Here are some immediate responses to Israel’s attack. The Syrian National Coalition released this statement, including this line: “The Coalition holds the Assad regime fully responsible for weakening the Syrian Army by exhausting its forces in a losing battle against the Syrian people.” Many Arabic language Youtube videos show various Free Army and Salafist militias condemning both Israel and Assad’s regime.

I wrote this on Facebook:

Assad responds to the Israeli attack by escalating his sectarian massacres on the coast and his bombardment of Syrian cities, including the Palestinian refugee camp at Yarmouk. Infantile so-called ‘anti-imperialists’ everywhere cheer on Assad’s ‘heroic resistance’.

By ‘sectarian massacres on the coast’ I was referring specifically to the ongoing slaughter of Sunnis in al-Bayda and other areas of Banyas, causing thousands to flee the area.

My next comment was this:

Isn’t it possible to absolutely oppose Israel and its self-interested interference and at the same time to absolutely oppose the fascist Assad regime and its deliberate sparking of regional sectarian war, its endless massacres, its destruction of Syria’s heritage and infrastructure? Isn’t it possible to support the Syrian resistance, despite the presence of Salafist extremists and plain traumatised people who do unwise things? So many so-called anti-imperialists are unable to do these things at the same time. Why? The minority regime in Syria is, like Israel, one result of the Sykes-Picot carve up and divide and rule machinations of 1916 to 1948.

Rime Allaf asked a very good question:

Where was all this “activist” attention to Syria and all the loyalists’ concern after the Assad regime knived children to death in Banyas?

She went on to write:

Many of us have openly opposed the criminal Israeli regime and the criminal Syrian regime simultaneously, for years. Try it, it’s easy.

Rasha Othman wrote:

FYI: Syrians are not stupid. They know Israel didn’t bomb the living daylights out of Assad because they truly care about the Syrian people or the Syrian revolution. Their interest lies in deterring Hezbollah. Any idiot can see that. Period. Unlike Obama, when Israel sets a redline, they follow through. Its SAD that it had to go down like this. However, pointing fingers and berating Syrians (especially from the comfort of your home and your laptop!) who feel a sense of happiness, however awkward, when Assad soldiers and weapons caches are destroyed, need to check themselves. The mother whose children were slaughtered with machetes in Banyas is not crying over what happened in Qasioun yesterday evening. And it is possible that you can support neither Assad, or Israel. Really, it is. Think about it.

This review was published at the Independent.

Joshua lives in a brand new town called Amarias. He shares his brand new house with his mother who, since his father’s death in battle, has been “like a pane of glass riddled with cracks that was still somehow sitting there in the frame,” and also with tree-killing Liev, the “anti-father” whose cloying unpleasantness is a great pleasure to read.

One day, chasing a lost football and propelled by an overbearing curiosity, Joshua discovers a tunnel which leads under a wall to an entirely different world – one containing both danger and kindness, and a beguiling young girl. As storytellers from CS Lewis to Philip Pullman know, there’s something archetypal about holes in walls opening onto entirely unexpected realms; and tunnels to wonderland have been evoking rebirth since ancient cave painters squeezed through crevices to make their sacred art. William Sutcliffe employs all this rites-of-passage symbolism with a very light touch, and crafts his novel with sustained suspense.

The new world is not named (not until page 80 is it called “the Occupied Zone”; and the words ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are never mentioned) – in this way the book avoids being self-professedly ‘political’ – yet the place is described with great accuracy and atmospheric precision. An “aftertaste of violence is hanging in the air, like a bad smell.” The houses are close-packed, unpainted, unfinished. The shops spill onto cracked streets which are “both enticingly alive and strangely depressing.” Those who know will recognise “the mournful wail of a solo voice backed by violins” as the Egyptian diva Um Kalthoum, but Joshua doesn’t know. He doesn’t even speak the language, though the inhabitants speak his.

Amarias, on his side of the wall, with its lawns and pools and rows of identical houses, is clean and fresh “as if a magic spell has conjured it up out of thin air.” Once Joshua has tasted forbidden knowledge, the town, and the fact that no-one around Joshua seems to recognise the absurd ephemerality of its situation, become darkly surreal.

