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Recognizing the SNC Wouldn’t Give Them a “Stamp of Legitimacy”

Fouad Ajami wants you to know that intervening in Syria will be easy and will cost America little: We frighten ourselves with phantoms of our own making. No one is asking or expecting the U.S. Marines to storm the shores of Latakia. This Syrian tyranny is merciless in its battles against the people of Homs […]

Fouad Ajami wants you to know that intervening in Syria will be easy and will cost America little:

We frighten ourselves with phantoms of our own making. No one is asking or expecting the U.S. Marines to storm the shores of Latakia. This Syrian tyranny is merciless in its battles against the people of Homs and Zabadani, but its army is demoralized and riven with factionalism and sectarian enmities. It could be brought down by defectors given training and weapons; safe havens could give disaffected soldiers an incentive, and the space, to defect.

Of course, no one is claiming that anyone is calling for a U.S. invasion (so far). Opponents of various forms of military intervention have made a point of responding to the specific proposals that interventionists have made (when interventionists have bothered to be specific), and they make fairly compelling arguments that escalating the conflict would make things worse for the population and probably still wouldn’t succeed in toppling the regime. Creating safe havens would require outside governments, almost certainly including the United States, to take military action against Syria’s armed forces. No one is asking for ground invasions of Syrian territory, except, of course, for the ones that are, but every advocate of armed intervention is calling for foreign governments to attack some Syrians to help bring other Syrians to power.

Ajami wants the U.S. to get behind the SNC:

Meanwhile, we should recognize the Syrian National Council as the country’s rightful leaders. This stamp of legitimacy would embolden the opposition and give them heart in this brutal season. Such recognition would put the governments of Lebanon and Iraq on notice that they are on the side of a brigand, lawless regime. There is Arab wealth that can sustain this struggle, and in Turkey there is a sympathetic government that can join this fight under American leadership.

In what sense can the SNC be the country’s “rightful” leaders? If they fully represented the opposition inside Syria, they might provide necessary provisional leadership, but they are at best a temporary umbrella organization whose claim to legitimacy is based solely in its hostility to the current government. Some of the opposition inside Syria doesn’t see the SNC as representing them, and the council itself is badly divided. The New York Times reported on the council ahead of today’s Tunis meeting:

The council’s internal divisions have kept Western and Arab governments from recognizing it as a kind of government in exile, and the Tunis summit meeting will probably not change that.

Because the SNC has to operate outside Syria, and because it does not fully represent all regime opponents, it is becoming less relevant as time goes by:

Aside from representing only about 70 percent of a range of groups opposing Mr. Assad, the council has yet to seriously address melding itself with the increasingly independent internal alliances in Homs and other cities across Syria trapped in an uneven battle for survival, they [diplomats and analysts] said, warning that the council runs the risk of being supplanted.

Recognizing the SNC doesn’t really give it political legitimacy in the eyes of all those Syrians that don’t currently accept it or follow its lead. Our recognition of exile leaders doesn’t confer legitimacy on them, and it isn’t going to shame governments that currently support Assad into changing their positions.

Update: Randa Slim reviews the different Syrian opposition groups, and notes:

All of these groups have failed in reaching out to minority groups including Christians, Alawites, and Kurds and the business community.

If that’s the case, why should anyone assume that any of these groups could be considered the “rightful” leaders of Syria?

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