WORLD_ If the Syria deal doesn't work, dictators will know they can slaughter their people and get away with it

If the Syria deal doesn't work, dictators will know they can slaughter their people and get away with it

By Alan Johnson - World-  Last updated: September 20th, 2013

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*** Alan Johnson is the Editor of Fathom: for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region and Senior Research Fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). A professor of democratic theory and practice, he is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine, and a Senior Research Associate at The Foreign Policy Centre. ***

A few days ago I listened to Michael Herzog briefing about the US-Russian deal on Syrian chemical weapons. Mike is always worth listening to, having served as head of the strategic planning division of the Israeli Defence Force, and worked with four ministers of defence as senior military aide and chief of staff. Mulling it over later, I was left with these eight observations.

First, if it works, the international community can feel pretty good about it.

There are huge benefits to a deal that denies Syria the production and usage of chemical weapons. Assad loses a strategic capability which has been used against the Syrian people, threatens Israel and destabilises a region already in turmoil. And if it works, a template has been created to deal with the Iranian nuclear weapons programme: if you want a diplomatic deal, keep a credible military option on the table.

Second, the international community should be really worried about whether it will work.

The implementation of the deal relies on the goodwill of Bashar al-Assad and that says it all. More: Putin is strengthened, the US is weakened, the UK Parliament is divided. Still more: Assad can go on slaughtering as long as he does not use chemical weapons.

Third, we have a pretty good picture of Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons.

Israeli intelligence coverage of Syria – shared with the US – is excellent. It was an Israeli intelligence general back in March who revealed that Assad was using chemical weapons against the rebels (at the time this was met with scepticism).

Fourth, there remain worrying gaps in our picture of Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons.

Herzog said "Based on what I hear from people in Washington, the US administration believes it has some gaps. Some of the capabilities have also been moved during the war."

Fifth, the deal presents a real challenge to the UN inspection regime.

Implementing this deal will be extraordinarily difficult. The Syrians will now hand over their list of chemical sites and the UN inspectors will examine it against all the existing intelligence data, to see that they are not cheating. All parties will monitor to see if there are any other sites or capabilities which the Syrians are leaving unrecorded. This is devilishly complicated. You have to know about all the sites and the inspectors have to gain access to these sites in order to check them. To then take out the chemical agents or destroy them on site, while monitoring all the other sites at the same time, will require at least 1,000 inspectors, and probably many more. It’s going to take years. (The Russian-American deal talks about a year – that is optimistic.)

It will be extraordinarily difficult to get thousands of UN inspectors into a war zone and keep them there, and to ensure they have untrammelled access to weapons sites across the country. Free movement inside Syria across Government-held and rebel-held areas is not available. Moving chemical agents across the country will be very dangerous. Both would require the full cooperation of the Syrian regime and that will not be on offer. As for the cooperation of the rebels, many are controlled by outside forces, including Jabhat al-Nusra and other extreme Islamists.

Sixth, the US now has to give the UN inspections a period in which to try and succeed.

On this blog, David Blair argued that Syria came to heel only because of a credible military threat. True, but the deal itself may make it harder to keep that threat credible. The US and its allies will now have to watch as the Syrian violations of the deal accumulate before they can say "it is not working" and seek to put military force is back on the table. And even if they do the latter, it isn’t clear that the US – agonised before the deal was struck – will strike. Anyway, according to the deal, if violated, the parties must go to the Security Council for a resolution under Article 7, which authorises the use of force. But the Russians and the Chinese will veto that. In short, the military option has slipped away for the foreseeable future.

Seventh, Israel will retain the option of preventing weapons transfers to Hezbollah

There is no credible information that such transfers are taking place at this time. However, Syria might seek to transfer chemical weapons to Hezbollah in the future. The transfer of strategic capabilities to Hezbollah in Lebanon is a red line for Israel, who carried out several airstrikes earlier this year against attempts to do just that. Would the presence of international inspectors stay Israel’s hand if Assad tries to transfer chemical weapons to Hezbollah behind the back of the inspectors? That does not seem likely.

Eighth, the truth is we just don’t yet know how this deal will impact on the international community’s ability to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

If this deal works, it is bad news for Iran. Why? Because it would mean a model of international cooperation has emerged, perhaps by chance, in which credible military threat is married to big power diplomatic cooperation to stand down the grossest violators of international treaties and norms. No more globoschlorosis.

If the deal does not work then the Iranians will draw the conclusion that they can get away with it. International diplomacy will be revealed to be a fraud; a cover behind which dictators carry on slaughtering (as long as they do not use chemical weapons) and theocracies acquire weapons of mass destruction.

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