All this is seen, very usefully, through a young person’s eyes, and so is stripped of fossilised narratives and assumptions. For once on this contentious topic, the absence of context is actually illuminating. “The Wall” is a book felt rather than thought, felt primarily through Joshua’s body, viscerally, in the details of the emotional jolts to his metabolism. It makes for fast-paced, exciting reading.

From Joshua’s football partner arguing there’s no such thing as a foul if there’s no ref present, to a cartoon of a large dog stealing a bone, the novel is littered with light images which bear heavy connotations only if you choose to notice them.

Joshua’s inarticulate sense of “an angry, vengeful machine” that will leap into action if he spills the secret of his access to the other side develops when, hiddden, he observes the checkpoint, the usual point of entry, and the different treatment of white and yellow numberplates there, and the cages and turnstiles through which the other ethnicity is prodded, wearing expressions “poised between patience and rage, weariness and defiance, pride and helplessness.”

“The Wall”, amongst many other things, is a coming of age novel. Taking sustenance from ghostly or substitute fathers, Joshua discovers his independence (finding “an edge, where I stop and Mum starts”), makes good a secret project, faces down the monstrous false father, and finally escapes, but only from one lie to another. The end is inspiring, delivering the spine chill that a good novel should, but is in no way romantic or idealised. Full liberation is delayed, as in the unspoken context it must be.

Hafez al-Assad burns in liberated Raqqa. photo by AP.

This was published in the National.

From the very start, some commentators convinced themselves that the Syrian popular revolution was plotted, funded and armed by the West. From Seamus Milne to John Pilger, from Glenn Greenwald to George Galloway, they described the West supplying oppositionist ‘jihadist elements.’ Former leftist icon Tariq Ali spoke on Russia Today of “Russia and China resisting attempts by the West to take Syria over.” Russia is resupplying the Assad regime with the materiel with which to slaughter the Syrian people, making Ali’s performance on Russia’s satellite as unedifying, and as distant from reality, as that of a commentator telling Fox News that Palestinian resistance is simply an Iranian attempt to take over Israel.

These journalists have staked their positions against the evidence. They have done so by forcing Syrian realities, breaking the edges of these jigsaw pieces, to fit their prior geopolitical concerns (their opposition to concurrent Israeli-American and Saudi enmities towards Iran) or ideological stances (that, following Iraqi and Palestinian models, the West must always be the troublemaker in the Arab world).

But Syria is neither Palestine nor Iraq; Syrian events are moved primarily by internal dynamics – namely the violence of the regime and the agency of the rising Syrian people. The conspiratorial leftist perspective misses this, first by vastly overestimating Western influence on current events (a failure to accurately diagnose the historical moment) and, secondly, by misunderstanding how unenthusiastic the West is for any rapid democratic or revolutionary change in Syria.

Months into the slaughter Hillary Clinton continued to describe al-Assad as a potential reformer and called for regime-led transition – a position not so different from Russia or Iran’s today. The Israel Lobby is fundamental to American Middle East policy, and Israel remained happy enough with the devil it knew in Damascus, a facilitator of Lebanon’s Hizbullah certainly, but also the guarantor of Israel’s quietest border – on the occupied Golan Heights. For not only did the Assad regime ensure that not a single bullet was fired across the line since 1973, or that Israeli planes striking targets in Syria were never engaged, it also locked up innocents like Tal al-Malouhi, a young woman whose only crime was to write blog posts on Palestinian suffering.

For the first months the revolution was a peaceful protest movement, but as civil society leaders were targetted for torture and death, as the numbers escalated of those shot and raped, Syrians began arming themselves, buying black market weapons from Beirut or from corrupt army officers. Revolutionary soldiers brought their weapons with them when they defected. Expatriate Syrians and Gulf businessmen bought weapons in Turkey and Iraq and sent them across the border.

