While there has been much speculation about Russian intentions towards Bashar Al Assad, less is known about how Iranian officials view the Syrian president’s future. However, a recent interview in Lebanon’s Al Akhbar newspaper, which is sympathetic to Hizbollah, provided some indications.
The interview was conducted with an influential Iranian official, Ali Akbar Velayati, the former foreign minister and currently an adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In the interview, Mr Velayati said that Mr Al Assad’s departure from office was a “red line” for Iran, before adding that Russia was coming around to the view that there was “no alternative” to the Syrian president.
The remarks revealed that even if Russia is willing to go along with a Geneva process whose ultimate aim is to organise a transition away from Mr Al Assad, Iran is in a different frame of mind. As for Mr Velayati’s claim that Russia recognises that finding a replacement for the Syrian president is not possible, very little in Moscow’s behaviour has proven him wrong.
Wishful thinking, particularly among western officials dealing with Syria, has calculated that Vladimir Putin has an interest in implementing Geneva, because he is facing economic sanctions over Ukraine and declining oil revenues. Mr Putin could push Iran towards accepting Mr Al Assad’s removal, the argument goes, to improve Russia’s position internationally.
Mr Velayati has just proven those who hold this opinion wrong. Given that it is Iran, rather than Russia, that is more involved on the ground in supporting the Assad regime, his remarks have to be given due consideration. Tehran and Moscow are coordinating over Syria, but that is precisely why neither of them may be willing to implement Geneva if it leads to the sudden collapse of a regime they have spent five years defending.
And Mr Velayati may be right about something else. Even if Russia would like to see Mr Al Assad’s back, it has probably concluded there is no way to ease him out without bringing down the security edifice it wants to keep in place.
Mr Al Assad benefits from a system his father set up, one in which the president sits at the centre of a state that, in effect, he has come to supplant. Hafez Al Assad’s primary concern when he seized power in 1970 coup was to render his regime coup-proof. But what he really produced was a body in which the president took on the role of both heart and brain.
This monstrous creation has made peaceful change in Syria virtually impossible. There are too many key people tied to the regime who would lose too much from Mr Al Assad’s departure to willingly accept shifting their loyalty to someone else. Rather than work with a transition, they would either seek to block it or, if that failed, look for a way to save their skins.
In other words the very people on whom Russia and Iran woulddepend to set up a post-Assad system to defend their stakes in Syria would probably abandon all hope if the Syrian president were pushed out by his allies. This seems increasingly evident, and explains why Russia has been so supportive of the Assad regime’s efforts to undermine the Geneva process and pursue military advances at home.
Indeed, at no point in the past months have the Russians exerted real pressure on Mr Al Assad. It could be that the announcement that they were withdrawing militarily from Syria was an effort to raise the heat on the Syrian regime. But that was soon contradicted by the fact that Russia’s military remained active in the country, helping in the recapture of Palmyra, a victory that enhanced Mr Al Assad’s reputation in the West.
Nor did the Russians show any disapproval of the Syrian leader’s organisation of parliamentary elections recently – an effort designed to underline that the aims of Geneva are irrelevant.
In fact, the notion that Mr Putin seeks Mr Al Assad’s removal is based on few facts, and too many people, present company included, allowed themselves to be duped on this.
However, what is truly remarkable is the unrivalled cynicism of the other purported sponsor of Geneva. The United States has sought to consolidate the ceasefire in Syria, on the pretence that this would revive Geneva.
Yet the US secretary of state John Kerry can see that the process is meaningless for as long as Russia refuses to persuade Mr Al Assad to step down.
Perhaps Mr Kerry assumes that it’s best to work with what we already have than to admit defeat and allow Syria to drift into more violence. At least the ceasefire, where it applies, can save some lives. When you work for a president who says that he is proud not to have intervened in Syria in 2013, when that too might have saved lives, such paradoxical thinking becomes depressingly common.
Michael Young is a writer and editor in Beirut
On Twitter: @BeirutCalling
