lot of details, arguments that this is a sunni uprising, i think need to kind of look at the social forces engaged and what really mobilized. what is the source of tension between them and the allawis. i would say on the whole are not religious. and we need to look at the regime and you know, there isn't much difference between the regime and the state, by the fact that the regime controls so much of the state. there isn't really a separation or atonmy of any institutions. it does that of course through the security services, and to some extent, the army as we are seeing today. so really, what we need to look at are sociopolitical processes that have been at work for a long time, for 40 years and we are now seeing them at work in

really we have populations, the allawi minority, some of the population are being used as buffers against the other parts of the population engaging in the protest. this also doesn't mean there are no allawis part of the uprising. many of the intellectuals and the activists and the people engaged in what is known as the local coordinating committees, many of them are allawis, many are jews and so on. we do see the minorities, whether they're allawis or whatever, kind of fearful for what can happen. but that's partly because the regime for a long time has presented itself as the guardians of the minorities against the extremist sunnis. >> i'll end by mentioning, one of my contacts who is organizing the demonstrations and so on, in

reference to her neighbors was told at the beginning of the uprising, i heard at the time, in april, they were told well you're going to lose your homes and and your land because your neighbors are going to come and claim it back and of course what happened is that many of the residents came thinking they're defending their homes against quote-unquote their extremist sunni neighbors. the regime has mobilized or functionalized a sectarian dimension to move people against each other. saying your life and your welfare depends on our continuity. the last example is with mazza 86 which has been established since the '70s, linked and continues. and they feel they owe their presence in the city to the president. they would say life is good, we

thank the president. at least for the older residents and that's not just cliches, it's the sense of gratitude which we can say. in more radical terms, that's linked to a gift, that's a gift of violence. this he were brought as instruments of coercion and they continue to be used. some of their young people are being drawn to suppress demonstrators from in central dmans cu damascus. to go back to the last point, one of the interviewers, the organizers, they said they live in misery like us. they defend the regime, which they have nothing in common. they have more in common with us, but they're made to fear for their life from their quote-unquote extremist sunni neighbors. thank you. >> thank you. and steve. >> my thanks, also, to mark and

to gw for sponsoring this. i have to say if you were interested in having two of the really smartest and more insightful analyses to help understand the dynamics of the syrian uprising, you just heard them today and i'm going to move us in a completely different direction. in the division of labor that we established for this panel, i decided or it was mutually agreed, that i would hold down what i would call the policy wonk of the spectrum for this discussion of the syrian uprising. which is something of a departure for me. i decided that i would focus on u.s. policy responses to the syrian uprising. focusing on where we might be

and where we might be headed. as depressing as where it might be as a starting point. there's the case that the only reasonable way to frame a discussion of u.s. policy in response to the syrian uprising is simply to acknowledge that the u.s. along with many of the other governments that support a process of political transition in syria, find themselves today in an exceptionally difficult position. they're really struggling, all of them, to find way forward with no clear sense of what that path way might be. and this meeting of friends of syria group that will begin later this week in tunis, is i think a reflection of both the challenges confronting the united states and it's allies in thinking about what the next kind of frameworks might be for sustaining diplomatic and economic pressure on syria at a moment in which the u.n. pathway

seems to be closed. but of course we have no real guarantee or no real detailed information about how or whether the friends of syria group might be able to play that role. what i would like to do in a very brief time is to outline three principal reasons why the u.s. confronts the sort of policy dilemma that it finds itself in today with respect to how it engages in and responds to the syrian uprising. i'll spend a little bit of time on each and try to come within ten minutes so we can all jump into the next phase of the conversation. first, we have to be clear that the administration over the past several months has bump up against limits of their efforts to use political pressure to bring about a change in the