Finally the Saudi and Qatari regimes delivered light weapons, but were prevented from sending heavy weapons by their American ally, which feared these may one day be directed against Israel or fall into the hands of anti-Western Islamists. In the words of Syrian National Coalition head (now resigned) Muaz al-Khatib, “the length of the beards of the fighters” seemed more important to the West “than the massacres.”

Just as it once left Bosnian Muslims defenceless against already-armed Serbs, the European Union placed an arms embargo on Syrian fighters. Russia and Iran, meanwhile, rejected any ban on arms sales to the regime. Politicians talked in vain of achieving an obviously unattainable international consensus.

In the absence of real international support, the lengths of some of the fighters’ beards, and their anti-Westernism, only increased. Following the regime (which predicted ‘armed gangs’ and ‘takfeeri militias’ before they existed, then created the conditions for their birth), the US has found itself in the self-fulfilling prophecy business. Syria has been so traumatised by two years of war that it now faces warlordism and national disintegration. The refugee crisis and growing sectarian polarisation are destabilising the wider region. Worst of all from a Western perspective, the al-Qa’ida-linked Jabhat an-Nusra has grown from an irrelevance to a key player. Raqqa, the first completely liberated city of the revolution, was captured by Jabhat al-Nusra in alliance with others bearing black flags.

As a result of these entirely forseeable developments, it now seems that a shift, albeit limited, is finally underway. Britain and France are expressing potential willingness to ignore the EU embargo (and Britain has expanded “non-lethal aid” to include armoured vehicles). The US Treasury has exempted Syrian rebels from formerly-imposed sanctions against private aid. All three countries are involved in small-scale training of rebels in Jordan. Most significantly, shipments of anti-tank weapons have arrived in Syria from Croatia, probably paid for by the Saudis, perhaps in coordination with the US.

The aim of the new policy is to tip the balance against both the extremist Salafist militias and the Assad regime, so that it will be forced to negotiate (although this remains unlikely; al-Assad wishes not to discuss a transition but to splinter Syria so he can survive as a warlord). The more time passes with Assad ensconced in Damascus and without a functioning central state, the greater the risk of a conflict developing between the alliance of Salafist forces in de facto charge of the north and east of the country, and the Muslim Brotherhood or non-ideological militias, variously backed by Qatar or Western powers, which are most active in the south and centre.

Was it the danger of the resistance consuming itself at the behest of foreign powers that made Muaz al-Khatib resign as head of the Syrian National Coalition? When the SNC met to appoint a prime minister, a struggle ensued between backers of Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s favored candidates. Qatar’s favourite, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s – American resident Ghassan Hitto – won the vote, but not unanimously and perhaps not without a good deal of arm-twisting. In the resignation note he posted on Facebook, al-Khatib wrote: “Those who are willing to obey [outside powers] will be supported, those who disobey will [be] offered nothing but hunger and siege. We will not beg for help from anyone.”

Or perhaps al-Khatib resigned, more simply, out of frustration at the world’s generalised failure to end or even ameliorate the bloodshed in Syria. At the Arab League he pleaded for the NATO Patriot missile batteries protecting Turkey to extend their range to Scud-riven northern Syria. “We are still waiting for a decision from NATO,” he said, “not to fight but to protect lives.”

Syrians need weapons to finish Assad before the crater of this disaster is too deep to climb out of. Commentators who claim that more weapons will just make things worse, that neither side can win the fight, should acknowledge that vast swathes of the country have already been liberated. This was achieved despite the commitment of the regime’s sectarian hardcore, the success of its divide and rule tactics, and its fundamental weapons advantage, for the simple reason that al-Assad has long lost legitimacy in the eyes of the vast majority of Syrians. Any uptick in weapons supply therefore immediately translates into the liberation of new territories, as seen recently in Dara’a province and the Damascus suburbs.

With or without weapons from outside, the fight in Syria continues. Muaz al-Khatib again: “If there is a decision to execute us as Syrians, then let’s die as we want. The gate of freedom has opened and will not be closed, not only for Syrians but for all peoples.”

A version of this review was published at the Independent.

