Killing time

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

NOW Lebanon

If it took the United States a surge in troops, immense resources and winning over the local population to turn the tide against a raging insurgency in Iraq, what makes Bashar al-Assad—with his exhausted elite units, depleted resources and a hostile population—think that he can prevail in Syria?

Since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising 15 months ago, the Assad regime has been in a hurry to bring it to an end, often through the use of lethal force, not only to kill, but to show a brutality that should dissuade others from joining the revolt. The regime has also arrested anti-Assad activists, tortured and raped them in a sadistic ceremony of "rehabilitation" aimed at reminding the population why they have remained silent all these years and why they should continue to do so. Finally, neighborhoods showing solidarity with the victims have been collectively punished through large-scale bombardment.

Since the early days of the uprising, Assad's propaganda machine has been announcing victories over insurgents. While many were real, the regime's military successes—without winning the population—have rendered the confrontation a game of cat-and-mouse.

Assad knew that he could not kill all of his opponents, only enough to convince the rest to give up. He was hoping the number would remain small to keep the international community muted.

But Syrian rage against Assad proved deep and thus invited unprecedented brutality. Rage and brutality then started feeding off of each other, both rising sharply. A shamefully shy world fell short of forcing Assad to change course and only succeeded in isolating his regime to an extent.

Assad reasoned that he could kill his opponents now and deal with the political consequences later. According to his then-ambassador to the US, Imad Mustafa, Damascus would hunker down for a decade or so, lean on capitals like Beijing—where Mustafa is now representing Assad—and work slowly to mend political ties with the rest of the world after having killed the uprising.

Yet even stopping the revolt proved complicated for Assad. Despite the resilience of his killing machine, scores of army personnel turned their guns against his loyalists. This forced the regime to rely more on its elite forces, which became thinly stretched and unable to subdue insurgents in more than one city simultaneously, as seen in February when they arranged for a truce with insurgents in Zabadani until they could finish up in Homs. Only after decimating Homs did Assad’s forces turn their attention back to Zabadani.

Retaking land, whether in Homs, Zabadani or elsewhere, proved no victory. "The rebels who withdrew from the Baba Amr neighborhood [of Homs] [in] March 2012 demonstrated the tactical wherewithal to retreat in order to preserve combat power," according to a paper by Joseph Holiday, of the Institute for the Study of War.

US forces faced a similar problem while fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. "Being fluid, the enemy can control his loss rate and therefore cannot be eradicated by purely enemy-centric tactics," wrote David Kilcullen, the Australian architect of the surge in Iraq, in his book “The Accidental Guerilla,” a manual on how armies can win asymmetric wars.

On Iraq, Kilcullen concluded that "an insurgent enemy needs the people to act," which made America focus on winning over the Iraqi population. In Syria, to Assad's detriment, popular support of the anti-Assad Free Syria Army (FSA) has no doubt given the rebels resiliency that, according to Holiday, "will make the Assad regime’s endurance difficult."

Perhaps realizing his shortcomings, Assad reasoned he could depend on something the Americans did not have in Iraq: The loyalty of Alawites and other minorities. Such a tactic that drives wedges between the different Syrian communities, however, transformed Assad from a president to a factional leader.

Desperate to show the population how strong it is, Assad provoked sectarian animosities to garner some support. This will further complicate his effort to remain president when the fighting stops, if it even does in the near future. Sectarianism is guaranteed to take the country into civil war, but not enough to turn the tide of the anti-Assad insurgency.

And if Syria goes into a full-fledged civil war, Assad's chances of emerging as a winner will be slim because those who start such conflicts are rarely the ones who preside over their end.

The Assad regime was founded on the premise of always being ready to swiftly defeat domestic challenges, whether coups, insurgencies or rebellions. But times have changed, and the template of the founder, Hafez al-Assad, is proving inadequate for his son Bashar, who over the past 15 months has been trying desperately to kill the Syrian revolution, but has so far only killed time.

From One Arab Man to Mona Eltahawy: Thank You!

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
The Huffington Post

It is intriguing that the sharpest responses to Mona Eltahawy's Why Do They Hate Us came from two Arab men, while the reaction of the majority of Arab women varied between the lame "both men and women are oppressed in Arab countries" and the redundant "women are oppressed in the West too."

