Syria, October 2012. (Photo: © 2012 Rami Alhames.) Used under Creative Commons License CC BY 2.0.

Despite an international agreement to rid Syria of its chemical weapons, experts at a recently convened UCLA forum expressed pessimism about expectations for a peaceful resolution to the Syrian civil war.

As things stand now, a number of nations — including the United States, Russia and possibly even Iran and Israel — have a shared interest in bringing the civil war to an end. But the problem is that though most world powers no longer wish to see the rebels win the Syrian civil war because their ranks are dominated by extremist Islamist jihadists, different countries cannot agree on whom to support.

So even with the chemical weapons disarmament agreement creating an opportunity for a negotiated resolution, the chance for peace remains slim, according to a consensus of panelists discussing the crisis in Syria. The discussion was organized by the Burkle Center for International Relations and held Oct. 7 at UCLA School of Law.

Moderated by Burkle Center Director Kal Raustiala, the panel consisted of Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation; Bennett Ramberg, a Los Angeles-based writer, foreign policy consultant and businessman who leads a monthly Global Security Seminar at the UCLA Faculty Center; and Daniel Treisman, UCLA professor of political science.

Chemical arms agreement: A small but real improvement

"We are at a better place than we were a month ago," said Kaye, "better than we expected." Given that U.S. air strikes would not have ended the conflict, she argued that getting a chemical weapons deal that would destroy the largest arsenal in the region was not a bad outcome.

In addition, Kaye said the agreement had both inserted the U.N. Security Council into the negotiation process and made it easier for the United States to make progress with its own negotiations with Iran.

Kaye argued that to resolve the Syrian crisis all regional players needed to be included in the political process. She observed that the conflict had never been limited to Syria alone: one in four Syrians is displaced internally or externally, meaning the situation affects Syria’s neighbors.

With different countries backing different Syrian factions, conflicts among outside countries is contributing to Syria’s civil war.

"Russia’s position is really quite simple," Treisman said. "It opposes U.S. interventions in other countries to effect regime change." He noted that the Russian government’s position on Syria reflected Russian public opinion.

Treisman said Russia’s reading of international law was that a military intervention in Syria without the approval of the U.N. Security Council — regardless of the dimensions of the humanitarian crisis — would be illegal.

Also, while Russia says it supports the removal of chemical weapons from Syria, Treisman said that Russia is realistic in thinking that Syrian President Bashar Assad may try to wriggle out of the recent agreement to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons.

From left: Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation, Kal Raustiala, director of the Burkle Center, Daniel Treisman, UCLA professor of political science and Bennett Ramberg, a Los Angeles-based writer and foreign policy consultant, all agreed that a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Syria wasn't likely in the near future. Peggy McInerny/UCLA

Although Russia prefers stability under a dictator to violent instability in Syria, it is intensely concerned about sectarian divisions in Syria and their possible spread — a concern shared by the United States, Treisman said. For Russia, the concern is the impact of these divisions on the Caucasus and Central Asia.

For the United States, as Kaye later noted, the worry is that terrorist activity will increase in Europe and the United States because many of the foreign jihadists fighting in Syria (estimated between 2,000 and 3,000 men) have European passports.

Treisman discounted the idea that Russia could induce Assad to leave power, noting that its own officials say the same in public. He also observed that the value of Russia’s relationship with Syria has decreased over time. Today, he argued, Syria’s need for helicopter repairs exceeds Russia’s need for Syria as an arms export market (it ranks sixth in monetary terms among purchasers of Russian arms).

Bennett took a longer-term view of the conflict, arguing that the Syrian crisis raises the challenge of how to handle future civil conflict in countries that possess nuclear assets (nuclear weapons, nuclear materials and/or nuclear reactors). "The current model is a muddle that won’t work in the future," Bennett said.

Bennett offered four choices for dealing with countries that have nuclear assets: force, containment, a hybrid of force and containment, or doing nothing. Force — whether a full-scale invasion, the use of special forces or air strikes — is the most efficient means of stopping the utilization or migration of weapons of mass destruction, he said. However, this option is costly, dangerous and risks a long-term conflict.

Among possible containment scenarios, Bennett included the establishment of a cordon sanitaire — providing intelligence and equipment to a government in distress and appeals to custodians and rebels to avoid moving or using such weapons.

A hybrid response could, Bennett continued, include containment plus intensive drone and air surveillance to identify weapons for possible destruction and/or deter their movement across borders.

Bennett pointed out that the choice of doing nothing has been practiced several times in recent decades with no discernible adverse consequences. He identified six instances where this was the case: Algeria in 1961 (where a nuclear weapon was about to be tested), the Vietnam War (where the United States eventually removed the small amount of weapons-grade nuclear material it kept in the country), the Cultural Revolution in China, the collapse of the USSR, the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s (where nuclear reactors were at risk), and Abkhazia in the 1990s (where less than a kilogram of nuclear material disappeared).

The impact and appeal of all four options, concluded Bennett, depends on where an actor sits vis-á-vis any given conflict.

Considering the consequences of a continued bloody stalemate in Syria, Kaye rejected "doing nothing" on both moral and strategic grounds. The refugee crisis, she argued, makes it urgent to find a solution, while a viewing a continued stalemate as OK, is short-sighted strategically, given that conflict has already spread beyond Syria.

Kaye said that the most realistic scenario may be a soft power-sharing arrangement with different parties dominant in different regions of Syria. Treisman agreed, noting that this scenario was effectively a ceasefire. "All parties," he said, "believe that the longer [the conflict] continues, the more destabilizing it becomes, but no one has any kind of road map toward some kind of practical solution."

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