“The Silence and the Roar” by Syrian novelist and screenwriter Nihad Sirees was written in 2004, long before the roar of revolutionary crowds, and the countervailing roar of gunfire and warplanes, filled Syrian skies.

The pre-revolutionary roar of the title is that of the (capitalised) Leader speaking, and of the crowd celebrating the Leader speaking, and of those being beaten because they aren’t celebrating loudly enough; a roar relentlessly repeated by radios and televisions throughout the city, accompanying the protagonist almost everywhere he goes.

Counterposed to the roar there are two forms of silence: of imprisonment and of the grave. The first holds an ironic allure, for “the most beautiful thing in the entire universe is the silence that allows us to hear soft and distant sounds.”

The narrator is Fathi Sheen, a writer fallen out of favour with the regime, silenced only to the extent that he doesn’t write any more. He’s very pleasant company, amusing and straightforward, his digressions into Aristotle and Hannah Arendt notwithstanding. Over the course of a day Fathi struggles against the flow of celebrant crowds and regime thugs to visit first his mother and then his lover. He’s been content thus far to continue not to write in return for being left alone, but it becomes clear as the hours pass that the Leader’s friends plan to drive a different sort of bargain. The novella is in part a parable of the artist surviving under dictatorship. How does he make space for creation between silent and roaring states of mind? How does he avoid the regime’s Faustian temptations? More generally, how should one resist?

One answer for Fathi and his lover Lama, as for Winston Smith and his Julia, is through sex, which they find to be “a form of speech, indeed, a form of shouting in the face of the silence.”

Another is by laughter. Fathi’s mother and lover both survive the world by ridiculing it, and Fathi too, in his amused insouciance under bullying and threats, meets the challenge by means of absurd comedy. His context is often situationally absurd – for instance he is refused access to the security building where he must reclaim his confiscated ID card, because he doesn’t have his ID card.

A state built around the amplified personality of the Leader is also absurd in the sense of surreal, ‘unreasonable’ in a literal sense. Surrealism is the term used to name the situation, both by Fathi (in conversation with an anguished doctor) and by Nihad Sirees in his afterword. The tragicomic ending is fittingly in dream shape, and bears great but indirect symbolic weight.

The city is not quite Damascus. The Leader too is generalised, not quite Bashaar al-Assad or his father Hafez; there’s more bluster and colour to him than that. Occasionally his outsized decadence is reminiscent of Garcia Marquez’s autumnal patriarch, as when he strolls through his palace peering into the mirror of TV screens, one in each room, each replaying the engineered roar.

This is a small dystopian treasure of Gogolian texture, nightmarish but also light, self-referential but never pretentious. Eery, banal, yet bearing the cold imprint of reality, Sirees’s vision of tyranny is distinctive enough to be ranked with Orwell, Huxley, or Marquez’s.

The superlative translation is by Max Weiss.

Blasim

A slightly edited version of this review was published at the Guardian.

Hassan Blasim, author of the acclaimed debut collection “The Madman of Freedom Square”, returns with fourteen more stories of profane lyricism, skewed symbolism and macabre romanticism. The qualities which distinguished the “Madman” are all here again in the opening pages of “The Iraqi Christ”: the sly self-referentiality of the frame – a story-telling competition hosted by a Baghdad radio station – the black comedy, the unexpected twists, and the sharp, disturbing images (a man “with no arms and a beard that almost reached his waist… deep in thought, like a decrepit Greek statue.”)

Like the “Madman”, this collection contains tales of war and migration, but these are more abstract, more difficult than the first, if possible stranger still. Treating casual cruelty, rape and murder, and common insanity, these sour cries from a land of generalised trauma don’t make easy bedtime reading. The processing of trauma, or the impossibility of such processing, is the collection’s central theme. Not only are stories dedicated to the dead, they are also narrated by the dead, concerned with death and the echoes of death in the souls of the living.

