It's a pleasure to be with you.
I'm going to divide my talk into three sections. I'll do three minutes on a historical background and how I see the conflict in Syria; a second section on who are the main players on the ground, what they want, and how powerful they are; and a third section on what those in the west in general can do and what are the various possibilities open to them.
If we start with a little PowerPoint, I would like to propose to you that Syria and the whole Levant area, that's Iraq, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, these parts of the Ottoman Empire, which are multi-ethnic and multi-confessional, are much like the Austro-Hungarian Empire and central Europe after the First World War when nation-states were drawn. They were drawn around peoples that did not share a common religion and often a common ethnicity. They were expected to get along and form a nation. They have not done so.
In almost every country, we see a struggle between minorities and majority, much like you did in central Europe. The First World War was about drawing those boundaries and breaking up an empire. The Second World War in Europe was about ethnic cleansing and rearranging. It was a great sorting out. Most of the minorities that were trapped within the borders of these countries got wiped out. That was true in Poland. Before the war about 64% of people in Poland were Polish, and after the war, almost 100%. In Czechoslovakia it was the same thing: 32% minorities, and after the war, almost none left. We get this kind of ethnic cleansing, and it's a nation-building process.
We are seeing something similar in these post-Ottoman lands. In Lebanon the Christians were left, and after the French left in 1946, they were the dominant power. They have lost that power in a 15-year bloody civil war, not all of it, but much of it. It is still not over yet. There is contention between Shiites, Maronites, Sunnis in Lebanon.
In Iraq it was the same thing. A Sunni minority was left in control by the British when they left after World War II, and the Americans helped the Shiites take over. The Shiites were 60%, Sunni Arabs only 20%. What we have today is an ongoing civil war in Iraq where the Shiites are consolidating their power and the Sunnis are fighting back. About 1,000 people a month are being killed in Iraq as this continuing ethnic sectarian civil war carries on.
It is the same thing in Israel-Palestine, where Arabs and Israelis are fighting it out and the Israelis are winning. Israelis were a minority in 1948, about a third of the population. Today they are the majority and they have been able to turn themselves from a minority into a majority. The Palestinians have largely lost. I don't think there will be a two-state solution. There might be, but chances are it's a zero-sum game for these minorities.
In Syria you have about 20% religious minorities. The Alawites, the ruling sect, if you will, the sect of President Bashar al-Assad, are about 12%. You have another 4% or 5% of other Shiite groups, and you have Christians, maybe only 6% Christians. Usually it says 10%, but they are probably more like 6%. You have 20% Kurds and another 10% Sunni, but they are a different ethnicity and speak a different language. They have already declared autonomy in the far northeast.
If you have my PowerPoints, we could go to a map of Syria.