Why Assad Believes That Syria Would Not Survive a Transition to a Federal System
The idea that the protracted civil war in Syria might be resolved by restructuring the country into a federation has been on a lot of minds lately. At first glance, it does seem tempting to try to reconcile the warring sectors of the population and all the various factions by granting broad rights of autonomy based on ethnicity and religion.
The draft of the new constitution that was originally pitched to the Syrians by the international community was in fact premised on the idea of granting such status to the “nationalities living in the country.” That manifested itself, for example, in the proposal to establish a bicameral parliament in Syria. Only relatively recently did the Syrian Congress on National Dialogue (soon to convene) begin going by that name. Previous attempts were seen to call it the Congress of Syrian Peoples. But President Assad was firmly against that version from the very beginning. He feels that because of the nature of the local environment in the Middle East, the states there that fly the flag of federalism are inevitably forced to watch their territorial integrity and sovereignty slipping away. It seems to the president of Syria that, by touting federalization, the West is resorting to political and subversive means to achieve the goals it has been unable to attain militarily. For example, without waiting for a final resolution of the matter, the Americans have already urged the Kurds, whose cause they so champion, to unilaterally proclaim the establishment of the Federation of Northern Syria in the territories they occupy. And that’s only the beginning.
History has shown that no federation has been viable in that area and that eventual collapse is inevitable. The Syrians themselves must see a lesson in the story of their own short-lived federation with Egypt, known as the United Arab Republic.
Nor did Libya’s repeated attempts to create a federation with some of its neighbors meet with any success. The efforts to merge Ethiopia and Sudan into a federation – initially backed by the West – ultimately ended once Eritrea and South Sudan won their independence and pulled out. Baghdad’s willingness to grant Iraqi Kurdistan an even higher status than that of merely a constituent region of a federation resulted in Kurdish attempts to secede from Iraq. It took a massive military intervention to put a stop to that. And should Syria take that path, there is even less hope that it might escape such a fate.
The projects to federalize states in that region are tied to the initiatives to completely redraw the borders of those territories. The campaign to alter national boundaries in the “Greater Middle East” really picked up steam with the arrival of the Arab Spring in 2011. The new map of the Middle East that was proposed in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1992 by Bernard Lewis, a professor of Near Eastern Studies and advisor to George W. Bush, has regained its popularity. In 2006, this map was updated by the retired military-intelligence officer Ralph Peters in Armed Forces Journal.
The Lewis-Peters map
The intention of these exercises in “applied cartography” is to strengthen American positions in the region by weakening those national states. To this end, a “Balkanization” of the Middle East was planned along the fault lines of religious, ethnic, and clan divisions. And stirring up the animosities between the Shiites and Sunnis was to play a key role.
Syria at that time was not seriously viewed as a target for those efforts, as it seemed like a rock of stability amidst its restive neighbors. It took almost two years for the “ripple effect” from the Arab Spring to reach Syria. Once the Syrian conflict began, a map surfaced in the media (which let’s call “the Israeli version”) showing the potential breakup of that country once it became a federation…….more here