The subject matter is not exclusively Iraqi. Europe’s forests – with echoes of Grimm – loom as large as Baghdad’s broken streets. The title story, grimly ironic, is about a Christian soldier possessing uncanny powers of prediction who sacrifices himself so his mother may live. An extremist leader marches through with Purge The Earth of Devils tatooed on his forehead. Elsewhere, a narrator falls into a hole alongside a flesh-eating jinn who used to teach poetry in Baghdad. Another helps his brother bury a stranger alive. Characters slip into criminal perversity unwittingly, almost by accident, as spontaneously as the poisonous trees which, in “Sarsara’s Tree”, sprout from a bereaved woman’s gaze.

Blasim’s work is so unusual it’s hard to place. “A Thousand and One Knives”, as the title suggests, owes something to the heritage of the Nights and the ancient fantastic tradition of Arabic writing, now revived by the pains of Arab modernity, particularly in post-invasion Iraq. But “The Iraqi Christ” also seems to belong with the literature of Latin America, likewise struggling with contesting cultures, political violence and overbearing religion.

The first-person story “A Wolf”, though Kafkaesque in its basic premise, recalls Roberto Bolano with its itinerant tone, its bars, poems, and dreams. The collection is more generally Bolanesque in its visceral exuberance, and also Borgesian in its gnomic complexity. Both Latin writers share with Blasim a fascination with texts. Many of the characters here are avid, obsessive, idiosyncratic readers, and the stories are packed with theories of writing, from Saddam Hussain’s crude epigram “The pen can shoot bullets as deadly as the rifle”, via a student wondering why his country’s contemporary literature does not contain the fantasy genre, to “a man the size of an elephant” whispering in a narrator’s ear, “A story’s a story, whether it’s beautiful or bullshit.”

In interviews, Blasim says he isn’t interested in preserving the beauty of the formal Arabic language. His taboo-breaking starts with grammar and diction and reaches to a strictly unsentimental depiction of behavioural and moral filth. Consequently, he’s as troubling to mainstream Arabic literary culture as Joyce once was to the West. For a long time his writing was only accessible to the Arab world online (at www.iraqstory.com). Last year a diluted version of the “Madman” was finally published in Arabic, but was immediately banned in Jordan.

Whatever Blasim’s detractors claim, there’s much more to his writing than bad-tempered sensationalism. He’s a master of metaphor who is now developing his own dark philosophy, in which ‘normal life’ is not so much punctuated by war as constantly anticipating and echoing it, as if war is reality’s basic pattern. So a waiter mixes “the names of the dishes with the names of daily instruments of slaughter.” Hence: “One fragmentation stew. Two ballistic rice and beans..” A child bearing the burden of unintentional murder learns to watch people “like a sniper hidden in the darkness.” Horror lies, visible or concealed, even in children’s games. In one story scientists invent a game which they can’t control; it “rolls ceaselessly on and on through the curves of time.”

For Tolstoy, history is the “swarm life”, determined not by great men but by unseen divine forces. For Blasim, history is a matter of malignant coincidence and unthought-of consequence, a beast with its own momentum. Alongside his obvious disgust, Blasim approaches reality with a sense of awe and great mystery.

We Won’t Die We Will Remain Here by Wissam al-Jazairy

This was published at The National.

On January19^th  Syrian foreign minister Walid al-Moallem gave an apparently conciliatory interview to state TV. “I tell the young men who carried arms to change and reform, take part in the dialogue for a new Syria and you will be a partner in building it. Why carry arms?” In the southern and eastern suburbs of Damascus his voice was drowned out by the continuing roar of the regime’s rocket, artillery and air strikes.

The UN and parts of the media have also called for negotiations. Until late January this year, however, the Syrian National Coalition – the widely-recognised opposition umbrella group – opposed the notion absolutely. But then SNC leader Moaz al-Khatib announced that he would talk directly to regime representatives (not Bashaar al-Assad himself) on condition that the regime releases 160, 000 detainees and renews the expired passports of exiled Syrians.