regime in damascus. based on the developments of the past several weeks, including in particular, the russian and chinese veto of an effort to secure a u.n.-resolution targeting the regime of assad, the u.s. now finds itself confronting what i think we have to conclude is the fairly decisive failure of u.s. strategy toward syria. it's a strategy that i would define as relying principally on traditional methods of statecraft, international diplomacy, economic sanctions with one aimed first and foremost, which is to increase the cost of loyalty to the regime. to peel away critical constituencies of the assad regi regime, including the business community, including various minorities and to cause sufficient strains and sufficient tensions within the ruling coalition, including, we

hoped, among the military leadership of the regime and the security service leadership of the regime. to cause the assad regime either to fracture or to force the assad's inner circle to accept some process of negotiated transition. or to simply persuade someone surrounding the regime that the conditions were in place that would justify an internal coup of some kind, an overthrow of the regime. this was the underlying logic of u.s. strategy of the raise the cost of loyalty with this cascade of consequences leading to the end of the regime. yet, here we are, almost a year after the policy began to be put in place, with virtually no evidence to suggest that it is working.

we know that the regime is frayed, and that there are internal tensions within the regime. that the economy is taking a significant toll from the impact of economic sanctions. but the kind of cleavages that might cause core regime supporters to defect have not occurred. and this, i think has to be recognized as a very significant failure and as my colleague bassam suggested, it is in many ways a failure anchored in a misreading, a fundamental misreading of of the resilience of this regime and the foundations it could draw on in order to sustain itself in the face of quite significant external pressure. moreover, this is the second reason i think we find ourselves at a particular troubling moment for u.s. policy. the administration together with its partners seem to feel that they really have no viable alternatives. to the straegs that they

developed, almost right from the beginning of this uprising, it is true that the eruption in chinese veto at the u.n. and the escalation of violence we have seen in syria over the past couple of weegs, with horrific attacks, and other centers of resistance of protest. have breathed new lives into conversations about intervention. we've seen it just this weekend with conversations by senators mccain and graham, that we should be supporting the syrian opposition. i expect the debate would continue. but i don't expect the debate to affect the strategic calculus of the obama administration. because i think underneath this rhetoric. underneath this debate, the administration understands very, very well that none of the conditions that would be needed to make intervention a meaningful option are in place. and i'm not going to go through and detail those conditions, we

can come back to them in the q&a. but i think there is a fundamental understanding that without the appropriate context, defined in terms of those conditions, intervention is for all intents and purposes, off the table. where does this leave the regime? it leaves the regime, the administration, you'll excuse the confusion. we defer to democracies as administrations and dictator ships as regime, it was a slip of the tongue. it leaves the administration in the position of continuing to argue that the same kind of economic and political pressures that have failed to produce an effect object the strategic calculus of the assad regime, define the strategy that we should stick with into the foreseeable future. and this, i'm afraid to say, is

not the position that i think any administration wants itself to be in. and in fact, the obama administration finds itself in the very unenviable position of arguing that our best course is simply more of the same. even though conditions on the ground are not waiting for a slow-moving u.s. policy to affect the strategic calculus of the assad regime. and if the rate at which the regime is willing to apply repression outpaces the rate at which our policy has an impact then we're kind of in the position of arguing and you know, this is an old joke from the sales community. we're in the position of arguing that we're going to lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume. i mean, this is not the position you want to be in. this is not a strong foundation on which to argue for, for your

policy. and in addition, this gets us to the third and final reason why i think the administration is struggling so deeply on syria right now. in focusing so much of its energy on the political track and its determination to resist military intervention and i support the notion that dm vengs would be a mistake, the administration has left itself fundamentally unprepared to deal with what i view one of the most significant and troubling trends defining the syrianuprising, the demilitarization of the uprising and a the prif lags of a growing number of thinly-organized and thinly coordinated armed opposition actors all over the country. nomly grouped under the free syrian army. but in fact operating with very little command and control.

