Mick Hartley

The Obama administration cites the need to preserve state institutions and avoid a power vacuum as one of its priorities in Syria. But the state institutions – to the extent that they survive – are mainly aimed at exploiting the suffering people even more, and the power vacuum is pretty much a fait accompli, with Assad becoming just another warlord.

Tobias Schneider – the decay of the Syrian Regime is much worse than you think:

Today, where briefing maps now show solid red across Syria’s western governorates, they ought to distinguish dozens and perhaps even hundreds of small fiefdoms only nominally loyal to Assad. Indeed, in much of the country, loyalist security forces function like a grand racketeering scheme: simultaneously a cause and consequence of state collapse at the local level….

Besides some residual agriculture, trafficking in fuel, guns, and people has become the dominant form of economic activity throughout much of Syria. And loyalist militias are cashing in. Armed groups purportedly under Assad’s banner have quickly learned to exploit bottlenecks in the local economy to emancipate themselves from Damascus’ tutelage — particularly when it comes to one of the most fungible of commodities: fuel. In another incident in Hama this summer, Syrian military forces discovered multiple tanker trucks of smuggled petroleum on their way to Islamic State territory. Fearing retaliation from Talal Dakkak, instead of confiscating and distributing the looted goods as proscribed, the officers quickly handed over the fuel to the local air force intelligence directorate. At that point, according to a local source in Hama, it disappeared once again….Rather than attempt to capture resource monopolies, certain armed groups have taken to making a profit by exploiting the suffering population directly. Consider the town of al-Tall, just north of the capital Damascus. Technically under a truce agreement with the regime, this small opposition community now houses hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people who have fled there from around the capital. Despite guarantees by the government, local loyalist militias tasked with manning the checkpoints in the area have recently begun leveraging a tax of 100 Syrian Pounds per kilogram on all incoming food products. Even a conservative estimate would put the monthly revenue of such a levy into the millions of U.S. dollars. This is enough to feed and supply the thousands of fighters manning the cordon, as well as their families. The watchdog group “Siege Watch” has put the number of civilians encircled by regime forces at an additional 850,000 across Syria. In these stricken areas, the cost of living has multiplied, with the difference syphoned off by those manning the bottlenecks. Put differently, with Damascus nowhere near able to finance and feed the families of loyalist militiamen, the encircling and taxation of civilians has an economic necessity for the regime to keep many of its most important frontline troops supplied and happy.

This is not merely to illustrate the moral evil of the Syrian regime, but to drive home a more important point: With public wages barely enough to feed the conscripts themselves, Assad’s men have long begun feeding off the land and the civilian population….

Over the past three years, despite foreign military aid and support, the regime under Assad has continued to atrophy at an ever increasing pace. If these trends continue, the Syrian president will soon find himself little more than a primus inter pares, a symbolic common denominator around which a loose coalition of thieves and fiefdoms can rally. Thus, with the slow decay of the once powerful state, military, and party establishment, the person of Bashar al-Assad himself has increasingly come to embody the last remaining pillar not of a state but of “the regime” and its brutal war against its own citizens.

The great majority of forces in Syria today, particularly among the regime’s minority supporters, fight an increasingly localized war for the protection of their particular communities. It is only through the continued existence of the regime — personified in Assad — that these defensive goals have been tied to an aggressive, national vision which we know to be unacceptable to a great majority of Syrians, disastrous to its supporters, and militarily unrealistic. While removing the tyrant may spark in-fighting among the surviving warlords, it would likely not mean a collapse of their forces and the slaughter of their villages….

If indeed there is no strong bureaucratic and military class left that could salvage and revive the state and if loyalist militants have developed an increasing degree of self-reliance, then the situation is not as Western policymakers assume. Syria’s president has become not only perfectly expendable as guarantor of the state, but ought to be considered the last remaining obstacle to a peace process based on local ceasefires and return to displaced peoples to their home communities.

This makes those calls heard in Western capitals, as well as Moscow, that Syria’s state institutions must be preserved ring hollow. All this suffering — to preserve what precisely?

It is the fiction of a national regime upheld by Assad that drives the worst abuses of this war, that obliges Alawite kids from the coastal mountains and the plains of Hama to fight their own countrymen in distant corners of a country long fractured into smaller fiefdoms beyond the reach of the state. The United States should not be complicit in this pretension. The Syrian state is gone for good. At this point, a quick decapitation might be preferable to a drawn-out implosion.

When Syrians first rose up, they demanded not just the downfall of Bashar al-Assad, but of the “nizam.” Commonly translated as “regime”, it more closely means “system”. Humanitarian suffering, state failure and — yes — terrorism in Syria are not competing concerns that need to be balanced, but symptoms of a singular disease: The mis-rule of Bashar al-Assad and his clients, cronies, and the petty criminals it has elevated to power.