In the context of Moallem’s media offensive (and in the absence of concerted international financial or military support for either the SNC or the revolutionary militias) al-Khatib’s announcement calls the regime’s bluff. It doesn’t, of course, mean that negotiations are about to be launched. For a start, the regime only intends to negotiate with, as it puts it, those “who have not betrayed Syria”. Like successive Israeli regimes, it will only talk with the ‘opposition’ it chooses to recognise. This includes, as well as pro-regime people posing as oppositionists, Haytham Manaa’s National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, a group which has no influence whatsoever on the revolutionary fighters setting the agenda. The SNC – which does have some influence on the ground, and would have far more if it were sufficiently funded – is definitely not invited.

And negotiations won’t happen, secondly, because the regime won’t release the detainees, not yet at least. If it did release all 160,000, this would indeed be a sign that it had understood it could no longer torture, imprison and kill the Syrian people. It would be a reasonable starting point for negotiating the transition.

Why has the SNC been so reluctant to negotiate thus far? First there is the obvious moral point that a regime loses its legitimacy when it prosecutes war against its own people. As a criminal and a traitor, it forfeits its right to engage in national dialogue.

The point is correct, but in the face of such vast tragedy a moral point is not sufficient. It may be a stubborn and ultimately irresponsible idealism which clings to moral principle while a land, a people and their future are burning. A much more intelligent motive for opposing negotiations is hard-nosed realism.

In April 2011 a Presidential Decree lifted the Syrian Emergency Law, dissolved the notorious State Security Courts, and legalised peaceful protests. The next day, ‘Great Friday’, a lawyer asked permission to hold a protest in Hasakeh. He was immediately arrested by the security forces to whom he made the request. By the evening, at least 88 unarmed protestors had been murdered.

At this early stage Bashaar al-Assad lost credibility with a vast swathe of Syrians. If they didn’t before, they knew now that all talk of legal reform was irrelevant, because Syria is not run according to laws and institutions but by the Assad family and its unaccountable security agencies.The law, like the parliament and cabinet, is a fiction, a theatre.

Syrians learnt to watch what the regime did rather then what it said. It released Salafists from prison and murdered the proponents of non-violent protest. It unleashed shabeeha militias and instrumentalised sectarian tension. It savagely bombed some liberated areas but withdrew from Kurdish areas without a fight, even handing weapons over to PKK-linked militias. It applied a scorched earth policy which has negligible military effect but destroys any possibility of social or economic rebuilding.

Actions speak louder than words. The regime’s aim is not to negotiate a transition but, if it can’t retain total power, to create a splintered and permanently ungovernable country. In this way Assad hopes to survive as a warlord among warlords. Talking about talks provides him with time while distracting attention from his real aim.

Peace plans have been proposed by the Arab League, Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi, and Assad has scuppered the lot. Not for a day have his guns fallen silent.

So why is Moaz al-Khatib shifting position now? Probably because he sees no sign of the Coalition receiving the funds or arms it requires. The EU continues to embargo arms to the opposition; the US continues to prevent its Gulf allies from sending the necessary anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry. No funds for the SNC means extremely limited relevance on the ground. And the SNC doesn’t help its own cause – it still hasn’t named a transitional government.

Yet with resistance advances in the north, east and now south, the military tide is flowing steadily against al-Assad. Continuing reverses may allow the regime’s more intelligent minds to prevail over the bitter-enders (though to anticipate this would be naive). Al-Khatib’s meeting on Saturday with Russian foreign minister Lavrov may or may not be a sign that Russia, finally recognising that Assad will never regain control of Syria, is about to twist regime arms towards serious, rather than theatrical, negotiations.

Al-Khatib now says he’s been invited to Moscow. It remains to be seen whether the regime will eventually negotiate its own exit. In the meantime, al-Khatib and the SNC, who have made efforts to reach out to regime soldiers and minority groups, should do still more to address those who are tied to the regime not by ideology but by fear of the future. Syria’s future stability depends much more on understandings with those people than with the regime which currently holds them hostage.