how is the u.s. responded to the trend? very poorly. it's continuing to insist that continued militarization is a danger and continued to repeat its view that the peaceful protests offer the best hope for political change for syria. and what that means is that as militarization deepens and expands, for obvious reasons, given what we've seen from the assad regime, the costs of not having some kind of strategy in place for more effectively managing militarization and for building a political approach that includes deeper, multilateral engagement with the political opposition, around a program to equip, to train, to increase the capacity of the armed resistance, and to do so in a fashion that would bring them more centrally under the authority of the civilian wing

of the syrian opposition. i think the costs to us of not having those kinds of policy tools in place become much, much higher. and i'll just conclude by saying that if we recognize that the aim of u.s. policy is not simply regime change, we are, we are engaged in this not simply because we want a political change of regime in syria. but because we want to support a transition process that holds out some promise of putting syria on a trajectory that will lead it with whatever difficulties and challenges we know it is likely to face, toward a stable and even one would hope, democratic outcome in the future. then it does seem to me that we have some obligation to assist in efforts that might prevent the growth of an uncontrolled armed opposition. with uncertain and i think potentially very dangerous consequences for syria's future. and we need to consider much

more actively. i think the administration needs to consider much more actively, how it can broaden u.s. strategy beyond its current focus on difficultyic and political efforts alone. and neglect militarization as a phenomenon, that it must respond to as way to deal with some of these potentially very dangerous implications of unregulated, unchecked militarization that we see playing out on the ground in syria today. thank you. >> i'd like to thank steve and bassam for some interesting and stimulating contributions. and i am mainly going to just pose a couple of questions to the panel as a whole and to the individual speakers to try to get some conversations and

discussion going. the only self-serving remark i'm going to make is that steve mentioned the absence of diplomatic strategies, it was a carefully planted remark to allow me to plug the report that i just released for the new american security offering a political and diplomatic path forward called pressure, not war. you can get it at www.cnas.org/pressurenotwar. you got that, c-span audience? i don't know if it answers the questions that steve raises. i agree with a great deal of his analysis. at least some of us are trying to find some of those, some of those alternatives. for the panel, though, the questions that i really wanted to raise were about some of the different readings of what the syrian uprising is and what it might become. because i think the rich and

detailed description of the revolution over time, it's not a creature of the so-called arab spring buts that fairly deep roots. i think that it's very important to go back and to recognize the long-term realities of the violent nature of the syrian regime, these processes, exclusion, marginalization, and the rural-to-urban migration, are very important for understanding the much deeper roots of these problems in syria. than simply being a response to the fall of hosni mubarak and people using facebook and twitter. i think these are fairly deeply-rooted phenomena, which has the negative consequence of also meaning that these are deeply-rooted internal conflicts which are not going it find an easy solution any time soon. and i think that this is one of the most sobering realizations for everyone who does not want to see bashar al assad fall and iran weaken, but actually wants to see a stable syria, which

doesn't become a vortex for regional intervention and conflict over the next decade. which is very possibly what it will become. in fact i would put odds that it's likely that it will become, whether assad stays or goes, if we continue tonight the current path towards militarization and civil conflict. so what we are actually trying to accomplish is as steve hideman mentioned at the end, to create some kind of reasonably stable and legitimate syrian political order after assad. then i think we really need to think about some of the different readings we've heard on this panel. first of all, i would very much like to hear bassam and salowa pick up the dialogue they began on this question of sectarianism, in particular sectarianism. and also the hint at the different reading of the implication of the rural and peripheral readings. i'm especially interested in the sectarian reading.

because we hear a great deal about the fears of minorities, of what happens after the fall of assad. i think that salwa made a very for the political roots of in conflict and yellow light it's a conversation that i've been involved with now in too many cases for me to bare to remember. i dealt with it during the bosnia campaign and in iraq and we are hearing it again. we hear the stories that there's no sectarian violence or disagreement. there's to history of it, we all live together but at some point people are slaughtering each other because of sectarian divides. how can the divides be prevented or can it be prevented once the guns come out and the path of

