John J. Metzler

UNITED NATIONS — All of Syria’s five neighboring countries sensed a quiet pleasure in seeing the rebellion against the Damascus dictatorship start two years ago.

Many observers, knowing the authoritarian political pedigree of the Assad family rule, probably assumed Syria’s entrenched but moribund political system would be swept away by the winds of the so-called Arab Spring. Thus this misplaced sense of schadenfreude for what many thought would be another Egypt or Tunisia. But Syrians are a tougher and harsher lot as all sides to the conflict are proving.

Now as the conflict, really a civil war, enters its third year with over 70,000 dead, the specter of a wider sectarian disaster looms both inside Syria and with collateral damage spilling over into neighboring states, equally causing tense political relations between the USA and Russia.

According to many security experts, Syria is disintegrating into a state where rebel warlords, militias, and an embattled Assad regime are divided along sectarian lines. Syria’s sanguinary struggle seems locked in stalemate and Islamic jihadi forces circle.

For Russia, the Syrian state remains a crucial and protected geopolitical chess piece; a longtime regional political comrade dating to Soviet times. The close ties are something akin to the former U.S. stance towards Egypt before the Arab Spring swept away a pro-American and secular government replacing it with a Muslim Brotherhood regime.

Moscow has given the Syrian regime diplomatic cover fire in the UN Security Council and along with the People’s Republic of China, has exercised three vetoes to shoot down moderately mild resolutions aimed at stopping the violence and brokering political change. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a blunt meeting with Secretary Kerry failed to reach any understanding which would ease tensions in Syria. Now Russia, as president of the UN Security Council for March, will direct debate on the crisis.

As a geographical neighbor, Turkey is keenly interested in Syria for three reasons. The Ankara government fears continuing refugee spillover and destabilization from the conflict. Already Turkey hosts over 250,000 Syrian refugees. Second, the Turks see the conflict within Islam, in this case between Ankara’s Islamic-lite Sunni Turkish government, supporting an embattled Sunni majority in Syria. Third, since Syria was part of the old Ottoman empire, there’s the nostalgic and cultural pull towards sorting things out in Damascus.

In the wider scope, regional states face destabilization, especially tiny Lebanon where sectarian fault lines were long part of a fractious political landscape; the Kingdom of Jordan, another host for Syrian refugees but a state decidedly wary of allowing the Syrian spillover to tip a delicate political balance in Amman; Israel who can militarily take care of itself but fears wider regional chaos and the possible creation of an Islamic regime in Damascus; and both Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran whose Shi’ite majority has long supported Assad’s Allawite minority sect ruling in Damascus.

So what about the U.S.? Amazingly, Assad’s secular Syrian regime was quietly courted early in the Obama Administration in the naïve presumption that an outstretched hand and wishful thinking would change the political game board. Indeed earlier in a deliberate political slap to the Bush Administration, Congressional Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi visited Damascus in 2007 to hobnob for “dialogue” with an isolated but hopefully reformist inclined Assad government. In 2005, Sen. John Kerry visited Damascus to test political waters with the regime.

When the Syrian uprising started, the Obama administration was decidedly cautious and probably prudently so. After the far more significant debacle in Egypt and the president’s initially wavering policy towards topping Libya’s dictator, admittedly Syria seemed a bridge too far.

While initial hesitation may have been prudent in 2011, the Syrian crisis spiraled out of control into a humanitarian nightmare with over 2 million people internally displaced according to the UN while another million refugees languish in neighboring countries.

Syria’s embattled Christian minority, ten percent of the population, fears the future.

Though understandably nervous about military involvement in another Mideast conflict, the Obama Administration’s callous indifference towards weighing-in in Syria is not a policy but a copout. Fouad Ajami, a noted expert at the prestigious Hoover Institution told the Wall St. Journal, “American passivity proved contagious. In the face of that passivity other powers held back.”

Though Secretary of State John Kerry made solving Syria’s crisis a highpoint of his maiden swing abroad, receiving strong political support in Paris and Berlin, Kerry has met with turbulence from Moscow. American plans to offer the Syria’s fractious opposition “non lethal” support were politely received but not taken seriously by the mainstream Syrian National Coalition opposition.

Islamic jihadi factions, among them Al Qaida affiliates, have entrenched themselves in the armed resistance. And there’s a stalemate among the warring parties and frustration among the diplomats. A game changer is needed — now.

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for WorldTribune.com.

  Arab Spring, Bashar Assad, John Kerry, Sergei Lavrov, Syria: From Schadenfreude to an out-of-control crisis, UN Security Council