Evidence of meeting #12 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was opposition.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:20 p.m.
As an Individual
If you want to get rid of chemical weapons, the best way to do it is to work with Assad. He presented this package with Russia of getting rid of the weapons because he thought it would re-legitimize him. If America is willing to come to terms with Assad's surviving in the parts of the country that he already owns, I think Assad will be happy to deliver those chemical weapons, which have not been an important part. He wants to use them to help him win stability and his own longevity in the areas he controls. If America is willing to help him survive there, he will give up his chemical weapons, and Russia will help build him up, and he will be a happy guy.
I think Assad is coming to the conclusion that he cannot re-conquer the whole country. I think Russia and Iran would be happy to have Assad survive in Damascus, because this would preserve all the national interest that they need, which is to be able to resupply Hezbollah, the Shiites in Lebanon, and for the Russians to have a toehold in the Arab-Israeli conflict and to have a port on the coast and be a player in the Middle East.
Regime change is going to bring the end of those things to all the actors. They are not going to cooperate with the United States, whether on chemical weapons, humanitarian issues, or ceasefire, as long as they believe that the United States is trying to undermine their interests.
If you want to get rid of chemical weapons, you have to deal with Assad. That's why he presented the package in the first place: he did not want to be destroyed.
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
Marc Garneau Liberal Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC
Thank you.
If we assume that magically for whatever reason the Assad regime were removed and was gone, given the fact that so many factions in the conflict are now involved, what do you rate as the chances of some eventual stable implantation of democracy in Syria? I'd like to have your crystal-ball feeling about that, starting with Mr. Tabler.
5:25 p.m.
Senior Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy
It's a very good question.
For implantation of a liberal democracy that we have in the west, I think the chances right now are very slim. Could you have local governance through local elections? We have seen those in a number of areas. Interestingly, even President Assad, in outlining his reform plan, has also talked about the need for local and more administrative elections, but that wouldn't deal with the national leadership. That is a very far way off, and could come out of the country's not only de facto partition, but also its de jure partition long into the future. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it could. The analogy most used is the federally administered tribal areas in Pakistan where you have a very loose control of the central government. That's a phenomenon we see not only in Syria but throughout the Middle East as regimes, however brutal, prove also inelastic to deal with the demographic problems and other social and other problems within their countries.
That's my humblest prediction at this point.
5:25 p.m.
As an Individual
They're very unlikely to get democracy. None of the major players want democracy and are not calling for it. There are tons of people who would like to see democracy in Syria, but they don't have any guns and they don't have political representation that can bring them there today.
As I started out on this, I think that Syria is so deeply divided, the distrust is tremendous. People cling to the coattails of those who can defend them. We see this in the Kurdish region; we see this among the Alawites, the Christians clinging to Assad. I think the Sunnis are doing the same thing today with their militia leaders, many of whom are very undemocratic and unlikely to become democrats.
So I don't see this happening. I think that if you destroy the Assad regime, you are going to be in for years of real militia chaos in Syria. That's the problem. America has no good options today. We're not going to occupy Syria and develop a central government the way we did in Iraq. The only reason Iraq has a central government today is that America suppressed and disarmed all the other militias and built up a state. That's not going to happen in Syria, which is why the recipe for this “Somaliazation” is very high, as we see in the rebel-held regions. Rebels have been fighting among themselves in the last few months and many have been killed. I don't think that's going to stop any time soon.
5:30 p.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Paul Dewar
We're going to have to leave it there.
I want to thank all of our witnesses. It was obviously a very sobering testimony from all of you, but we really appreciate your testimony today to help inform us in our deliberations and ideally some recommendations to government. Thank you so much for joining us today.