militarization has progresses. these with tough my greatest worries, suddenly it becomes very real and once begun it is not reversable. you see in bosnia, it's now 17 years after the end of the killing and you see no movement towards reconciliation or normalization of society, is that where syria is heading? the second big question that i would like all the panelists to think about is the implications of this for the groups active on the ground, they are challenging the assad a jeem and we all know this and the speakers have referred to it. many of them are highly local and many of them are peaceful and rooted in communities. even if they now seek the protection of things that go

under the banner of the free syrian army, nobody is under a idea that they are representing a organized opposition. there's a great attraction to the idea that we can avoid as bassam put it, the false choice between supporting tierney or supporting an armed opposition, and we would pliek to find those people to support. but when you trying to formulate policy and think about where to go forward, you have to support somebody. who is it that we should be supporting, if there's no unified point of contact, no political organization, no organized military hierarchy, than who do they help when they seek to find someone? exactly? and how are they able to gain a point of entry into that. this is a question that i would

pose even more directly to steve, one of the things, using him as a punching bag for the discussion in the international community, again, and again, and again i hear we must arm the syrian army but we must not do that until they have come together as a more legitimate umbrella for the syrian opposition and yet, everything that we heard today suggests that they are not only that thing, they are not going to be that thing any time soon. it does not stop people. they still want to arm the opposition. it reminds me of the people that told us with great detail that you cannot do counter insergency operation s unless there's a government or organization.

here, there's a strong temptation to go in and arm the free syrian army. is there any prospect that in the timeframe that we are talking about, in which the free syrian army being armed will make a difference that they will have any form of political un n unity, and then the last question, exile sh i'll shut up them speak. i think that all three speakers described effectively, it's one greatest worries, the question is, as the process of militarization extends and spreads whether or not we arm the free syrian army, let's assume the violence spreads, what does this do to the possibility that you would see

the current regime supporters being willing to take a gamble on a negotiated transition after assad. it's an article of faith in much of the community which wishes to support the syrian opposition that evening the balance of power would trigger deinfections among the military and the confidence that assad would fall and this would give them the license they need to make that enormously risky leap from support to opposition. the counter argument is as they see their adversaries who deeply believe that they are go out murdering their opposition, as they arm up, they will be less likely to make the leap into the unknown. what i'm asking is in your reading of this, are we heading towards a situation, if we all

accept the militarization is happening, is this leading us in a direction where the kind of political transition that steve laid out becoming more or less likely. what does that mean for what is possible in a post syria, aassuming we get there. those are easy questions, you get two minutes each. um, actually, i think that it would be better for this round if you wanted to come up and just, in turn and kind of talk for a few minutes about it and then you'll sit at the table when we get questions from the audience. go ahead bassam. >> okay. thanks. i'm just going to address a couple of things, because there's, i think my colleagues will be better suited to address some of the points. the point on the uprisings what are they? i mean, in syria and in the rest

of the region, to make a long story short, in my view, it is certainly a function of the explosive combination of sustained military rule which could be more or less brutal depending to case, along with basically economic policies that are themselves as mix of near liberal policies and crony capitalism that has produced devastating divides within society, at the same time that they have unravelled the state public sector in many ways or the state welfare services in many ways that ultimately by the last, including in the last decade specifically, withdrew the subsidies and supports that many relied on to survive, not as extras or to supplement their

income. the economy from 2005 to 2010 gradually eroded the support that many who relied on the state support had been getting. and it create method fertile ground. the uprising would not have happened in there was not a domino effect from somewhere. the kids who wrote -- people demand the over throw of the regime -- would have been tortured as they have and beaten a couple of years ago with very little response because this has been happening in syria for decades. so, we have to really recognize that as much as many of us would like to put supreme importance on syrian's authority, it does

not produce mass protests. so, there are a number of factors that produce discontent that is ready for a mass mobilization, and i athink that syria was not as ripe as we have been seeing as other states, for sustained massive movement with very little public support. there's a reason the other arab states have not actually you know gone that way. and they have to do with the -- not with the fact that they don't have -- on sectarianism, i heard someone say a couple of times, something, and i saw you looking at me, so i was wondering, considering that i agreed