Golan drinks, Lyse looks on, Nihad eyes me suspiciously

Last night I was at London’s Purcell Room, honoured to be in the presence of novelist and screenwriter Nihad Sirees and poet Golan Hajji. The event was chaired by the BBC’s Lyse Doucet. We were talking about writing in the context of the Syrian revolution. Then I participated in the morning edition of the BBC World Service’s World Have Your Say, discussing Syria, and I joined the WHYS in the evening too, discussing Syria and Mali (on which I’m no expert) at greater length.

Here is the morning edition.

And here is the longer evening programme.

This piece, a rebuttal to Marc Lynch, was published at Foreign Policy under the title Fund Syria’s Moderates.

In response to non-violent protests calling for reform, the Baathist regime in Damascus has brought Syria bloodshed, chaos, and created the conditions in which jihadism thrives. The now partially armed revolution is doing its best to roll back the bloodshed and to eliminate the regime that perpetrates it.

Yet Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch, one of the more perceptive analysts of the Middle East, argues that after more than 60,000 lives have been lost, “the last year should be a lesson to those who called for arming the rebels.” In a previous article, Lynch noted, “Syrian armed groups are now awash with weapons.”

Anyone laboring under the delusion that pro-revolution foreign powers have flooded Syria with hi-tech weaponry should scroll through the blog of New York Times correspondent C.J. Chivers or peruse the web pages displaying improvised catapult bombs and PlayStation-controlled armored cars. These are hardly the tools of a fighting force that has been armed to the teeth.

While it’s true that some armed groups — particularly the al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra — have sometimes found themselves in possession of plenty of weaponry, the resistance remains overwhelmingly dependent on the weapons it can buy, steal, or seize from captured checkpoints and bases.

Simply put, the assumptions of those who called for arming the rebels have not been tested because the rebels have not been armed — except in irrelevant, sporadic and, in Lynch’s words, “poorly coordinated” ways. For instance, an ammunition shortage slowed the original rebel advance in Aleppo to a destructive halt.

Yes, the Saudis and Qataris distributed some light weapons — each according to their own interests, which only compounded the disorganization of rebel forces. The United States has held them back from providing heavy weapons, which could have made a difference against tanks and aircraft. In any case, the Arab Gulf states are also manipulating the Syrian conflict for their own ends: The Saudi tactic seems to be to slowly bleed Iran in Syria in the manner of the Iran-Iraq war rather than to push for a rapid revolutionary victory.

NATO’s Patriot missile deployment in Turkey, which will only be used to stop missiles crossing the Turkish border rather than to establish a no-fly zone in Syria, sums up the broader thrust of Gulf and Western policy: a vain effort to quarantine the Syrian problem rather than to allow the revolution to come quickly to its natural conclusion.

In October and November, rebels did acquire man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), which were almost certainly seized from over-run regime bases. A number of regime planes and helicopters were then shot down, prompting media talk of yet another tipping point. But now the MANPADS have dried up, and Syria’s cities and villages have been returned to the unending grind of aerial bombardment.

A steady, well-coordinated supply of anti-aircraft weaponry would have liberated parts of northern Syria from these bombs, which pulverize both infrastructure and human life. Refugees could have returned from Turkey. The Syrian National Coalition, the umbrella organization for opposition groups, could have made a real effort to coordinate governance and food supplies in these areas, and warlordism would have been weakened. Rebuilding could have started. Schools could have reopened. But there was no supply, and as a result northern Syria is dying.

“It’s too late to avoid the militarization of the conflict or to prevent the sidelining of non-armed groups,” Lynch writes. While this statement is entirely true, it fails to take account of the enormous and continuing disparity between the sides. Not only is the regime far better armed and organized than the resistance militias, it is also by far the most destructive force in the country, by far the greater killer of civilians. At this point, it’s not unusual for 1,000 civilians to be killed in a week. Bombs are not dropped on bread lines or petrol queues as a battle tactic, but to murder, terrorize, and demoralize the unarmed population.

The inequality of military power does not restrain, but in fact encourages, the use of force by the Syrian regime. As the United States did in Iraq, or as Israel has done again and again in Gaza, stronger parties rely on overwhelming force when other solutions fail them. The weapons disparity is the only reason Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad continues to believe that he can win. He has lost vast tracts of the country, a large majority of the population despises him, the economy is crumbling — but still he has planes, helicopters, tanks, and missiles, and his opponents do not.

