Syria in 2017 (April-December)

[Azor]

External intervention in a civil war is never easy.

No, it isn’t, but by the same token, few civil wars have occurred without external intervention.

The Syrian Civil War is hopelessly intertwined with the Iraqi Civil War as well as the other anti-authoritarian popular uprisings throughout the Arab world. It is as much a Gordian knot in our time, as the Thirty Years War was for 17th Century Europe.

Once the Assad regime decided to bludgeon the protestors the die was cast. I do not think there was ever a chance the regime would reform itself. There was a potent "witches cauldron", with a fair amount of external advice and training. Having "kept the lid" on protests and repressing the Homs / Hama revolt in 1982, why would it think the trusted, reliable methods wouldn't work once more?

I disagree that the repressions of 1979-1982 informed Assad’s course of action in 2011. The former uprising was largely a militant Islamist one led by the Muslim Brotherhood whereas the latter uprising was peaceful, popular and anti-authoritarian. Whereas Hafez al-Assad could rely upon the Soviets and other allies to prevent foreign intervention on behalf of the Islamist rebellion, his son was much more isolated in 2011 and had seen the Western response to the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia already.

I strongly believed that Assad was following the advice of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who suppressed the uprising in Iran in 2009-2010, and who had assumed that they could achieve the same success in Syria. Yet Syria is not Iran…

Was there a "golden hour / day /month" when external intervention could have ended the civil war? No.

I completely agree. As I have said to Outlaw and CrowBat many times, the reconstruction of Syria as a liberal democracy would have required a major and enduring U.S. or Western commitment.