IF  SYRIA ISN’T A FAILED STATE…
(…what is?)

The chaos and slaughter in Syria continues unabated.

As for the international community, by and large, it continues to sit vulture-like on the sidelines, watching and waiting to see what part of its remains, if any, will be worth feeding upon. Its immediate neighbors, meanwhile, finding themselves swarmed over by a flood of Syrians fleeing to reach some kind of safe haven from all of that, keep making the most tepid moves possible to accommodate them just to avoid being seen as either favoring a rogue government (the root cause of the situation), or, supporting a largely incoherent opposition to it.

Yet, incredibly, there are still erstwhile pundits and high level diplomatic sources continuing to express concerns that the Syrian situation might soon become a “failed state” one. Really?  What are these people smoking? If Syria isn’t a –failed state- what is? Myopia has never been better defined by such an unwillingness to face the realities that exist on the ground, and for maintaining the figment of a government’s “sovereignty”…which no longer exists…as an excuse for non-action. All of which raises these questions:                                                            

* When does the sovereignty of any government cease to exist?

* When is a national state deemed to be a failed one?                                                                              

Obviously there don’t seem to be any kind of well defined standards or thresholds to answer such questions, and, frankly, one can’t help be wonder why not.

 Perhaps the answer is simply because too many members of the United Nations, are governments with dubious claims to “sovereignty” and borderline “failed states” themselves, and because of that, these don’t wish to be seen as pots-calling-kettles-black for fear that doing so may ultimately come back and bite them where the sun don’t shine. So, they use individual national self-interest instead to guide their policies for such situations as Syria. We’ve seen it countless times before. And a classic example of reacting from a purely national interest perspective, rather than from any other one, is that of the USA in this instance. Self-interest guided its imposition of –no-fly- zones over the Saddam regime of Iraq, and later over the Kaddafi regime in Libya, giving active opponents of those regimes some sort of secure zones to become stabilized and organized into the semblance of an alternative national entity. Syria, apparently, does not provide anything to warrant that kind of action or support. Worse yet, it seems to only be viewed through the current American paranoid lens of having too many suspected “extremist” elements among those fighting the Assad regime.

To any observer however, even from the outside, Syria, no longer exists as a coherent national state. Its people and society are broken apart and scattered around the region, and beyond. Its political, economic, and civil institutions, its physical infrastructure, are literally shattered apart, with each segment hunkered down within its own area or zone of territory. Much like Humpty Dumpty, it is questionable if after this kind of horrendous collapse it can ever put itself back together again.

And the formerly suppressed Kurdish part of Syria may become an especially difficult piece to put back together with any other of those pieces because, much like their Iraqi kinfolk (and being more or less immediately adjacent to them), they’ve probably taken advantage of the situation by quietly getting themselves organized in their part of the Syrian territory, including developing their own armed and “well-regulated” militias…just in case anyone tries to muscle them back into any kind of new Syrian fold. If they do acquiesce, you can bet their conditions for doing so will be quite firm and demanding for some form of strong autonomy.

So by any criteria one might care to use…the Assad government no longer has any kind of authority, beyond the immediate range of whatever firepower it can apply, and thus has no “sovereignty” left behind which to hide. The Syrian people took that away with them when they rose up against it. It’s time the rest of the world community accepted that, formally declared the Assad regime a rogue, non-sovereign entity, and the Syrian national state…a failed one, thereby allowing members of the international community to act unilaterally or collectively to help the Syrian people reconstitute their nation as best they can. Which leaves the international community with only two options now…that is… quarantine the whole mess…until its people manage to thrash things out for themselves, or, intervene directly to impose a temporary – guardianship- authority – over its territory to maintain law and order and essential services…while the Syrians sort out their political issues among themselves.

Of course doing that kind of action would require the United Nations to become something more than a perpetual gaggle of diplomatic eunuchs, helplessly wailing and moaning and wringing their hands…when faced with such events. Well, perhaps by the next millennium it might come to pass. Meanwhile Syria, as a nation, will slowly continue to die, day by day, sinking ever deeper into chaos and misery for a long time to come. Whose self- interest does that serve?

Well, if America can set aside its paranoid perspectives of it, for a while, and apply some of its naval air and drone resources to nullify the Assad regime’s main means of force against its –Free Syria- opponents, to impose a no-fly region from Aleppo to Iraq, all along the Turkish border, that could tip the balance, and end the Syrian nightmare.

The question is: is America’s national bird still an eagle…or just another one of those buzzards waiting on the sidelines?

CENTURION