In the first "manly" response, Imam Faisal Abdul Raufwrote: "Was it God's intent to set gender relations as they were in the seventh century for all time? Or does the Quran's directive reveal a divine intent that striving for gender parity and justice should be perfected in our time?"

To his credit, Rauf said that Islam's teachings should not be taken literally -- that they should be viewed within their seventh century context and be implemented in a modernized form to fit the current time and age. Eltahtawy had complained against these seventh-century teachings, even though she did not take them head-on because she knew that such an attack would allow her detractors to call her apostate and turn the debate away from the issue of women.

Another Arab man, Shadi Hamid, wrote that in the Arab world "democracy and liberalism do not necessarily go hand-in-hand." He argued: "Democracy means that governments need to be responsive to the will of the people. But the will of Arab men, and even Arab women, does not seem to be particularly supportive of the Western conception of gender equality." He added: "What if Arabs decide they want to be illiberal?"

To Hamid's mind, an illiberal post-Arab Spring region reasserts the importance of cultural relativism. Eltahawy had vehemently opposed such a scheme, insisting that women's rights were universal.

While seemingly correct, Hamid's argument on responsive government disregards democracy's known risk: "The tyranny of the majority." That's why the designers of most Western states made it a point to differentiate between a representative government and the nature of the state. The first requires simple majority, the second absolute majority.

In the Arab Spring context, Islamists can sweep every parliament, form every cabinet and appoint every judge. That will allow them to make policies and implement them. But that will never give them the right to amend constitutions, an agonizing process which usually requires four fifths of parliaments in many democracies.

Maintaining the nature of the state, through a hard-to-change constitution, is important because it safeguards personal freedom. Regardless whether Arab liberals end up governing or not, they should be able to express their opinion free of coercion or reprisal, which is still not the case despite all the Arab revolutionary zeal and the presumed hard-earned freedom.

Eltahawy made it a point to over generalize, perhaps to provoke. She made all Arab men hate all Arab women. But as an Arab man, I was not offended. When I read Mona's beautiful treatise on women, I immediately understood what she meant. Her ranting against the "toxic mix" of religion and tradition and those newly elected officials who have just jumped out of the seventh century stood out.

As an Arab man, I've had endless arguments with my peers over the necessity to recognize the urgency of "women emancipation" in Arab countries. And as an Arab man, I can say with certainty that the majority of Arab men enjoy their privileges over women and plan to keep them. Their reasons might go beyond simple misogyny and be more connected to the nature of patriarchal societies where violence is practiced to establish the chain of authority, regardless of gender. This means that those Arab men who beat their wives are themselves oppressed by other men outside the household. Yet this does not put the suffering of both genders on par. In America, the latestcensus showed that women are paid 77 percent of what men are paid for similar jobs. In Arab countries, women are nobodies compared to men.
The alleviation Arab women's colossal suffering is possible. For a starter, existing laws should be amended to grant women full and equal rights as men.

But that's only part of the story.

When any adult female steps forward to challenge males, whether her so-called guardians (the father, the husband and the brother) or only her peers, the government should grant this woman full protection from physical harm. This is not because the government should violate the teachings of Islam, but because it should be beyond any government's powers, Arab or Western, to implement any religious or social tradition.

The liberty of every adult citizen, woman and man, is a universal right without which the Arab Spring becomes a mere reshuffling of rulers. All coming Arab governments, whether Islamist or liberal, should make sure to safeguard liberty and protect every citizen from harm.

The problem with the Arab Spring has been so far its focus on political affairs. While important, there will be no Arab revolution without a shift in cultural paradigms, and this is only possible when people like Eltahawy take the lead and provoke.

As for those who argue that maybe Arab women are opposed to change, whether radical or incremental, here is their answer: Human, especially women's, rights are not elective. The laws should be there to protect them. Then, in order to observe cultural relativism that I oppose, Arab women can take these laws or leave them.

Saudi women, for instance, can choose not to drive. But it is the responsibility of everyone to make sure that if they ever decide to do so, there will be no traditions or laws -- religious or temporal -- that can stop them.

Thank you Mona Eltahawy for a sobering article that, as an Arab man, I fully endorse.