Bye-bye, Assad

[VV note: Steve Coll's books, especially Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, should be required reading for anyone with an interest in international policy.]

Deaths in Damascus

Posted by Steve Coll, The New Yorker

On Wednesday, an apparent suicide bomber in Damascus attacked a meeting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s war cabinet, killing Daoud Rajha, Syria’s defense minister, and Asef Shawkat, who was the President’s brother-in-law. The attack was the most striking in a series of signs that Syria’s uprising has tipped into a full-blown civil war, as the Red Cross has now labelled it, with the war’s momentum now favoring the rebels. (The intelligence and access required for an attack to succeed against a crisis-cabinet meeting suggests that the rebels are running sources inside Assad’s security apparatus.) Other recent signals include sustained fighting around Damascus; the reported withdrawal of Syrian forces from the Golan Heights to combat the revolt; the spread of persistent violence to most of the country’s provinces, drawing in virtually every unit of the Syrian security services; and significant, accelerating defections of diplomats and military officers.

Assad is finished. What seems left to discover is how much time will be required before he is either killed or flees; how many more Syrian civilians will die before the war turns to a struggle for post-Assad ascendancy; and how much longer the United Nations, undermined by Russia, will continue to embarrass itself by failing to craft a political transition or reduce the indiscriminate killing of Syrian civilians by state-security services.

This sentiment itself is not new. For many months, it has been the blustery habit of Assad’s opponents, including those in the Obama Administration, to declare that the Syrian President’s time has come and gone. But those declarations have been mainly a form of political argument. Western governments have sought to persuade Assad that, realistically, any durable peace in Syria will require him to negotiate a departure from office, or perhaps an accommodation, such as the one that has taken place in Yemen, where the former dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has left office but held onto considerable power.

Now, Assad’s coming demise seems less of an argument than an observation. It looks probable that the President will take his place among the war’s victims, at the hands of a coup-maker within his ranks, or else at the hands of a rebel attack, in the manner of Muammar Qaddafi’s death at the climax of Libya’s rebellion. It is conceivable that Assad could slip into exile, perhaps to a dacha outside Moscow, where deposed Soviet clients and spies used to settle into retirement and give the occasional bitter interview to a Western correspondent back during the Cold War.

(More here.)