In the light of the regime’s extreme repression, the arming of the revolution was inevitable. Non-violent protest continues to be important in Syria, but it lost its centrality in the first months — before the emergence of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) — because peaceful demonstrations were consistently broken up by bullets and clubs and non-violent activists were tortured to death. The FSA did not create these conditions, but emerged in response to them. When soldiers are ordered to fire on their unarmed countrymen, some will inevitably defect. When people experience the destruction of their homes, the rape of their sisters, the torture of their children, some of them will inevitably take up arms. Once they have done so, they are hunted by the regime; they must either bring it down or die.

Yet Lynch writes, “The United States should lean even harder on its Gulf allies to stop funneling weapons and cash to its local proxies for competitive advantage.” This is a recipe for mass slaughter. These people are not going to give up, and Russia and Iran are not going to stop funneling weapons and cash to the regime.

Lynch is right that direct foreign military intervention is inadvisable. It would fulfill the expectations of those in and beyond the Middle East who believe the Syrian revolution is all about Iran and that the revolutionaries are pawns in the hands of dastardly foreign powers. There’s too much bad history, particularly as far as the United States is concerned. Moreover, Syria would be an infinitely more difficult conflict than Libya: Western forces would find themselves fighting several wars at once — against Iran, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, perhaps even against Kurdish insurgents. Their presence might well exacerbate the sectarian element of the conflict.

But direct military intervention has always been highly unlikely. It’s a red herring (the most persistent red herring of the conflict) — and one that misjudges the West’s mood, its economy, and its current capabilities in the Middle East. The only useful intervention that can be hoped for is not a land or air invasion but a coordinated effort between the West, the Arabs, and Turkey to fund and arm the Syrian National Coalition, which is now recognized by over 130 countries as the “sole” or “legitimate” representative of the Syrian people.

With regard to Jabhat al-Nusra, Lynch writes, “The shift into armed insurgency and civil war is what brought al Qaeda into the mix, not America’s failure to deliver guns.”

Once again this is true, but surely time plays a role too. In Iraq, it took more than a year of attacks against Shiite civilians before the Shiite militias geared up into ethnic-cleansing mode. In Syria, for the first year of the armed revolution, Jabhat al-Nusra was an irrelevant fringe group. That’s a year of increasing trauma and desperation for the military defectors and suffering civilians on the ground. Trauma and desperation tend to radicalize people’s politics.

But two factors above all have dramatically improved Jabhat al-Nusra’s profile in the last six months, and neither of them is ideological. The first is the shortage of arms among the rebel groups. Jabhat al-Nusra’s existing arsenal — acquired from Iraq and from private donors in the Gulf — wedded to its cadres’ fearless discipline in battle, allowed it to capture a string of military installations in the east, and thus to procure more weaponry, including heavy guns. It has used the new weapons to take on new and bigger regime targets, like the Taftanaz airfield in Idlib province, and in the process has won new weapon-hungry recruits.

The second factor is hunger. In Aleppo, regime bombing of bakeries, poor supply lines, and other militias’ looting and indiscipline sparked a bread crisis. Jabhat al-Nusra stepped into the breach and won plaudits from locals for safeguarding grain supplies and fairly distributing bread. According to the survival standards of today’s Aleppo, it is applying good governance. So far, it looks like al Qaeda’s most successful incarnation — one which has learnt valuable lessons since the Iraq branch with which it maintains ties — alienated Iraqi Sunni communities.

It’s too late for a happy ending in Syria. There are no easy answers to the country’s enormous problems, but there is an obvious first step toward a solution: funding the moderate Islamists and secularists of the Syrian National Coalition, which will then feed the hungry and fund the fighters, empowering them to buy the weapons they need. That step will provide those Syrian communities scared of the revolutionary future, as well as the West, with a real Syrian interlocutor — a transitional political body rather than a collection of militias.