with Islam, there even could be a benefit to having an indigenous secular regime in Syria instead of another U.S.-imposed secular regime.

The existence of a Kurdish minority in Syria is another reason for a go-very-slow approach to regime change. Perhaps not as restive as their brethren in Iraq and Turkey, Syrian Kurds nevertheless may view a change in Damascus as an opportunity to begin asserting claims for autonomy and perhaps even support for joining an independent Kurdistan. Either way, it would be an unwelcome complication to the evolving situation in Iraq and an unnecessary irritant in U.S. relations with Turkey. Equitably accommodating Iraq's Kurdish minority without destabilizing Kurdish areas in Turkey could become the central challenge for the new regime in Baghdad. Meeting that challenge will be difficult enough without adding Syrian Kurds to the mix.

As important as the Middle East is, it is not the only region where there are security threats and foreign-policy issues. North Korea's nuclear programs, tensions between India and Pakistan, the ongoing turmoil in Colombia and Venezuela, and U.S. relations with NATO all warrant our attention. Now is not the time to dive deeper into the Middle East pool, particularly since it is possible that nonmilitary measures will be enough to deter Syrian adventurism until the day when the regime change occurs naturally, in response to domestic pressures. For the foreseeable future, the first priority of the United States should be to ensure that reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan succeeds. Events in Iraq will be strategically decisive in determining the course of U.S. relations in the Middle East. In comparison, events in an isolated and ideologically bankrupt Syria are a sideshow and should be treated as such.

Finally, it might be wise to reflect on the lessons learned in Operation Iraqi Freedom before launching a military campaign against Syria. A pause in operations also would give the United States an opportunity to replenish military supplies and equipment so that we do not end the next war (wherever it is fought) with nearly empty lockers.

The U.S. military is better than any other armed forces at adapting new tactics and technologies on the basis of "the last war." It is one of our competitive advantages, and we should use it. Syria will, of course, also try to draw lessons from the war in Iraq, but given its poor economy and strategic isolation, dramatic improvements in its military capabilities over the short term are exceedingly unlikely. The truth is that there are no quick fixes available to Syria. Accelerating the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction or increasing support for international terrorism once might have been perceived as quick fixes by the Syrian leadership - as they once were by the Iraqi leadership - but in today's environment they are too risky.

There are no substantial military risks to deferring action. We can afford to wait.

Miskel is a professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and teaches courses on the Middle East at Providence College. He served on the National Security Council staff during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. This essay reflects his personal views, not the positions of the Naval War College or of the U.S. Navy.