Peracchio: Why Libya and not Syria?

Adrian Peracchio, a former foreign correspondent and editorial writer for Newsday, is a lecturer at C.W. Post College's Hutton House Lectures program.

As the brutal crackdown of democracy protesters rages unabated in Syria, with more than 1,000 killed and another 10,000 arrested, it continues to meet with a profound lack of response in Washington and elsewhere in the West or the Arab world.

No contrast could be starker in the evolution of the Arab Spring uprisings than the international response to the revolts in Syria and Libya. Just last week, as the NATO alliance resorted for the first time to helicopter gunships against Libyan forces, the Syrian army used attack helicopters for the first time to gun down its own country's unarmed demonstrators.

That grim irony escaped official comment in Western and Arab capitals, where the brutal repression in Syria has met with a timid reluctance to confront the regime of President Bashar Assad with anything beyond mild, almost regretful, condemnation.

So why unleash NATO against Libya and hold back against Syria, where the same crimes against humanity are occurring -- a regime murdering its own people? Why focus political and financial capital on ousting Libya's regime, when Syria is a far more critical actor, the nexus of influence tying Iran to Lebanon and Palestinian groups?

The simplistic answer is that Libya is easy, Syria is hard. And there is some truth to that. Libya's Moammar Gadhafi is a borderline psychopath with no friends in the Arab world; Syria's Assad has lots of influential allies, especially Iran. Libya has weak air defenses and a marginal army; Syria has sophisticated air defense systems, a strong army, and known biological and chemical weapons.

But that's only the easy part of the answer. Far more complicated is the geopolitical dilemma that would be posed by the fall of the Assad regime for the United States, its Arab friends, Israel and even Turkey. The inevitable fall of Gadhafi in Libya won't cause any significant ripples, beyond some concerns about the nature of the government that will follow him. But the capitulation of the Assad regime -- and if and when it comes, it promises to be a bloody one -- could upend an already volatile region.

Syria has been called the political linchpin of the Middle East. Though it has a largely Sunni Muslim population, its political elite -- the Assad clan at the top -- is drawn from the Alawite sect of Shia Islam. Through its influence, Shia Iran was able to establish Hezbollah as the dominant Shia power in Lebanon.

If Assad were to fall, the biggest concern, for the United States, Israel and Turkey, is instability. Policymakers and analysts in the West and the Arab world fear the crumbling of the Syrian regime, which could bring chaos to neighboring Jordan and Iraq. It could cause convulsions in neighboring Lebanon, where the dominant party, Hezbollah (an Assad supporter), could come under attack. Hezbollah's rise to political power would not have been possible without the implicit backing of the Syrian regime, which occupied Lebanon for more than a decade. With Assad gone, the Christian Falangists and Sunni factions in Lebanon would feel emboldened to rise up against Hezbollah and resume a bloody civil war.

The worst scenario would see Iran, the closest and most powerful Syrian ally, intervene militarily to prop up Assad and his minions, help Hezbollah and force Israel on a war footing. Israel could not countenance Syrian forces operating right across its northern border and would need to divert military resources defensively to prevent any direct incursions.

Israel, though no friend of Syria, has found the Assad regime to be a relatively stable adversary willing to maintain the terms of its armistice over the Golan Heights. So Israel has no wish to deal with the turmoil of a Syrian breakup, or the possibility of an Islamist regime taking over.

For its part, Turkey -- a member of NATO -- has established closer ties to Syria in recent years, beginning to form with it a Near East trading zone including Lebanon and Jordan, with the elimination of tariffs and no passport requirements. Turkey also depends on cooperation with Syria in suppressing the independence aspirations of its Kurdish populations, a mutual problem that Turkey fears would bloom into a full-fledged insurgency across their common border if Assad's regime were to fall.

As for other Arab states, Saudi Arabia chief among them, their leaders fear that if they were to take a hard stand against Assad, they would encourage democracy advocates in their countries to begin protesting in their own streets. If they denounce Assad as having lost his legitimacy, they would indict themselves before their own subjects. Unlike its 11th-hour agreement to demand the ouster of Gadhafi at the United Nations, the Arab League could not be counted on to support an international military intervention against Assad.

President Barack Obama knows all this. He also knows that Syria poses an uneasy test for the new policy he articulated somewhat tentatively toward the Arab Spring. In his speech -- delivered when the Israeli prime minister was visiting Washington and just as the United States was handing over to NATO the lead military role against Libya -- he tried to balance idealism against pragmatism, not entirely convincingly. He conceded that the United States would try to promote its ideals of democracy and self-determination where it could, but that short-term interests would sometimes conflict with long-term goals.

Syria is a glaring example of this conflict. In brutally candid terms, Obama and his allies have decided that the devil they know in Syria is still preferable to the one they don't know who might succeed him. Supporters of this stance call it pragmatic realism, critics see it as willful hypocrisy.

For his part, Assad may be counting on the international community reacting just as frogs did in that classic lab experiment: If a frog is dropped in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out. But put it in a pot of cold water and gradually heat it up, and the frog will stay in and die. If Assad had killed as many as 20,000 people in a single massacre, as his father Hafez did in 1982, then perhaps the international community would have risen up in shocked outrage. But if he keeps killing a few dozen protesters at a time, week after week, then the international frogs will get used to Syria's boiling pot -- at least until Assad surpasses his father's body count.

Then again, yet another revelation of a child tortured and killed by Syrian forces -- as happened last week and the week before -- might be enough to shake the international community out of its torpor. At the very least, it could force Obama to declare, as he did for Gadhafi, that Assad must go. But then he would be committed to act and demand international action, knowing full well that Russia and China would block him at the United Nations and the Arab League would balk.

Then what? Would Obama act on his own, with two active wars, Libya a work in progress, and Yemen on the cusp of a civil war? That's why Libya was relatively easy and Syria is so hard.