As Syria war grinds on, no good options for Putin and friends

BEIRUT, Lebanon, April 24 (UPI) -- Hafez Assad was a smart man, regardless of what his enemies say about him now, 17 years after his death. When he felt that the Soviet Union was about to fall, he quietly distanced himself from Marxist socialism, in­troducing investment laws to res­cue Syria's tottering Soviet-backed economy.

Months later he realized the United States was going to create and lead an international coalition to liberate Kuwait from the avari­cious clutches of Saddam Hussein and that the USSR was collapsing and powerless to stop it.

Assad took the highly unusual step of siding with the George H.W. Bush White House against his long-time rival. That same year, he authorized face-to-face talks with Israel at the landmark Madrid con­ference after decades of conflict.

In the 1990s, when Assad's har­boring of Kurdish separatist lead­er Abdullah Ocalan in Damascus nearly triggered a war with Turkey, the Syrian leader quietly asked him to pack up and leave.

Former U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk once observed that the can­ny Assad "calculated risk and op­portunity like a computer."

These days, many Syrians are wondering whether Assad's son Bashar will do the same to avoid what seems to be a looming con­frontation with the United States after President Donald Trump bom­barded a Syrian airbase on April 7 over an alleged Syrian chemical weapons attack that killed scores of civilians.

Syria avoided threatened U.S. airstrikes in 2013 by surrendering its chemical arsenal, while the price of doing that today is up for bargain­ing between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad's key ally.

Meeting Assad halfway, Trump has softened his rhetoric some­what after initially calling on the Syrian president to step down.

Speaking to The Wall Street Jour­nal in mid-April, Trump said when asked about Assad's removal: "Are we insisting on it? No!" But the U.S. president reportedly has put three scenarios on the table for Putin to consider.

First, he initiates a political pro­cess that stops the war and leads to Assad's departure after a tran­sitional period, which results in a new constitution and a new par­liament but keeps the state and its institutions, including the military and security apparatus, intact.

Putin would get to keep geo­graphical Syria and maintain the regime, minus one man only. The Americans would let him march on all territory east of the Euphrates, which includes oil-rich Deir ez-Zor and the Kurdish canton. This has been officially rejected by Tehran, Damascus and Moscow.

The second option is that Russia gets to keep Assad in power and the territory he controls now while "everything east of the Euphrates," where all Syria's farmland, natural resources and oil are located, be­comes the U.S. enclave in the coun­try, run by Kurds and other proxies.

Syria would get chopped up into spheres of influence, with the Russian zone west of the Euphra­tes including a Turkish canton in the north and a Jordanian one in the south, while the United States would embrace a Kurdish enclave in Syria's northeastern tip.

Syrian refugees in Turkey and Jordan would be resettled in these territories and the Syrian Army would not be allowed to strike them.

This keeps Moscow and Da­mascus ruling only a fraction of a country that is largely in ruins and bankrupt with little prospect of international support. This option too has been rejected.

Third, Assad gets to stay and re­ceives international support and re-legitimization, with Russian help of course, providing he rejects Iran and Hezbollah.

The possibility of pursuing this option might very well be on the table if a new war erupts between Lebanon and Israel next summer, as many in the region expect.

If it does, it would be a doomsday war in which Israel would strive to eliminate Hezbollah once and for all, as it has failed to do since the early 1980s, even if that means de­stroying Lebanon and parts of Syria.

In the 2006 war between Hezbol­lah and the Jewish state, the Israeli Air Force largely concentrated its firepower on Beirut's Hezbollah-dominated southern sector and the Party of God's military stronghold in south Lebanon.

Next time around, the Israelis have warned, they will hammer all of Lebanon "back into the Middle Ages" on the grounds that the state is essentially controlled by Hezbol­lah and Iran.

In April, Israel completed the op­erational deployment of its highly sophisticated anti-missile defense system that is intended to counter Syrian, Iranian and Hezbollah mis­siles.

The world will be watching how Syria responds to this war. Hezbol­lah expects far more active engage­ment from Damascus, far beyond the logistical support it received in 2006.

That is clearly no longer enough — not after the crucial role that Hezbollah has played in keeping Assad in power since 2012. Syria would be expected to send arms, food and money to Hezbollah or even join the war on its behalf.

In the United States, nobody ex­pects a weakened regime to get in­volved and as far as the Americans are concerned, neutrality would be more than satisfactory but it is highly unlikely that Damascus would do that anyway.

This article originally appeared at The Arab Weekly.