In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [117]
The unrest sweeping Syria and the rest of the Middle East provided Washington with an opportunity to launch a Syria policy that would allow the administering of more tests in better ways. First, Washington should continue to shine a light on the Assad regime’s human rights violations by bringing it before the UN Security Council. On the multilateral front, the administration should be working closely with European allies and Turkey to establish an effective sanctions regime—including diplomatic isolation—against Assad to push him to stop his bloody crackdown on protesters and follow through on his reform promises. Second, the Obama administration should continue to issue sanctions and executive orders targeting individuals responsible for human rights abuses in Syria. Third, it should use this remit to designate more Syrian officials and figures under Executive Order 13460, which targets rampant regime corruption—the mortar that holds Assad’s regime together and a key issue that has brought protesters out into the streets. Elite defections could play a key role in pressuring the regime either to cut a deal with the country’s Sunni majority or leave power. Along those lines, Washington should impose costs on other Syrian businesspeople who continue to back the regime. One way to do so is to lengthen the list of US Treasury Department designations aimed at businesspeople close to the regime, many of whom are the exclusive importers of a wide variety of goods on the Syrian market. This would not only create fissures in the regime’s traditional alliance with the Sunni business elite, it would also diminish government revenue, since many major trading families pay an increasingly larger share of state revenues via a flat 20-percent corporate tax.
Fourth, the Obama administration should target Syrian energy. Syrian oil production has been in steady decline since the mid-1990s and is now around 390,000 barrels per day. Of that, Syria exports around 148,000 barrels per day, with revenues accruing directly to the state. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) and US government estimates, oil sales account for between a quarter and a third of state revenue, with the remainder increasingly made up through corporate and public-sector employee taxes. As the protests decrease tax receipts, Damascus is likely to become increasingly reliant on oil revenue, forcing the regime to tap reserves and/or resort to deficit spending. This in turn would constrain the regime’s ability to maintain market subsidies (for example, for diesel fuel) and payoffs to patronage networks.
Accordingly, the Obama administration should prod the chief buyers of Syrian oil—Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands—to stop purchasing the regime’s heavy crude. It should also pressure multinational energy companies operating in Syria—Royal Dutch Shell; Total; Croatia’s INA Nafta; India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC); Canada’s Petro-Canada; and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Sinochem—to exit the country. In addition, it should ask Britain to halt the operations of Gulfsands Petroleum, the one-time Houston-based company specializing in extracting heavy oil from depleted fields. The firm relocated to Britain in 2008 to avoid US sanctions on Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s cousin and the regime’s primary businessman.
With these additional measures in place, Washington can rally allies around a common cause, send a strong message to Assad that his crackdown will cost him, and lead Assad toward a soft landing with his people and a transition toward a more accountable government in Damascus. In the meantime, Washington can also use these instruments on Assad’s worsening domestic position to extract concessions on his relationship with Iran, be it his